Article Title May 17 2016

Getting Started with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. It involves promoting products or services and earning a commission when viewers make a purchase (or whatever the desired action is) by clicking through your referral link. Basically, instead of selling your own stuff online, you sell or promote someone else's business or products and get paid for it. There are basically four steps involved in affiliate marketing:

1. Seek out a product to promote
   
2. Sign up for the affiliate program
   
3. Get a link to use for the product that tracks the people who click it
   
4. Get a commission when purchases are made through that link.
   

Affiliate marketing is usually used on a blog, website, email list or other online platform where you have an audience. Blogs with a high readership are an especially effective place to start doing affiliate marketing because the links get viewed by more people. Then you partner with a company, i.e. become their affiliate, in order to recommend their products to your audience. You can do this by writing posts about it, linking to their products in your text, including it in an email newsletter, discussing it in a post on social media, etc. Wherever you do it, you always use the special affiliate link which tracks all sales back to you.

After a certain period of time or when you hit a certain earnings mark, the company you've partnered with issues a payout to you. Sounds pretty simple, right? It can be a great way to make easy, passive income - but there are a few things to keep in mind before you get started.

Affiliate Software

Affiliate programs can be very lucrative but they do require some time and effort to promote and manage. Affiliate marketing tracking software can help you keep track of your affiliate marketing programs. The programs usually fall into one of the following categories:

• CPC (Cost per click): This is when you get paid when a user clicks on your link, regardless of whether they purchase anything.
  
• CPA (Cost per acquisition): This is when the advertiser pays for any specified action - such as an impression, form submit, etc.
  
• CPS (Cost per sale): As the name implies, this is a model where you get paid when an actual sale is made through your link. Typically the payment for this model is a little higher because it results in an end sale.
  

Affiliate marketing software can take care of all of the needs you have in tracking your affiliate programs. Here are a few great examples.

Cake

CAKE is a complete management tool that helps you track and optimize affiliate networks in one easy-to-use dashboard. You can see how well your program is performing overall or on different platforms, manage your contacts and analyze results in order to ensure you're getting the most leverage out of them. It also offers multiple payout formats, individual portals for your affiliates, referral rewards and more. There is a three-tiered pricing structure so you can choose the right plan for your needs.

HasOffers

HasOffers affiliate tracking software by Tune is one of the leaders in the industry. It has a completely scalable system so you can easily expand it to meet the needs of your business. It allows you an unlimited amount of affiliates so the sky is the limit! Plus, you can use it as an ad agency to promote your e-commerce store. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to test it out before you commit to a plan.

OmniStar

OmniStar is one of the longest-running affiliate software. It offers a simple and accessible dashboard that is super easy to set up so you can hit the ground running. It is very versatile and can integrate with any payment system or shopping cart and offers souped-up SEO and social media interconnectivity in order to connect you with new affiliates and customers. It's priced on the low end of available software.

Affiliate marketing success stories

Many people are skeptical of how affiliate marketing can actually make them money. But it can! Check out some of these awesome success stories.

Darren Rowse

Darren is the guy behind ProBlogger.net and he is known for being one of the most successful affiliate marketers in history. As of 2013, he has earned nearly half a million dollars as an Amazon affiliate marketer. Amazon commissions are small, but it's a highly trusted company and referral links work for everything that a user ends up buying when they click through your link - not just the product you're advertising. That means if you advertise a book and they end up adding a television and a bunch of video games to their cart, you get commission on it all. He had tremendous success with this program.

This Is Why I'm Broke

This Is Why I'm Broke is the name of a website that aggregates interesting and amusing products for people to peruse. The products run the gamut of price ranges and, as of 2014, it was making about $20,000 per month from Amazon affiliate sales - and this doesn't even count the money they were making from eBay and other sites. The site is super streamlined but features sharp images and carefully curated products.

David McSweeny

David McSweeny runs the site Top5SEO.co.uk. His blog went from making $0/month to making around $4,000/month in just six months. He put a lot of research into the content he was featuring, checking out online reviews and writing really deep reviews on his own site - sometimes as long as 2500 words. He boosted his site traffic to over 800 visitors in the first month. It goes to show how much initial work goes into creating a successful affiliate marketing program - but the payoff can be huge.

If you enjoy building sites, doing research and making money, affiliate marketing might be exactly the kind of thing you should get started with right away!

