Ad.Ventures in Affiliate Marketing

Another One Bites The Dust

I think I’m going to start a list of GooRoos who have joined the A-list’s ‘jump when I say jump’ fan club.

Guys who promote a product – using the affiliate-manager-supplied email copy word for word – without a thought to their integrity, or even to reality for that matter. This list is seriously going to be difficult for me to make though, because I’ve unsubscribed nearly every list I was ever on, so I don’t really get that much email anymore (thank goodness! the stuff I do get goes to a separate account that I check just for kicks every now and again). So help me out here. If you come across the kind of thing I’m looking for, send it my way. Thanks in advance.

On the chopping block today is one Howie Schwartz. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Not guilty of all the above, but one charge in particular – ignoring reality in favor of hype.

I received an email today entitled “email marketing is DEAD“

There are a few things at play here – in case you hadn’t guessed it, he’s promoting mobile marketing, the new buzzword craze that is hitting the cyberstreets all around us.

First things first. I don’t have any issue with mobile marketing. Personally, I’ve never done it, and can’t comment on its efficacy. (It doesn’t yet seem appropriate enough for my market). However, from what I’ve read, yes, it is going to be a wave of the future. Notice that little one letter word I snuck in there? Yeah. A wave.

Is Marketing Dead?

More to the point, and the reason for this post is this current attitude that “email marketing is dead,” “Google Adwords is dead,” “XYZ marketing method is dead.”

Frankly, you can’t say a marketing medium is dead until it is bringing negative return on investment. Last I checked, and it wasn’t that long ago, one major industry journal was being quoted as saying marketing brought an average 5100% ROI across industries. Oh yeah, and they’d done a large survey and study on the issue. Sorry, I don’t have a reference link, but I was suitably impressed enough to use the stat as the title of my own report on email marketing for small businesses.

Hmm… 5100% about as far from negative as I can imagine.

Pre-dating this lot were the guys claiming that direct mail was dead. Apparently those guys never notice the small mountain of mailings that no doubt arrive in their mailboxes each week. Marketers aren’t dumb. They don’t just send those things for kicks you know!

Even more to the point: GooRoo hypocrisy. Promoting one thing to the IM newbie crowd one week, then (and you can just about set your clock on these) approximately 2 weeks later, promoting yet another magical fix. In the case of the Facebook vs Adwords flurry a few weeks back, this was exactly what happened. One day, Gmail targeting is the bomb. The next? Adwords sucks, and they’re scared poopless that Facebook is going to crush them. You can read my rant on that here.

Wait – wasn’t the $197 course I purchased last week supposed to land me in a shiny red convertible? Oh… I see, I need this one now as well. Ok Mr. GooRoo.

The Problem With Our Industry

You see, I’m coming from the perspective of having been an IM newbie. Having been essentially addicted, (can YOU think of a better term to describe it?) to new information products, many of which now pitifully sit in the corner, dust-covered… having spent more than $30,000 in a single year on information. Was all that wasted? No – I’ve learned a lot from it. Was it necessary? Nope.

But you know what? None of that got me on the right track. In fact, it served to keep me effectively off it. In fact, all that information wasn’t enough to keep me on track when factors out of my control effectively shut down my very comfortable revenue stream.

Long term progress started happening when I put my head down, chose a plan, and stuck with it. I already knew more than I needed – all that was lacking was to do it. In a clear, determined manner.

You see, the problem with GooRoos is that people trust them. For whatever reason that may be… compelling copy, testimonials of one in a million results, incredible Clickbank screenshots – you name it. But GooRoos get a certain authority. And they use it… and many abuse it. This is, in my opinion, one of the primary reasons we have such a healthy ‘Floundering IM Newbie Squad” around. Why the Warrior Forum has 100,000 people who still don’t understand the value of a list.

So what to do about this most common of phenomenons? Unsubscribe from nearly everything you can (except my newsletter of course =). Pick your niche, your strategy, and run far and fast with it. Selectively choose whom you will trust for information. Wait at least 24-48 hrs before making any IM purchase, and even more importantly – explain to somebody how it is going to help you achieve your stated business goals this year.

Have you had any run ins with the GooRoos? Tell me about it in the comments.

Screw Google: Facebook Now Rules… Whaaat?

