Category: Blog

Many affiliates are intimidated by the amount of products they can possibly promote via CPA Networks or ClickBank.

We completely understand this, but we always suggest to the advertisers to get the best offers and to advertise in Hooqy in order to earn as much as possible.

Finding a great product is actually pretty simple and straightforward. Let’s see how.

OfferVault.com

OfferVault.com allows affiliates to compare CPA offers from thousands of affiliate networks, including all the big names like CPAWay, NeverBlue, Clickbooth, etc. Offer Vaults allows affiliates to search their database for 10,000s CPA offers to promote and compare offers and payouts between CPA networks. So you can compare which network can provide the best price with the same CPA offers

Odigger.com

oDigger provides an Affiliate Offer search tool which is easy and fast to find the best offer, and the highest payout. It contains 350 Affiliate Networks and 65,000+ offers on a daily basis. Compared with Offervault, it has better interface to search CPA offers. And affiliates can easily make decision to pick up which network offers.

 

CBEngine.com

CBEngine.com has been around for a few years now and has
established itself as one of the best tools for researching the Clickbank marketplace. And you can filter the products using gravity, keywords, categories.

After you have created your landing page to promote your affiliate offers, media buys are your next logical step if you want to get traffic to your website fast.

When it comes to media buys, you will find that an ad network like Hooqy Media is cheaper than a direct buy since the ad network is working as the middleman. You will also have to use a bidding system with an ad network to compete with your competition in your niche. Some ad networks will normally require you to have a bigger budget, and they should only be considered if you want to scale an already profitable campaign to a broader audience. In Hooqy Media, you can use use self-service platforms of cost per click (CPC) advertising, cost per 1,000 impression (CPM) advertising, cost per visit (CPV) advertising and cost per interstitial (CPI) advertising. This will give you the chance to start out by spending around $25 or so to see what works for your market.

It is important to understand that you don’t need to spend billions of advertising dollars to see results in online marketing. You can still purchase successful media buys with a smaller budget, but you do need to make sure that you are working wisely and efficiently as you do so.

The way to maximize a small budget is by ensuring that your money is spent well and working with ad networks that will give you as many extras as possible in your ad campaign.

Your conversions are really what matters, which is why it may be best to work with ad network that can offer conversion to your campaigns. If you work with an ad network that is able to reach targeted users, then your smaller budget will go a longer way by generating more conversions for you.

Simple is good. This philosophy can apply to affiliate marketing. According to our recent data, we notice that poor conversion campaigns have the same problems:

Too much content clutters landing pages

Make it clear to your customers that they can buy your product right there.
Keep it plain and simple. You’ll notice that a simple landing page is not the prettiest sites of all time. However, it’s clear, easy to navigate and, most importantly, attractive to customers.

Banner stuffing

When you go to website which is filled with banners everywhere, you feel annoying too. If you do decide to add a banner only use one or two. Banners are not as useful as they once were.  Excessively used banners provide an impression that you are trying to sell too hard.

AdSense barrage

Before we activate CPV campaigns which contain Google Adsense, we kindly remind our advertisers to remove it. It’s not a bad program and, in fact, there are people who do extremely well with AdSense. However, there are two pitfalls.  First, Adsense simply makes your site look less professional. Second, Adsense may steal your potential customers and reach to your competition.

Too Many Products

We keep to emphasize: Simple. Limit the amount of items you’re selling on a page to under 6. If customers are given too many options, they may get confused and leave your site right the way.

Spending money buying media is actually the easy part. Getting the campaigns to work is part art and part science. Here are the media buying strategies. With testing, your goal is as follows:

1. Test
2. Find Pockets of Profitability
3. Support (stabilize) those pockets
4. Scale
5. Rinse and repeat

Test with a fixed amount (almost everytime). Normally this amount should never change, but there are a few important exceptions to the rule

1. If the distribution has a higher minimum threshold. Most of the ad networks you are going to test have a minimum $100 budget, however as you get into more advanced and larger buys, the minimum will be higher

2. If the offer you are promoting is a high ticket (low conversion offer), you may need to test slightly more to see if it can convert.

What to do if your campaign loses money….

1. Look to reduce what you are paying for the click.
2. Check your targeting and see if that can be improved without increasing the price.
3. Check your creative. Is there anything you can improve or create a greater call to action.
4. Landing page. If you are promoting a 3rd party offer, you have little options. If its your own page, find creative ways to increase conversions.
5. With 3rd party offers, ask for a higher payout. Getting a few extra dollars may mean the difference between profit and loss.

