In celebration of the long awaited Mac edition of Internet Marketers Companion I have a few surprises in store.

To kick things off we thought we’d make some too good to resist coupons to help spread the word.

The following coupons are in effect as of today and run through to the end of June.

1 x Launch75 – 75% off the cost of Internet Marketers Companion

15 10 x Launch50 – 50% off the cost of Internet Marketers Companion

25 x Launch25 – 25% off the cost of Internet Marketers Companion

Just enter the coupon in the shopping cart to the right before checking out and the discount will be applied immediately.

In Affiliate Marketing parlance, EPC is Earnings Per Click. What it actually means is Earnings Per Hundred Clicks, but EPHC doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily.

It’s a measurement that also comes with a time element. A lot of Affiliate Sites will show you 7 day EPC and 30 day EPC’s.

I usually use the 30 day EPC as my guide as it’s less susceptible to spikes and shows a better picture of how the merchant is doing.

EPC is a good indicator to use when choosing a merchant to promote, and a good way to help with
your PPC settings.

So I log into my Affiliate Site looking for a new merchant to promote. Their site looks good and terms are reasonable. So we check out their history.

It shows that the 30 day EPC is $37.00, so for every 100 clicks the affiliates are making $37.00 what I do then is working out the maximum cost per click I’m going to bid on, then I can do some keyword research which I’ll cover later.

At a cost per click of 37c I’ll need one sale per 100 clicks to break even. Not too bad depending on the niche, but I’d likely start much lower and see where the ads end up. I want to be on the first page of google but not necessarily in the top 3.

As long as I don’t go over 37c a click and get at least 1 sale for every 100, I’m in good shape. If everything else looks ok and I find some good keywords, I’ll blast out a few adgroups and see how it flies.

Ciao for now.

Shane

What is ROI?

ROI is Return on Investment and is ultimately what you need to concentrate on in your business. It shows what you are getting back for all the work, not to mention money you are putting in.

Think of it like this. If you stick your money in a bank, your ROI is .05% / annum at current rates (If you’re lucky). So if you stick your hard earned money in the bank, they’ll give you 5c a year on every $100 you let them use. Banking rocks, because they’ll then leverage that into $1000 at 8% + fees. However I digress.

The basic calculation goes a little like so:

ROI = [(Payback - Investment)/Investment)]*100

If you invest $100 in your business and get back $150 in sales:

ROI = [(150 - 100)/ 100] * 100 = 50%

Not bad for a days work eh? You end the day much better than you start and if you keep that up you have a much better chance of retiring to Maui that the 5c the bank is going to give you.

Ok lets turn it around. Say you still spent your $100 on your business on staffing, advertising, products etc. but only made $50 back, what does that look like?

ROI = [(50 - 100/ 100] * 100 = -50% ugh, not nearly so good but maybe, just maybe better than a weekend in Vegas.

In the Affiliate Marketing game your ROI% looks more like so:

ROI % = [(commission - cost) / cost] * 100

Where the commission in minus the advertising costs (Usually Google Adwords) are the driving factors.

It’s important that you keep your data handy so that you can track your ROI, preferably on a per campaign or even adgroup level. It keeps things in track and lets you know when a runaway campaign is sucking away your hard earned profits.

Plan your work and work the plan.

Cheers,

Shane

In simple terms Affiliate Marketing is selling product or service for someone else.

Payment is usually by percentage of sale, fixed fee or CPA (Cost Per Action ie signing up for a survey)

There are hundreds of Affiliate Sites out there with some of the more popular being ClickBank, Commission Junction, Clix Galore and ShareASale.

Then there are thousands of companies and websites that run their own Affiliate Programs, such as us.

Affiliate Marketing as it relates to the internet has been around a very very long time. It started out as banner ads where webmasters would be paid per click. “Oh great, you sent someone to my site … have 1/4 c” It took a lot of traffic and clickthroughs to make any money.

Things changed when Google come to market with Adwords. Now you weren’t limited to placing tacky banners on your website, heck now you didn’t even need a website.

You could run up an ad, target the Affiliate link with a nice display link and away you went. Making commission on the sales and juggling to ensure the costs didn’t eat you alive.

It’s pretty much the same now except there are a bunch of more options, MSN Adcenter for advertising on Bing, Yahoo (Formerly Overture) for the yahoo search engine and assorted other options.

Banner ads are still around and you see them everyday. There are new hooks being tried all the time also. For a time Google had video ads that they would serve up in Adsense blocks.

Things are always changing and the most exciting thing I’ve seen of late has been iAds from Apple. Much more interactivity for the viewers without fully taking them away from the application they are using. It won’t take long for the Internet Marketing fraternity to come up with similar interactive ads, although at this stage I’m not sure how applicable it will be for the web.

There’s still money to be made, and untapped niches to explore, with more being created every day.

Best Wishes,

Shane

What is a Super Affiliate?

In my mind there are two distinct types of Super Affiliate, and while all marketers can and should aspire to be one or both kinds, some folks will like the path of just one or the other.

In short a Super Affiliate is a marketer that generates massive sales and money for both themselves and more importantly their clients. They are often sort out by clients to sell product because they have a proven track record of taking massive action.

The first type of Super Affiliate you already know. Most likely you are on the mailing list of at least a couple. I’m talking of folks like Jason Moffatt, John Reese, Frank Kern and Mike Filsaime. They are very well known, deliver great content are usually very entertaining with video’s and hooks to keep you interested and in a lot of cases run very successful businesses that don’t involve making commission from Affiliate Sales.

The other Super Affiliates you have probably never heard of and likely never will. They don’t have huge community following, big brash websites or do outlandish stunts. What they do is generate millions of dollars of sales for their clients and are quite happy that way. Many are experts at PPC and have proven methods that ensures they are making an excellent return on their investments.

Whether you want the fame and notoriety that comes with being a visible public faced Super Affiliate or would rather the anonymity of working your business in relative peace and quiet, the fundamentals are the same.

Create a plan on how your business will work. Concentrate on both where your money is going and coming from. Track your progress and make course changes as needed to ensure you are heading towards your goal. Have a blast doing it.

Enjoy your work.

Ciao

Shane