With the simple qualification of you being in marketing and having a functioning email address, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve recently been digitally assaulted with one of the latest renditions from the “Screw Google” crowd.

Specifically, I’m sure you’ve now been educated to the fact that Facebook gets 39+ BILLION page loads per month, 5x more than Google. And that for this very reason, Google is now trembling in their gold-lined, diamond encrusted bunker, aware that their demise must be imminent at the hand of this fearsome foe. Further, savvy marketers should get on the band wagon ASAP, and ditch Google in the hope of greener pastures on the other side of the fence. Why stick it out on the Titanic?

Facebook, so it would seem, is the new Adwords (circa 2004) – king of cheap, targeted traffic.

Proponents say there’s more traffic, you can target by demographics, and that click prices are cheaper.

I’ve been seeing the emails increasing all week long, to the point where I’m getting a little cheesed at this latest ‘slap-Google-back’ stunt. Finally, I just read a good post over at the Affiliate Black Book blog that talked about the issue (yes, that’s where I scraped that fan picture from… thanks X!) and seeing as I was just sitting around here on a Friday evening waiting to go out, I thought why not write my own?

So let’s consider the issues.

Is Facebook a Threat to Big G?

Ok – is Facebook really a threat to Google? Well, depending on your source, Facebook’s projected revenue for 2009 was somewhere between $500 and $550 million. Google’s 2009 reported gross income was $23.65 Billion according to this source. Oh yeah, and they reported net income of $6.52 Billion.

In case you didn’t catch that, there was a B on Google’s statement, and just a little m on Facebooks’.

In case you didn’t catch that, Facebook’s entire 2009 revenue was about 8.4% of Google’s profit.

I highly doubt Google is shaking in their boots about on this one.

Is Facebook Targeted?

Ok, so let’s look at the claims. Facebook is incredibly targeted – you can choose your customers (that’s the claim). Ok, but what are they doing on Facebook? Most people are jumping on Facebook to tell their friends that they just got their hair done, the latest game sucked, or their boss is a jerk. (Careful with that – boss’s are on FB too!). Does that sound like a warmed up prospect? Not to me.

Ok, let’s look at Adwords again. Hmm… prospect types in “XYZ review” sees your ad, and clicks because its relevant. You’ve got a shot at making that sale. He was looking for you. On Facebook, they’re not looking for anything. It’s interruption advertising, same as anything else. Content network, CPV, etc etc. Except search. Oh – and the fact that content network is contextual.

Yes, you can choose your demographics on Facebook, but you can do the same on Google’s content network. And the content network is far larger.

Compared to Google, Facebook’s advertising platform looks like something a 2 year old could rustle up in a sandbox. And need I say that you have FAR MORE OPTIONS on Google’s highly advanced Adwords platform? Anybody who is familiar with the content network on Google knows that Facebook doesn’t offer even 1/10th of the refinement and control that Google does.

Google offers targeted advertising. The best we currently have anyways. Facebook offers you an educated shot in the dark.

Is Facebook Cheaper?

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

I found a blog post where one fine fellow got quite excited about Facebook’s potential. He says he spent about $500 in a couple of weeks and was able to add about 1000 fans to his new fan page (less 50 of his friends that joined as well… so 950 for $500).

How does that work out? That’s about 53 cents per conversion. To get a fan.

I’m trying desperately to remember how that quote goes about not being able to buy love.

Ok, so 53 cents for a conversion isn’t bad. But how does it compare to the content network, or search network? I’m currently getting conversions for around 83 cents a piece (its still dropping) – but these conversions aren’t joining my fan page. They’re opting in to a sales funnel. Many of them are buying my products. The revenue from my sales overshadows the cost of PPC, thus making list building (and there’s a BIG difference between list building and fan base building) essentially a negative cost. Yes, because of the sales, it costs me less than nothing to build my list.

So yes, you maybe be paying 25-50 cents per click on Facebook, but I can tell you I’m currently getting hundreds of clicks per day at an average of 11 cents each off the content network. Oh, and a quite bunch at 4 cents each off one particularly massive site which I won’t name, just to keep you guessing.

So you can talk about prices, and you can talk about conversions. But even then, most people aren’t talking about the same thing. A conversion can be becoming a fan, opting in to a list, or becoming a paid customer.

Should We Really Ditch Google?