Find Pockets of Profitability (and Scale)

Your goal is to find and support profitable campaigns. Once you can identify profit, your goal is to support that profit by any means necessary. This includes:

1. asking for a higher payout
2. asking for quicker payout
3. asking (probably not getting) exclusivity

Once you can get profit, you want to scale the campaign both within the same network and take that winner and expand elsewhere.

If you’re selling other people’s products as an affiliate marketer, or are planning to do so, please understand that you have a lot more control over how much money you earn, and how many sales you make, than you might think.

You still have control over…

(a) Deciding which products to sell, and

(b) How to promote your affiliate links.

Opinions differ as to the best way to decide which products to promote.

We notice some of our advertisers promote products which are already selling well in the affiliate marketing.

On the other hand, others find lesser known products to advertise, perhaps even ones that are new to the marketplace, since you are likely to be competing with fewer affiliates.

Our suggested approach is to pick the best. In other words, find the ones that seem to deliver the best value for money for prospective customers.

Obviously, it goes without saying that the amount of commission will be a big consideration for you – that’s why you’re an affiliate marketer.

However, the reason we suggest looking for the best value for money for the customer first, is that we believe it’s far easier to sell a great product through our network when you truly believe in it – even if there’s a lower commission payout available – than it is to sell an inferior or average product, despite the higher commission.

Great products spawn genuinely positive word of mouth, and once you’ve read the section on word of mouth, you’ll understand why this can often make or break a sale.
There are a couple of principles we strongly recommend when advertising other people’s products in our network:

1. When possible, use the product.

This may not always be practical, especially if you’re trying to choose between several different products, but whenever possible I’d recommend that you use the product with which you’re affiliated.

This gives you the advantage of having a real knowledge of the product, instead of one based solely on the sales material.

And since a lot of other affiliates may not actually be using it themselves (depending on the product and market), this gives you the advantage over them as well.

If it’s not possible to use it, then do as much product research as possible – find people who are using it, and get their opinions. See if there are any negative reviews out there, and find out why they’re negative. (Just be aware that many of those reviews may be from other affiliates, who are not necessarily impartial.)

2. Pre-sell the product.

Many affiliate marketers don’t promote their affiliate link directly, but send visitors to a “review page”, where they have a review of the product (possibly along with reviews of similar products, for comparison purposes).

Using a review page as landing page and advertising in our network is useful because there are many things you can do with it, including split testing (which I’ll discuss later), collecting the email address for further follow-up, gathering feedback, and making unique “buy through my link” offers.

3. Add value.

Some affiliate marketers add incentives for the visitor to buy the product through their affiliate link. The incentive could be cash, a related product, or an information product (such as a report) that adds value to the affiliate product in some way.

This is another good reason to use the product you’re promoting – you’ll know how to effectively add value to it. For instance, if the product has a particular weakness, or a feature that is difficult to use, you could write a short report showing how to use that feature easily.

Anything that adds value and helps them to get the most out of their purchase will not only help you to get the sale through your affiliate link, but is likely to lower refunds too!

You can give this incentive once they’ve purchased through your affiliate link – get them to email you their receipt in order to receive the incentive.

A unique selling point (USP), also called a unique selling proposition, is basically something that differentiates you from your competition, that is presented in an advantageous way to your customer.

All other things being equal, USPs are essentially reasons a potential customer should place their order with you, rather than somebody else.

For example, with one of our advertiser campaign, he owned the patent to a particular feature of his product that he claimed made it more secure than a standard product installed by his competitors.

As selling product online, you can be sure that you showed customers this feature, and what it meant to them in terms of increased security; and you emphasized that this was unique to your product, since the technology was patented. In short, it was a unique selling point, a reason to buy from you, instead of anybody else.

It’s useful to develop a set of unique selling points before you actually create the product, because (a) you can then build them into the product in advance, and (b) you’re thinking in advance about the angles you can use in your sales material.

With a little imagination we’re sure you could come up with several USPs.

If you’ve evaluated the competition, you’ll have some ideas for building some features into your product that are uniquely different from your competitors, that can be translated into benefits for the customer.

When it comes to information products, it’s actually quite easy to build in USPs, because you can add material that will be unique to your own product.

For example, a particular technique or piece of knowledge may not be unique in itself, but you can almost always present it in such a way that it becomes unique – perhaps by sharing an experience of how you used the information, or more deeper insights that aren’t as widely known.

Insights, examples and experiences can easily become unique, if they haven’t been shared elsewhere.

There’s one important point to understand about unique selling points.

They should be easily translatable into actual benefits for the customer. So if your product is “28% faster than the nearest competitor”, what does that mean for the customer? What’s in it for them? If it means they will get to work faster, then it’s saving them time – which is the actual benefit of being 28% faster.

