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The A To Z Of Wholesale Affiliate Programs, Every Term Explained

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

Have you started to look online for ways to make money from home? Would you like to supplement your regular income, or perhaps even break away from the shackles of a 9-5 job completely? Then there’s a good chance you’ve come across the concept of being an affiliate before. Affiliates are essentially salespeople who get paid for sending somebody to a site/getting somebody to take an action on another website. This traffic can be generated from your own site or by taking part on forums and other portals. It’s a new type of business which has helped some people do very well for themselves Unfortunately, as with any new field it brings its own jargon with it. So lets take a look at this jargon and explain it in easy-to understand English. Affiliate As mentioned before, an affiliate is a person that puts links on the internet to direct traffic to particular websites. The affiliate then gets paid a comission when the customer buys something/completes an action. They can also be known as an Associate or Publisher) Affiliate Program Where a merchant (see below) allows affiliates, partners or associates to promote their products or services and pays the affiliate, partner or associate part of the money they make off sales. &nbspThis is done by the affiliate using an affiliate link (more about this later) to keep track of who they send to a site and allows the merchant to work out who to pay commissions to. This can also be known as an partner or associate program. Merchant This is a company that sell products or services and uses affiliates to generate traffic and sales. Affiliate Directory A site or company that keeps a database of different types of affiliate programs that affiliates can join. Affiliate directories are not organized as thoroughly as affiliate networks and once signing up for one affiliate program you are not automatically signed up for others. Affiliate Network This is a site or organization &nbspthat not only allows merchants to list their affiliate program/s there but also manages it so affiliates can take part in one or more programs easily. All the sales from multiple affiliate programs in an affiliate network are pooled into one affiliate network box. &nbspThis is usually paid every month. URL The ‘address’ of a website. It is what people type into their browser when they want to go to a particular site. Affiliate Link This is a special type of URL with a code unique to a particular affiliate (say awebsite.com/&M=18925) This code will stay on all links that a site visitor goes to, and when a purchase is made, will tell the merchant to pay a commission to the afilliate (aka associate/publisher) Banner Programs / advertisements This is a program/link generation system where the affiliate links are behind a merchant banner on the affiliate’s site. These banners tend to be graphical advertisement and are usually sized 468 pixels wide by 60 pixels tall. Those using this type of affiliate link usually get a commission for every 1000 impressions, per sale, or per click-through. PopUps Advertisements or websites which open up in a new browser window. They normally popup when your visitor is on the site. Popunder & Exits A Popunder ad displays behind your site so no one notices that it is there until they leave. Exit ads appear once a visitor leaves your site. Lead Another name for a site visitor/potential visitor that can generate money for affiliates. Referrals The technical name for what the affiliate gets paid for. &nbspThe referral, or Referral link, is the link from the affiliate that points the customer to the merchant site. Pay Per Click (PPC) A system where the affiliate (or web agent) gets paid every time the visitor clicks on referral/affiliate link and goes to the target site. The most famous example of this is Google Adwords? Which is itself used by affiliates as a lead-generation tool. Pay Per Lead / Action This is when an associate/affiliate gets paid commissions for each visitor that follows a referral link and then completes surveys, downloads or signs up for a membership. Pay Per Impression (CPM) Earning its acronym for cost per thousand (M is the in the abbreviation is the Roman numeral for one thousand) Pay per impressions means a system where the affiliate makes money every 1000 times the page the banner is on gets viewed. Affiliates normally get paid per 1000 impressions/page views. Pay Per Sale A program where the affiliate gets paid a commission when the visitor/lead you have referred buys a product or service from the merchant. Raw Visit A raw visit is counted every time a page is viewed. Unique Visit A Unique visit is counted every time a site is viewed every 24 hrs. Text Links Text links are links that either describes a merchant’s product, service or their site. When the link is clicked on it will take you to the merchants site. This is one of the more commonly-used ways of &nbspmarketing for affiliates who do not have their own site as it is the easiest to do. 2 Tier Commission With a 2 tier commission an affiliate won’t only get commissions from sales they generate but sales their own affiliate generates. How do they work? Well, if you refer a visitor to a merchants site, they become an affiliate and he / she then makes a sale with an affiliate link then you yourself will also get a commission. Direct Referrals People that you refer directly to an affiliate program. Indirect Referrals People that are referred to an affiliate program by your direct referrals (see 2 tier commission). Net 60/30 Net means accumulated profits in the world of business so net + number just means a system where you are paid after a defined period. Net 60 programs pay after a period of 60 days net 30 programs are paid after 30 days. There you have it, now you have all the tools at your disposal to start learning more about the world of affiliate programs. Join the electronics affiliate program program with the high payouts visit the wholesale affiliate program leader Chinavasion.com today. – About the Author: Rose Li is the PR Manager for Chinavasion , China’s premier dropshipper for wholesale consumer electronics Article Source

