Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

Revealing My Affiliate Marketing Secrets

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20-questions-answers

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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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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optinmonster-review

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:

listbuilder

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:

optinmonster

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!

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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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…]