As affiliate marketing becomes an increasingly prevalent method in South Africa and other emerging markets, it is essential to understand this type of relationship and how it may benefit you. Heavy Chef chats to Deborah Whitlock of World Wide Creative, to get to grips with affiliate marketing and the possible challenges that come with it.

Can you explain to us what affiliate marketing is?

Affiliate marketing is a working relationship whereby a merchant, either an online shop or advertiser, has consumers driven to it by adverts on an affiliate website. If a consumer visiting the affiliate’s site, clicks on an advertisement and goes on to perform a predetermined action on the advertiser’s site , which is usually a purchase; then the affiliate receives a payment.

Is there scope for this in emerging markets?

For affiliate marketing to work well in a given market, there are a few things that need to exist.

Well known brands in the market need to be doing successful Ecommerce, and need to deliver a satisfying ecommerce experience. There also needs to be a culture of online shopping. There needs to be sufficient online audience for affiliates to mine and channel traffic to the merchants or brands they are representing. And lastly, the market needs credible affiliate websites using accountable online marketing practices, who have a loyal following.

Emerging markets such as South Africa are in the very early stages of the first two points. Therefore affiliate marketing as a standard practice within a marketing strategy is still in its infancy.  It would be a challenge to get it right at present but that is not to say it couldn’t be done. The ROI model, that being the commissioning of a third party to market your product, is successful in and of itself.  Right now the model would probably work best as individual partnerships negotiated between interested parties. An example of this is Woolworths partnering with Discovery Vitality to promote themselves on the Vitality website, with their own profile and special offers.

Can you give an example of any affiliate marketing you have done or are busy with?

In the UK I managed two fairly large affiliate programmes with two networks.  I was responsible for the growth of both programmes, oversaw the relationship with the individual affiliates and had to ensure that the brand, Weight Watchers, had continuous exposure across the affiliate networks, with activity peaking during key campaign periods in, line with sales targets.

What are some challenges that come with choosing this route?

Well some of the key challenges are managing an offer portfolio to keep affiliates happy. They like to offer their audience an exclusive deal. And balancing this with over-exposure in the market. Ensuring consistent, high account manager service levels from the networks. This plays a huge role in the quality of the affiliates, general reporting and effectiveness of marketing campaigns, as account managers have to do a lot of following up with affiliates on your behalf. Attracting good affiliates who actually make sales is another challenge. Affiliate marketing follows the usual Pareto principle, which means that 20% of affiliates drive 80% of the sales. Lastly, finding time to talk regularly with the top affiliates to keep the brand top of mind, can be challenging.

How do you think trust is perceived though this type of marketing?

If you had asked that question ten years ago, you’d have been met with a snort and a derisive laugh.  It used to be an industry riddled with a lot of clandestine practices.  Today affiliate marketing is very well established across Europe and the USA.  Most top brands use affiliate marketing as a standard part of their activity.

It has created what are termed Super Affiliates, which have become reputable brands in themselves, churning out thousands of Ecommerce transactions both online and via social media and mobile.

A few UK examples include TopCashBack.co.uk, Quidco.co.uk and Nectar.com.

These are the type of sites which successfully represent top brands across the country and help to build those brands in the Ecommerce space.

I, like many folks, was removed from the Amazon Associates Affiliate Program once my state (California) enacted an affiliate sales tax law.**  I needed to take a look at where I’d been using Amazon Associates affiliate links and determine what to do with them.

I told you how I’d found a solution, called Skimlinks, when I announced my new niche site, Redomestication. In that post a few people left questions in the comments about Skimlinks, so I wanted to address them as well as give you an overall Skimlinks review for everyone’s benefit.

SKIMLINKS Q&A

Sandy McDonald of Melbourne asks:

If you mention your selection from one of their 17,000 merchants in a post, it will automatically turn it into an affiliate link. Is that right?

You got it Sandy! Skimlinks has over 17,000 merchants across 28 affiliate networks. By joining Skimlinks, you become eligible to earn commissions from any of those 17,000 merchants. On a WordPress blog like this one or Redomestication, you install the Skimlinks plugin (free, obviously) and then input your sites’ code to the plugin.

It places a bit of javascript on your pages that cause any links clicked out to merchants in their program to become affiliate links.

So I can link to http://www.amazon.com or even a crazy URL’d product page like  http://www.freepeople.com/wide-stripes-pullover/_/cmCategoryID/8a61524b-907c-474c-ab37-f357c9ae11e3/?productOptionIDs=f41043ca-b93c-4663-9e51-620b10b9f1f6 and Skimlinks will turn it into an affiliate link FOR ME. I don’t do any of the work.

