GeekAffiliate

If you’re a geek, scoffing at sales and marketing is almost a badge of honor. But geeks often fail miserably at online marketing, whether it’s affiliate selling, content monetization, or product creation and promotion. Here are the top reasons why geeks fail at Internet marketing and some ideas on how to change failure into success.

1. Thinking “sell” is a four-letter word.

Get over your natural dislike of the selling process. Selling doesn’t have to be sleazy. Compared to other forms of selling, online selling greatly levels the playing field. It’s more about building trust with an audience than schmoozing potential customers. Think pre-sell instead of sell.

2. Not learning about online marketing.

You read books, online manuals, tutorials, and blogs to learn new things about technology, don’t you? So why aren’t you doing the same thing with online marketing? Do you really think there’s nothing you can learn? Continued education is key. The next time you visit your favorite bookstore, head to the marketing section (here’s Amazon’s) and buy a business book or two.

3. Selling products that no one wants.

It’s tempting to only promote the expensive products with the highest payouts, but that’s rarely the path to success. Neither is creating a product just because you think it’s a cool idea. Here’s a tip: don’t start with the product, start with the audience. Find a market with an untapped need or want, then find (or create) a product or service to fulfill it.

4. Not being honest.

Let’s be frank: online marketing is ultimately about making money. Admit this and you’ll find it easier to focus on the things that can actually make you money. Your customers already know it, and pretending otherwise just makes you look foolish. Be honest with them about your intentions and about the products or services you’re promoting — they’ll appreciate you all the more.

5. Talking about features, not benefits.

Geeks love to talk up features. Linux is great because it’s open source or This system is twice as fast are typical examples. But that’s not what interests your customers. They want to know how a product or service will benefit them. What problems does it solve? How will it make their life better? Those are the questions they want answered. Don’t know how? State your feature and then ask yourself So what? and come up with a list of benefits.

6. Not knowing when to outsource.

The term outsourcing has lost its shine these days, but the truth is that most businesses outsource things that fall outside their core areas of competency. Payroll, IT, security, travel and event planning, public relations — these are just some of the things that can be outsourced. Geeks can outsource, too, and spend their time working on the things that matter most. Why manage mailing lists yourself when $20/month is all it takes to have someone else do it for you? Why get woken at 2 in the morning to respond to a network problem with your servers? Get over your geek pride and spend your time on the important stuff, the things that make you money.

7. Thinking “if I build it, they will come”.

Sure, you know how to build a fancy website. You can do it in your sleep. But who cares? There are programs out there that will create decent-looking enough websites for not very much money. Or you can hire someone on Elance to do it for the price of your next latte. Even building a new product (e-book, video, script, application) isn’t that hard, for similar reasons. The hard part is the marketing and promotion of your product/service — getting human eyeballs to see what you have to offer and convincing them to open their wallets and buy it. You may not be able to make the horse drink, but you still have to lead it to the water.

8. Not investing enough time to succeed.

Like anything you want to do right, online marketing takes time. Time to write and distribute articles and press releases. Time to create websites. Time to build your mailing lists. Time to analyze your sales to see what’s working and what’s not. Time to keep your knowledge current (see #2). Time, lots of time… The only overnight success stories are from marketers who spent a long, cold winter in Antarctica. (And probably without a high-speed Internet connection.) Devote some time each day to marketing activities.

9. Not having a plan.

When you sit down to code, you have at least a minimal plan formulated in your head, or even a formal plan written on paper. Otherwise how would you know where to begin and when you’re done? The plan lists the steps you need to take to succeed and the goals you’re trying to achieve. Good marketers make plans. Those plans aren’t always right, but they provide focus and a way to measure accomplishments. Make a plan.

10. Getting bogged down in the details.

How much time have you spent getting a web page to render perfectly across all browsers? What was the cost of that perfection in terms of opportunity cost? You’re better off to automate as much as you can and spend your time dealing with the hard parts: writing copy that sells, interacting with others, researching keywords, etc. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough.

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There’s no way to guarantee online marketing success, but there are definitely things you can do to guarantee that you won’t succeed!

