Aminology

Perception is a powerful thing. Information packaged in the right format can be used to produce a different kind of response from your readers, and can even act as the tipping point in securing a lead or a sale for an offer or product you may be promoting. When implemented correctly, it can be a powerful tool in helping you increase the amount of leverage you have in your business.

Affiliates and Product Vendors: Affiliates and product vendors can package information and give it away for free as a bonus product to incentivise a product sale. The information itself can be anything related to the product, but for best results the information should truly act as a ‘bonus’ and complement the product directly.

For example, if you are promoting a weight loss guide, a PDF on healthy food recipes entitled ‘Delicious Weight Loss Recipes You Won’t Believe Are Good For You’ can be offered as a ’special, limited time bonus’ for anyone that purchases the product through your link. This is just as well if you are a product vendor, as a bonus product which appears to be scarce and ’special’ will boost conversion rates for your primary product sale.

Bloggers: You have a blog and want to better the relationship and trust you have with your readers. Let’s face it, if blogging is your thing, there is a certain point at which most people tend to switch off and not listen to what you’re saying, and this affects the type of bloggers who ‘lack style’ the most.

A way of overcoming this is to hit them with different formats of information. Video and audio both work great in giving your readers a whole new perspective of you and what you have to say. Geoff from CantGetRich did this by launching his podcast series , which increased his readership and got himself sponsored. Free reports through the form of PDF files also work great when you want to put extra emphasis on something you’ve written up - PDF files are also generally given more attention and respect than a standard blog post. With a little branding and a touch of hype, you can make the information you have to offer much more exciting and special than it really is , which doesn’t matter as long as your readers are happy, and as long as your readers are happy and you have their trust, pitching a service or membership to them is much easier.

Email Marketers: This is mostly in reference to those who manage lists of 100 to 100k subscribers, as opposed to high volume mailers who deal with ‘deploying’ millions of emails a day. As with the previous point, audio and video work great, but PDFs in particular are necessary if you have something long to say, because I sure as hell don’t like reading long emails, whereas I have on many occasions read long PDF reports. A PDF report containing information of value will also allow you to appear as a ‘giver’ - someone who just wants to help out and share the wealth. And if you keep your subscribers keen with good quality (and of course free) information, pitching a product or offer becomes much more fruitful when it comes to conversions.

For you email marketers that like to have a more personal relationship with your lists, a link from your email to a blog post containing video footage of yourself works great in not only getting your subscribers to pay special attention to what you have to say, but it also allows them to change their perspective of you as a person, (hopefully) for the better. On top of that, doing this through a blog allows your subscribers to engage in conversation with each other through the commenting feature of your blog post. Always encourage conversation, it helps build relationships and community which will ultimately work in your favour.

A few points on video and audio :

-A personal video to your readers or a promotional video for your prospects can create a kind of intimacy between you and your readers/prospects that can’t be achieved through writing. Even if you don’t like to appear in the footage, a collection of related images along with an audio of you talking about an idea or a product can be much more powerful and effective in increasing appreciation and trust your readers/traffic will have towards you than text, which will ultimately benefit the rate at which you can convert your readership/traffic into sales and leads.

-Audio also works great, but I like to consider it as one step behind video, because it only deals with one of the human senses, while video is both a visual and aural experience.

***

The core message behind this post is simple: when you give something of value to people, they feel compelled to return the favour. And giving away information which has a high perceived value is one of the best and easiest ways to secure the kind of response you are looking for, whether it be increased readership or more business.

Affiliate marketer ‘aim’ from the Wickedfire forum started a thread on “why affiliates are the bitch of the industry“. His post was targeted at affiliates who operate within the CPA area, and he was certainly on the ball with a lot of his points.

Posts like this are important because it gets affiliates thinking outside of the box. The more you promote as an affiliate, the more you experience, and the more you experience, the more you understand about how the whole system works.

I invest most of my time and money into creating and marketing my own informational products. My marketing campaigns in the CPA area are primarily for me to gain a greater understanding of affiliate marketing so I can in turn apply it to my own business, and gain inspiration for future projects.

There are certain types of offers which are prevalent in almost all the major CPA networks out there. Ringtones, cash loans and weight loss products would be a few good examples. While I personally don’t like to promote the more shady and ethically questionable offers, there is an abundance of good quality offers that can not only be promoted, but also replicated.

