In the online marketing world, it can be a struggle to get your voice heard, especially since many marketers will be adopting similar tactics when it comes to promoting products to their prospects.

The proliferation of competitive intelligence and spy tools means that a new affiliate can create a clone copy of another affiliates campaign, often within a few hours.

The net result? A potentially profitable campaign, although with an uncertain lifespan.

Instead, affiliates who are planning to be in the industry for the long haul can better channel their energy to create a sustainable presence on the Internet. The following factors can help you shape the direction of your business

Improve on How Everyone Else is Running Their Business

Think of companies like Apple, FedEx and Twitter and see how they positioned themselves above the competition. Although personal computers, overnight delivery and social networks had been around before these companies were established, these new entrants looked at where the bar was set in their industry and moved it up a couple of notches.

Within the affiliate marketing context, most affiliates are promoting their campaigns primarily through text and graphics, thin affiliate sites, which may not provide much value beyond specifications lifted from the merchant’s site and product pricing.

Going the extra mile to create additional content, especially catering to buyers earlier in the sales cycle, can help boost your conversions.

Although there have been numerous presentations at trade events and seminars about the power of video in branding yourself and getting more sales conversions, there are just a handful of affiliates who use these services, and more importantly, use them well.

Always Be Testing

Department store pioneer John Wanamaker has been quoted as saying “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Although Wanamaker, considered the father of advertising, came up with the words in 19th century, the saying still hold true when it comes to online marketing today.

You won’t know what will or will not work when it comes to a traffic or conversion tactic in a campaign. I’ve heard more than my fair share of stories about marketers trying something wild and unexpected on a whim as they’re setting up a campaign, only to have it go gangbusters on them.

Unfortunately, you won’t often read blog posts or forum postings about these techniques because they’re some of the key tools of the trade. If you do hear about them, it’s usually after some time has passed and the affiliate has made a killing and moved on to something new.

The lesson here is to think about what you’re doing in your business and find ways to innovate. Creativity can pay off very handsomely in these circumstances.

Andrew Wee blogs about affiliate marketing at WhoIsAndrewWee.com and is co-founder of the InternetMarketingCookbook.com resource site.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 9 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/24376105/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-9
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While every affiliate marketer coming into the industry has aspirations to be like one of the top affiliates, it isn’t exactly a walk in the park for many. Informal research shows that a large proportion of new affiliates enter the industry expecting that success will fall into their lap, only to discover that reality is vastly out of synch with the picture of success they see themselves in.

Fact #1: Drop the dream and focus on affiliate marketing as a real business.

You might have read blog posts about affiliates buying a new house off the efforts of their Christmas campaign, or going for vacations funded by their marketing efforts every other month.

While it’s true that this is their lifestyle now, you will discover that many of these affiliates have been working at this for some time, and they have paid their dues along the way.

It pays to talk to an active affiliate at an event like Affiliate Summit and hear how they got started and their lessons learned along the way. Other resources include podcasts on the GeekCast.fm network or even my Friday Podcast series (WhoIsAndrewWee.com/podcasts).

You’ll often learn that any aspiring affiliate will face a variety of challenges and obstacles as they build their business. Dealing with and overcoming these challenges are an important part of becoming successful.
Often, it helps to think of yourself as a business owner, rather than an affiliate, who might be focused on shorter term, arbitrage-style marketing campaigns.

Fact #2: Build expertise; but more importantly, be an active affiliate.

It’s strange that some affiliates will use paid promotion methods like Pay-Per-Click or Pay-Per-View advertising without having read the documentation or guides that reside in the respective systems’ training area.

Relying on secondhand information on blogs or forums can create a world of pain, especially if the campaign goes south. It’s important to be informed and understand your promotion method, especially if you’re investing time and resources into it.

On the other hand, learning and mastering a new promotion method can be quite intimidating, especially since there seem to be multiple tips, tricks and strategies you can use to make each method work. This can paralyze affiliates and result in their avoiding PPC or other forms of marketing because it seems “too complex”.

However, the only way to get over this hurdle is to actually do it; investing time to set up a campaign, allocating a budget and measuring the results.

In many cases, you can expect your first couple of campaigns to be in the red. Achieving the break-even point on your commissions vs. marketing spend should be your first target.

One unhealthy way to look at your marketing spend is as a loss or even “throwing money into the gutter”. Take broader perspective and see that you are paying to collect market data, which you can use to refine and optimize your campaign into a profitable one, and you are taking steps to build a concrete business.

Andrew Wee focuses on blogging, affiliate marketing and social traffic generation and blogs at http://WhoIsAndrewWee.com.

