When I die I hope my wife goes through my coat pockets to look for spare change, because I am notorious for leaving money in my pockets. I’ve found twenty dollars bills in coats I haven’t worn in two years.
Well, if she goes through my coat pockets, she should also go through my online affiliate accounts as well because just the other day I found money in one account I had forgotten about.
Several months ago I set up a one page website that offers to deliver inspirational messages via email. The site contains just one call to action and an email sign up form. The inspirational messages are delivered using autoresponder software and it has been on auto-pilot adding one or two new subscribers a month for the past several months. At the bottom of every automatically delivered email there is a simple text link promotion for an affiliate product. As new subscribers sign up for the free service they are effectively starting a chain of emails that will provide them with daily inspirational messages and a single offer for a product promotion.
This is a fantastic way to set up an automated sales force, but there are a few things to consider.
The balance is to not make a pushy offer because it will over power the positive effect of the inspirational message. You want your audience to look forward to your emails or they won’t open them. By not being pushy, but consistently providing an offer with every email I am playing on the nature of curiosity that we all have. Eventually, they are going to be curious about what’s behind that link and then they will check out the offer. If it is something they are interested in then they will check it out sooner than later.
It is also important to try and match the offer as closely to their interests as possible. The more relevant the offer is to the list member who is seeking inspirational messages, the more likely they are to take action. I have been using promotions from AzoogleAds with much success. You could use any affiliate network that has ad inventory to match your target audience.
I picked offers from AzoogleAds because I like what they are promoting and their reporting is easy to use and understand. They also offer a good selection of ad formats and creatives. That also helps me match ads to my list because an image ad is not always appropriate in every situation and sometimes a text link just doesn’t get noticed. So, I like to have choices when I am presenting an offer.
But basically that’s it. Aside from a few small promotional links on other sites I have not had to do that much promotion of the site. I did pick the domain name based on a few keywords and I have been sure to use keyword specific phrases on the homepage. This in combination with using stumbleupon and other social sites to promote the site has served well. And since the whole thing is on auto-pilot I am not pressed to manage it constantly, which of course is why I forgot about the affiliate revenue.
Maybe I should investigate some affiliate management software and report what I find. I know there has to be other affiliates out there with this same problem. Of course it is a good problem to have.
If you know of any good affiliate tracking software out there send me a message and tell me about it.
Forgetting to remember,
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
Recently I had the opportunity to share some Internet Marketing resources with local business owners. What I learned from them concerned me so much that I felt it was extremely important to write about it here so that the information would help as many people as possible.