If you had an income stream producing consistent revenue, would you throw it away in favor of something else? No, any rational, sane person would simply test the new source, and if it worked out, add it to the mix. Only an idiot would throw out something that is working.

I’ll say that again. Only an idiot would throw out something that is working.

So, that gets me to the main tick in my craw. The fact that every marketer, as well as some of their dogs, have been promoting the NewTrafficHoneyHole product from Ryan Deiss.

The same guy who just promoted his product that taught people how to use Google’s content network to target Gmail is now telling people Google sucks.

You can’t have it both ways!

That’s the thing that really gets me about the internet marketing crowd. Gurus are no exception. Somebody comes out with a hot product, and every starts flogging it, because there are a few bucks to be made. Fact is, I and others I know have tested the Gmail tactic and never been wildly successful at it. And I’ve seen Deiss’ course – nothing we weren’t trying in there.

I’m not sure it ever worked that well, and that makes this latest Facebook thing suspect.

Who’s the Real Rival?

The funny thing is, is that in all of this, I haven’t heard a peep about the fact that Yahoo and MSN are now merging their advertising forces. Just heard it on the radio the other day. Now, that’s something to talk about. Both have highly developed advertising platforms, in many respects far closer to Google than Facebook has any hope of being within a couple of years.

They are both established players, and they’re looking to make waves. Bing is not only aiming at Google, they’re firing. With some Yahoo bullets in the chamber, they’ll get a bit further. It’s going to be very interesting to watch that particular game unfold over the next year or so.

What’s the Upshot?

Well, I’ll make no bones of the fact that Google still pisses me off. They act like they’re God, and they just honestly don’t care about me, or you. Doesn’t matter if you spend a buck a year or a million, we’re all human spawn in their eyes. Except if you’re a real big boy like Amazon or Ebay (then you get preferential treatment apparently as their ads seem to be WAY outside the normal relevancy guidelines the rest of us are subject too).

So no, I don’t like Google. Does that mean I don’t do business with them? Well no. It’s profitable for me, and an excellent source of economical, targeted traffic.

So what about Facebook? Well, I’ve just launched a campaign there this week as well, and I’m now testing out different strategies. Am I abandoning Google? Heck no. But I will be evaluating Facebook’s advertising performance against my benchmarks from Google.

So until I’m able to prove it otherwise, Facebook is not ‘da bomb’ that most people are making it out to be right now, and no, I’m not jumping ship from Google, even though I freely admit the thought of doing business with them frequently brings a sinister gleam to my eye.

Last word? Shape up guys. Use some integrity in what you promote eh?

The Importance of An Upsell

Back in November I released my first product in my new niche. In December I released the second one. Finally, in mid-January, I made the second one an upsell to the first.

The reason I didn’t get around to doing this right away was quite simple. It was on the list, and clearly not of high enough priority.

You’ve heard all the gurus say it before, but you need an upsell!

It’s quite simple. A percentage of people will purchase it, and if done right, the others won’t mind at all.

Well, I knew all that as theory, but when I finally put the upsell in place, I figured I would be lucky to pull in a 10% conversion rate for the upsell. I gave them a bit of a deal – $10 off the regular price of the second product.

So I installed the upsell late one afternoon, just before heading to Mexico, and let ‘er rip.

My upsell process consisted of a 2 minute video, and probably one paragraph, and that was it. How can that do justice to a full on product?

Well, I’ll let you in on a secret. That upsell, pathetic sales process and all, has converted at over 30% consistently since I put it there. In fact, right now, its north of 40%.

And I haven’t even done anything to optimize that page, make it pretty, or anything! It actually is a bit ugly.

Now the truly ironic thing is that the upsell is converting far better than the actual salespage of that product. The one where I’ve got an opt in page, a sales page, a sales video, a launch style blog with good free content, an autoresponder followup…. the works!

THAT site isn’t converting very well… yet. The upsell? Where I give them hardly anything to go on except for my word that the two products go well together? Yeah, that sucker is performing!

So if you haven’t decided yet whether or not you need an upsell, let me make that decision for you right now. YES.

If you don’t have one created, you can use PLR, or just create another complimentary product that could work. It doesn’t have to be better than the first product, the main thing is that you’re able to raise the overall average transaction value. Great if you can have a $27 front product and $97 backend, but even if your upsell is only $10, if a percentage take you up on it, you’re making more moola.

