Online Marketing Glossary: Advertiser
Advertiser (also Merchant or Retailer):
- Any website that markets and sells goods or services. In affiliate marketing programs, advertisers contract with affiliates to get consumers to register for services, purchase products, fill out forms or visit websites.
Basically, the person paying for those leads & sales is the advertiser. In affiliate marketing, the advertiser is responsible for funding the commission pages, providing coupon codes and creative banners, text links, etc. The success of the program rests ultimately on the shoulders of the advertisers. Imaging the pressure on me at PsPrint!
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Delisting
Delisting:
- When webpages are removed from a search engine’s index.
Most of the time this is done because a page breaks the search engine’s terms of service. On rare occasion this can happen when the spiders misinterpret something on your page that’s questionably close to the line.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
CJU Course: Affiliate Marketing 101
As the first course of the conference yesterday, I’m sure there was a lot of pressure for this hour and fifteen minutes to really set the tone for the three days of Commission Junction University. Titled “Affiliate Marketing 101: Back to the Basics”, I attended hoping to maybe pick up some things I didn’t actually know considering I taught a lot of the basics to myself a couple years back. The speaker was:
- Jeremy Palmer, President, QuitYourDayJob.com
I converse with & follow him on twitter and I’ve heard great things about his last projects The Black Ink Projects and Black Ink 2, although haven’t had a chance to check it out myself. I won’t know until Thursday if this session really did set the appropriate tone for the conference or not, but it was definitely worth my attendance!
Bullet Point Review!
- Choose Your Niche
- The niche you choose should be your passion – it’s the easiest foundation to build upon.
- Know a lot about your niche to be successful.
- Develop a Business Plan
- Put together a SWOT analysis for you AND your closest competitors – their weaknesses can be your opportunities.
- Just make it a simple spreadsheet.
- Have a unique selling proposition. It’s not enough to just copy someone else, you have to see what they’re doing and how you can do it better.
- Learn about the customer persona.
- Inventory your own skills objectively – what can you do yourself and what would you be best served by outsourcing?
- Write Value Added Content
- Start writing content before you design your site.
- Content is the key to the site.
- Have 10-15 pages of content before you launch to improve Quality Score.
- Design Your Site
- You must have professional tools to create a professional site.
- Be objective about your experience and consider outsourcing.
- TOOL: 99Designs for design contests – you only pay for the winner, and you pay much less.
- Develop Your Site
- Outsourcing programming can be done on Elance or oDesk quite effectively.
- Be sure to write extremely detailed specifications on what you want the site to do and how it should be done when using outsourced talent.
- With these services you can escrow your payment so that no money is released until certain milestones are done – and done to your satisfaction.
- Test the Waters with PPC
- Google hates “rich pages” (also referred to as “thin landing pages”) where the only intent is a conversion.
- Google recently updated their algorithms and human QC when assigning Quality Scores, so be sure to read up.
- Essentially Google wants you to develop your own content: they want independent reviews, content not found directly on the merchant’s website, and the comparison of several merchants.
- Many affiliates have had good success with video reviews because they resonate more with consumers.
- Remember that Google isn’t the only game in town – test on Yahoo & MSN to discover what works in terms of keywords and ad copy.
- Test & Optimize
- Look at conversions using keywords.
- TOOLS: Tracking 202 (free), Prosper 202 (free), Optimize My Site (paid), Google Website Optimizer (free).
- Pay equal attention to conversion rate and click through rate.
- Don’t use vague or hype laden copy – it won’t convert well.
- Split test your landing pages.
- Build a Sustainable Business.
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
- You want to thrive without Google just in case.
- Facebook Ads are growing with better ROI.
- Remember the viral marketing element (what can you do that people will pass on?)
- You want to be who people will think of when they think of your niche.
- Create a brand for yourself.
- Random Tips
- Some books to check out: Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin & Malcolm Gladwell and The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, & David Weinberger.
- When doing product comparisons, try throwing in a weaker competitor to enhance the value of the better products.
- DO NOT use the standard WordPress template when adding a blog to your site – make sure it looks like the rest of your site.
- Comparison pages only need to be very simple tables.
Points brought up during the Q&A
- Mobile has great opportunities for merchants and advertisers, but it’s hard for affiliates. People are not (yet) likely to use mobile devices to make purchases.
- Outsourcing content? Elance is ok but Jeremy expressed some displeasure with what he’s got from that site. An audience member suggested PR Newswire and searching for keywords to find experts.
- My own suggestion is to try going to LinkedIn & looking for experts to approach for writing.
- Go where the good designers and writers hang out to find them – when you go to freelancing sites you’re getting the people who might be hard up for work and not that great of results.
- In regards to CJ, pay a lot of attention to the Network Earnings bar.
- Once your site’s Quality Score tanks, you’re done. You have to start over with a new site because there’s no way to get that back.
Jeremy did an excellent job mixing up the experience level of the information he put forth, knowing instinctively that most people attending wouldn’t quite be at the 101 education level in regards to affiliate marketing.
Read MoreOnline Marketing Glossary: Algorithm
Algorithm:
- A set of mathematical equations or rules that a search engine uses to rank the content contained within its index in response to a particular search query.
The algorithm is what powers search engines, and also provides websites with page ranks, Alexa rankings, Technorati authority, etc. The algorithm often takes into account inbound links, outbound links, where the inbounds are coming from, where the outbounds are going to, number, quality, etc.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Pay Per Sale
Pay Per Sale (PPS):
- A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant’s website. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions and the lowest conversion ration.
This is the most common model of affiliate program. The merchant puts the pressure of generating a sale on the affiliate, but in exchange will give that person a higher commission since it’s a guaranteed sale. Generally commissions I’ve seen range from 5% to 20%, with some exceptions of course. This model of program is the most beneficial for most merchants since they are paying exclusively for the most beneficial form of performance – the sale, which makes them the most money of course in any of the pay-per models.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
Online Marketing Glossary: Crawler
Crawler (also Spider, Robot or Bot):
- Component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically trolling the Web and following links to webpages. It makes copies of the webpages found and stores them in the search engine’s index.
The faster the crawlers work, the faster the pages are indexed and show up in search engine results pages.
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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine
