Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Need a Mailing List? Aweber Free Trial

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Aweber Free Trial

I’ve been using Aweber for my mailing lists across many of my sites for a number of years. I have an internal list processor that I use for Sunshine Rewards (combined with Mandrill for delivery), but I use Aweber for everything else. I know a lot of affiliates and bloggers go back and forth on which newsletter companies to use, but here are some of the reasons that I keep my list on Aweber.

Customer Service

I won’t lie and say that I haven’t had any problems at all with my newsletters. When I have had problems, Aweber has given me MULTIPLE ways to contact them. I’ve talked to them via email, on Twitter, and even on the phone when I was really having problems. When I am paying for a monthly service, I want to be able to get in touch with someone to get my problems resolved! So far, they have helped me resolve every problem that I have had.

Affiliate Marketing

Aweber is a pretty integral part of the affiliate marketing community. Their terms (unlike some other newsletter providers) do not exclude affiliate marketers. In fact, they exhibit and speak at Affiliate Summit, have their own internal affiliate program, and even allowed me to moderate a panel on affiliate marketing at their first conference last year (ASCEND Summit). When affiliate marketing is your business, it’s good to have partners that understand as much about it as you do.

Reputation

I’m not alone in my love of Aweber. I see so many of my friends using them and when I ask other people what they use, Aweber is one of the top 2 or 3 that always get mentioned. The ones who do NOT use Aweber usually say it is because their list was not double opt-in. But Aweber has done away with the requirement that imported lists be double opt-in. So I bet even more people will now be switching.

Tools

I’m not incredibly high tech, but I have some high tech demands for my sites. I need WordPress integration, widgets, light boxes, blog broadcasts, and more. In fact, I even found a way to turn my deal posts in my VBulletin forum into an RSS feed that is now a Daily Deal email on Sunshine Rewards. Talk about repurposing content! (You can see how I did that in my post Combine Tools to Streamline Work and Reach Customers.) I also like the archive pages for my newsletters and the ability for them to be shared easily.

Price

When I started out, my lists were VERY small. It was nice to be able to pay a small monthly fee when I wasn’t making much off of my lists. As my lists have grown, I have not moved up very much in my monthly fee but I have been able to really expand to offer multiple lists for different sites. I can control my costs by deleting out unsubscribes, undeliverables, and people who just aren’t interacting with the emails (especially for my niche sites where I use contests to generate signups).

And what is the very best price? Free!! Because that is how much their trial is now. You can sign up for free and get in there and really get your hands dirty seeing what it can do for you. You actually get an entire month free (which is longer than a lot of free trials these days). Or you can take an even bigger discount by getting a whole quarter for only $32.67 (versus $49).

So what are you waiting for? Jump in there and grab your free trial and see if Aweber is the email marketing solution for you.

What Do You Do With Zero Commission Rates?

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In the last couple of days 2 different big brand merchants have announced that they are setting their program terms to 0% commission. Leapfrog is turning off their entire program so the 0% is a stop gap until people have time to remove their links. However, The Children’s Place is simply “out of budget” for the time being and promises to return affiliates to the regular rates hopefully in April. ToysRUs and BabiesRUs recently also “ran out of budget.” It happens!

What’s an affiliate to do when they get a notice like this?

First, I hope that you are already using link redirects. I’ve mentioned them so many times before and this is a perfect time to be using them. I use Pretty Link on my blogs and an internal script on Sunshine Rewards. By changing one link on the back end, I can change the links across my whole site to redirect them somewhere else. It’s a lifesaver in case where a merchant changes networks but can also be used in times like this.

But should you redirect your links?

For a site like SR, I will absolutely turn off a merchant completely because I am not going to send them free coupon/cash back traffic. And I can easily just deactivate the merchant on my site through my administration panel so that their page disappears. That’s pretty much the best solution with sites like that.

What about blogs?

This gets tricky. If you wrote a purely promotional post about a sale at The Children’s Place and you leave your links active, you will be sending them traffic and they will not be paying for it anymore. What a boon for them! And a bust for you. From a financial standpoint, it’s dumb to let them have the free traffic.

But you’ve got your audience to think about. What happens when your reader click on your link and it takes them to a dead page or a merchant they didn’t expect? You might lose credibility. In that case, you are better off leaving the links as is. And of course the merchant knows that and is hoping for that. If the merchant closes the program completely like Leapfrog, you may just want to put in a direct link to their site. If the program is going to be at 0% for an indefinite amount of time, you can just leave the affiliate link.