As an affiliate marketer, there is a tendency to want to maximize conversions and profits, and it’s sometimes difficult to see the forest through the trees and easy to lose perspective of the greater goal of growing your business and expanding its scale.

Ultimately affiliates overcome five challenges to bring their business to the next level:

1) Master Plan and Consistent Action:
Having a list of goals/resolutions at the start of the year is pretty useless… unless you put in the action to back that up. Consistent, focused action, and refusing to get sidetracked by small, more interesting projects is what separates serious affiliates from those who have a myriad of “interesting” hobby affiliate sites.

2) A Systems-based Business Architecture:
As your marketing campaigns, with their components involving research, set up, tracking, analytics and optimization, become more sophisticated, so too will the need to document the processes and have step-by-step procedures to not only increase the probability of success when launching new campaigns, but it will also reduce the time taken to set them up.

Sitting down once a month to map out your business processes will give you a clear blueprint and help you identify your strengths which have led to successful campaigns.

Building on these strengths will likewise build your business. Checklists, flowcharts and procedures can aid in this process.

3) Business Leverage:
No matter how superhuman your resolve and physical endurance, you’re still limited to 24 hours a day. Looking at options like hiring employees, automating repetitive elements of your business by developing software or scripts to reduce manual labor, and outsourcing tasks outside of your expertise to experts can increase your effectiveness and efficiency.

This will free you to focus on high value activities like sourcing for new offers, as well as negotiating for better terms from merchants and networks.

4) Joint Ventures/Collaborations:
Partnerships are one of the best, and sometimes worst, ways to grow your business. In some cases, the partnership will not work out because each side had different expectations from the project and the reality doesn’t match up to it.

However, if the partnership works out, particularly if your partner complements your strength, this could be a classic case of 1 + 1 = 3.

5) Building a Long-term, Brand-based Business
Affiliate marketing is growing up. Thin affiliate sites created with appropriate About Us, Contact, and Privacy information pages to meet Google AdWords requirements are still out there, but the writing is on the wall. As the industry matures, users will look for full fledged destination/portal sites that they’ll be returning to for repeat purchases.

Success will be measured not just in conversions, but ultimately in repeat purchases.

Long term affiliate success will lie in rolling with the five forces that will help you shift your game to a higher level.

Andrew Wee blogs about blogging, affiliate marketing, and social media at http://WhoIsAndrewWee.com.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 5 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue5.pdf
FeedFront issue 5 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00category/issue-5

There’s a perception that blogging is just a platform for creating affiliate sites and generating profits with them, which may not be totally undeserved.

A well-maintained blog features frequent and new content, compared to traditional article style websites. Search engines happily send visitors seeking niche relevant content by featuring blogs high in their results.

However, blogging can be much more than just another quick way to create a Web site and pump it full of advertising and embedding affiliate links in the post. That’s just scratching a blog’s potential.

The big money comes when you establish a brand and THEN bank on your brand.

The Power of Branding

In a study conducted by a retailer which manufactured their own lines of car batteries, it found that one product line consistently outsold the others many times over.

This was despite the fact that the batteries had the same specifications and performed the same.

The difference? The brand.

One brand carried the retailer’s name, while the other product line was labeled Die Hard batteries.

The Die Hards flew off the shelves, outselling the ones carrying the retailer’s name many times over.

How does this relate to Internet marketing?

Think about your niche for a moment. Is there a particular influencer or opinion leader that almost everyone listens to?

Is there an Oprah or Martha or Larry King who talks and causes everyone else to listen?

With the power of blogging, you don’t need to have a million dollar budget to achieve the same effect.

Here are some tips to help you break apart from the millions of blogger out there:

• Integrity: Honesty and reputation are two of the highest valued attributes when people were surveyed about role models they admire and respect. The personality and character outclassed even physical appearance and wealth.

Integrity in the blogging context means you’re objective in your posts, it may even mean choosing not to promote affiliate products with high payouts, simply because you don’t agree with the ethics of the industry or the manner in which it is projected.

• See things in a different light: You may have your favorite news channels, which sounds strange because all broadcasters have access to the same news source. What makes it different is the way in which it’s presented.

Being able to understand how everyone else is doing things, and consciously choosing an approach that reflects your personality and gives a fresh perspective to your audience will have them thanking you for your efforts.

Studying some of your favorite blogs and analyzing their style and techniques will give you ideas for enhancing your blogging style.

While establishing a brand with your blog takes more effort than merely publishing keyword-loaded posts, it can generate huge dividends for your profits and your business.

Andrew Wee is the creator of the SecretBlogWeapon.com blogging system and blogs at http://WhoIsAndrewWee.com

Download the entire FeedFront issue 4 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue4.pdf
FeedFront issue 4 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/category/issue-4/