Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Are You Part of the Affiliate Market Industry Problems?

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I’ve spent the last month helping kids practice junior high speech team, and one of my jobs each week is to find quotes for them. I came across one this week that made me think about our industry.

“If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.” –Eldridge Cleaver***

Like any industry, ours has a lot of problems but not anything that can’t be helped. We face governmental issues like the FTC and their disclosure guidelines or states passing nexus laws. We deal universally with challenges like ad blocking and the reputation of affiliate marketing. The one string that connects the problems is that none of them can be dealt with successfully by individuals. They all take group effort.

I’m not saying that every one of us needs to become a lobbyist and spend our time fighting in Washington for the betterment of the industry. What I am saying is that if you are not doing at least SOMETHING to make the industry better and you are making your living in this industry, you are doing so on the backs of all of the other people who ARE working to keep us all in business.

If you think you don’t have a lot of time to help, here are some ways that you can be a part of the solution with your pocketbook or just a few minutes a week: [Read more…]

Revealing My Affiliate Marketing Secrets

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Last year when I was trying to figure out what to present on at Affiliate Summit, I wanted to do something completely different. Instead of focusing on one topic, I decided on “20 Questions and Answers from Behind the Scenes.” I spent a solid hour sharing what I consider to be some of the best-kept secrets in affiliate marketing that have gotten me to where I am. The sessions was described as “I’m the person who spills the beans about everything from tracking to increased commissions to FTC disclosure. Learn from 10 years of my mistakes and successes in blogging, networking and marketing.”

This week Affiliate Summit released the video for the session. I’ve embedded both the video and the slides below. The slides are only slightly helpful without the video that goes along with it so definitely check out both! Although a few things have changed in the last year, on the whole about 95% of it is still relevant.

Here are some of the topics I cover in the video: [Read more…]

5 Reasons Bloggers Need This Toolkit

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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!

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…]