Eric Giguere is an online marketing geek. When not pretending he’s an AdSense expert, he develops software for iAnywhere Solutions as part of the AvantGo development team.

Technorati Tags: geeks, internet marketing, online marketing, marketing, AdSense, affiliate, products, promotion, blogging, SEO

Affiliates often use pay-per-click (PPC) programs like Google AdWords to place ads for the products they are promoting. Although some affiliates can drive traffic directly to the product owner’s site, most send the traffic to sites they own. The usual scheme is to create a single landing page that links directly to the product’s order page, with no other links on the page. In fact, it’s not unusual to create several variations of the same landing page for tracking and testing purposes, but all follow the same general pattern.

Recent AdWords changes are throwing this time-honored method into disarray, however. As documented over at Inside AdWords, the quality of a landing page now has a greater impact on the advertiser’s overall Quality Score. This is important, you see, because the advertiser’s minimum bid values vary with the Quality Score (QS). In short, advertisers with low QS pay more for their ads. If the price of the ads goes up too much then the cost of attracting eyeballs to the affiliate landing pages starts to outweight the profits generated from affiliate sales. For examples of how this affects affiliate advertisers, see the extensive posting by Michael Gray.

Quality Guidelines

If you’re an affiliate who depends on PPC to make money — it’s often the quickest way to get going with affiliate marketing — then the first thing you should do is carefully read these two pages:

• Google AdWords Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines
• What is Google’s affiliate advertising policy?

The latter explains why most affiliate marketers use their own landing pages rather than directing visitors to the main product site — when multiple advertisers place ads whose display URL (the URL that the user sees in the ad) is the same, only one of those ads gets shown per search query.

The first link, though, is the one that really interests us, because it talks about what makes a good landing page in Google’s eyes as opposed to what it makes it good in the affiliates eyes.

Content is King

Once again, Google shows its bias towards quality content. Look at the headings for the three sections of the landing page guidelines:

• Provide relevant and substantial content
• Treat a user’s personal information responsibly
• Develop an easily navigable site

The simple truth is that most affiliate landing pages fail these three tests. Most just rehash the same content, the product’s sales page. Those that ask for user’s information (the typical squeeze page) present nothing more than a simple “we’ll never sell your information” privacy policy. And many landing pages are not part of the overall site. This is why such pages end up with low QS values.

So what is an affiliate advertiser supposed to do?

Pre-Sell the Product with Landing Sites

The solution is to place more emphasis on pre-selling the product. Instead of creating landing pages, create content-rich landing sites with this kind of information:

• Authentic and original stories, reviews and testimonials about the product. (You do use the product you’re pushing, don’t you?)
• Free samples, previews or demos of the product. Promoting an e-book? Try to get a sample chapter (ideally with your affiliate ID embedded in its links) to distribute. Or if that’s not possible, make up your own document describing the e-book in detail — table of contents, summary of each chapter, etc.
• Details about you and the seller. Put a human face to the site: let the visitor learn who you are, why you’re promoting the product, and why they can trust the product’s creator.
• Direct links to the order page. Many affiliates simply direct visitors to the product owner’s sales page, which is somewhat redundant and often self-defeating. After convincing the visitor to buy, make it easy for them to do the transaction.

It’s also good policy to avoid intrusive marketing gimmicks on these sites. You can’t put pop-ups on the actual landing pages themselves, but you’ll be tempted to put them on the other pages of your landing site — resist that temptation.

More Work for Affiliates

Building a useful landing site around one or more landing pages (be sure to watch out for duplicate content issues with the pages themselves — you might want to exclude the main search engine robots from those pages, though be careful not to exclude the AdWords crawler) definitely takes more work than building a good landing page, which is itself an art. But if you’re serious about increasing your QS and lowering your costs, it’ll be worth the investment in time. Besides, the more effort you make in pre-selling the visitor the more likely you are going to be able to convert that visitor into a customer.

It’s interesting to note that many AdSense publishers create mini-sites to build income streams from content pages. The same techniques they use to keep the visitor on the site and to encourage repeat visits can be used with affiliate landing sites. You could even explore AdSense arbitrage with your affiliate landing site, but that’s a tricky game to play and you’re probably better off to concentrate on getting visitor to buy the product instead of clicking ads.

