Well, it’s been an interesting past couple of years here at Affiliation Cash. But this is the last of it you’ll hear from me. I’m moving on.
For the affiliates that got to know me, they already knew I wasn’t totally devoted to online marketing. Great way to make money, but doesn’t leave one with a sense of fulfillment at the end of the day if you’re after a bit more out of life than just being monetarily wealthy.
So whilst I’ll continue to keep a toe in the water, and may see some of you around the traps, like WickedFire, DP or WaFo, it will be a lot less often as I concentrate more on my own personal passions that lie elsewhere.
For those that have shared ideas with me, I thank you. It’s helped me a lot.
For those that I’ve attempted to share my own ideas with on this blog, I hope I’ve prodded you enough into thinking of some new concepts. Sorry about not giving you the answer on a silver platter, but you’d never learn to think analytically if I had. Hopefully, you got something out of all these rambling posts of mine.
Lastly, for my affiliates, Brendan, Jo, Ricky or Mark will be taking you on if you have any questions or issues now that I won’t be around to help you out with them.
Performics recently released yet another study revealing what we already know: People will take their friends words for the quality of a service.
This works particularly well on Facebook. This is also something we’ve already mentioned, and you probably already know. So why bother bringing it up in relation to affiliate marketing, and specifically for Affiliation Cash programs?
Because you can get people to Facebook share your pages!
Whilst you can’t directly advertise on Facebook as they have a policy against download based services, and you probably can’t stick up a fan page either for the same reason (although I’d be interested to see the results if anyone tried), these are not nearly as effective as merely getting people to share about the URL of your site, particularly if you have a logo that still manages to look attractive in that tiny little Facebook box.
If you’re already using something like Facebook’s own sharing widget or an Add This button on your page, that’s great… But you can always go a step further if you’re a little inventive.
Remember, most regular users of Facebook will basically stay logged in on another window or tab all day long. Some clever and amazingly unethical use of Javascript could see each and every one of those people clicking your FB Share button.
Turns out he didn't die... and wasn't in a car crash... and is actually white!
Well, probably not if you’re not a fan of Kanye West, which I’m not so I wouldn’t read it… but pretend you like inferior rap music (Seriously, it’s not 2LiveCrew, it’s inferior…). Now wouldn’t you be intrigued and potentially click through?
If you said no, you’re probably lying to yourself.
Because this exact trick was used to get hundreds of thousands of suckers, suckers who are potentially your next conversion, to load their computer with fake security software. Not only was this security software totally fake, they were also charged money for it, had their credit card and contact details logged, and probably sold on for later use by criminals somewhere in a former Soviet state, with the people behind harvesting all these details now richer than the Prime Minster of Australia (proudly celebrating 40 years of running electricity!).
The trick specifically?
Create fake, controversial news that people want to believe, and quickly spam it out to numerous social media channels, remembering to +1 it about 100 times through social bookmarks, and have it go to a faked blog that’s relevant to the topic. Then you have your affiliate marketing program as a part of the site with calls to action along the lines of “<action> to their last <creative work> before they tragically died”.
Learn this technique, learn to refine it. You can do it to smaller and smaller groups, eventually manipualting individuals to do as you please. Dance, my puppets, DANCE!
Some of our cleverer affiliates did this the moment they heard Michael Jackson had died, and experienced bumper profits for a week. This was using real news.
Real news does not last long, however, as you are going to get quickly outranked by major news sources, and you are not the original source of the information. Linkbaiting it gives you control over the entirety of the message delivery from start to finish, and if it’s believable, you’ll get about 6-12 hours of pure internet hysteria. People retweeting your original tweets (remember to have a few twitter accounts that you can use to retweet your hashtags, link and message), others +1ing your Diggs and Stumbles… in the meantime, all this goes back to your blog that you threw up 2-3 hours ago.
We call activities like this “Social Engineering”.
It’s powerful, so don’t over use it, and certainly don’t screw it up.
So by now, if you haven’t heard of Twitter, you’re either sitting there with fingers in your ears screaming “LALALA!” at anyone that gets within 10 feet of you, or living in North Korea. If you don’t fall into either of those categories, and still want to know what it is, it’s yet another social media platform, limited to amazingly small post sizes, and everyone seems to be using it, including celebrities (well, actually, they hire people to ghost write it because they can’t think of 140 characters of profundity).
Everybody’s doing it!
Marketing “gurus” have swarmed to this phenomenon in flocks, saying how much it’s increased their sales and earnings. These dubious claims spew forth yet more “info” product eBooks about the wonders of Twitter for your online marketing campaigns.
So how is it really, in the context of the sort of campaigns that Affiliation Cash runs?
I’ve tried it out, been grossly disappointed, given up hope, cried a little because we’re not afraid to show our emotions around here, and moved my concentration back to things that were generating sales and money. Like exploiting lazy people on Yahoo! Answers.
To lay it all out for you:
It’s just another one-to-many communication tool for telling people what you’re up to, and is EXACTLY like Facebook’s status update, but more limited because it won’t show pictures or descriptions of the things you link to, and has a very limited (140 characters) text field. In fact Twitter is like any other social network in respects to getting traffic from it directly.
What I mean is IF you have a pre-existing site, you merely need to tweet about your latest update. “PersonX: is writing about the latest political infighting in Uzbekistan - uzbekpolitico.com” or whatever your blog is about, and whatever the address is. Better yet, if it’s running of a CMS like Wordpress, there are even plugins that will do it for you automatically. Obviously, with our programs, your site likely centers around some form of entertainment media, not Middle Eastern politics.
The point is you can’t make money directly off of Twitter. Even if you wanted to cram in an affiliate link, most affiliate URLs are too large. I suppose you could use a shortening service like TinyURL. Our PID encrypted links will fit in, in most circumstances, so long as you’re not actually saying anything else, or passing variables to a site with a search function… but it doesn’t really matter as most people resent having a URL shoved in their face when they don’t know what it is.
IF you happen to be running the sort of site that people would return to regularly for new content then it is possible to get followers who use it because they haven’t figured out what RSS is for. On the bright side, people that haven’t figured out RSS generally are the exact sort of people that won’t think twice about laying down the credit card for what you’ve got on offer.
But if you don’t already have flocks of people following you, it can be hard to get the crowd going.
Here are a three simple things you can do to increase your flock of followers, or as I like to call them, Twits:
Start following others, hope that they add you in return, and then dump them unless you actually read them. It takes ages, but there are some automated tools out there now if you don’t mind doing it the blackhat way.
Produce “quality” tweets… however the hell you produce quality anything in 140 characters. People will eventually follow because they’ll tell their friends about your posts. Haikus seem to win friends and influence people, as to scathing replies to other people. It’s almost like highschool again.
Link bait… Post controversial BS, and people will flock because they’ll tell their friends… Especially if you can keep up a BS story, like the guys that does professional media hoaxing.
Just to keep things fun, here’s a video of Twitter in action:
For the affiliates that got to know me, they already knew I wasn’t totally devoted to online marketing. Great way to make money, but doesn’t leave one with a sense of fulfillment at the end of the day if you’re after a bit more out of life than just being monetarily wealthy.
