Tricia Meyer

Affiliate Marketer, Blogger, and Consultant

30 Affiliate Marketing Tips in 30 Days

by

I’m going to attempt to do something that I have never done before–keep my mouth shut (for a few days). I have a tendency to shout everything I know from the rooftops as soon as I know it. I tend to “overshare” what I know about affiliate marketing. I had a great idea to write a blog post about 30 of my favorite affiliate marketing tips.


After almost 10 years in the industry, I have a lot of insider information plus tried and true techniques. Why not put them all into one big blog post and give it to the world? But how would I know if anyone is actually reading and using the tips?

So I have decided instead to include them in my newsletter and space them out over a month. You won’t find the list anywhere on my site. You can only get it if you subscribe to my newsletter.

Am I Trying to Bribe You?

Sort of. I do want you do sign up for my newsletter. But more than that, I want to engage with you. Once you sign up, I want to connect with you on LinkedIn or G+. After you get the first set of tips, I want you to email me back and tell me whether I am a genius or a total faker.

I want us to be lifelong friends who eat chocolate together and paint each other’s nails!!!

Well…that may be taking it just a little too far. I’m actually not much of a nail painter. What I do want is for us to see how we can help each other. If you like my tips, give me one of your own. If you are reading my site, tell me about yours, too.

Why Am I Doing This?

Quite a few reasons. One is inspired by the back story as well as the actual post Story Time: All Cookies Are Not Equal. Everyone is at a different stage in the growth of their affiliate marketing businesses. I want to be a part of the solution in helping each other grow even when times are tough.

Another reason is that I have a lot of information in my head that I forget to share until you get me talking about it. Sit with me at Affiliate Summit and I may go on for 2 hours about the best ways to get higher commissions (see what I mean about how I can’t keep my mouth shut?). This is my way of informally formally putting those type of discussions into one place.

Selfishly, I want to grow my list. If I keep posting everything for the world to see, you don’t have any motivation to sign up and connect with me. Now you have a reason!

Take A Chance and Tell a Friend

What’s the worst thing that can happen? You sign up for my list and start getting the tips and find them useless and unsubscribe. That’s okay. You tried. I tried. What’s the best that can happen? You learn something new. I make some new friends and learn from you, too.

Sign up for my newsletter below! Tell a friend if you think they would be interested. Expect a series of three emails in the next month, each with 10 tips.

And when you sign up and get that first email from me, please do respond and tell me a little about yourself. I’m anxious to hear from you!

Cookies and Wine: Long-Term Benefits of Good Content

by

Most of the time when I write about cookies and affiliate marketing, I mean the digital cookies that result in our tracking. Not this time. This is a story about how actual cookies resulted in Facebook likes, Pinterest traffic, backlinks, and more… but not until almost a full year after a post was published. More importantly, it’s about the long-term benefits you can get out of good content.

If you want to read all about the technical aspects behind how our site was able to keep up with the traffic and the programming behind it all, check out Eric’s post: Be Ready for Viral Sharing. This is essential if you do not want your site to crash or to spend a fortune in hosting!

It Started with the Cookies

Todd Farmer, Eric Nagel, and I have a system for our Wine Club blog. We publish X number of “money posts” (highly monetized) and X number of “filler” posts. We call them “filler” for short, but they are really the content that makes up the site beyond just writing about our merchants. They can be evergreen posts related to our merchant (like How to Choose a Wine Club), Pinterest-worthy posts (like Red Wine Chocolate Cupcakes), or timely posts (like Fondue Day).

The Pairing Wine with Girl Scout Cookies post was meant to be both timely and Pinterest-worthy. Eric created an image that would clearly show both the Girl Scout cookies and the wine.

On February 7, 2013, we published it, Pinned it, posted it on Facebook and Twitter, etc. All our normal methods of sharing. In the first week, it had 319 pageviews. A couple of repins. A couple of likes. Nothing spectacular. In the time since then, it has gotten a little traffic here and there. But nothing like what happened starting January 11, 2014. [Read more…]

Are You Throwing Away Your Affiliate Money?

by

Losing affiliate moneyAs an affiliate that promotes everything from clothes to surveys to video streaming, I see a lot of different offers and business models. Once upon a time I was happy to take $1 per sign up for an offer even if it meant sending my traffic away to a competitor. It was revenue! And I didn’t know any better.

Last week at ShareASale ThinkTank I had a number of conversations with bloggers about why they should not promote toolbars that will steal their commissions. Little did I know the big surprise I would receive from a merchant this morning.

SavingStar is a great way to save money using digital grocery coupons. I use them myself. I promote them to my members. I guess I should say “promoted.”

I received an email as a SavingStar affiliate announcing happily their new cash back shopping and toolbar. I’m sure that it is very exciting for them because it will bring in huge revenue for them. As an affiliate, huge warning bells went off in my head. Here are a few lines from the email that worried me most:

  • We also have a toolbar which makes it seamless and easy to save all the time you see a deal.
  • Through SavingStar’s Cashback Mall, you can save every time you shop at sites like Groupon, Travelocity, Proflowers, Macys.com, Sears.com, LandsEnd.com, BestBuy.com, and hundreds of other online stores.
  • Enjoy promoting these amazing offers and I will be updating you more frequently about exclusive coupons, increased cash back and holiday shopping deals.

