Super Affiliate Marketing Blog

The time has come, when the leaves start to change colors, and more and more school busses are seen on the street with young kids riding them (as opposed to older summer school rejects). Ah yes, Fall is just around the corner. Instead of seeing leaves and kids, I see dollar bills. Think it’s a cynical approach? Well, good for you, because every kid going back to school is a potential dollar or two more that you could be making. When kids go back to school, and summer comes to a close, more people go online and spend more time on there. Whether it’s hanging out on myspace, or just looking for deals on books (college kids). So how do we bank on the back to school boom that only happens once a year?

Easy. We market to them based on a psychological approach, rather than a technical one. What does this mean? Well, think back to when you were in college (or maybe you still are, and if so, let me know so I can sell shit to you now!) and you knew that your folks only gave you so much cash to spend on books and supplies. So since the internet is by far the best and easiest way to buy those things at great prices, you’ll be deal hunting. Now, when people shop, psychology plays a HUGE part in it. I’ve always wondered, why someone would buy the same generic pen at a store for $4.00 instead of $0.65? What is so good about that $4 pen? Well, a lot of it has to do with how the pen is packaged and what cool and pointless things the company can come up with to make it sound like you NEED this in order to get good grades or save your hand from falling off. It’s complete bullshit when you think about it, and totally about the psychological aspect. They purposely package it in shiny or brightly colored paper and plastic with flashy tags right on the packaging about how it’s some advanced form of ink relaying from the ink well to the ball point at the end. Again, more bullshit. It’s a freakin’ pen for god’s sake! All you need it to do is write, nothing more. And yet, the company values it at more than $3 more than the barebones model, even though the actual pen is identical to the other.

So how do we take the example of branding psychology to the internet and sell these college kids on stuff like backpacks, electronics, beer, and other necessities? We package the site like that $4 pen. You sell them on the idea that this product will benefit them, and make them uber popular for having or using it. I’m sure you can be creative and come up with a pack of lies on your own for almost any product out there for the college kids. Make the site flashy, but believable. Don’t tell them something rediculous that they will just laugh at and close, you want to get inside their heads and sell based on their emotions and thoughts of the product.

Let’s use backpacks as an example. Ebags.com is probably the biggest backpack retailer on the internet, and I’m pretty sure you can find their affiliate program on CJ.com too. So we want to sell backpacks right? But let’s not focus on every bag they have, because then your site will be done by next September, instead of the one starting tomorrow. First pick out the type of traffic you want to sell to. Yes, we are going to go a little backwards, because when selling products, sometimes it’s good to start off with the target audience before the product. So, say our goal are freshmen students at colleges around the US. Simple enough, there are probably millions of them all around. Why not build a site focused primarily on Freshmen starting college then. Use the ebags affiliate links and pictures to market the bag right from your site, so that when they click to buy it, they go directly to the product page or signup form. Who’s to say that you can’t market and make a semi-white label product page of the actual bag or product in general. Your goal is to pre-sell them as hard and much as possible so that when they do go to the merchant’s site, all they have in their head is “I need to get this bag”. When marketing the actual bag, there’s no need to talk about it having zippers or pockets. Well, lightly mention it, but it shouldn’t be your primary selling point. Focus on something to get into their head. Don’t put a lot of focus on the actual makeup of the product either.

Let’s go over what we have so far. We are going to make a site targeting college freshmen students specifically. There will only be a few select, but uber popular bags that will be pushed so not to overwhelm the user with a plethora of crap. Insist that they will be getting the best possible price if they buy through your site or links. A good idea to do as far as deals go, since you don’t actually own the product or hold inventory of it, is to go onto the ebags site, and look at their prices. Usually they’ll have a price that looks like this - Retail: $79.99 — This is important, because you can put the price on all of the bags as that retail price, and then put a star or flashy symbol with the actual price of $25 or whatever it is. But list “mysite.com’s price $25! for Freshmen only!”.

On the site itself you want to really get them excited. Put in some ad copy with a very laid back down to earth appeal about how your site was made by Freshmen students (because we were all freshmen at some point) for other freshmen students. Maybe say stuff on how the bags on the first page all came highly recommended by sophmores, juniors and seniors in a poll about the best bags to use for school, but also looked really good too. Again, be creative, there are tons of little things to tell them about. Another solid idea would be to make them signup to a newsletter of “deals for college students only”. Have them list their basic info of first/last name, email, school, gender, grade. This way you know that if they are freshmen, you have 4 full years to market to them with other products or services!

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I haven’t made an update here in almost a month. I know boys and girls, that you are missing some of my oh so cool posts, but to be honest, this summer was supposed to be slow as shit, and instead, it’s been one of the busiest times in my career as an internet marketer. I’ve teamed up with tons of new ad networks, made lots of new sites, hired two new people in my company, and cut tons of new deals to ensure that we will be around for a very long long time.

