Demons Lounge – Affiliate Marketing Blog!

As far as i know nobody enjoys building links! There is a certain 9 to 5 feeling about it- the repetitiveness, the feeling that you should be doing something more constructive with your time, and the personal rejection you feel when someone doesn’t reply. You are at work and don’t you know it.

Building links is tough and never more so than in the early days when you have no exchange capital ie. you have two websites that are PR F*ck all and it feels you cant give your links away. Fortunately this feeling will pass, how quickly depends on your approach.

If you are smart and you have used a ‘mapped approach‘ to your site building your link exchanges will get easier quickly, and maybe even to the point where you no longer have to hunt good exchanges down, you are now the prey (in this particular example that’s a good thing). If you are less smart (like me which is probably why i didn’t use the term stupid) you will have niche websites all over the place and the original problems will continue for some time longer. Just one reason you shouldn’t spread yourself too thin.

In my experience it is at this point (basically the second hurdle after building the website) that most affiliates will give up and move onto something else. Others will just watch their stats daily in the hope that as the website ages the traffic will come – sorry amigo this aint going to happen.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

I recently read Clarke Duncan’s post entitled Jason Manford could be an Affiliate! (Jason Manford is on 9 out of 10 cats and is a comedian for those not in the know).  In the post Clarke basically looks at Jason Manford’s  online presence and quite rightly establishes that what he does is in a sense affiliate marketing as he (Jason) is selling a product, albeit his own.Clarke then points out (as only a time served affiliate could) that Jason was missing a trick – he was sending all his traffic to Amazon, HMV & Play for free and receiving no commission for the referrals or for his endorsement of their shops.

Having read this article i bounced the ideas around in my head for a number of days and established almost nothing except an early thinking process reminding me somewhat of the conversation you would have as a child, but this time it was  not who would win in a fight between a shark & a polar bear? but who is the best celebrity affiliate? I have decided to put my early findings forward and beg you to ‘Top Trump’ me!

Everyone knows that Stephen Fry is a twitter freak and probably spends most of his life online, whether it be his i-pad, i-phone or any other means, so he seemed the obvious place to start, and guess what – he is an affiliate.

The New Adventures Of Mr Stephen Fry (his blog) not only contains advertisements served by Fox Networks, his store (which sells his products) is fully monetized with Amazon & Itunes affiliate links. Perhaps we may see Mr Stephen Fry at the A4U Expo yet (maybe an idea for a guest speaker).

Can you Top Trump Me? Do you know of any secret celebrity affiliates? Then get in touch with your stories!

Popularity: 6% [?]

I have actually wanted to review this product for a number of months but for whatever reason it has always been put on the back burner. I am not being paid for this review and the product has no current affiliate program so you can be 100% assured that the review is of a genuine nature.

I have never been very good with code (whether html, php, or any of the others that i cant name but am sure exist), but have always wanted to learn how to use data feeds to create online affiliate stores. For those of you relatively new to affiliate marketing i will give a brief description of what data feeds are:

Data Feeds are essentially a feed from an online retailer that enables you to display products on your affiliate site. They are 100% self updating so when price changes occur they will also occur on your site. To effectively implement data feeds involves many hours of coding and styling so that the data feed products do not look out of place on your website.

When i began researching data feeds in the hope that i could learn to implement them on my websites i became very aware very quickly that this was never going to be possible, so i turned to looking for tools that could basically do this for me. Although at this time there were a number of tools claiming to be able to do what i was looking for on closer inspection it was obvious that the look, feel & functionality was never going to be such that i could compete with affiliates who were adept to using data feeds never mind the merchant themselves. I realized there was no product to help me and turned my attentions to other (non storefront) affiliate ambitions.

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Popularity: 18% [?]

Niche Research

Before committing to any niche it is important to research your potential niches thoroughly. You will want to get an idea of how many people are searching for your products, how much competition you are likely to have, and what products you can potentially sell from which merchants and at what commission rate. Completing your research will give you a feel for the market but will not give you the exact profitability due to the large amount of factors that can effect your sales.

At this point in our process you can buy tools to aid you, however I would fully recommend that you get used to using the free resources available to you.

Tools

Google Keyword Tool


• Research the approximate search volume of specific keywords related to your potential niche.
• Research alternative keywords that are being used to find the products you plan to sell.
• Research advertiser competition down to keyword level within the niche you plan to promote.

Google & Yahoo Search Engines

• Research competition by viewing sponsored advertisements on both search engines (or as many as you wish)
• Research competition by understanding how many results show for your particular keywords.
• Get a feeling for other websites advertising or selling similar products and begin to get a feeling for how you would like your website to look and behave.

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Popularity: 3% [?]