The Affiliate Business

The Affiliate Business

Your affiliate marketing business is just that ... a business. To be successful, you need to treat your business like a business and focus on growth. Your affiliate links are your business; you are the owner of a marketing company, and it is an asset you can grow into more and more assets. Here are three strategies to build your marketing business.

1. Get your own website and domain name.

It looks cheap and marks you as a "newbie" when you post a long affiliate link in your ads. With domain names as inexpensive as they are now you can purchase your own domain name. You can then either forward your URL to your affiliate link or set yourself up with some free hosting and establish more of a web presence. Your best bet is to write a benefit-full description of your affiliate program and link to your program via an HTML link that is part of your description.

2. Build your own list.

Stop relying on one-shot ads to make you money. Real businesses have repeat customers that they cultivate in order to make more profits. You must do the same. Make a commitment to establish relationships with your customers and especially with visitors to your site. Create an email list to keep in touch. Send out periodic tips or articles and focus on helping your customers. Only promote your affiliate links in unobtrusive ways; don't make your emails one big ad.

One of the best ways to build traffic to your list is to write a short report that describes the benefits of your affiliate program. Make this report available only by email. When someone sends for your report, they are added to your list and you can continue to communicate with them.



3. Build traffic to your own site and list.

This is where you really make your affiliate links your own business. By having your own site and building your own list you are building your own business and brand, not just marketing someone else's. By doing this, you can market to your own customers over and over again.

Do not overlook this point: When your ad redirects a customer to your affiliate link, you have lost that person as your own customer because you lost the ability to communicate with them on a repeat basis. When you direct customers to your own site and list, they build a relationship with you.



There are many ways to build traffic: write articles, post in forums, market in safelists, advertise offline, etc. My advice is to pick one traffic-building method, work on it for awhile, and master it before moving on to something else. If you focus on offline advertising, write and rewrite your ads until you determine how to get the best response. If you market on safelists, make a list of the top 50, and send your ad to 10 each day. Keep testing to make sure your safelists are responsive.

These three strategies will help you build and grow your affiliate marketing business.

Small Affiliate Still Growing

Small Affiliates Still Growing

Despite loudly proclaiming doom, small affiliates seems to be riding the economic tsunami well.

Small affiliates are doing well, it seems, because they target niche markets and keep costs low. Start-up websiteswhich create and aggregate content about topics like sports, business and health, are recording sharp gains in visitors and revenue. Some are also landing distribution partnerships with big media brands eager for cheap content during the recession.



The number of visitors to sports Web site SB Nation, for instance, rose 15 percent from December to a total of 3.4 million in January, according to the company, even as unique visitors to the category of sports sites tracked by comScore Inc. fell 2 percent. SB Nation launched a partnership with Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo Sports last week and has signed another deal with Gannett Co.'s USA Today."Consumer engagement is shifting toward niche-content experiences," Andrew Braccia, a partner at venture-capital firm Accel Partners, told the WSJ. Braccia, who sits on the board of SB Nation, added that "Three to five years from now, people will no longer be drawing a distinction between traditional forms of publishing and what we know as blogs today."

It's Time To Gentrify Android

HTC One With A BikeReminder: don't text and ride.Dan NosowitzIt's a real up-and-coming operating system. Oh, sure, it's been here for years, but now it's ready for rich people to move on in.It's not polite to say, but here are the facts: Android is used by poorer people, and iOS is used by richer people. A Pew survey taken last month bears this out: Android is beating iOS in all income brackets except one. Among users in households that earn $75,000 or more, a whopping 40 percent identify as iOS users, compared to 31 percent who identify as Android users. Compare that to the users in sub-$30,000 households--only 13 percent use iOS, while 28 percent use Android. "Android is popular because it's cheap, not because it's good," wrote Sam Biddle for Gizmodo earlier this year, about the reason for the success of Android phones.But that's changing. The HTC One, and especially the contract-free version of the One released this month with stock Android, like Google intended, is good. It might be the best phone I've ever used. The tide is turning, and that means one thing.It's time for rich people to gentrify Android.* * *Android is the formerly bad neighborhood that brokers are starting to describe as "up and coming." Rents were cheap--you could snag a phone for free, or for $50 or $100, with a two-year contract. You could get an Android phone on whatever network you want, including those that deal significantly or even primarily to lower-income customers, like T-Mobile or Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) like MetroPCS, Boost, or Virgin Mobile who rent tower space from other, larger networks. You could get a buy-one-get-one-free deal on a phone. That's why the lower-income set opts for Android over iOS.The iPhone is for rich people not necessarily because it's more expensive; a current-generation iPhone costs as much and sometimes less than a current-generation top-of-the-line Android phone. But it came first, and so it grabbed the money and loyalty of the early adopters, who are by definition rich folks--it initially cost a whopping $500, and it remained pricey for a few generations. And its advertising focused on its premium materials, its high-end manufacturing processes, and its fancy (paid) apps. Apple successfully marketed the iPhone as high-end.But even bad neighborhoods have strengths. Android has flexibility iOS doesn't; there's only one iPhone, but there are dozens of Android phones at any given point. You have space to stretch out, if you want it. And slowly, Google and the Android hardware makers are realizing what landlords and shop owners in up-and-coming neighborhoods realize: your profit margins are an awful lot bigger when you sell to rich folks.The HTC One, with its big, gorgeous aluminum body, its vivid and spacious screen, its wildly superior versions of GMail, Google Maps, and the Chrome browser, its voice control that crushes Siri in every way possible, and its genuinely futuristic and exciting Google Now, is a perfect trigger for Android gentrification. It's a badass, affordable loft in a neighborhood you'd been eyeing but couldn't quite bring yourself to move to. That makes it different from the other top-tier Android phones on the market, like the Samsung Galaxy S IV, a more-of-the-same sequel to a phone we didn't much like last year. iPhone users might look at a Galaxy S and think, "Why ditch my comfortable, luxurious iPhone ecosystem for a chintzy plastic Samsung phone with desperately overstuffed featuresets?" It'd be like moving from a comfortable old brownstone to a brand-new, spacious apartment in an up-and-coming neighborhood...that's made with paper-thin drywall and the cheapest possible kitchen appliances. And a clothes dryer that singes your underwear. But the HTC One changes all that: it's something new and perhaps even better.Android phones are now a legitimate option for the wealthy. And as the rich people come to Android, the apps will follow, just as the organic grocery stores and adventurous Japanese fusion tapas restaurants come to gentrifying neighborhoods. A smartphone ecosystem is not unlike a neighborhood: when that 31 percent percent of $75,000+ households rises to 40 percent, you can bet the New Yorker will hurry a little bit harder to bring its digital magazine to Android.What happens to the lower-income types when Android starts marketing more heavily to the wealthy? I'm not sure. Maybe nothing! Just because there's previously un-accessed profit to be made on the high end of things doesn't mean manufacturers will stop catering to the (also profitable) lower end. There are hardware manufacturers who have shown no interest at all in the more premium side of the business, like ZTE, Kyocera, and Haier. Or maybe another platform, like Windows Phone or BlackBerry, will start marketing more heavily to the lower-income segment.But assuming the HTC One sells well, this could be the first major step towards Android gentrification. Some day, the rich kids who've grown up with Android will look back at the HTC One. "That was when my parents knew that Android was safe," they'll say.