Anyone who thinks that being in affiliate marketing and traffic generation means that you sit at your computer and don’t interract with anyone else is doing something wrong. I’ve recently had to upgrade my Nextel plan to the $150/mo plan so that I can call people all over the US and Canada without going over my minutes. It’s a pretty cool unlimited plan, and the service rocks. I speak to a minimum of 12 people a day, 5-6 days a week concerning business, projects, traffic, and future goals. There are so many things I am so excited about rolling out this year, that I can hardly contain myself sometimes.

WickedFire is also a huge hobby project of mine that is taking off in ways I never thought possible. I originally started it in the hopes of just creating a really laid back and cool place for people to hang out and shoot the shit and interract with one another, but it’s taking on a life and personality of it’s own. I’ve become friends with so many great people who I would have never met before. My company also hired two great guys that I met from the forum too. WickedFire added 3 new moderators that were all part of the original 50 or so members when the forum first launched. The community itself has been really great to WickedFire, and a lot of affiliate networks have been sending their affiliate managers to have a voice there and represent their networks to better field and answer questions by affiliates. If you own an ad network or affiliate network or service, by all means, go to WickedFire.com and join up and ask/answer questions. You’ll never be charged like other forums do, and it’s a fantastic way to really get close and personal with both big and small affiliates and site owners.

AD:TECH NY - New York City 2006 - I will be there in person with my partner to sign autographs and take pictures! Just kidding about the last bit.. But I will be there and I would love to see people who either read my blog or are members at WickedFire. I will be giving away a bunch of tshirts too from WickedFire as well, so come find me if you’re there and check it out. I’ll definitely make a blog post about it as it comes closer (November 2006).

Affiliate Summit West - Vegas 2007 -  WickedFire will be there in full force. Not sure on the event(s) that we’ll be co-sponsoring just yet, but the ideas we’ve been tossing around have been really great. This is a must attend conference for all affiliates big and small.

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The other day I was talking to my father, who owns a real estate development firm. Our discussions are always the same. He doesn’t quite understand WHAT I do exactly, but he knows I’m happy with it, and it’s made me a lot of money. Aside from that, he’s constantly asking when I’m going to join him in his ventures and immerse myself in the offline real estate world. The answer to that is probably in five or ten years from now, when I’m good and ready. But without drifting too far off topic here, he had called me and asked “what’s this internet real estate stuff one of these younger guys in the firm was talking about?”. Apparently, one of the newer guys in the firm gave a presentation about some new project they were going to be working on, and made a comparison to how profitable and easy internet real estate is to buying physical land and properties. It got me thinking. Are we really this far along now that the internet is ready for it’s first big cyber real estate boom? Will there be a rush, and has it already started? With these questions swirling around my head, and the fact that my father, the most anti-internet person I know has heard about it, I needed answers. So off to the land of research I went. For hours I pored over magazine articles, web articles, blogs, domain name forums, spoke to active domainers, etc. I finally came to a conclusion.

We are in fact in the midst of an internet real estate boom. It hasn’t peaked yet, and surprisingly so too. Usually everything on here moves at two million times per second. You’d think too, with some domains selling for over $7 Million, like Business.com did in the early days that, that was the trigger or peak even of the rush to buy up as many domains as possible. But it’s nowhere near over, nor is it even slowing down.

But what does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Since that is what I like to focus my topics on.. Well, for one let’s compare it to buying and flipping real estate. We’ll stick to residential real estate, because my father’s type is far too complex for me to get into now. So in residential real estate flipping, your goal is just like that of say arbitrage. Buy low, sell high. So you find a property in distress. Distress can mean it’s a total piece of shit on the inside or out, no one wants to live there, it needs a lot of annoying and sometimes expensive fixing up, the person who owns the mortgage on it has been late for god knows how many months. Whatever the case, you buy the house for $100k. You get a contractor to come over, and you pay them $30k to fix it up and make whatever additions you need. When it’s all said and done, let’s say the house was valued at the $100k you bought it for, well, after the fixing up, it’s now worth $250k. So in that month or two that it took you to fix it up, pay the contractor and his team of workers to do all of the labor and fixing up, maybe you painted it yourself and put a bunch of hours into it here and there, but when all is said and done, you sell the house at $250k, and you just made yourself a hefty profit of $100k-$120k (minus taxes and other crap) for very little work and effort. Pretty good you say eh? Well, that was just a quick example, I’m sure it depends on your location and whatnot, and let’s face it, this isn’t a real estate investment site either, but for argument’s sake, let’s take that same example and apply it to the internet.