Article Title May 17 2016

The Hillary Clinton Approach to Content Marketing

What if you had only one product? Not one line of products, but one single item that had to be sold by November 8th or it would be valueless in the market. That level of intensity would truly focus your content marketing efforts. You can gain some important insights into the marketing strategy of someone whose very professional life depends on it: presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Political campaigns are valuable testing grounds for marketers for three reasons: the time lock, the high motivation bar and the binary results. Time lock is a term borrowed from screenwriting, where pressure mounts as time runs out. The high motivation bar means that political marketing has to inspire people to leave their homes and vote rather than just click a button. Finally, binary results refers to the fact that the number two position in most industry vertical tends to be a very good position, while coming in second in a political race is a total failure.

While President Obama has been called "the first president of the social media age," this year's candidates are seeking to do more with all the digital platform available. They are taking multi-channel messaging to a new level. The following is an introduction to the key elements of the Clinton approach.

The Voter Persona and the Data "Sweet Spot"

The Benenson Strategy Group (BSG) led the digital marketing efforts for Obama's successful campaigns in 2008 and 2012. Now BSG principal Joel Benenson is plotting a similar strategic course for Clinton. After her loss to Obama in the 2008 primaries, Clinton's marketing team determined that average voters perceived her as "inauthentic." As a result, BSG has crafted, and continually updates, a voter persona based on a unique recipe of voter data sources. They combine big data in the form of aggregate characteristics from national averages with "small data," which includes diaries from representative voters and customized focus group interviews.

Benenson explained, "There's a real need today to find that sweet spot between big data and small data - and I believe most companies aren't doing that well enough yet. If you think about the big data we have, it's all backwards-looking and behavior-oriented, which is very valuable in some ways. But how do you communicate with that audience, what message keeps them loyal and how do you strengthen the bond with them? All the behavioral data in the world looking backwards won't answer that question."

A Multiplicity of Platforms

An investigation into the digital marketing platforms used found that Clinton lead all the other candidates in the diversity of her digital advertising buys. While Trump led the Republican candidates with a portfolio of seven ad networks and retargeting platforms, Clinton went further with nine, including her team's controversial AOL buy. The AOL investment was mocked by comedians as being outdated, but the resulting free media coverage nearly doubled her impressions with preferred audiences. For her email marketing automation, Clinton chose Mandrill from MailChimp, MailGun's RESTful APIs from RackSpace and mobile engagement tactics from Silverpop. Perhaps it's a bit ironic that although Clinton is facing investigations into the security of her email usage, her team has made effective use of the latest email marketing platforms.

The New Logo

Corporate strategist Peter Sealey expressed the power of Clinton's logo by saying, "It's exactly the same as selling an iPhone or a soft drink or a cereal. She needs to use everything a brand has: a dominant color, a logo, a symbol. . . . The symbol of a Mercedes is a three-pointed star. The symbol of Coca-Cola is the contour bottle. The symbol of McDonald's is the golden arches. What is Clinton's symbol? If you can get her promise down to one word, that's the key." Her logo started with a bold sans-serif H and then took a clue from the FedEx logo, adding a progressive forward arrow.

Steven Heller, winner of the Smithsonian National Design Award, chose it as the best of the candidate logos, waxing philosophic, "It embodies all the best qualities of the Obama 'O,' yet goes to another symbolic level: The future lies ahead, and H (Hillary) will take the country forward. An even deeper read of the arrow smashing through the vertical stroke of the H suggests that her presidency will break down barriers." However, it also drew a great deal of criticism. American Institute of Graphic Arts gold medalist David Carson wrote, "The first response I have is: Hospital on the right, got it. It feels distant, cold, non-inviting and possibly too much like the perception of the candidate herself." Perhaps what matters most is the number of people discussing it, regardless of how they feel about the logo.

The Medium vs. the Message

That may also be the biggest lesson that the Clinton marketing teams has taken from Trump's marketing. It's a variation on the old saying, "There's no such thing as bad publicity." One recent analysis of the correlation data revealed that Trump has achieved a 3X better poll lift from negative coverage on Twitter than he does from positive coverage. That's an impressive achievement no matter how you slice the data. In any case, expect to see remarkable changes to the marketing strategies of the remaining candidates in the wake of the Republican and Democratic conventions. That's when the time lock, the motivation bar and binary results will begin to exert their most intense pressure.