It’s good to know how well your ads are performing. It’s even better to use our ROI tracking to fine-tune your campaigns and become a more effective—and efficient—online advertiser. You can use these ROI tracking data to test various ad strategies.

Don’t just look at the numbers when a campaign is over and say, that was pretty good (or not, as the case may be). Instead, look at the data over the course of a campaign to help test different ad variations.

This typically means running two or more variations on a given ad, which may include different ad copy, different images, and the like. You can also test regular content versus rich content ads to see which pulls better. You can also test what keyword or channel your ad is suitable.

With our advertising network, you should test the effectiveness of individual keywords or channel. You want to find out what combination of factors gives you the best bang for your buck.

You should also test your bid levels on these keywords/channel —what prices produce the best or most effective positions.

You can use our reporting tools to generate the data for these tests or use one of the third-party tools. The key is to isolate one variable among test ads and determine which variation is most effective.

As all marketers should know, tracking and testing your strategies is an essential part of marketing. Concentrate your efforts on those strategies that produce the best results and you’ll be a smarter and more successful online marketer.

For advertising in Hooqy, the most important metrics to track include impressions, clicks, click-through rate, cost, conversions, and ROI.

When you’re tracking the performance of your online ad campaign, what data should you be looking at? Let’s examine the most important metrics for advertisers.

Impressions

How many times was your ad displayed? That’s the impressions metric, which is key for CPM|CPV|CPI display advertising; the more impressions, the more people who were exposed to your ad.

Impressions are also important for CPC advertising. You need your ad to be displayed before it can be clicked; the more impressions you get for your ads, the more clicks you’ll theoretically generate.

Obviously, when it comes to impressions, more is better. If your ad is generating a low number of impressions, you won’t get your message across—or generate a lot of clicks.

There are a number of ways to increase the number of impressions an ad receives. This is simple as increasing your ad budget or raising your bids on selected keywords or channel; higher bidders get more and better ad placements.

Clicks

How many times was your ad clicked? That’s the clicks metric, key to CPC advertising; the more clicks, the more traffic you have to your landing page.

As with impressions, the more clicks you get, the better the visitors go to your site. But a large number of impressions doesn’t always result in a large number of clicks; if your ad isn’t interesting or compelling, people won’t be inspired to click it.

You can improve the number of clicks by improving the effectiveness of your ads. For text ads, you should include more powerful words in your copy, make sure you talk about your unique selling proposition, and include a compelling call to action. For display ads, consider changing your image, including animation, and adding other rich media content. Just remember, the more effective your ad, the more clicks you’ll get.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Raw clicks are important but not necessarily the best measurement of an ad’s effectiveness. You can’t generate a lot of clicks, after all, if you have minimal impressions.

A better measurement of ad effectiveness, then, is the click-through rate (CTR). This metric measures the number of clicks as a percentage of the number of impressions.

A high CTR indicates that your ad is doing its job; a low CTR indicates that you need to retool your ad copy.

Remember, CTR is totally independent of the number of impressions your ad receives. This enables advertisers on a budget to compare the effectiveness of their ads against big-budget competitors.

If your ad has a high CTR, increasing your budget is sure to result in more absolute clicks—and more customer conversions.

Cost

How much have you paid in total for a given keyword, ad, or campaign?

That’s the cost metric—as in, this item cost you this much money over a specific time frame.

Note that your cost for an ad campaign will never exceed your specified budget. In fact, it most often will come in under your budget, as you won’t always be the high bidder on all the keywords you choose. Consider your daily budget as a max spend amount; your actual spending is reflected in the cost metric.

Conversions

A conversion occurs when someone clicks your ad and then proceeds to purchase what you’re selling, or otherwise do what you want them to do.

Hooqy let you track a number of conversion-related metrics:

■ Conversions/Sale — The total number of sale taken by people who viewed or clicked your ad.
■ Conversions/Signup — The total number of signup taken by people who viewed or clicked your ad.
■ Conversions/Lead — The total number of lead taken by people who viewed or clicked your ad.

Obviously, if you’re trying to generate sales revenue from your advertising, tracking conversions is important. While clicks matter, revenue matters more—and conversions are directly related to revenue generated.

Revenue

All of this brings us to our final advertising-related metric: revenue. If you’re in the business of selling products or services online, what really matters is how many sales result from your advertising campaign. Impressions and clicks and even customer engagement are fine, but dollars pay the bills.

Now, we probably do not directly track the sales resulting from your ads. You need to do that yourself because you know what you sell and who you sell it to. Your job is to tie each sale to the ad that generated it.

