Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

How Affiliates Can Use Merchant Order Numbers to Their Advantage

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Using Affiliate Data

As an affiliate you have so much data available to you that you are not likely using. While doing some research for Wine Club Group today, I was messaging Eric with a bunch of numbers and we were discussing the significance of those numbers. All of a sudden he said “that’s blog post content.” He was right. This is the kind of thing most affiliates would never even consider compiling and analyzing and yet it is right in front of you!

Who Does It Work For?

This data works best when you have fairly regular sales over a set period of time. The number of sales necessary depends on how much volume the merchant does. In our case, only a couple of sales a week per merchant during their “off season” was enough to give us some good metrics.

Compiling the Data

I used ShareASale for this, but you can use any network data where you are provided order numbers as part of your reports (which should be almost all of them). [Read more…]

Social Media for Every Small Business

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social-media-webinar

As the final post in my ongoing series sponsored by Comcast, I want to talk social media. As an online business owner, social media is a huge component of my business. However, these days it is important for EVERY small business no matter what you do or where you do it. Some days I love it and some days I hate it. At its core it is easy to use, but it is increasingly difficult to keep up with so many different platforms and figure out how to maximize your ROI (if you even have any right now). How do you keep it all straight?

Go Where Your Customers Are

The best advice I ever received about social media was to go where my customers are. I see articles on a daily basis about how to use and advertise on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now even Snapchat. There’s no way for me to be able to be in all of those places short of hiring a full-time social media person (which isn’t my budget). So how do I keep up?

Although I have a minimal presence on each different platform, I focus on the ones where my customers find me and interact the most. I’m sure that I have a lot of Sunshine Rewards customers on Snapchat. But that medium isn’t conducive right now to online shopping. It’s more about big brand awareness, which is not for me. I have an Instagram account that I post to once a week, but my members are just not interested. Instead, I focus on the 7000+ fans that I have on Facebook where I can get them to interact with the deals that I post daily. I see what gets them excited and what they share with their friends. By going where my customers are, I am able to commit my resources there and see results without getting frustrated.

Learn from Others

There’s no sense reinventing the wheel when you are already spread thin. In fact, chances are pretty good that someone has already tried just about everything you want to try and answered every question that you have to ask. Find sources that you trust to help you stay educated about changes, trends, and tips. One such source is the Comcast Business Community. In fact, they recently released a recorded webinar about social media that will give you tips and advice on how to use it to increase sales. The webinar is about an hour long and you can also get the Slideshare with all of the slides.

Who can benefit from the webinar? Anyone who is either trying to decide whether social media marketing is necessary for their business or has started using social media but needs a better understanding of how to take their plan to the next level. I don’t watch a lot of webinars, but I am glad that I took the time to watch this one (and wish that I had been on it live). It helps frame some of the questions about social media in a way that will make you rethink some of your strategies and give you ideas for a new roadmap. (For a long time I was one of the people guilty of the very first thing the presenter talked about!) I knew I was going to believe in the presenters when one of the first things they talked about was exactly what I wrote above—my belief of going where your customers are instead of spreading yourself too thin.

In addition to the webinar, Comcast Business frequently releases new articles through the Comcast Business Community site. Each week there are articles about everything from social media to being an entrepreneur to how to make your YouTube channel more engaging to funding your business. No matter what line of work you are in, you will find something there to interest you.

Social media can make or break your small business depending upon how much time you are putting into it and the results of those efforts. Be smart about how you are using it and use any resources available to you. You’ll find that you can spend less time and grow your business more when you are smart about it.

Comcast Business partnered with bloggers such as me for this program. As part of this program, I received compensation for my time. They did not tell me what to purchase or what to say about any product mentioned in these posts. Comcast Business believes that consumers and bloggers are free to form their own opinions and share them in their own words. Comcast Business’ policies align with WOMMA Ethics Code, FTC guidelines and social media engagement recommendations

What’s the Fastest Way for Bloggers to Make Money in Affiliate Marketing?

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Blogging and Affiliate Marketing

Last year I gave a presentation at Affiliate Summit with some of the most frequently asked questions I get about affiliate marketing. One of them was “What is the fastest way for bloggers to make money in affiliate marketing?”

There are hundreds of presentations, webinars, and ebooks out there to help bloggers learn affiliate marketing. There are tools and widgets and scripts to help with the technology. But those usually aren’t the biggest barrier for a lot of bloggers. The biggest barrier is “How do I make money off of my posts and still be authentic with my audience?”

The answer is to continue writing about things you love and use but write with an eye toward monetization.

All of the products pictured above are things that I absolutely love and shout from the rooftops about. They also happen to be products that I make money promoting on a weekly basis. Each of them solves a problem or answers a question in some way.

How do I chop salads like Subway? Easy. You buy the cool chopper that my husband gave me a few years ago and I now use on every salad I eat. What’s a great book series to read with my teenagers? The Mortal Instruments. What are good running shoes for people who overpronate? My Pink Adidas. How can I get to sleep at night? Valerian root tea.

When you write about things that you use on a regular basis, you are honest and genuine and your audience picks up on that. You can describe things in detail that they won’t find on a product page. Your review can state both the pros and the cons of the product (unlike in a lot of sponsored posts) so that it comes across as fair and not tainted.