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The A To Z Of Wholesale Affiliate Programs, Every Term Explained

10 Steps to Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

Posted by under Pay-Per-Click

SES New York kicked off with an excellent keynote presentation by David Meerman Scott (interview) followed by a panel on Digital Asset Optimization including Mark Knowles, Chris Boggs and myself. Richard Zwicky moderated. The rising importance of optimizing one’s digital assets came out of Google and other search engines’ decision to start including information and file types from other sources that their main search index. Some queries trigger search results that go beyond web pages, MS Office docs and PDF files to include images, blog posts, news, video thumbnails, books and others. While many SEOs were responding to the changed landscape of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and optimizing for other file types, many others were already optimizing holistically under the premise of, “ What can be searched on can be optimized “. Most companies are not wired to create the variety of content that can achieve top visibility on search engines. In most cases, search engine optimization efforts are focused on content and digital assets that are currently in place.  Being able to get more marketing impact out of existing content is as much a driver of digital asset optimization as it is a part of a holistic strategy that matches up with the opportunities presented by an ever changing search results page. In the DAO session I presented a historical perspective on DAO based on when we started writing about it in 2007 and the changed search landscape we face with personal, real-time, social and mobile search. I also discussed TopRank’s 10 Steps DAO Content Strategy: Search & Social Media Keyword Research Anticipating demand via search is traditionally handled by keyword research tools such Google’s tools, Bing or services like Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery. As advertising and media placements can drive search, so can social conversations. Social media monitoring tools can help marketers conduct social keyword research as a compliment to search based keyword research. Find out what key language and key topics are being discussed on the social web and you’ll have invaluable insight into content idea that provide value for social media marketing and search engine optimization. Analyze Search Results Landscape The output of Universal and real-time search results are not persistent. For example, a search for a particular phrase one day might yield news and image results and on another day display only web pages. It’s useful to monitor the search results landscape for keyword phrases that you’re after. Understanding the mix of data sources besides the main search engine index can help with the allocation of optimization resources. If News and real-time results are most common, it may make more sense to focus on content promotion there vs images or video. Define Buyer Personas & Buying Cycle Understanding the needs of your customer is marketing 101. Search marketers are becoming more sophisticated in their understanding of customer profiles and developing personas to represent who you’re trying to attract via search is an important step in a content strategy. Knowing what kind of content and what type of digital asset your customers will best respond to can improve effectivness at driving traffic from the search visibilyt you’ve achieved through SEO. The buying cycle is another dimension that warrants attention to make sure you’re creating, promoting and optimizing content that is relevant to where your customers are in their search/research process. Broad concepts usually represent early stages of research versus more specific phrases which often indicate a buyer is closer to purchase. Inventory Existing Content & Assets With a more holistic SEO effort, especially one that will incorporate digital assets, it’s important to have a baseline understanding of what you have to work with. Taking inventory of your content and digital assets is something we’ve been recommending for over 3 years and it’s an essential first step. Having an understanding of current content and digital assets can also uncover content that is ripe for re-purposing. A common example is video that can be deconstructed into multiple, short form videos, single images, transcribed into text or splitting the audio off into a podcast. Develop editorial plan for new content Understanding your search and social media keywords, buyer personas and the assets you have to work with will help identify what new content you’ll need to create. Adopting the perspective of a publisher, not just a marketer, will help resource allocation, planning and goals/measurement for content creation. For example, rather than just sending out a press release and publishing a blog post with a new product announcement, a company might, based on search/social keyword research and an understanding of their buyer personas, decide to create a resource page for journalists that includes links to relevant resources, standard press release, images, PowerPoint, video, past media coverage, executive interviews, audio snippets, demo and