You start looking for a distressed website property on a site like bizmp.com. I recommend using bizmp.com because instead of checking a bunch of different boards, it checks all of them at once for you, and lists the websites (properties) for sale with a little bit of extra information to boot and help you out. So you’re looking for a distressed property here, not something that will cost a boat load and will take a year to become profitable. You want something that has lots of potential, but the owners are either too lazy or just don’t have the time, patience, or best yet, know how to monetize it. When you finally pick something out that you like, you have two choices before you begin. Do you want to keep this site and add it to your arsenal of already profitable sites, or do you want to flip it in a month or two for some more cash? That choice is entirely up to you, but let’s pretend you chose flip it.

So how do we take a say, $500 site and turn it into a $3000 site? Well, we need three major parts to work out to make it more appealing to potential buyers.
The design. Is it too crappy to look at? Do you need to change it around? Chances are pretty good that you will need to make some alterations. Whether you should redo the whole thing is again, up to your taste and budget. Remember, you already spent $500 on this, and your goal is $3k, so you don’t want to go overboard with unnecessary beautification operations. Let the new buyers handle that. Make your site as physically appealing as possible, in the most minimal and cheapest way. All you have to do is stress the goal of the site with a little more than basic design.

Second on the list, usability. Is the site easy to use. Depending on the overall goal of the site, whether it’s selling a product, a service, or just providing information, your site needs to be fast, and it needs to get the end user to where they have to go on the site quickly and easily. This is also something that long term buyers look for, because no one wants to sit there and fumble with a script or CMS changes when they are waiting for a site to become profitable.

Last thing on the list, potential monetization. The site has to be profitable in some shape or form. Granted you may find someone that buys it and just likes to look at it all day long, but the chances of finding someone like that is nothing to hold your breath about. So your goal is how to monetize the site, or at least get it started so that when you put it back on the market, it looks flippin fantastic, literally. Do some SEO, whether basic or extensive is always up to you. But if it were me, I’d run a small linking campaign. Get some direct links to it, submit it to niche directories, get some relevant blog links to it. Maybe run a press release about it. Change the meta, title, content, and header tags too. Just give it a nice clean workout so that everything is there for the new owners to play around with and not have to hire some expert to do the work from scratch. Remember, that even though you are selling a property that doesn’t really interest you much in holding onto, you are selling it to someone who finds it as a good deal or investment, so you must treat it with respect, because this property may be someone’s baby sometime soon. Back to work though, put some contextual ads onto it if you like, get the stats program working again, collect as much real data as possible on the current situation of the site, and then make projections of 3, 6, 10 and 12 months. Base those numbers ONLY on the current situation of the site. If you just go off and make numbers up, they won’t buy anything else from you ever again, and you may also sabotage your reputation on your first deal, which can suck. So spend some cash and get that sucker onto the engines, get some traffic flowing in, if it’s selling a product, get some interest in it. Do whatever you can without spending much money to get the site to work like a well oiled machine.

Now that you’ve turned the property from a garbage site into a squeaky clean, working, and semi-profitable property, you can put it back onto the market. Don’t be afraid to tell people that you only owned it for a few months. It’s good to be honest with potential buyers and come straight out and say “I bought this as a fixerupper and I am flipping it”. You don’t necessarily have to mention your original price for it, but just let them know that you’ve invested time and money into it and it’s not just false hopes and promises that are tying this baby together. This would also be a great time to bust out those stats and projections on traffic and revenue figures and potentials. The more equipped you are with valid information, the better the site will look, and the more eager people will be to buy or bid.

So since this is pretend land, let’s pretend that your site sold after a week on the market. That was a pretty good turnaround. You spent about two months on it, put a little bit of cash into it, but mostly it was work (which can also be outsourced to another country if you like). You took this thing from zero to hero, and let’s say it sold for $3k. So you just made a $2k-$2.5k profit on it (minus expenses). That’s not too much, but look at it from this way, you just made it many more times profitable than the original owner ever had it at.

What you should do is after you make a few flips, you should constantly take notes on what fixing up methods have worked best to attract buyers, and then apply them to all of your new properties. As you buy and flip properties like this over and over again, you can start to establish yourself as someone who knows what they are doing, and send out a newsletter to all of the buyers and even potential buyers of your sites and let them know that if they ever need a new type of site, that you can find one for them and sell them a well working startup, instead of a crappy one.

This method is being used all over the place I’m sure. Although I’ve never read up on people doing it, maybe this post will convince more people to get up off their asses and take control and do what they need to do to make it big in the industry. There are soooooooooooooooo many distressed sites out there, and you can even start one up from scratch if you like. You can turn yourself into an established internet brokerage firm, or you can hire one to handle your properties for you.

This market is wide open and fairly untapped, and the buyers are always out there. So the ball is in your court now. Let’s see if you have what it takes to harness this information and use it to your benefit.

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