When I started affiliate marketing I knew very little. Since then I have learned a lot (and still have a lot to go) but these are the 5 things that I wish someone would have told me before I started.
This is part one of a six part series where I will follow-up with the initial post covering all of the six weapons of influence by Dr Robert Cialdini. Unlike the book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, these posts will not maintain the same order as they are mentioned in Cialdini’s book and will be refocused specifically for affiliate marketers in mind.
Offer Spotlight: Cosmetyn from Clickbooth
In this offer we see a short form at the top right corner that lets the user admit that they are looking to remove their stretch marks. By making a person take a stand they will feel pressure to commit and continue filling out the form.
Unlike politicians, the average person does not like being inconsistent. Being inconsistent is a sign of weakness and our egos will counterbalance this weakness. Many times a person will stick to their guns even after knowing they made a mistake just to remain consistent.
Remember to always try to get your users to commit to a decision. With websites and forms it is difficult to get our users to call you up and admit they have a problem but by filling out a short form our users have taken a stand and will stick to their initial decisions.
Tip to Becoming a Super Affiliate: If you have a landing page setup where you have multiple “self improvement” offers available — get your users to admit they are looking to become healthier and more attractive. Have a form where they can write a short paragraph of “goals” that they would like to change after asking them if they are looking to remove embarrassing stretch marks and have whiter teeth. Once you are able to get your users committed to this mindset of bettering themselves, you can display offers from a wide range of campaigns available from Clickbooth!
Disclaimer: Remember never to use this tactic to deceive or “trick” your users.
Offer Details: If you are looking to promote this offer you can find it exclusively on Clickbooth - one of the top affiliate networks on the web. The offer pays $35.00 with a network EPC of $1.39. One of the great things about running this offer through Clickbooth is that you can place your pixels on the confirmation page for affiliates interested in running search traffic. Join Clickbooth and start making more money online.
So my blog was listed in Affiliate Summit’s Affstat as an affiliate marketing resource. When you weed out the networks there are about 50 blogs left written by actual affiliates and my blog was one of them.
What interested me is that rather than referencing the author (Nick Abramovic) like many of the other personal blogs, they called my blog “Many Body Theory” — is that my new brand?
Remember that Affiliate Summit East will be August 9th, 10th and 11th in New York this year. If you have not planned your trip, start now because it is less than two months away.
I lie about my numbers ALL THE TIME just like everyone else in Internet marketing. The only difference is, I tell people that I generate less than what I actually make.
“Fake it till you make it” is bull. When the FTC comes knocking on the door of affiliates who do you think they will go after first? My money is on the affiliates that posts thousand dollar checks on their blogs.
I keep everything on the downlow, that is why this blog is hosted on a $5/mo server — I don’t let anything that can connect me with what makes me money. If you do whois or check the IPs you will see that I’m clean as a whistle.
Lesson of the Day: Keep your stuff on lockdown and don’t talk about your revenues. Who are the first affiliates to get their landing pages hijacked whenever a new offer comes out? Its the ones who are telling the world how much they are making.
SocialHour and SocialReach are two ad networks where Facebook and MySpace application owners can just add an iframe and get paid on a CPM while SocialHour and SocialReach bank off of running CPA offers from affiliate networks.
Facebook is now attacking these networks and forcing them to swap out their offers and run less-competitive ads. Attached is an email that SocialHour sent to all of their publishers:
Monday, June 8th, 2009
Facebook Publishers:
Due to circumstances beyond our control we are being forced to temporarily pause our advertisements on the Facebook platform.
Please remove our ad tags from all of your Facebook applications by 9pm PST tonight.
We apologize for the short notice however this is beyond our control and we hope to continue Facebook operations again in the near future.
Note: We will still be accepting traffic from all other sites.
–
Phillip H
Director of Sales & Business Development
SocialReach, LP
I am on the side of SocialHour, SocialReach the other ad networks and any application that is running offers on their own. So what that people are stupid enough to click on an ad that says “Someone has a crush on you” and think if they give a website their cellphone number that they will find out who their true love is.