appropriate media relations contact info. It would be made easy to bookmark or share this resource page as well. The assets being linked to from the resource page would be hosted either on the corporate site, optimized of course, or hosted on 3rd party media sharing sites such as Flicrk, YouTube, SlideShare, DocStoc, PRWeb and others. This provides a richer experience as well as numerous options for interaction. It also offers multiple, potential entry points into the resource page via search, since the optimized digital assets can rank in search results on their own and link to the destination content on the corporate web site. Map Keywords to Content & Digital Assets The functional process of implementing search/social keyword research is to map those concepts to the content and assets you have. This helps manage the initial keyword optimization process. Mapping keywords to the editorial plan is also a useful guide for the future creation and optimization of content. Not only are web pages, images, video and other assets optimized for search, but optimized for customers. Operationalize Content & Digital Media Creation with SEO SEO and digital asset optimization are not one-time events. Keyword demand will change and of course, new content and media will be published. To ensure keyword optimization of new content, it’s important to incorporate SEO with established content creation and promotion processes. That might be updating the corporate styleguide with SEO and keyword usage rules or it might mean making programming changes to the web site’s content management system to prompt content creators with keyword cues when adding text or other media. Develop Off Page DAO Assets The beauty of social content is of course, that it’s social! Sharing should be easy and encouraged. Hosting some digital assets on social media sharing sites such as those mentioned above (Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare, DocStoc) can introduce your optimized content to new audiences and attract both traffic and links. More relevant links mean better search engine visibility and web site visitors. Promote/Syndicate via Distribution Channels How will anyone know you have excellent content and digital assets if you don’t promote? Dedicate a fixed and persistent effort to developing social networks where your customers and influentials spend their time on the social web. Do the same with social media sharing web sites so that when you post a new video on YouTube for example, your network there can be notified. Developing distribution channels for content will significantly improve reach and the likelihood of your content being passed on, shared and made socially popular. Email newsletters, RSS, Ping.fm and TwitterFeed services are good examples of content distribution services that help promote content efficiently. Ongoing Measurement with Web, Social and Search Analytics Search marketing professionals are well aware of the value from web and search analytics that measure search visibility performance as well as web site interactions and conversions. The importance of social media monitoring and analytics is also essential for a DAO Content strategy. On the front end, social media monitoring tools can help you identify conversations and influentials that are meaningful to the topics and customers your marketing efforts are trying to reach. Social keyword research can in part, be accomplished by some social media monitoring tools. Those same tools are essential for measuring the social impact of your digital asset and social media optimization efforts. A simple cycle would be one where you’ve identified new keyword topics beginning to buzz on the social web and taking that cue to create content. Promote that content through your social networks and use social media monitoring to track the effects of your content contributions to the larger conversation on the topic. Use web analytics to measure any increase in search based traffic based on the growing popularity and awareness of the topic based in part, on your contributions and social interactions. With an Optimized Content Strategy, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that by following these 10 steps, a significant impact can be achieved in overall authority for the topics and keyword concepts focused on as well as the ability to attract new business, media coverage and employees. The bad news is that it’s not easy. Making the commitment to serving customers with content and media on an ongoing basis, indefinitely without the initial ability to forecast ROI will make many companies say, “Great idea and it makes sense, but not for us.” However, those companies that make the effort to really understand and implement these fundamental concepts are making an investment with a payoff that is very long term and with momentum, very signifcant. Some companies will be able to “come out of nowhere” and dominate their category by following these 10 guidelines for an optimized content marketing strategy. Live blogging coverage of the Digital Asset Optimization session at SES New York was provided by: SEM Geek Outspoken Media Search Engine Roundtable AimClear And this article on Holistic SEO with Digital Asset Optimization was recently posted on ClickZ

