10 Tips for Online Affiliate Success – Tips 3 and 4

In my last post I gave you the first two of ten tips for maximizing the return from your online affiliate marketing* efforts. Here are tips 3 and 4.

Tip #3

Create communities related to your niche to leverage the power of social media sites working synergistically.

How? If your niche is golf, for example, then all the social media tools you put to work should focus on golf… and only on golf-related info, products and services. Not on sports in general, but on golf. Just golf.

Some of the things you can/should do to create communities:

• Choose a URL (domain name) that has golf in the title. This will enable you to have an e-mail address with a golf-related suffix (e.g. yourname@golf.com). All things being equal, this will produce much better results than having a “free” or generic e-mail address. It will also help raise your website in the returned search results – and it’s one of the basic Search Engine Optimization tenets.

Make sure that you have plenty of golf-related content on your website to keep the search engine crawlers happy and to help you with page rank.

Make it easy for people to find your products and buy your products on your site - they should be able to get to where you want them to take action within 3 clicks.

• Choose a twitter name that has golf in the title. This will signal that your primary interest is indeed golf and help people interested in golf to find you... and make them more likely to follow you. Make sure you use the bio section to talk about your golf passion and/ or business’ experience re golf, etc. Also, create a twitter background that shows golf images – and have it created so that the image fills your page, rather than tiling a smaller image (when you tile, the image is repeated over and over and over again on your page).

• Choose a blog title (the name you give your blog) with the word golf in it and create a banner for your blog that shows golf images (which you alt tag with the word golf).

Make all your posts about golf-related topics and use blog post titles that contain the word golf, or a content-relevant golf term. Your blog content should include your own golf experiences as often as possible/appropriate so that your personal passion for the subject shines through.

You can include affiliate sales links on your blog - but don't overwhelm your visitors. They are turning to your blog to get info or be entertained, not to be sold.

• Create a facebook business/fan page that has golf in its name. Again, golf images need to be used… and if you are going to include a picture of yourself, make sure you are in golf attire. Use this page to sell your material by posting a blurb and link under your picture.

From time to time, update your page with info about your affiliate products... and message your fans, occasionally, too.

• Ditto re your YouTube Channel.

• Join other social networking sites and choose screen/user names that contain the word golf. If possible, use your facebook or twitter name (if they are not one in the same). Link back to your facebook fan page (where

• Interlink each of these online “presence makers” and encourage visitors to one “site” to visit the others to help drive traffic and establish connections between your various communities of followers.

• Leverage automation tools such as ping.fm so you can syndicate one message to more than one of your social media accounts. Consider using an RSS feed as well to automatically post great content about your niche to your social media sites. (Thanks to Maria Gudelis from Wildhorse Performance Marketing for this tip’s phrasing.)

Once you have created communities, and people have come to know you and trust you, you will find it easier to sell products to this group – just make sure that all the affiliate products you create or choose to sell are golf-related to maintain credibility within your community.

Tip #4

Create digital videos and add them to your blog posts, website, facebook page, YouTube, etc. There are people who search for/ click through to videos rather than printed info, so you will miss a growing portion of potential online traffic if you ignore video.

Make your video as professional as you can and stick to one single golf-related topic per “movie”. This will help you stick to YouTube maximum time length of 15 minutes or 2GB (unless, of course, you have a professional account and then you have unlimited time length).

Also, do not try to sell material with all of your videos. Current “best practices” say to make sure that at least 75% of your material is aimed at providing information, not at selling. Yes, include links (or verbal references) to sites where you do sell stuff, but do not make that the focus of your message. This alone will increase your referral and view rate… leading to increased sales.

An important production tip (sounds obvious but…): Make sure your video and audio lengths are the same length.

There are many simple online tools for creating videos, including animoto and Windows Movie Maker. Practice, record, review, get input from people you trust, edit and/or re-record as necessary. When you’re ready, upload your video in the original format in the highest quality possible.

YouTube supports the following file formats:
• WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
• .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files - (typically supporting h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
• .AVI (Many cameras output this format - typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
• .MPEGPS (Typically supporting MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
• .WMV
• .FLV (Adobe - FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

Note: YouTube prefers de-interlaced file (de-interlacing: the process of converting interlaced files such common analog television signals and 1080i format HDTV signals, into a non-interlaced form). If you are recording your video online or using a digital recording device, you don’t need to worry about this.

Once you are happy with your video (not just satisfied), you are ready to upload, you can use free automation tools such as tubemogul to submit your movie to multiple video-sharing sites simultaneously.

Caution: Make sure you really are happy with your video because it is not possible to re-upload videos to YouTube (you’ll have to delete, rename and upload as though for the first time). Once a video becomes popular, the number of views, user ratings, user comments and other community data, cannot be transferred if another, higher quality version of the same video is uploaded.

Well, that’s it for now. Tips 5 and 6 will be posted shortly – but why not sign up for this blog so that you are notified when I post them?

Until then, have fun and remember: “You must be prepared to go out on a limb because that is where the fruit is!”