If you have a page of niche product recommendations that you can remake easily (for example just taking them out of your PopShops search results or creating a new Make a Page quickly with ShareASale merchants), you can keep your content but recommend other products. That’s the best-case scenario for a page like that, even if it does mean some extra work on your part. Just change any mentions of the merchant entirely and pick products from a different merchant.

Which Is the Best Option?

You know your audience better than anyone else (or at least you should). Depending on how much traffic you are getting to the posts versus how much money you make off of them versus what alternative merchants you can switch to, you at least have some options. As affiliates we HATE getting these types of notices, but it’s just part of the business and we have to figure out how to roll with it for our particular sites. It hurts worst when it is a brand that is hard to replace (like Children’s Place) because you can’t get the same items anywhere else (unlike Leapfrog).

What do you do when a merchant sets your commission to 0%? Will you trust them again later and eventually put their links back up? Or will you refuse to work with them again even if they reset them?

Introducing Our New Beer Club Review Site

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My business journey with Todd Farmer and Eric Nagel started 4 years ago. After being in a Mastermind Group together for about a year, we presented at Affiliate Summit, Mastermind Groups Exposed:Success in Affiliate Marketing. What came of that presentation was Our First Joint Venture, Wine Club Group.

Our wine club review site has been so successful and educational that people asked us to follow up that Affiliate Summit presentation with one showing where we are now and how we got here. We’ll be presenting that in January at Affiliate Summit—Case Study: Drinking Wine and Making Money (The Full Monty).

But that wasn’t enough for us. Over the course of the last two years we had a new idea brewing…literally—brew.

Beer Club Reviews

This week we are launching a completely new review site, Beer Club Reviews. We took the same concept as our wine club site (reviewing clubs, taking pictures, making videos, etc) and applied it to beer. In part we were just a little tired of wine and in part we wanted to try some new things.

I should say *they* were tired of wine. I don’t even like beer, which makes this even more of a challenge for me. It’s the first time I have launched a niche site I wasn’t passionate about. However, I *am* passionate about the concept. And Todd and Eric are happy to be the taste testers while I do the research and education pieces.

In addition to that major difference, there is one even bigger difference. We decided to try out a crazy new gTLD. That’s Generic Top Level Domain. Instead of holding out for a “.com” or even a “.net,” we have decided to go with a “.reviews.” So our new site will simply be BeerClub.Reviews (that’s Beer Club dot Reviews). Easy to brand and even easier to remember.

I’ve been quietly building up our Facebook and Twitter content using Shareist while Eric and Todd have been reviewing a few beer clubs and writing blog posts. It’s a nice way for all of us to be able to contribute while focusing on our individual strengths.

We’re anxious to see how quickly we can get a .Reviews domain ranking. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. But we’ll have fun trying.

Rebranding the Wine Club

In addition to our big beer club news, we have some minor wine club news. Everyone hated our www.wineclubreviewsandratings.com domain, and the days of keyword-laden domains are over. We had always had on the backburner a plan to rebrand completely as our “parent company” name Wine Club Group. Toward that end, we are moving the entire site to the wineclubgroup.com domain. No more tongue twister of a domain name (you’re welcome, Lisa Picarille). And more importantly, it’s a change to build the brand itself.

Eric did an AMAZING job of moving our entire site in less in faster time than I was even able to write this blog post. It will be interesting to see the impact it has on or traffic and conversions.

There are a lot of pros and cons to moving the domain, especially right before our peak shopping season. If you want to find out whether or not the gamble worked for us, you’ll have to attend our Affiliate Summit presentation!

I’m so excited about all of this because I am a total affiliate marketing geek and I love trying new things. By this time next year I hope to be singing the praises of drinking AND selling beer!

How Much Should Blogger Affiliates Be Paid Per Post?

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A lot has been argued and written lately about bloggers being paid per blog post when they are also using affiliate links. Greg Hoffman wrote a great post (Affiliate Education for Bloggers) on the heels of ShareASale Think Tank. Roger Snow also wrote about how bloggers should consider affiliate links for long-term revenue as opposed to paid posts (Bloggers CAN Make Money in Affiliate Marketing). Joe Sousa wrote about “What Makes a Motivated Blogger.” Clearly it is a hot topic amongst affiliate managers. But what do AFFILIATES think?

This post is specifically about bloggers who are using affiliate links…not bloggers who are being paid only on a per post basis. That’s a completely different pot.

I don’t generally charge for any of my blog posts because I tend to use affiliate marketing links in them. I don’t expect merchants to pay me for placement on any of my sites with the exception of increased commissions for added exposure or things that take more work than standard reviews (like video reviews).

That said, I do love when merchants offer bonus opportunities either to get you active (or re-active) in a program or if they have specific things that they are trying to get out to the public.

Today I had two very different experience with this.

