Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

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…]

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…]

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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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.

Why You Should Join a Slack Group

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Benefits of Using Slack

I wasn’t exactly an early adopter of Slack. In fact, Brian Littleton had to almost drag me to it. But very quickly I came to understand why. I know at the outset it seems like just another tab you have to keep open on your computer, but once you start using it you will see why it might become your most important tab.

Explaining Slack is hard. It’s a combination of instant messenger, meeting place, calendar notices, and file sharing. There are so many integrations that you can include that you can make it do a variety of things that will streamline your processes and keep you organized. You could pretty much use Slack just by yourself and find it useful in a lot of ways, but there are so many benefits to joining a Slack group.

Collaboration is Key

Whether you are working with colleagues in a corporate setting, volunteering with a non-profit, or sharing information with people of like interests, Slack is perfect for collaborating. Once you join a Slack group, you can work with others in a public or private channel, start small group conversations, and send direct messages to people. You can send files back and forth easily and keep them organized. You can tag people you want to respond to something so you know that they will see it. Use a “thumbs up” for simple voting or weighing in on ideas.

Affiliate Slackers

Being a part of a Slack group means you can quickly get responses without interrupting the flow of your day. It’s easy to bounce ideas around. There is also a built-in search functionality so that if you know someone mentioned something at a point in the past, you can search back for it rather than asking them again. [Read more…]