SESNY: 5 Tips To Optimize Press Releases For Search

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

TopRank Online Marketing has been working with PRWeb providing SEO consulting services starting in 2008. PRWeb was founded in 1997 to help small businesses and communications professionals leverage the web to share their news directly with the public. As part of this process PRWeb lead the way for the “direct-to-consumer” press release, enabling companies to communicate their news directly to customers, prospects, analysts and the media. During the past decade, PRWeb has reshaped the traditional press release and changed how companies large and small distribute news. Innovations of PRWeb over the years include: Search engine optimization (SEO) for press releases to increase the visibility of news in search engines like Google and Yahoo! Social bookmarking tools like trackbacks and bookmark links to take advantage of the explosion in social networking Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to increase the distribution potential of news and built the industry’s largest RSS network Allowing customers to include podcasts along with their news to increase the impact of their news release The “Feature Video” allowing customers to leverage the video content from popular sites like YouTube to bring their news to life Meg Walker, Director of Online Marketing for PRWeb lead a session discussing how to optimize press releases to gain the strongest visibility in both search engines and media. 1.  Meet audience demand Prior to drafting a release, you need to understand what your audience is demanding.  Meeting audience demand is integral to accomplishing your press release visibility objectives. There are many times you don’t realize there may be a hook in to reach your target, and understanding audience demand allows you to tap into it. The steps to meet audience demand include: Knowing your audience – what is it potential prospects and media are interested in?  In what tone should they be spoken to?  Do they appreciate a certain angle over another?  Understanding is key and should drive the strategy behind the release. Be relevant – more than just understanding your audience, give them content that is both relevant and timely.  By doing this, you’ll create the highest propensity your news gets picked up, shared and passed on. Satisfy customer demand – to know what the demand is, first research popular trends in search engines and stay on the pulse of your industry.  By creating content that is related to hot topics you can create far more visibility for your releases.  Staying up to date, informed and on the pulse of your customers is vital to connect with them through press releases. 2.  Stay focused By keeping your keywords and topics focused, your release can rank better in search engines and resonate more with media.  As you are writing releases, remember you are writing about one topic per release .  By segmenting the message or trying to say too much at once, you dilute your key points and take a risk prospects and media will walk away without taking next steps or remembering the point.  Keep it simple, focused and impactful. 3.  Use images for search Images can increase the click through rate on releases in both regular and news search by 15 – 25%.  It’s a simple step, but can’t be stressed enough.    Additionally, using images creates more traction in media – journalists and bloggers both love images as it helps them tell their story. At PRWeb, we have seen releases that used 3 images generate more than 50 articles.  We also find that many people are discovering images via image search, which then draws them back not only to the release, but to the customer web sites.  Because PRWeb hosts press releases forever, your images can continue to receive both organic and image search traffic indefinitely. 4.  Use videos to engage visitors By using video in news releases, we have seen up to a 500% increase in time on pages.  As the web shifts to a rich media experience, bloggers, media and end users are becoming more accustomed to video.  In the future, it may be common that video is included with releases.  But since today it is not as frequently used, it’s a chance to make your news stand out. 5.  Optimize your release Anchor text links – use 3 One to homepage – direct visitors directly to your company website. One to product page – send media and consumers directly to the product they are reading about. One to blog post – this presents an opportunity to speak to readers in a less formal fashion.  With social web users and digital influencers continually expecting social content, a press release presents a great opportunity to spark interest in your social content. Alt-tag – an alt tag helps your images get discovered in search engines – all release images should be tagged appropriately. URL Keyword – top keywords can be used as part of the URL string, so be sure and include those during the release selection process.  PRWeb allows you to customize this. Description Tag – add a keyword rich and compelling description tag (on PRWeb, that will become the meta tag). Title of release – the title of the release will become the title tag of the page, which is a vital element of your on-page optimization.  If you have a target phrase, ensure your phrase leads the title of release.  You can learn more about PRWeb at their website or follow them on Twitter . © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | SESNY: 5 Tips To Optimize Press Releases For Search | 9 comments | http://toprankweb2.mn2.visi.com