Life As A Merchant (And How to Keep It Simple)

For the past few months now, I’ve been deeply involved in creating and marketing my own products. I still do some affiliate marketing, but for the time being, I’m building my own inventory.

Along with being a product owner comes some unique challenges.

One of these is customer support.

I keep a rough mental tally of how many emails I’m receiving on a given subject, and when things start getting out of hand (ie more than 2-3 emails in a week on a particular question) then I try to come up with a solution. 2-3 emails right now could easily become 10-20 per week later on, and if there is an easy fix, I’ve saved myself tons of time, right?

Ok – so here’s an example. I offer a member’s only download area, and some people were having trouble logging in and downloading. Mostly these questions were due to weak computer skills, and I found myself explaining things like ‘right click and save target as’ over and over. Well, I quickly realized I hadn’t put that particular line on my download page, so I added that, and things improved a bit.

Then I decided to do a walk through screen capture video and talk about everything a member might want to do, and show them how to do it. Boom. Emails dropped off.

Something else I’ve been dealing with lately is failed transactions. It just drives me nuts to see a failed transaction come through, because I know that’s lost revenue for me!

Unfortunately I don’t currently have a way of automatically following up with those people, but I did start emailing each one separately, to see if I could provide some suggestions as to how they might successfully purchase. Anyways, this started to get tiresome as well.

So I created some custom signatures in my email program, Entourage, one for each product. Now if a person tries to purchase product XYZ and fails, I can go into my system, click on their name (which opens an email window), type in a subject line and “Hello Johnny” and then select the signature of my choice and hit send.

The signature is in fact a complete email, complete with a screen capture shot of the order form with red circles and instructions.

So now I have a way of following up in a semi-automated manner, and hopefully capturing back some of those transactions. To date, although I haven’t counted exactly, I have seen a handful return for a successful purchase. Well worth 30 seconds.

You could take this same concept (email signatures) and use it for pretty much any kind of common customer support issue you run into. It is just a really handy way of storing a pre-packaged answer to a common question.

Do you have any little tricks on how you deal with customer support issues as a merchant? I’d love to hear them – leave a comment below!

Marketing Lessons from a Food Court

Whenever I travel I enjoy looking for new and innovative examples of marketing. To be honest, sometimes I emerge from my cave so rarely (feels like anyways) that the main stream pop culture and the marketing that goes with it is often new (ish) to me.

Which often provides me with interesting observations.

Anyhow, I found myself last night in a mall near Seattle (on my way to Mexico.. oh yeah!), grabbing some food with some friends at the food court. It was about 5:30 Friday evening, and the food court was nearly empty.

We wandered around looking for food, past all kinds of restaurants with nobody in line.

Then out of the blue, there’s this little guy in a big red chef’s hat calling us over and offering us a free sample of Teriyaki chicken on a toothpick. “Only $5.69 for a meal!” he told me.

Now you find me one red-blooded male who’s in the process of looking for food who will turn down a nice juicy chunk of hot Teriyaki chicken that’s being waved in his face, and I’ll show you a race of jungle pygmies that walks around on their hands, using their feet only for basket weaving.

Of course I tasted the chicken, and it was marvelous.

Mustering up supreme amounts of willpower, I pulled myself away from the delicious chicken, forcing myself to make a rational evaluation of ALL my options. I was immediately aware of the power of this form of marketing, and though my marketer’s brain loved it, I still wanted to be sure I was making the best choice!

So we walked around, and around, and strangely, I noticed that the more distance I put between myself and the chicken, the easier it was to contemplate eating something else. All the same, the chicken was now the the gold standard, and everything else was being evaluated against the savory flavor still lingering in my mouth. And, it was being evaluated against the price – a rather tempting under 6 bucks for a meal. Most of the other meals were 8 to 10 dollars, thus seeming to be in a different class.

Despite my wanderings, in the end the known quantity won out over the wild cards, and I opted to go back for the chicken. Partly because of price, and partly because I already knew I would like it.

I hopped into line, grabbing an extra sample on the way in

As I sat in line I contemplated their marketing a bit further. Their lineup was 2 rows deep… a total of 25 people in line at the moment I arrived. I had a quick look around. There was a pizza place on the right, with not a soul in line, but tons of pizza sitting there in the warmer. Every now and then someone wandered by and inquired about the price or something.

