Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

5 Reasons Bloggers Need This Toolkit

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fmtc-toolkit

For the last 9 months, I have been actively using the FMTC Publisher Toolkit. I’ve dabbled with some of their free services before (including the Merchant Hub, which I LOVE) but this was the first time that I spent awhile experimenting and understanding how powerful their technology is and how it can be used on my sites. I always assumed that because I am already pulling datafeeds myself and use other tools that there wasn’t anything I needed from FMTC. I will readily admit that I was wrong!

After trying out the Toolkit, I am now using it both on Sunshine Rewards and on my niche sites. Below are some of the ways I use it on an almost daily basis.

Who is this good for? Anyone who posts affiliate links to products or deals…no matter your level of affiliate marketing or technical experience.

And I have some GREAT news for my readers!! The Publisher Toolkit comes in different levels from Free to Premium. If you just want to try it out with Skimlinks (more on that later), go with the Free version. If you want to use your own network IDs or get alerts for a lot of merchants, go with Lite or Standard (which start at $9.99). Mega-users like me will want Premium. [Read more…]

Why You Need To Get OptinMonster Today

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A lot of times when people tell you that you need to get something for your site TODAY it’s because they think the product is so great that you don’t want to spend another day not having it.

While I do think of OptinMonster that way, that’s not the reason that you literally need to get it TODAY (or at least in the next couple of days).

What the heck is OptinMonster and why should you even care?

I’ve been slowly changing over my signup forms on all of my sites from a variety of different options to only using OptinMonster. I started the process on this blog when I switched from Aweber to Mailchimp and was so happy with the results that I made it my goal to switch every one of my sites by the end of the year.

Not only was the process easy, but I have been seeing better conversion rates.

I was using ListBuilder before and here was the last set of stats that I pulled before I switched the site:

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You can see that for the time that I ran a specific set of popups, the conversion even doing A/B testing was never higher than 2.43%. I do love the A/B testing option in ListBuilder, but it is definitely not a feature unique to them.

Here’s a sample of my data from one of the tests I have been running using OptinMonster:

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Just one campaign without even running A/B tests yet to maximize conversions yielded me a 3.23% conversion rate.

Also…ListBuilder costs me $20 a month per site and I paid $99 a year for 3 sites for OptinMonster ($199 a year for unlimited sites). If you wait to sign up after August 23, the cheapest plan will be $108 and the Unlimited Site plan will be $348. My $99 plan will be going up to $228.

OptinMonsterObviously I have a lot still to learn and play with when it comes to OptinMonster. My dataset isn’t huge for my campaigns because I have been changing them up and figuring out how their system works. But even the limited test above with 500 popups is enough to tell me that it is worth continuing to use them and see how I can increase that even further.

For those of you who need more specifics on their popup timing, customer segmenting, mobile-specifics, reporting, etc. I would suggest that you visit their site and read up on it yourself. They have so many great options that I am just scratching the surface!

Look Past the Smiles to the Purpose

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For the last 3 years I have participated as a part of the Affiliate Marketers Give Back team in the Avon 39 Walk to End Breast Cancer. 

Each year you see me posting happy, smiling pictures at the start line, the finish line, the mile markers, and even the medic tent. I share my journey via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and text messages. It looks like I am having a great time, loving every minute of it. 

That’s part of the story….but certainly not all of it. 

I don’t participate in the walk because it’s fun. While I enjoy my time with my teammates, I’m not going to lie. It is hard. For every picture you see of me smiling, there was a time when I was crying because: 

  • I saw a walker with his mom’s picture pinned to his back and he told me how many years ago he lost her to breast cancer.
  • My blisters were so bad that I was bleeding through my socks.
  • 5 20-something women were all walking in front of me with the same name pinned to their backs. When the crowd parted, I saw the named woman (also only in her 20s) walking in the middle of the group.
  • My back was so sore I was popping ibuprofen like candy and layering on hot patches to be able to sleep.
  • A group of survivors stood along the parade route thanking me for walking for THEM.
  • When it came time to write the names of who I was walking in honor of on my tag, I had too many names to fit on the sheet.
  • I had to tell my teammates that one of the friends I walked for the year before lost her life in the interceding year as a result of complications from her breast cancer battle.
  • My teammate’s mom, a breast cancer survivor herself, came every single year to greet us at the finish line.
  • A group of survivors who walked the walk was honored with a parade into the closing ceremonies and they cheered and laughed and cried and let us celebrate them.

So many tears over those 39.3*3 miles…and more now as I think back on my 3 walks.

Today I’m asking for your support in my next 39 miles. I have to raise $1800 in the next 60 days. It’s amazing how every single donation from $5 to $500 adds up to get me there. $3 from each of my 700 Facebook friends would put me over the top.

If the money isn’t in your budget or you’ve already given for another great cause, like I know so many of my friends do, will you help share this post in the hopes that someone else might help me?

You’ll hear more from me about this over the next 60 days, including more of the reasons that this walk is so important to me. I hope that you can find it in your heart to support me!

Information You Need To Negotiate a Better Affiliate Deal

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Affiliate Marketing NegotiationSeveral years ago, I gave a presentation at Affiliate Summit entitled “Negotiation Tactics for Affiliates and Affiliate Managers.” Although the full presentation went through 5 different steps, I want to share some of the core of the presentation that pertains specifically to affiliate marketing. What information do you need to gather as either an affiliate or an affiliate manager before you negotiate a deal? Both sides will want all of this information, but some of it will be easier than others for each to gather. Do the best you can!

Commission Research

The most important part of the terms you negotiate will be the commission so that’s the place to start your research. As an affiliate you want to know:

  • What you are being paid by the merchant now and what you have made in the past (trends, changes, limited time opportunities)
  • What you are being paid by similar merchants
  • What other affiliates are being paid

[Read more…]

FTC Settles with Warner Bros. Over Influencer Campaign

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The FTC has once again invoked the .com Disclosures, this time in a lawsuit against Warner Bros. (WB) over an influencer campaign for video games. The FTC announced today that it has settled the lawsuit in which it alleged that WB “failed[ed] to adequately disclose that it paid online influencers” to post positive game reviews on YouTube and social media. An advertising agency named “Plaid Social Labs” was hired to create the campaign.

What’s really interesting about this case is that WB did require the influencers to “disclose” and gave specific instructions. Read on to find out why the disclosure requirements were still not adequate. [Read more…]