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SESNY: 5 Tips To Optimize Press Releases For Search

Customer & Influencer Research in Social Media

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

“If you don’t eat your meat you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat!” Pink Floyd, The Wall. That quote from Another Brick in the Wall reminds me of the cart horse situation with social media marketing:  If you don’t know your customers you can’t engage them. How can you ever hope to engage your customers if you don’t understand who they are? There are so many questions from marketers and agencies alike about how best to grow businesses through online channels.  Questions are particularly popular when it comes to best practices for social tools. “Always do this” and “always do that” is what most marketers have been bombarded with for as long as there have been conferences to attend and email newsletters to subscribe to. Inevitably, many of the most pressing questions about social media come down to understanding who you’re trying to reach. For example, some common questions I hear a lot at conferences: Q: Should we blog or focus on Twitter? Is Facebook or LinkedIn a better fit? Foursquare or Gowalla? (Or other shiny object) A: Find where your customers spend their time and spend your time there too. Q: What type of social content should we create? How often? Where? A: Study your customers as they create, consume and share content.  Then you’ll know the what, how, when and where. They why has to come from your organization. Q: What  is the most overrated social media site? A: The one your customers aren’t using. So much time is spent on tactics without a good understanding of goals, audience and how to measure success with social media programs.  As we discuss Roadmapping social participation with companies, audience research is one of the key areas of importance. As I mention above, how can you reach and engage customers if you don’t understand them? Let’s say you’ve used a social media monitoring tool like SM2 to identify who is talking about your brand and topics of importance to your prospects and customers. Within this analysis, you’ve noticed that there’s alot of activity on Twitter. A logical next step might be to further investigate influential Twitter users.  If a paid tool like Radian6 or SM2 don’t fit your budget you can try free tools Trackur or Social Mention to gain some insight into content types, commentary and sharing/publishing platforms. Other tools you might use to identify influentials on Twitter include directories like wefollow. Under the tag, “ SEO ” you can see that Matt Cutts is the most influential.  Since reaching out directly to a popular person on Twitter, especially a Google employee, might not be prudent, it can be helpful to learn more about that individual and who they are influenced by as well as who they influence. Using the site Klout, you can see a Twitter influence score (78 is pretty high) and other information including predictions on who is most influenced by Matt and more interestingly, who may be an influencer of Matt Cutts. There are other tools that show communities surrounding an individual such as Top Twitter Friends. As for understanding what kind of content someone likes on Twitter, you can look at retweets and @ responses. You can also look at what kind of content and what user tweets get favorited most,. Favstar is a tool that does just that. In this example, Favstar shows which Tweets Matt Cutts has favorited . The types of content and users can be noted for guidance with future outreach. I mentioned free social media monitoring tools above including Social Mention. Below is a screengrab that shows how much information you can get from Social Mention with options to download into Excel friendly formats. Other Twitter user analysis tools worth looking at include Twitter Analyzer and Twitalyzer . The basic tools I’ve shared here are just that, basic. They’re good for poking around and getting familiar with discovery of social content and influencers.  However, it would take a more robust tool set (which is what Agencies and larger companies do) to scale monitoring over many topics, influencers and conversations. Other customer social media research tactics include: Survey your existing customers for social preferences and behaviors Review web analytics for social media sources and behaviors Tap into Compete, Quantcast, Alexa  information on specific social sites Leverage profile information provided by advertising staff on social sites themselves In combination with directly observed and experienced customer behaviors and preferences, general site data can compliment understanding of customer social content needs.  What are some tactics and tools you’ve found useful for researching customers on the social web?