Second — Facebook, seriously? Is this really about the ads or is this because you know SocialHour does a better job monetizing traffic than you do? I remember going into Facebook and meeting with their team to talk about monetization — everyone there is clueless. I laid out the framework on what to do and they still can’t get it right.
Third — the Self-Service Ads go back and forth every week on whether they should allow ringtones and weightloss ads to show — I am not going to hold my breath on the application network standing ground given Facebook’s history.
One of the best books ever is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini. This is a six chapter book where each chapter is a different “weapon” on how to influence people. What I love about this book is that he takes examples from what people have done in the past — what is also great is that he takes a scientific approach versus the MBA approach when showing how tests were run.
Seriously, read this book. Whether you’re an affiliate, in-house marketer, selling your services.. whatever it may be: this is a must read and should only take you a week if you spend 1 - 2 hours a day on it. I have seen offers go from barley profitable to 2x-3x ROI when making changes based off of these six weapons of influence.
Reciprocation - People tend to return a favor. Thus, the pervasiveness of free samples in marketing.
Affiliates — That “free trial” where you’re giving away a month’s free of your product and all you ask in return is for the buyer to pay for the shipping/handling.
Commitment and Consistency - If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement.
Affiliates — this is why email/zip submits work. Just get the person in the funnel and interacting with the website.
Social Proof - People will do things that they see other people are doing.
Affiliates — Doesn’t this sound like those “Ashley placed this game on Facebook” or “5 people think they are smarter than you” type ads? It also should remind you of all of those fake blogs.
Authority - People will tend to obey authority figures.
Affiliates — can you say: Oprah? This is why affiliate offers leach off of celebrities and the offer page will mention that the product has been featured in 60 Minutes, NY Times, etc.
Liking - People are easily persuaded by other people that they like.
Affiliates — This is why you always want to have attractive people in your creatives and landing pages. People like attractive people.
Scarcity - Perceived scarcity will generate demand. For example, saying offers are available for a “limited time only” encourages sales.
Affiliates — how many times do those landing pages have a countdown clock whenever an order is supposed to be made?
http://www.ppc.bz/stuff-that-is-actually-useful/some-blogs-that-are-good
PPC.bz the unofficial source of all things affiliate marketing has categorized this blog as something that is actually useful.
Note: this spamming might not be done by SinglesNet internally but by one of their affiliates (the joys of allowing anyone to join your network)
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/18/a-bunch-of-hot-spammers-had-the-day-off-of-work-lol/
This is older than social networks, in fact, it is almost as old as Craigslist from what I can remember. An old trick to do on Craigslist was to post on their personals of a girl looking for a guy and then BAM you have someone who is single, you know their location, potential profile info (if they send you a note with picture) and you can easily reply back with a “find me on one of these dating sites” canned responses.
I do not encourage the above mentioned practices, however, I will say they can be very effective. To be fair, my hat is off to the guy who pulled this off on Twitter because I was thinking about something very similar for the last two weeks 
Get ready for Ad:Tech SF 2009!
I am really stoked for Ad:Tech SF this year. Things have come a really long way for me since 2008 and I can’t wait to see what happens between now and Ad:Tech 2010.
If you are going to be at Ad:Tech remember to hit me up. nick [at] many.body.theory.com
So I’ve been keeping busy but I did want to name down some offers that you should be running right now:
GameVance Downloads. This is an offer that Azoogle is running and is the shit. ‘Nuff said. I’ve got some sites that aren’t Facebook or MySpace where this rocks on but I won’t be telling you where. I’ll tell you this, I’m the only one running it (so far on this site) and its on the perfect under 25 demographics.
Obama Survey - Email Submit from Hydra. Most of you kids are buying traffic on Facebook and MySpace so why not run an Obama survey? I suggest creating multiple Facebook campaigns because half of my ads were approved… the other half slipped through the cracks. Used the same creatives, just tweaked the demographic targeting.
For those who have been waiting for the full suite of keyword generation tools (I’ve updated the archive for the slang lexicon.. and it has been pretty sweet so far in testing) — don’t worry. Also, I’m incorporating neighborhoods with the city/zip keyword tool and will be expanding into Canada, Europe and Australlia. Stay tuned.
If you see an offer that works let me know so I can steal it from you see what’s up.
