GeekAffiliate

Any intro marketing textbook teaches the importance of defining and targeting specific market segments. Understanding your market is key to selling into that market. But do you understand your meta-market?

The meta-market

For online businesses there are two meta-markets: consumers and resellers.

Consumers are the traditional meta-market, the end, er, consumers of a product or service. To sell to them you must sell them on the features and benefits of the product. Show them how it fulfills a need or a want. All the usual marketing stuff.

Resellers are the other meta-market. Resellers take products and sell them to consumers. Or, more likely, other resellers.

So which meta-market appeals to you?

An example

Say you wrote an e-book on dog training. It’s a good book, and you’ve got some promotional material written. So which meta-market do you target?

The consumer meta-market is actually very hard to sell to. These are the same people that most marketers — online AND offline — are chasing. Lots of competition. Lots of money to reach them. Of course, if you have a high-traffic site about dog training or you’ve built a large mailing list of dog lovers, your job will be much simpler. This is why building a reputation and a following is important if you want to be successful at consumer selling.

Or you could go after the reseller meta-market.

Resellers are always on the lookout for products to sell, either to consumers or (more on this shortly) to other resellers. If there’s something unique and appealing about your product, if there’s a money-making angle you can exploit, the reseller meta-market can be extremely profitable.

Primed to spend, easy to reach

There are two problems with the consumer meta-market:

• Consumers are hard to reach; and
• Consumers are not easily convinced to spend their money online

The reseller meta-market, on the other hand, is almost the opposite:

• Resellers are actively searching for new products to promote; and
• Resellers are eager buyers of online products

Even though the reseller meta-market is much smaller than the consumer meta-market, it’s a much easier sell. I touched on this before when I talked about turnkey AdSense site economics, but it goes way beyond AdSense.

So what’s your meta-market?

Understanding which meta-market you’re actually targeting is one of the keys to succeeding as an online entrepreneur. The strategies you use to go after consumers are different than the strategies you use to go after resellers. There’s a lot of overlap, of course — you must convince resellers that what you’re offering is of interest to consumers, or at least other resellers — but you focus on different things.

We’ll pick up this discussion later.

Technorati Tags: resellers, consumers, affiliate selling, internet marketing, affiliate, online, marketing

Internet marketing — and affiliate selling in particular — involves a lot of fear. Not in the sales pitch — although there is certainly a lot of “buy this now or you’ll regret it!” messaging — but in the attitudes of the seller vis-a-vis the potential customer.

And let’s be clear: these are customers we’re talking about, not “visitors” or “readers”. Don’t sugar-coat it: if they’re giving you money, directly or not, they are your customers.

Almost everyone engaged in affiliate selling exudes boundless enthusiasm and a “it-can-do-it-all” attitude in an attempt to convince a potential customer to push the Buy! button and hand over their money.

Desensitization

The problem, of course, is that potential customers then become desensitized to the whole sales process and view everything with a certain degree of skepticism. (As well they should.) With everyone babbling on exuberantly about how wonderful the product is and how it’s the cure for your problem and how it’s so easy and how only a few are being let in on the secret… well, really, is there any doubt that the conversion ratios — how many people see the message versus how many actually buy the product — are so low?

This is why, in a crowded arena of me-too sales pages, the negative review has a disproportionate amount of power. Not to dissuade potential customers from buying — the sales pages already do a good job of that — but to convert them into actual customers. Let me explain.

Idealism is inauthentic

Nothing is truly perfect in real life. Ideals are pursued, but never reached. If asked to describe your spouse’s faults, you can probably rhyme off a half-dozen without thinking. But so what? You know what those faults are and you’ve accepted them. They’re part of the price you pay to have that person in your life. The faults are outweighed by the positive attributes that drew you to him or her in the first place.

This is why the fear of saying anything negative about something you want to sell is counter-productive. It doesn’t seem authentic, to push a concept that Seth Godin espouses.

Negatives are relative

But negatives are not absolute. What you think is wrong with me (of which there are many!) my wife may consider attractive. Just because you think a book can’t teach you something doesn’t mean that it’s not useful to someone else.

Books are a perfect case in point. Look up any Amazon book that’s a bestseller — say in the top ten — in its category. Read the most recent customer reviews for that book. Which reviews were the most useful to you? The exuberant utterances of the personal (or paid) friends of the author or the ones that say “I didn’t like this book because…“.

Look at my last book: Make Easy Money with Google, about to celebrate its first anniversary, has now been reviewed by no less than 41 customers on Amazon.com. While I’m happy to report that it’s maintained a steady 4-star rating, there are several quite negative reviews. Here’s a sampling of them:

• Perhaps this book would be useful for a person totally inexperienced in just about everything, including tying their shoes.
• … this book is aimed squarely at the absolute beginner, who have no idea how to build sites, and who want in on the money race.
• Overall, valuable if you’re a novice that wants to get into internet publishing monetized by Adsense but worthless for pretty much anyone else.