Let’s use a health product as an example.

Green Tea Extreme is an offer that you can find on the NeverBlueAds network. The payout for this product is $25/sale, so it’s pretty clear the advertiser is making much more than this with each sale.

After spending huge sums of money into marketing the product, an inquisitive affiliate marketer would start to think beyond the payout and reflect more on the actual business model itself:

“If I’m making so much money as a single affiliate, how much is the owner of the business making?”

That’s certainly the question I asked myself soon after I got into affiliate marketing, and it is the reason I prefer to have affiliates working on my affiliate program rather than be an affiliate and work on an advertisers program. You have got to remember that the advertiser has many affiliates promoting its product, so no matter how much you’re banking on that particular product, the advertiser is banking at least 10 times harder.

So how do we go about replicating this specific business model?

I’ve only just pulled this offer out of NeverBlueAds, and I’ve never promoted the product before, but I still have a basic idea of how I could go about doing this myself.

As we are not dealing with digital and informational products here, the product creation stage becomes much more complicated. Which is why we avoid it altogether.

I would go ahead and import the product instead. And the easiest and quickest way to do that would be through Alibaba.

So I go on Alibaba and search for ‘green tea pills‘. The search generates more than a dozen green tea pill products to choose from.

Here’s one item that looks interesting:

Green Tea Soft Capsules

Because I am using this is an example, and have no interest in promoting and selling green tea pills (at the moment anyway), I haven’t gone ahea and asked the supplier for a quote. But I know for a fact I can get the pills MUCH cheaper than the commercially available ‘Green Tea Extreme’ pills.

In fact, I did a similar search some time ago for weight loss pills, and discovered that weight loss pills can be imported very cheaply, no where near the prices they are being marketed and sold at right now.

What’s even more insane is that we can find many suppliers that offer ‘private labeling rights’. This means that the actual goods will be sent completely unbranded, with permission granted to you to label it under your own company brand.

‘Green Tea Extreme’ could just as easily be one of the cheap green tea capsules we found on Alibaba.

With the goods and branding completely sorted, we come to the real meat of the action. The marketing process. I need not go into this any further.

Why?

Because as an affiliate, that’s where your real skill lies. You’ve worked with the networks, you know how things roll, and you know how to market anything.

Seasoned affiliates can market practically anything on offer in the networks.

What most should realise is that they can use their affiliate marketing expertise to push their own product even better than the advertiser they are working for.

If you’re promoting a product as an affiliate or even as a product owner, then make sure you continue targeting not just the well converting keywords, but also the actual URLs that are displayed on the organic search results from these high converting keyword searches. Many people still mistakenly enter a website url into a search box, and since many web users set Google (and still Yahoo) as their home page, it would be a waste to not actually bid on competitor URLs as keywords.

This technique is particularly effective for ‘product review’ sites. For example, if a user searches for www.guitarguide.com, then an advert for a review on the actual product would typically yield a high CTR and healthy conversion rate. You will of course need to create many ad groups, with each ad group targeting a different product.

You don’t even have to be an affiliate to do this.

If you own the URL in question, then go ahead and set up an ad campaign targeting the site. My recommendation is to go with a (seemingly) independent review site, as opposed to sending the user directly to your site as they intended. This is because sending visitors through an intermediary site which strongly endorses the product (while appearing as neutral as possible) greatly increases the conversion rate, increasing the possibility of a sale or lead.

Content can be produced relatively cheaply these days. Articles are charged per word, and are priced not on the originality and value of the article as a whole, but on the uniqueness of the content. For online marketers, any content which contains a good distribution of their targeted keywords and doesn’t get flagged by the big G as ’spam’ or ‘duplicate’ is good enough.

This approach is pretty standard for content that is published on the web for free in order to generate CPC or CPS revenue for the online marketer. I’m sure many online marketers still continue to buy cheap content, monetise it with adsense ads or affiliate links, and earn peanuts for their efforts. And if you are one of those guys and already pay for low quality content, you might as well go all the way and start churning out bot generated scraper content on a massive scale.

The point is this: if you’re going to have real, unique content produced by a real writer, then make sure it’s quality and don’t just give it away for free. Don’t hire any content writer to write you generic, keyword rich articles on a topic simply because you want to post it on your content site to help it rank higher in the SEs for the purpose of generating more money from ad revenue. If your site sells an actual product and receives affiliate traffic, then SEO articles help. But otherwise, don’t publish cheap content for free.