(And anything that = less work is dreamy, right?!)

You’re then paid by Skimlinks your commissions each month.

When you hover over the Skimlinks links, like those 2 examples aboe, they don’t even look like weird scary affiliate links either. Skimlinks makes the hover text look like regular links. For you, that means no affiliate link cloaking is needed.

While Amazon is one of the many merchants in the Skimlinks system, there are thousands of others. Skimlinks is what finally allowed me to link to Sephora and have it be an affiliate link, I program I’ve wanted in to for years (I think the affiliate managers at Sephora have their heads screwed on backwards).

(And yes, I could have affiliated with another beauty products type of store for all these years, but Sephora is what I actually use and love. I’m not comfortable telling folks to go to Beauty.com when I don’t go there myself!)

Jeff Weiss writes:

Are all of these products through Skimlinks?

And Joel Igene similarly asks:

Are all the links to external products affiliate links?

No, and I think this is a topic for the next post, but I write about what I want to on Redomestication. Many of the links end up being affiliate enabled, thanks to the massive number of merchants in Skimlinks’ system. But the content on the site is not driven by what will and will not earn a commission and there are probably more non-monetized links then monetized links.

SKIMLINKS: THE BAD

SKIMLINKS: THE GOOD

• Easy access to 17,000 merchants
• Entry to affiliate programs that may have denied you before (…SEPHORA!)
• One program, one sign-on, one check each month (KISS principle!)
• No building individual affiliate links – just link to the product page and Skimlinks will convert it to being affiliate enabled on the fly
• Shows you which of your outgoing links – across your whole site – are getting the most clicks (I found some traffic leaks with this)

WHO IS SKIMLINKS BEST FOR

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If you have a blog with a regular readership and you like blogging, making an income is easier than you think. Consider affiliate marketing to turn a profit by hosting sponsored links or banners.Affiliate marketing can be very rewarding for some people. Although, it is not as simple as making money through a website for promoting a merchant’s products. It is also about knowing the market and the customers.If you are already drawing visitors to your website with your blogs, you know they are looking for information. Write interesting articles related to your niche. Several things contribute to the success of your affiliate marketing site, but good content tops the list.Look for affiliate programs that complement your site. You should also ad … blogging, blogs, affiliate marketing, advertising, site promotion, seo, careers, home based business, small business, sales, wealth building, author, writing, webm

In case you keep a blog, you are supposed to write new materials on a regular basis. Adequate stated. There are loads of blogs which might be not obtaining adequate attention from readers only because of the reality that they tend not to have an adequate quantity of material on them. However, when you have been a blogger for any time period, you comprehend that that is mostly tied in to coming up with new tips to post about. This would provide you with the likelihood to make new weblog posts. It is not that simple to generate new content material if you do not know the direction in which you’re going.So what really should you do to produce this much less complicated? Whether or not you have a tiny blog geared toward individuals searching fo … blogging, blog marketing, blog promotion, blogs, make money online, affiliate marketing, internet marketing, online marketing, internet business, online busine

I had a great idea for a business about 2 weeks ago. Checked the domain name and it was available. Quickly plotted out a no-fail traffic strategy in my mind. Did some brief checks on dropshipping and production of the physical goods and everything was A-OK. It looked golden.

Still, I decided to sleep on it. What looks like a stroke of genius at 11pm can, and often does, pale in interestingness as soon as the next day.

Next morning comes and I still really like the idea. But I didn’t go ahead with it (yet). Why?

To have a successful business, you’ve got to get radically, painfully honest with yourself.

And that means being 100% dead-on truthful about the current status of your projects and whether you can realistically take on additional projects.

Last week Lynn Terry wrote this about taking ONE site from start to profit:

I always recommend that you focus 100% on ONE site or project – all the way from start to profit. And then to maximum profit potential, even… Your website is not finished until you’ve targeted every keyword phrase related to your topic, and you have a Top 3 ranking for each of them.

Wowza! Lynn’s not messing around!

While I don’t necessarily advocate only working on ONE site at a time, the heart of the message I absolutely agree with, and that is….

RADICAL INTERNET MARKETING HONESTY

• If you’re about to start a new business project, you better be done with the ones already on your plate!

Interestingly enough, folks often consider themselves “done” with a site/project because they find it’s not profitable.  They’re not ranking high enough quickly enough and jump to thinking something must be wrong with the (keyword research, backlinks, conversion, traffic volume, etc.) data.

We lie to ourselves. We ignore and hide parts of the truth. We don’t want to be the one responsible for shitty results. I think Seth calls it the “lizard brain.”