Technorati Tags: AdSense, AdWords, Google, affiliate, marketing, selling, landing pages, content

At some point in your career as an affiliate marketer you’ll try creating your own infoproduct, be it an e-book, a video or some software. To sell that product you’ll need a three-dimensional (3D) cover or box shot of some kind. Most are fairly sophisticated, with the flipped-up top, shadows and reflections. I created this box shot for a parody site of mine:

And while it’s not as fancy, it still does the job. And it was ridiculously easy to do with Paint Shop Pro. Here’s how you can do it yourself.

Step 1: Create the Front

The first thing to work on is the main cover graphic, the front of your cover or box. Start by creating a large picture, at least 400 pixels wide. You’ll be shrinking it down at some point to create smaller versions of your cover/box. Starting with a large picture and shrinking it always works better than starting with a small picture and expanding it.

Creating the front graphic is perhaps the hardest part of the whole process. This is where you need to be creative. The only advice I can give you here is to use large fonts for the product title so that they’re very readable when you shrink the cover or box. And to turn on anti-aliasing for smooth curves.

Let’s create a cover for my special report The Real AdSense Code: Understanding the AdSense Patent, which I was too lazy to market properly. We start with a blank 400 by 600 image and color it deep green:

(Note that most of the screenshots are not being shown actual size.)

Now we place images and text on the cover:

To create this image I just placed some text on the background and stuck on a public domain image from PDPhoto.org. The best advice is to keep things simple unless you’re a good artist.

Now we’re ready for the next step.

Step 2: Create the Sides

A 3D book/box has at least one side visible in addition to the front. Typically this is the left side. You may also want to include a top side in the shot, however I would recommend you stick to one side initially until you get the hang of things.

Start by creating a new image that is the same height as the front image, but a much smaller width. How wide depends on how “thick” you want the final image to be. Typically, e-book boxes are thinner than software boxes, but it’s up to you to figure out what’s right.

Now fill in the side image. First, rotate the side image counter-clockwise 90 degrees so that it’s wide and short. This makes it a lot easier to work with the text. You can rotate it after you’re done.

The side should be based on and complementary to the front. Same colors, repeat the text if possible.

Here’s the side for my special report:

Now we play with the perspective.

Step 3: Change the Perspective

A 3D look is all about perspective, making one side look smaller than the other. Luckily, Paint Shop Pro has a tool that makes changing the perspective very easy.

Make a copy of the front cover image (you should always keep copies of the individual parts of your cover/box so that you can fix or update them later). On the copy, select Perspective - Horizontal from the Geometric Effects submenu under Effects:

On the resulting dialog, set the Distortion value to somewhere between 10 and 25, depending on what angle you want for the book. Set the Edge mode to the appropriate color, which is usually white:

Here’s the resulting image for a distortion of 15:

Repeat the procedure for the side, except use the negative value for the distortion. Here’s the side distorted to -15:

Now place the two distorted images side by side on your screen. Does it look good together? If not, you can adjust things by hand using the Deform tool if necessary.

Step 4: Combine the Images

Once you’re satisfied, it’s time to combine the images together. Start by creating a new blank image that is larger than the front and side images combined. Make the background color white. Now copy the front and side images onto this new image and place them close together. You may or may not want to leave a line of pixels between the two. Play with it and see what looks best. You can also use various other tools to shade the edges differently, or blend them together somehow.

Here are the images combined to form a box:

(Remember, it looks better if you click on it and see it full-sized.)

At this point you can do other things like add drop shadows and such, but the basic box is good enough for most needs.

Resize the box into different sizes (always remembering to start from largest size for each resize operation) and you’re done!

Here’s the final image scaled down to 250 pixels wide:

See how much sharper it looks? This was done using Paint Shop Pro’s “smart size” resizing.

If you’re using another software package, the steps would be much the same — all you need is a perspective mode of some kind.

Technorati Tags: e-book, covers, ebook, boxes, 3d, Paint Shop Pro, perspective, AdSense, e-books, ebooks, e book, e books, software