Instead of spending $100 on 20 cheap articles written by a cheap, foreign content writer, spend $100 on one long article written by a certified professional on your topic and turn it into paid content to be added as an addition to a bigger project you may have started working on. Invest money on content not so you can drive traffic to the page you post it on for the purpose of making affiliate sales, but to create something which has a much greater perceived value and as a result is appreciated and valued much more for the simple reason that it’s paid and therefore quality as opposed to free and therefore cheap.

There is far too much ‘free’ content on the web, free content which has been written for the sole purpose of having the site it is published on ranking in the search engines and generating ad / affiliate revenue. And believe it or not, the average web user isn’t looking for generic content or even better, bot generated content. They want real content to provide them with real value. And while more and more online marketers focus on churning out as much cheap or bot generated content as possible, there will be an even greater demand for high qualiy information - which is why online publishing will continue to thrive and web users will be more than willing to pay for access to high quality information.

If the niche is good enough for you to make money from ads or affiliate links, then it’s good enough for you to start charging for the actual content. More on this later.

The information marketing industry is strange. You’ve got the ‘get rich quick’ scam marketer types that (financially) excel in the industry by exploiting the foolish, gullible and poor through tasteless yet rather insanely effective sales gimmicks, and then you have an angry super affiliate from the other side of the online marketing industry waving his fist in the air, denouncing all eBook publishers and peddlers and calling for a crusade to end the insanity of it all.

While it makes for good entertainment, I like to distance myself from both the phony marketer and anti-eBook crusader types. I am also an information marketer, but my approach is serious and reputable. I understand the necessity of good sales copy, but I don’t like over-hyped, everything-is-highlighted-and-underlined sales letters.

Publishing information as a product for sale is a business. And like all business models, there are the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

The good informational products offer long-term value to the buyer and long-term profitability to the publisher. High quality informational products are usually niche targeted and are written and produced by real experts. They provide the customer or member with the knowledge they were looking for, without asking them for an obscene amount of money. They are typically sold on a professional, non-scammy website with a simple, elegant design and a relaxed sales copy. Good information products thus rely on credibility, positive reviews and a general public approval within its respective niche. As opposed to poor quality products, they don’t rely on an over hyped sales copy to bring in the sales. Good examples of informational products are Seth Godin’s IdeaVirus and Brian and Tony Clark’s TeachingSells program, the latter of which actually offers multiple products through a variety of formats.

The Bad

Unfortunately, there is an abundance of bad informational products. These usually come in the form of an eBook, where the time spent on the actual product is a small fraction compared to the time and effort put into marketing the product. These products rely on positive reviews by unethical affiliate marketers that only care about making a good ROI. What seperates the bad from the ugly is the niche. No matter how bad the information product is, it will never truly be ugly unless it’s a ‘get rich quick’ product.

and The Ugly

The lowest of the low. These products are ‘get rich quick’ guides. They are usually not only of a poor quality, but they have the sole purpose of making the product publisher rich through the poor mans pennies. These products claim to teach noobs how to make millions, yet the authors of these products depend on selling the dream so they can pay their own bills. And what’s even more ugly are the affiliates that promote these products - most of these affiliate fully understand the underlying scam behind it all. A crap informational product can be identified by a heavily hyped sales letter with excessive use of punctuation, highlighting, underlining, and other cheap copy tactics. As a rule of thumb, the more overhyped a sales letter is, the more it is trying to compensate for the sheer garbage that is to await the fool that decides to invest in the product. Certain ‘internet marketers’ take pride in this and come public with their products under the illusion that they are real marketers or entrepreneurs. Alex Goad, author of Google Payload and Project Black Mask, immediately comes to mind.

I will talk a lot more about how I approach information marketing later on, from the basic concepts behind creating and publishing a quality informational product to different marketing tactics you can use to bank even harder from your product. I’ll also talk about why I totally recommend marketing your own goods rather than marketing someone else’s product or offer as an affiliate, so affiliate marketers reading this may want to stay tuned to read my alternative method of making money online. I’m speaking as an internet marketer who happens to be both an affiliate marketer and information marketer.