Fact is, most of the time, a lack of ranking, income, traffic etc. is directly related to our lack of actually being DONE with a project we once started with the best of intentions. We get bored. New ideas beckon to us. The work of content creation or link building gets tedious. So we lie in our own heads and say the work has been done.

It’s human nature, so we don’t need to get down on ourselves because of it. We just need to be aware, because once we’re aware of a habit or behavior, we can change it.

5 WAYS TO BE RADICALLY HONEST ABOUT YOUR IM BUSINESS

What does it mean to be “done” with a project? For those of us who build content / affiliate sites, here are some questions to ask yourself when you think you’re “done”:

• Did you do your keyword research? I mean really, really DO your keyword research. How competitive is your market? How many links, what PR, what types of linking domains do you need to beat your competition? How much traffic will you get at the #1 position for your top 5 keyphrases?

• Since you’ve got all the data to clobber your competition backlinks-wise, did you REALLY go out and get all those links? Do you have an internal linking plan as well? If you run your backlinks against your competition in Yahoo & Google, are you kicking the competition in the rear? Are the links you got really comparable (in PR, type of domains, variety of unique class C’s, hosts, registrars) to your competition? Is your anchor text comparably varied? Did you build links and are ranking for more than just your main KW phrase?

• Perhaps you’ve got your rank and your traffic but the site isn’t bringing in the kind of money you think you should be making. Have you tried different monetization methods (Adsense, affiliate offers, CPA offers, etc.)? Have you split-tested those different monetization methods against each other? Have you split-tested the size, color, placement of those monetization methods? This is how you maximize your revenue.

• Is your content crap? Really though, is it bad? Google announced on Friday that, “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” If you’re running a pure autoblogging kind of set-up or other scraper site, you may be headed for a drop in rankings – or that could already be the reason you’re not getting the ranking you want. But even if you’re using original content, if visitors are hitting your site and they immediately think it sucks, they’re likely to hit the “Back” button instead of one of your monetization methods. Check your bounce rate – lower is better. Get real – is your content good enough to engage a real visitor?

• Are you building a list? Are you offering an incentive to encourage new subscribers to join? Have you split-tested opt-in boxes and call to action text? Do you have a follow up sequence in place for your list? Do you also broadcast to your list frequently to keep them coming back to your site or to introduce them to new products / services you have available?

Most of the time, there are still things to try before we have to turn in the towel, hang our heads and realize all this internet marketing nonsense was a waste of time.

You’re not done until the questions above are done.

But the good news on the flip side is, you haven’t failed until you’ve done all those things too.

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If you happen to own a blog or a website it”s possible that on a number of occasions you have wondered what you are able to do to improve traffic to get hordes of targeted visitors. This is really a question that everybody should be prepared to have a plan for just before they even get started. With out a plan to drive new targeted visitors to your website you will have a slow start and fairly possibly a blog or website that never really gets off the ground.

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A lot of human beings all over the planet are trying new and creative ways to make money online with things like Adsense and affiliate marketing. It gets truly annoying when you have so many things to worry about! So if you are using sites like Amazon to make money as an affiliate of various products, you have to get a good Amazon plugin to make the process easier. Here’s why you should use Plugazon Pro.For those who don’t know, Plugazon Pro is a brand new addon to a WordPress blog that gives you a chance to make money promoting Amazon products. The process is easy! You install Plugazon on your site and it can automatically add relevant product links for each post you make that you can get paid a good bit of cash with if a sale is made thro … wordpress, Amazon affiliates, Amazon plugin, wordpress plugin, blogging, affiliate marketing, make money online, business

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Could a business still use a blog in a purposeful way, or have the brand new social media web sites, for example Twitter and Facebook become more preferred. However blogs still have a worthwhile position. After all, many companies realized a couple of years ago that prospects had been turned off by fact-heavy websites that appeared like pages from an Yearly Report. After they created their sites more interactive, often by way of blogs, the entire company-customer dynamic changed and became more positive and involved.It’s widely recognized in the business blogosphere that Dell Computer systems showed the way, it’s stated that they were one of the earliest companies to adopt this approach. Though Dell was an extremely prosperous business, a b … blogging, micro-niche, twitter, facebook, online marketing, site promotion, wordpress, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, social media, social networking

Have you ever noticed that some affiliate blogging tips just beat around the bush? They never really quite give you the information you need. Well I am not going to be doing that. In fact I am going to give you some simple tips that really work. So read on to learn the best affiliate blogging tips.

#1. Your content is very important so you should write with passion and excitement. You need to focus on the content of your blog and your specific niche and make sure that all your blog posts stay on topic.

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