The Industry Review

This Wednesday I’m giving a two hour introductory talk about affiliate marketing. This is following my plan to start doing more speaking engagements which I enjoy (as mentioned in my post about my talk at Social Media 201).

 
Preparing my Powerpoint deck was fun although it was somewhat time consuming. I also prepared a resource page for the audience.

 
I don’t know exactly the demographics of this blog’s visitors (clearly Alexa is untrustworthy, as I’ve joked about): I would estimate that at least a quarter are seasoned affiliate marketers, another quarter is friends, and the rest are people I meet through Twitter or people who Google for certain topics I’ve written about – Twitter Jail being the most popular (of course, it’s possible to be both a friend, an affiliate marketer, and know me from Twitter 🙂 ).

 
Since I took the time to make this resource list, I figured, why not share it? If you’re an affiliate marketer, you can stop now because at least 95% are things you know, and know well (however, I AM sure most marketers aren’t familiar with the Mobile CPA Network I joined, for example). But if you’re not… proceed.

 
I think I will make more of these introductory posts, explaining resources for building links and other things new affiliate marketers require. But that’s for another time.

 

“Standard” Affiliate networks

These are networks dedicated to physical products or eBooks.
Clickbank Sign up page – eBooks, eCourses
ShareASale sign up page – physical products
Linkshare sign up page – physical products
Linkconnector sign up page – physical products
Commission Junction sign up page – physical products

 

CPA networks

Here are some of my favorite CPA networks: harder to get into than other networks, and normally require a brief phone interview before being approved.
Neverblue sign up page
Marketleverage sign up page
Azoogleads sign page
Clickbooth sign up page
Copeac sign up page

 

Mobile CPA networks

This is a CPA affiliate network dedicated to mobile offers. I am aware of two more such networks, but since I have not used them myself (yet), I’m not listing them.
Sponsormob sign up page

 

Offer directory

An excellent resource for finding offers and comparing commissions across networks.
Offervault

 

PPC: Keyword spying tools

If you’re doing any PPC at all, you really need a keyword spying tool. I used PPCBully 2.0 and thought it’s great.
PPCBully 2.0
Affportal – has a lot of useful tools for PPC campaigns

 

SEO/Blogging: Keyword research tools

If you’re creating search engine optimized niche sites you must do your keyword research.
Micro Niche Finder: superb tool, and even has a ‘brainstorming’ function which just finds good niches for you on its own.
Market Samurai: superb tool which just gets better.
Google Keyword Tool: a good place to start

 

SEO: Link building

eZArticleLink: If you need links, this is a good resource – there’s even a free version!

 

Pay Per View Networks

I included only some of the PPV networks I use.. since this is an introductory talk, I’m not sure I would recommend on PPV being the starting point. However, I didn’t want to leave this out.
DirectCPV
AdOn Network
MediaTraffic

 

Pay Per View Resources

If one does do PPV then Affportal is a must. An absolutely fantastic – and mandatory – resource for PPV which just gets better.
Affportal

 

Email marketing Resources

Here too I only mentioned the one tool I use. Yes, there are others, but this one is the best.
Aweber – best email marketing tool

 

Twitter resources

This is probably better phrased as ‘Twitter monetization resources’.
Ad.ly
SponsoredTweets

 

Media Buying resources

This is useful for anyone doing demographics research for the purpose of media buying. Most definitely not for new or even intermediate affiliates!
Alexa
Quantcast
Compete

 

Domain registration

I registered more than 60 domains with Namecheap and don’t have a single complaint. They’re also the cheapest. In fact, I’m going to register one, possibly two, domains right after I finish this blog post…
Namecheap

 

Domain hosting

Unlike domain registration, I’ve had my share of hosting accounts and was very unhappy with most. However, Hostgator is excellent: very good service, high reliability, quick and friend customer support. Definitely better than the other accounts I used. Even their pricing is competitive!
Hostgator

 

Facebook advertising resources

Since it’s hard to do split-testing with Facebook because there is no way for the average user to get a bulk upload tool, the Facebook Ad Manager is a must in order to do any serious Facebook advertising.
FB Ad Manager

 

Click on the image to see the full stats

 

I’ve already written before that I doubt Alexa’s accuracy. But this is just comical. When I go to the Alexa stats for this blog, it gives me the demographics of my visitors. For crying out loud, where are they getting this information from? I have the Alexa toolbar installed as well and I don’t recall ever giving them any information, let alone specific details such as education.

 
So you can imagine my surprise when I found out that my blog is vastly popular with guys between ages 45 and 54, and quite shocked to discover no one over 55 reads my blog – and very few in the age group 18 to 24 as well. I’ll try harder, I promise.

 
Also, it seems the number one query for my blog is “chinese affiliate” (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, click on the image above to see the full stats). This is very interesting. Yes, the phrase is mentioned once in this blog, but with all due respect to Alexa, I look at my stats every day (usually a few times), and “chinese affiliate” is not my #1 source of traffic, nor is it second, third, fourth or fifth.

 
Neither is “affiliate network”, which is probably a very competitive phrase. I think it would be quite cool if I did rank high in Google for “affiliate network” – I’d probably get tons of traffic. But that’s not the case.

 
This is comical, but it also raises serious questions. Recently I did a small media buy based on demographics I obtained from Alexa. How can I trust these results at all? I think the stats for my own blog are complete nonsense.

 

Alexa is an internet service that by using a toolbar that is installed on a large number of people’s browsers, is able to collect a lot of information on internet sites. Since the claim is this statistical sample is large enough to make statistically significant statements, Alexa theoretically can be used to accurately measure traffic of most (if not all) internet websites.

 
The lower the traffic rank score, the more popular the site is and the more traffic it gets. For example, I just checked Google’s traffic rank and it is 1. I tend to believe this is accurate and Google is the most popular website in the world. Bing is ranked at 19. Of course, it can’t be 100% accurate since not all internet users in the world have Alexa installed, but the claim is that it’s accurate. And with a large enough base of users that accurately represent the collective behaviors of internet users (this is pretty important!) it should be true (this is the same problem faced by people who conduct polls – to get a sample that represents that the population demographics).

 
I noticed that with some of my sites, Alexa seems to estimate traffic pretty accurately However, with others, it is completely and utterly wrong. For example, my most popular site – quite a niche site admittedly – yet one that has been able to get a very decent daily number of visitors and two page 1 Google rankings, is assigned an extremely bad traffic rank of ~5,000,000! This is far from accurate. The mentioned site gets at least 3-5 times as much traffic as this blog, yet has a far, far worse rank. And this blog is barely a month and a half old.

 
The answer to this question is simple: the ‘average’ user does not visit my mentioned website as much. However, isn’t the claim that Alexa’s user base is large enough to be able to give a good indicator? And if that is not the case, how can we trust its rankings for anything except for the most popular/mainstream websites, really?

 
My goal in this post has not been to analyze the pros and cons of Alexa, but more to pose an open question to readers: How has been your experience with Alexa rankings? And if it’s been accurate (in your opinion), is your site big/small, on a popular subjects/niche topics, targeted to a specific demographic/worldwide? I am just curious in trying to get a better understanding for this.