You want to know which ads generated the most sale revenue. That’s how you tell which ads are truly successful.

Even if you’re not in the click-to-sell business, even if all you do is image-oriented display advertising, you still want to track revenue over the course of a campaign. Ultimately, you’re advertising to build your brand and increase your sales. Your display advertising is part of that effort and should be measured accordingly.

After all, you’re not advertising for the fun of it, or you shouldn’t be in any case. You also shouldn’t be advertising because your competitors are doing it or because your boss expects you to or because the technology is, frankly, enticing. You’re advertising to grow your business. So you need to track that growth and tie it back to specific advertising—whether that advertising is online or off. Track your revenue and decide where they came from. That’s how you determine a successful online advertising campaign.

Once your ad campaign is underway, it’s time to start tracking its performance. That means looking at different types of raw data and then analyzing that data in various ways. You can learn from both your successes and your failures and use this information to create better-performing campaigns in the future.

Using Tracking Tools

How do you track ad performance? Hooqy offers the set of reports (Keyword/channel report, geographic report, site report, image banner report) and ROI tracking tool, and for most advertisers these are sufficient. Just display the report that contains the data you want and then view the results— piece of cake.

Tracking with Hooqy

Hooqy provides much of its reporting data on the main page, or Dashboard, located at http://advertiser.hooqy.com/. Select the Reports tab to view specific types of data:

■ General Report —Tracks performance of whole campaigns, including total number of clicks received, total number of impressions for your ads, the click-through rate, total cost of the campaign and various conversion data.

■ Keywords/Channel Report —Tracks performance for each keyword & channel you’ve bid on, including clicks, CPC, CTR, cost, and ROI.

■ Geographic Report —Tracks geographic performance of the individual ads you’ve created.

■ Site Report —Tracks performance of Hooqy Publisher Sites and partners.

■ Image Banners Report —Tracks performance of each banner size you’ve created.

■ Payment History Report — Display all payment transactions of your advertiser account.

Hooqy also lets you create custom reports based on date. Use the Hooqy Report to select which data you want displayed in your report that you want analyzed. You can display your reports onscreen, download them in Excel.

Using Third-Party Tracking Tools

You may be satisfied with the tracking tools provided by Hooqy you use. Or you may not. In either case, you may want to check out some thirdparty online ad tracking tools.

Most of these tools offer reports and analysis that go beyond what you get from our ad network. One thing you get from a third-party tracking tool is the ability to track ads across multiple ad networks and compare the performance of each network.

Some of the more popular third-party ad tracking tools include the following:

■ AdWatcher (www.adwatcher.com)
■ Clickable Pro (www.clickable.com)
■ Conversion Ruler (www.conversionruler.com)
■ CrucialStats (www.crucialstats.com)
■ HitsLink (www.hitslink.com)
■ OneStat (www.onestat.com)

Of course, you pay to use these tools; they’re not free, like the ones are from your ad network. Most charge a monthly subscription fee, from $10/month on up, but many offer free trials so you can check them out before you invest.

Imagine you’re a real estate agent and you’re trying to attract investment property buyers.

You’ve identified that it’s worth a little more effort to get these buyers loyal to you because they can buy property after property over the years, rent their properties out through your renting service and list their properties for sale through you.

To build credibility in this market and to capture leads you need an enticing incentive…a valuable information product.

So you talk to a successful property investor you know who is also one of your loyal, happy clients.

And together you record an audio interview about how to successfully invest in property in your area.

You cover all the basics…how to choose a property, how to get financing, how to negotiate a contract, how to find good renters, when to sell, how to get the best price when you sell etc.

You can use the audio as an incentive for people to sign up to your email list in your landing page.

The best part of this method is it is very quick.

All you need is either an interview microphone coupled with a computer and free audio recording software like Audacity.

Or you can both be in different houses, different cities, different states, even different countries and record your interview using a free telephone conference call service like FreeConferenceCall.com

The audio establishes you as a leading expert in the real estate field and people listening in are far more likely to call you to buy an investment property, get someone to do the rental management for their property or to sell their investment property.
If you follow up on the audio with good content by email you continue to build credibility (you gain instant expert status), trust and your subscribers will be even more likely to reciprocate by buying from you.

Also keep in mind this method can work to create a high quality information product in nearly any field.

Just find another expert in your field, record an audio interview and you have a product that’s ready to sell with some minor editing.

If you’re a leading expert in your field and you know you can talk in an engaging way for an hour or two you can get someone to interview you with a list of “suggested questions” you give them beforehand.