Unless I am misunderstanding something, SavingStar wants me to encourage my visitors to shop through SavingStar’s affiliate links. Those links include merchants that I myself promote. So if I am encouraging them to shop through SavingStar, I am basically flushing my own affiliate revenue down the toilet.

I may make $2 for convincing someone to sign up with SavingStar, but how much am I losing when I promote a Macy’s deal on my site but my visitors use their handy dandy SavingStar toolbar to get a deal and cash back? Even if the toolbar is not set to pop up when an affiliate link is used, are you willing to take the chance to encourage them to use a cash back site to get your $2 and then just hope that they do not ever use the cash back site?

I have nothing against the cash back business model. I own a cash back site. But I also tell bloggers not to promote cash back or coupon sites if they are going to use affiliate links themselves. If you aren’t going to use any other affiliate links, by all means take the CPA on referring your visitors to other deal sites.

SavingStar is just the most recent merchant-turned-affiliate to pull this. I’m calling them out only because 1) a lot of bloggers will not even catch that email, and 2) many will not understand the significance of the shift from just grocery coupons to online deals. Eric Nagel is working on a post you’ll want to read about some of the other ways you might be valuing short-term over long-term. I’ll link to that as soon as it is up.

Are you a blogger that has been promoting SavingStar? Will you continue to promote them? If you are a merchant or affiliate manager, how do you feel about participating with a “merchant/affiliate” like this?

Good Stock Photos for Only $1

by

If you are like me and have bought into the idea that we need to have pretty pictures with our posts to get more attention on social media, you have probably been 1) making a lot of graphics lately, 2) buying a lot of photos, 3) stealing images from other people, or 4) searching all over online for someone to borrow from and give them a link back.

I stay clear of #4 for the most part because I like to alter the images and don’t like giving away backlinks. I’d like to think that we are all above #3, so that leaves #1 and #2. I am terrible at making graphics, so that basically leaves me with buying them.

I had been buying most of my images from iStockphoto, and they do have a lot. Pretty much anything you could possibly want. I don’t mind paying for really nice graphics whenever I need really nice graphics. But most of the time I just need something basic or something that I can doctor up with a little of my own low budget magic. Just something to put an image to the headline.

I had purchased some graphics from GraphicRiver before and was happy with them. I had a few credits in my account there and decided to check there first for an image the other day. I ended up on their sister site, Photodune, where I could also use my credits. I found exactly what I was looking for and only paid $1 for it! Since then, I have been getting everything I need for between $1-3.

One of the best things about it is that I can use my credits across their different properties to buy everything from infographic templates to photos to WordPress templates (including the one we used to create WineClubReviewandRatings.com). I make a quick $20 payment from my PayPal account and can buy graphics for a month. If I don’t need graphics, I can buy music clips for my podcasts, video clips, and even lines of code. Because their marketplaces are all linked, you can find many different shortcuts to make your sites nicer.

Here are a few of the images that I ended up with from the $1 photos I bought. As you can, they are not fancy, but they were great for the articles that I wrote and accomplished my goals. In the first case, I wanted something perfectly sized for the new Facebook image guidelines so that it would like nice in the News Feed. For the second I was more concerned with the thumbnail and Google+

This last one was actually made from a graphic from the GraphicRiver section of their site. The “Birthday Frame” cost me $3 and then I was able to make changes to it easily in Photoshop.

I don’t think that graphics are going to become less important anytime soon with them now being displayed so prominently across social media when people link to our posts. For those of us who are not great with graphics ourselves, we can either spend money on them or spin our wheels trying to create or find them. From now on, I will be spending a dollar or two on something that works versus hours of frustration.

Affiliates Take Note: New FTC Disclosure Guidelines

by

(Sign up for my newsletter to get updates!  Or follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter!)

(Updated 6/29/23) In 2013, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) first updated its guidance for advertising disclosures in a guide called .com Disclosures: How to Make Effective Disclosures in Digital Advertising. The original guidance from 2000 left open many holes including advertising on mobile devices and places like Twitter and Facebook. Since then, the FTC has clarified much of what it originally wrote. The most recent update was June 29, 2023.

This is a short summary of the Guidelines but for a full understanding, keep reading for the various updates listed below over time. As affiliates, we have already been advised that disclosure must be “clear and conspicuous.” The new documents go even further. In fact, it specifically states that disclosure at the end of blogs posts is not acceptable. Here are some of the highlights from the guidelines:

  • Affiliates and Influencers (“endorsers”) must disclose any “material connections with an advertiser.” This includes commissions, free products, placement fees, etc.
  • Disclosures must be “clear and “conspicuous” and “unavoidable.” This includes being placed at the top of any blog posts and not hidden on a privacy or disclosure page. The customer must not have to click to read the disclosure. Pop-up disclosures should not be used.
  • Using hashtags for disclosure is okay but MANY are not adequate including “affiliate link.”
  • Disclosures on social media follow the same rules and cannot be buried.
  • Disclosure effectiveness will be evaluated based on the target audience of the endorsements (e.g. children or elderly).
  • Affiliates, influencers, agencies, and advertisers can all be found liable when disclosures are not done properly.
  • Advertisers and agencies are responsible for instructing endorsers as well as monitoring and correcting compliance.
    [Read more…]