OMS10 B2B Marketing Case Study: Marketo

Posted by BlogPostman under Blog Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

Our agency TopRank Marketing has been working with Marketo providing SEO, content and blog marketing consulting services for about 2 years. I finally had the opportunity to meet Marketing VP Jon Miller in person today prior to his presentation at Online Marketing Summit: Marketo’s Secret Sauce for Demand Generation. Marketo is one of the fastest growing software companies in the U.S. and this session is a case study for how Marketo has achieved that rate of growth. Marketo launched their main product about 2 years ago. In 2 years, they’ve signed up 400 customers at a value of about $30,000 per year in recurring revenue. The current run rate is over $12 million which is pretty impressive for a 3 year old company. Marketo revenue cycle benchmarks show that Marketo spends about 50% more than comparable companies on Marketing but less on sales. Their customer acquisition cost are much less than other software companies. Marketo has a very efficient marketing and sales effort. How is that so? They use their own product and have made smart investments in their marketing efforts. Rather than a sales cycle, Marketo focuses on the revenue cycle that starts from awareness to becoming a customer. Awareness > All Names > Engaged > Prospect Qualified > Lead > Sales Lead > Opportunity > Customer Marketo keeps their landing page forms very simple. They then actual manually check the company web site and decides if that inquiry is a worthwhile prospect. Since they’re marketing automation company, adding a manual process may seem contradictory but such activity helps sales people evaluate companies a lot more effectively.  Contacts are then nurtured and scored. If they score above a certain level, they become a “lead”. Awareness – Investments in awareness and brand have paid off in a very big way for Marketo. They’v found it to be very effective to focus on content and thought leadership through tips, best practices and ideas that are available without registering. Marketo’s blog is their single most effective marketing tactic. They’ve actually diverted marketing investment away from other activities and focused instead on blogging.   Woot! TopRank gets a shoutout as Marketo’s SEO agency. PPC is the top converting tactic and their best leads are coming in from inbound: search and word of mouth. Once a prospect is generated, sales follow-ups are personalized and very soft touch. What is Lead Nurturing? The art of maintaining permission to stay in front of your buyers as they educate themselves. The key to lead nurturing is relevance. Types of Lead Nurturing: Stay in touch, Incomin lead processing, Accelerators, Lead lifecycle.  If you get a new prospect, about 1/4 are sales ready. Putting lead nurturing in place resulted in 50% more qualified sales leads at 33% of the cost. Content mapping . Make sure content is relevant to where buyers are in the buying cycle. Think big, start small and move quickly. It doesn’t have to be your content either. You can package other content with your observations surrounding it. Companies with sales people that spend the time to qualify leads ultimately generate more revenue. Lead scoring rules focus on behaviors: Latent and Active. Latent means people engaging with content. Active means showing interest intent such as Googling Marketo’s brand name as well as downloading reviews, visit web site 2x in one week. There’s a certain threshold that’s met to initiate follow up. There’s a huge drop off for leads that are not responded to with 5 minutes or less. Inbound leads are segmented: target companies, enterprise companies, other. Also segmented by latent or active. Response time is based upon meeting scoring criteria.  Inbound calls, contact us forms, and qualified free trial requests get “Active” follow up. ie speedy follow up. At the end of the 21 day lead nurturing period, a final email is sent giving options for recipient to self score themselves in terms of interest in Marketo. No lead left behind: There’s an automated process that reminds sales teams to follow up. This dropped unresponded leads from 33% to 5%. Lessons learned:  Focus on the entire revenue cycle, not just generating new leads. Do not understimate the value of creating content! Build trust and reduce risk vie thought leadership and social media. Leverage analytics. You can learn more about Marketo on their blog and on Twitter .