Ouch! I can’t say those reviews thrill me, but they’re honest. They’re authentic. I’m sure they’ve put people off from buying the book. But I bet those people were never in my target audience. However, a novice looking for a good introductory text on AdSense would look at those comments and say Hey, this sounds right for me! and he or whe will buy the book.

To such a person, those negatives are actually positives, because they don’t want a jargon-filled book that they can’t understand.

Expose those warts!

Recently I wrote a review of a software product called Desktop AdSense Cash Machine. It’s not a perfect piece of software by any means, but it does an adequate job. I acquired resale rights to it and decided to sell it to anyone who wanted to buy it, but given its limitations I priced it low at only $10, not $37 or even $67 like some others do. Because I thought $10 was a fair price for what it actually does.

Now, I’ve not sold a ton of the product or anything, but I got some great feedback about my review. People thanked me for the detailed review (with screenshots) and for giving my honest opinion about it. It was like a breath of fresh air for them.

All I did was expose AdSense Cash Machine’s warts: here’s the product, it does this, it doesn’t do that, it’s worth this much, take it or leave it.

An opportunity for the geek

Luckily, geeks excel at negative reviews. They’re happy to deconstruct products and ideas and to tell you exactly why they won’t work and how to fix them. Where the marketing type wants to build, the geek wants to destroy. Well, maybe destroy is too strong a work. Deconstruct would be a better way to phrase it. And that’s where your skills (you, the geek reading this) come into play.

Does the thought of writing a sales page make you sick? Then don’t! Write an authentic review instead. Don’t just parrot the sales copy. Don’t shy away from exposing the warts. Describe what the product does and what it doesn’t do. Who will benefit from it, who won’t. How to use it, how to abuse it.

Don’t underestimate the power of the negative review!

Technorati Tags: affiliate, marketing, negative, sales, essays, AdSense

Welcome to GeekAffiliate, my new blog about affiliate selling in particular and Internet marketing in general, tailored specifically for geeks.

Who is writing this?

My name is Eric Giguere. If you’re a software geek in the wireless or handheld development areas, you may know me as the author of a number of technical books. Or you may know me as the author of Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program, an introductory book about Google’s AdSense program.

Or not. I’m not foolish enough to think I’m famous just because I’ve written a few books.

What is a geek?

Geeks are self-defined. If you think of yourself as a geek, you are a geek. Geekdom is not conferred. Having a computer science degree doesn’t make you a geek — I definitely had classmates who weren’t geeks.

What is affiliate selling?

Affilate selling is simply receiving a commission for selling someone else’s product. You refer a user to a site, they buy a product, you get some cash. Simple to understand. Amazon has the best-known affiliate program and is often the place where newcomers start, but it goes way beyond Amazon.

What is Internet marketing?

Internet marketing is just marketing — identifying and satisfying the needs and wants of consumers — applied to the Internet. It involves using websites, blogs, forums and email lists to entice people to buy products or services.

Many geeks have had little or no exposure to marketing except as targets of marketing endeavours. This blog will educate you about the weird world of Internet marketing.

Why should I care about affiliate selling and Internet marketing?

Because it’s another way to make money with your computer skills. I’m not saying you’re going to get rich. Like anything, it takes serious effort (and some luck) to make a fortune with affiliate marketing. But if you can get a few extra bucks coming in here and there from stuff you already like to do, why not do it?

What about AdSense?

I already have a contextual advertising blog that covers AdSense and related programs. Check it out. The focus of this blog is affiliate marketing. The two can be complementary, but they’re different.

Do we really want to go over to the Dark Side?

Not really. The point of this blog is that it’s possible to make money via Internet marketing and affiliate selling without losing your soul. Many geeks fail at selling because they try to emulate what the non-geeks are doing. But some of what they’re doing goes against the nature of the geek. Geeks should instead focus on the unique strengths and skills they have and work with those attributes instead of against them.

Where to next?

This is just the beginning. Over the coming months we’ll be covering all kinds of topics. We’ll review various products and services. We’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t. And we’ll have fun doing it!

Technorati Tags: affiliate, Eric Giguere, AdSense, selling, Internet marketing, money, affiliate programs, marketing, geek

P.S.: Bear with me as I tweak the blog template. It’s pretty vanilla right now. I’m still figuring out which WordPress plugins best suit my needs. So far I’m using SimpleTags, AdSense Deluxe and Sociable, and I’ve only made minor changes to the standard WordPress template.