Today I met with Jason Spievak, CEO of Ring Revenue. Jason is another local Santa Barbara CEO and we had a great chat about Make It Work, Ring Revenue, Affiliate Marketing and life in SB. He’s a great guy and taught me a bunch of new things about affiliate marketing and his company. I will share what I’ve learned about affiliate marketing in the past few days with you now. I am anxious to see my blog post a month from now where I update my findings.
Affiliate marketing is nothing new to the Internet. Google, Amazon and Ebay have been at the game for a long time. Santa Barbara born companies such as DoubleClick, ValueClick, Commission Junction and FastClick are all leaders in the space (the last three are all now owned by ValueClick who’s founder is a major investor in Make It Work). Each company adds something different to the mix. The focus of this post is Commission Junction, as we are just about to get started with them. I remember when they started in a building I once thought to lease for my 2nd company Push. I’m glad to see them thriving as they add tremendous value for today’s online marketing needs.
Commission Junction, or CJ as it’s known, is the leader at the affiliate middleman game. Through CJ’s website, Publishers/Affiliates bring hits to Advertisers’ websites by using Google Adwords, blogs, email, Twitter, Facebook and other means. These hits translate into conversions or sales for the advertiser and a commission is paid to the affiliate with Commission Junction taking a piece of the pie. This brilliant business model has grown fast and has helped many companies grow their revenue. There are many affiliates out there, some trustworthy and some not so much. The secret in this game is to start with a product that is viable to the online audience, garner attention from leading affiliates and then turning the traffic into paying customers.
An example of this process is evident right here on my blog. If you look over to the right, you will see some ads for various products. If you click on these ads and buy the products I recommend, I get a small commission and I appreciate it! That said, every product I recommend here is something I own, wish I owned and truly believe in. You don’t pay any extra, but I get paid for my referral. Nothing wrong with that right? Nope. The problem however is when you visit an unreputable site and purchase products recommended by someone who is neither an expert nor has any experience with the offered products. Some affiliates will sell anything to make a buck. We all get emails daily offering various products and we do buy them from time to time, me included. If we Trust the referral source and we like the product, we buy. Such is why many have purchased the products I recommend.
This new way of marketing is truly amazing and has tremendous value. I for one would rather have someone making a commission on the products they sell me as they will work harder to make sure I get the right item, the right size, the right fit, etc. They will also give me better service. This is not always the case on the Internet, so be careful what you buy and who you take advice from. You can trust me because I have a strong branded company image to protect and I truly love recommending products that I believe you will love.
The problem for some of us advertisers is that we are not as interested in hits to our website as we are calls to our phones. To generate phone traffic, we tried ReachLocal. While they are similar to Google Adwords, they implement phone call tracking in their reporting, sort of. Either way, you still pay by the click, regardless if they called or not. It didn’t work for us, but we are very excited to get started with Ring Revenue. They solve a major problem for companies like Make It Work. With Ring Revenue, the affiliates will send potential customers to our phones. We pay based on each call received. We book appointments for about 97% of the calls we receive, so you can see how this will be very valuable to us. Check back soon and I will post some stats on our progress. In the meantime, check out www.ringrevenue.com or look them up on CJ.com.
Interested in becoming an affiliate? You can sign up at CJ.com and learn how to become an affiliate for thousands of products. Choose wisely and you can earn commissions from your work. You will need to setup a website and/or blog and you will need to get handy with Google Adwords and other forms of Internet marketing. Be careful out there as many have perfected this process and they are your competition. Read a lot, test, and find a niche.
OK, as promised, I’ll be back in a month to compare this blog post to the one I post after another 30 days of learning. I’ll try to keep you abreast of my progress along the way. In the meantime, if you are seeking more Twitter followers, buy TweetAdder (see image to the right). Click the image, buy the product and add thousands of Twitter followers fast. I BOUGHT IT AND I LOVE IT. Thanks in advance.
To the moon!
-Eric Greenspan
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