Merchant 1: Offered me $1 to write a blog post about a particular product that they want promoted. I could also get 50 cents for Tweeting about it. That’s not a typo. ONE DOLLAR.

Merchant 2: Offered me $10 to post about a new deal the merchant was running.

My responses

Merchant 1: I was so completely floored that they would think my time was only worth $1. I tried to politely respond without saying “I’m worth more than your stupid dollar.” But I was actually offended by it. I couldn’t believe that they would think that $1 would in any way motivate it.

Merchant 2: I knew it was a perfect fit for my audience anyway so the $10 was like a little icing on the cake to do something I should have been doing anyway. I wrote the post. And I plan on submitting it to get my $10!

Why did I respond so differently over $9? Neither bonus was going to make or break my day–or even my hour. But one was offensive to me and the other was kind of fun.

Merchants offer these types of bonuses all the time from $1 up to over $100 a post. They may be for initial placement, preferential placement, or promoting something with a known low conversion rate. As long as everyone comes out a little ahead, I don’t see a harm to it. I just don’t think it should be EXPECTED either that 1) blogger affiliates always get paid for posting on top of the affiliate commission, or 2) that blogger affiliates are willing to work for $1.

What do you think? I’ve started a little poll below. What is the lowest amount that is acceptable to even offer an affiliate to write a blog post on top of their commission rate? Weigh in in the comments section as well and be sure to mention if you are 1) a merchant, 2) an affiliate manager, 3) a blogger who doesn’t use affiliate links, or 4) a blogger affiliate. I am anxious to see if it makes a difference.

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What I Learned from Aweber (#ASCENDSUMMIT2014)

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Sometimes I get in a rut of talking to the same people all the time and doing the same things over and over. Last month I was given the opportunity to get out of that run by traveling to Philadelphia for the first ASCEND Summit, sponsored by Aweber.

I use Aweber for a number of my newsletters, and I was asked to moderate a panel about Affiliate Marketing. I viewed the conference as an opportunity to get a little more speaking experience and participate in a panel of really smart people in my industry. I didn’t expect to actually get a lot out of the conference because only a small part of my business is email.

I was absolutely, completely dead wrong. I got more out of the conference than I have in a long time. There were various reasons for that.

First, I was out of my element. The conference wasn’t about affiliate marketing. Everything I was learning was something new. Second, there was only one track of presentations and I didn’t feel comfortable skipping things. So I attended sessions I would not otherwise have attended (almost out of guilt!). Third, I was with a whole bunch of new people I had never been around before–never learned from or shared ideas with.

What I Learned About My Business

As much as I think I know, I still have a lot to learn. Ann Handley gave me ideas about generating better content. Wil Reynolds helped me understand the importance of branding on SEO. Andy Crestodina taught me that I am not using Google Analytics enough. Justine Jordan made me completely rethink the way that my emails appear on mobile devices. Oli Gardner and Brian Massey showed me that my landing pages are pretty much crap.

That’s all just the tip of the iceberg, but you can see how all of those things would greatly impact my affiliate marketing business. Did you know about 50% of people open their emails on mobile and 30% of people who unsubscribe do it because they just don’t like the LOOK of the email? Did you know that having social icons on your website just leads your customers AWAY from your website to a point that they will probably not come back? Or that telling people you will not SPAM them just makes you think about spamming them?

I also learned about some really cool stuff that Aweber is doing that I should have been paying attention to. If you have a mailing list and are serious about growing it and making it convert, you need to check out their tools.

What I Learned About Myself

I need to get back to the basics that got me where I am. I need to attend more sessions at Affiliate Summit instead of looking at it only as a networking event. And I need to go back and watch videos of sessions I didn’t get to. I need to attend more small conferences as well so that I can grow my network and learn from new people.

I consider my affiliate sites a business. I don’t just blog for fun (although I usually have fun doing it!). Yet I have really been missing some huge opportunities to learn and grow my business the last couple of years. I always think that I don’t have the time to spend listening to speakers or attending more conferences. But what if I were learning things that would 1) help me save time in my work, and 2) grow my business more so that I can hire more employees? Wouldn’t it be worth that time investment?

Two Challenges for You

I have two challenges for you.

Challenge One: Check out the ASCENDSummit2014 hashtag and either follow a couple of the speakers or click on some of the resources they provided. I guarantee you can learn something.

Challenge Two: Go learn something new this week. Either attend a webinar, watch an Affiliate Summit video, or find a local meetup. Spend just an hour learning something new that might help your business–even if it means one less hour you have to get work done!

Did you attend the conference and learn something that will change the way that you do business? When was the last time that you DID learn something like that?