Think about all of the products, movies, books, vacation destinations, subscription services, etc that you have probably already written about in your posts. Why not go back to the posts that are getting traffic and add affiliate links? Even if they aren’t getting traffic, add the links and push them out through your social media or newsletter one more time.

Going forward, think each day about what you are using that other people might want to know about. From the time you get up until the time you go to bed, there are probably at least 10 things you use that you could blog about with affiliate links. Make a list as the day goes on and then do a little research to see which ones you can get affiliate links for. Dig a little deeper and figure out which of the merchants convert the best (that’s a post for another day!). Add those links and start watching your traffic and clicks to see how people are responding. Then tweak your process as necessary.

No matter what networks you are signed up with or what tools you are using, any blogger can find ways to quickly monetize some of their posts with simple links. It’s an easy way to transition from blogger to affiliate marketing while staying true to your voice and audience.

Want to get more information from me on a weekly basis to help you make money in affiliate marketing? Sign up today and I’ll send you 30 Affiliate Marketing Tips in 30 Days!

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Affiliate Marketing is Not a Zero Sum Game

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affiliate-zero-sum-game

Last week I attended ShareASale Think Tank in Chicago and had the opportunity of meeting with a lot of new-ish affiliates. In many industries you wouldn’t even think of meeting with your competitors and sharing information. Yet in affiliate marketing, this is exactly what most of us do on a regular basis. Smart affiliate marketers know that it is because affiliate marketing is not a zero sum game. What does that mean?

Zero Sum Game defined: “In decision theory, situation where one or more participants’ gain (loss) equals the loss (gain) of other participants. Thus, a gain (loss) for one must result in a loss (gain) for one or more others.”

It would be easy to assume that as an affiliate, you are going to make less money if another affiliate starts making more. The reality is that it isn’t true. In fact, as other affiliates succeed, your business can grow as well. The same holds for merchants and OPMs. How is that possible? Take into consideration these scenarios:

  • A competing OPM picks up a cool new wine merchant to add to their portfolio. Their revenue goes up. Does yours go down? No. In fact, when one of the competitors of that wine merchant sees what is going on, they decide that they want to launch an affiliate program as well to stay competitive in the market. Now YOU also have the chance to gain a new client.
  • A blogger in your local blogger group starts using affiliate links on their site. You’re worried that they will take some of your traffic or sales. However, when the state decides to pass a nexus tax, they stand beside you and help defeat it. In essence, they helped save your business.
  • You join a mastermind group or Facebook group and start sharing information about a topic. Others in the group take and take the information but never seem to give anything back. Out of the blue one of recommends you for some consulting for a friend of theirs because they see what an expert you are. You now have a revenue stream outside of your affiliate site.
  • A big named competitor of yours starts getting media attention about their business model–which happens to be the same as yours. Do all of your members jump ship to sign up with other site? No. In fact, the media attention helped legitimize your own business with the public.

I didn’t make up any of those examples. In fact, I’ve watched them play out in the last few years, some of them in my own business. Affiliate marketing is a cooperative industry. Yes, there is competition. Yes, you can lose revenue when you lose traffic. There will be “winners” and “losers” on given days from a traffic and revenue standpoint. But someone else’s gain doesn’t always have to be your loss. In fact, sometimes you can turn their gains into gains of your own.

As an industry the more that we grow, the more opportunities we will all have and the bigger our voice will be compared to other industries. Until every single merchant has an affiliate program and every consumer is shopping through affiliate links, there is still room for each of us to thrive.

The next time you have an opportunity to sit down with someone in the industry and learn from them either through a roundtable, over drinks at a conference, on a PMA Council, or even standing in a taxi line at a hotel, consider what you can gain by contributing to the ecosystem.

Keep Up with Small Business Trends with Comcast Business

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comcast-business

I spend a lot of time online trying not only to keep up with what is going on with my industry but also what is going on with business in general. It’s basically a full-time job just staying on top of affiliate marketing. Add to that technology, human resources, public relations and everything else that goes into running a small business and you may very well find yourself buried in information.

Did you know that you can turn to the Comcast Small Business Community for new articles every day on the latest trends in small business?  Just in the last week I have found information about:

  • How to hire the right people (overqualified candidates, new college grads, etc)
  • Tips on creating a new venture
  • Secrets about getting new referrals (this one was particularly helpful to me)
  • Using social media to increase sales (including a slide presentation and webinar)
  • Why some customers are NOT worth it

The site makes it easy to search by content area or explore what is currently trending. The articles are easily digestible and often have links to other resources if you want to explore the topics further.

The industries covered by the Comcast Small Business Community are pretty diverse–including Bars and Restaurants (with contributor Robert Irvine), Retail, Education, and even Sports. It’s clear that they are working on providing small business resources that complement their product offerings.

It’s easy to get bogged down in only reading the same sites and authors all the time–particularly those who write in your industry. Take a few minutes to check out some of the articles I mentioned above and remember why you started your business to begin with and what you need to take it to the next level.

Disclosure: Comcast Business partnered with bloggers such as me for this program. As part of this program, I received compensation for my time. They did not tell me what to purchase or what to say about any product mentioned in these posts. Comcast Business believes that consumers and bloggers are free to form their own opinions and share them in their own words. Comcast Business’ policies align with WOMMA Ethics Code, FTC guidelines and social media engagement recommendations.