On the left, there was a Mexican place with about 4 people in line for burritos.

That was the same story all around the food court. In fact, if you added up everyone currently in line, in the entire food court, you’d probably have about 50 leads at any one time. The line I was in had a full 50% of those.

Alright, so I’m sitting there in line. The staff were all hopping… efficient and really giving it all they had. Yelling at each other, chopping stuff, and having a good time – generally looking like they were working hard for the their money. I looked again at the menu… yeah, the chicken looked good. Then I noticed you could substitute noodles for rice, for only 50 cents. Hmm.. I like noodles. Then I noticed just before the till a nice big glossy picture of Teriyaki chicken, and a sign that said “double meat for 99 cents”. Hmm… that sounds good! And then I noticed there were spring rolls as well….

Plus, the meals didn’t come with a drink… so most people in line were buying a drink as well. I skipped that one, but as I looked, nearly every single order (7 out of the 8 that I counted) got the little green toothpick in their carton that indicated double meat. I figure the average order came close to $10, with a drink.

Even though there were 25 people in my line, it moved through pretty quickly, due to the efficiency of their system. I didn’t have to wait to pay, to order, or anything – that was all done well before I ever got to the till. The girl managing the till was taking orders 4-5 people in advance, getting them ordered, prepped and paid before they ever got to the till.

So… What Can We Learn?

A few things stuck out to me from this experience, and I think they’re worth mentioning. First…

The FREE Offer
These guys were out there full time, giving away free food (extremely tasty too) to draw people into their line. They were the only place doing that… in fact most of the other shops looked like you might need to wake up somebody to take your order.

It struck me that all those other shops were seemingly apathetic about their state of affairs. I don’t know if they just never put two and two together, but to me it was obvious. You get someone in with free food, they get that taste in their out, and typically they’re going to want more. Why rock the boat? Go with what you know. Plus, now you feel a slight indebtedness to these guys, as they’ve been so kind as to give you something, asking nothing in return. (Read Predictably Irrational sometime for more on this)

So did they think that THEIR food wasn’t suitable for a toothpick delivery system? I’m sure you could cut up a pizza and do that with toothpicks. I’m not sure how you’d do that with a burrito – though they sell meat too, so why not do the exact same thing? The fast food greasy burger place could offer chicken nuggets or something, or parts of a chicken cutlet. The fish and chips place… chunks of fish. If they really put their mind to it, there would be way. However, nobody did.

I guess this is a good example of ‘moving the free line’ and adapting that into a retail / service environment. Can we do this online? Of course. Offer a free report, or an ebook, or a something.

The LOW initial price & UPSELL
Another thing that stood out to me was the low price of the offer. $5.69. Walking around that food court, it was difficult to find anything else that low. Does that mean these guys were undercutting on price?

Not at all. As I mentioned, I would estimate the average order was much closer to $10 because of the ingenious little upsets. So they definitely weren’t giving up much revenue, even though they came across as the cheapest option out there.

Think we can do this online? You bet. If you’ve got a product, you better have an upsell. The more relevant the better – i.e. double your meat is a terrific upset. What can you do in your market that is similar?

SOCIAL PROOF
There’s something about crowds that draws people – subconsciously I guess we’re social beings, and expect that most of the time, most of the people are right. So… why buck the trend? I hopped in that line despite it being more than 4 times as long as any other lineup in the place, and it remained full the entire time I was in line.

How to take this online? The more comments on your blog, or on your site, or wherever, the more people see that as social proof. Testimonials, success stories… there are lots of ways to create social proof and the feeling of a crowd environment.

BOTTOM LINE
As marketers, it is our DUTY to watch & learn what people IN OTHER INDUSTRIES are doing to get ahead, and then adapt that for our own market.

There were probably 15 businesses in that food court, and only 1 took the initiative to do something interesting to drum up some business. I can pretty well guarantee you this wasn’t the first time they’ve done it either – so all those other businesses have had opportunity to watch & learn. Have they learned? Nope.

I think that will be true for nearly any market. You’ll always have tons of people in a market, but if you can be unique, exciting, innovative, or provide a different twist on something – chances are even if your competition notices, they won’t follow you.

And over time, they’ll be scratching their heads, still wondering why the heck you’re doing so much more business than they are.

Isn’t it a weird world that we live in?