Hustlin’ & Making Money at Affiliate Summit East

This isn’t going to be a typical post on ASE’s parties and the fun of networking. There are plenty of other blogs that cover that. This is a business blog. I’ll just go over what will help you make more money.

Simply the best part of Affiliate Summit is meeting other successful affiliates. They know the traffic sources. They know copywriting (the smart ones at least do). They actually know advertising. They simply know what they’re talking about. This is the primary reason to attend. You’ll also end up with a lot of affiliate contacts that you’ll AIM/Skype after the conference. Many are likely to even be working in your exact niche.

Keynotes

Frankie Luntz

I thought last Affiliate Summit’s keynote would be impossible to ever top. However, this ASE’s keynote by Frankie Luntz was also extraordinary. Luntz often works as a political consultant. Ironically, his presentation was not politically correct at all, but it was funny. Anyway, there’s the necessity of a lot of persuasion in politics, as you know. He definitely knew his stuff. He has this book on “Words That Work“. Of course, I was persuaded to buy it. I justify it by assuming that I should be able to split test some of his book’s words with my own adcopy and simply make more money by the results. Here are a few words he recommended from his presentation:

1. imagine/inspire
2. cleaner, safer, healthier
3. comprehensive/long-term
4. accountability
5. results/solutions
6. hassle-free/no worries
7. you’re in control/you decide
8. efficient/efficiency
9. reliable
10. respect
11. renew, revitalize, rejuvenate, restore, rekindle, reinvent
12. the simple truth
13. consequences
14. bold action/getting it done
15. peace of mind
16. independent certification
17. mission/commitment
18. cutting edge
19. common sense
20. convenience
21. exceeding expectations

Jim Kukral

Kukral’s talk was good as well. I didn’t find it as applicable to the many affiliates I know, however. He definitely understands branding better than 99% of marketers out there. If you’re interested in branding, here’s a good summary of Kukral’s talk.

Seminars

I’ve heard affiliates speculate that the seminars are useless. I disagree. Most affiliates don’t even attend many seminars so they don’t know what they’re talking about. You may know the quote: “Those that fail to plan; plan to fail.” I take 5 minutes beforehand and lookup which presentation will actually be useful. You can figure it out by the title typically. Good presenters should know copywriting. That means, they often write great teaser headlines for their presentations. The one exception to this rule is if you want to see a more technical presentation. Both are still easy to spot.

On Sunday, when I was walking to the first presentation, this woman stops me and asks me which presentation I’d recommend. Since I had a visible press badge, the woman thought I had some “inside scoop.” I admitted I didn’t, I killed my ego, and I recommended the one I was about to attend.

Innovate! New Exciting Applications of Affiliate Marketing by Joe Stepniewski

I’ve never heard of this guy before, but it didn’t matter. I knew he was going to talk about startups using affiliate marketing, and that would definitely inspire me with some idea. A few of the points he brought up:

• Adult industry leads the way in a lot of innovative online advertising
• Coupon code sites would use cookie stuffing when they didn’t have any active coupons. Told users to “click to reveal” coupon code. That click just redirected user to merchant’s site without coupon, but new affiliate cookie would be set.
• Retargeted users are four times more likely to convert.
• Interesting affiliate startups: Empora (fashion search engine), PremierInnFinder, Pixazza (ads on images).

More Money, Same Traffic, List Building & Paths by Jason Akatiff

Also known as Smaxor online, I knew Jason’s stuff would be good. It was a session about building lists and selling (from emails, phone numbers, to other personal information). One thing he mentioned is how you typically have to incentivize to get a user to optin. The way you incent, can make a huge difference:

1. Incent for a free iPad, PS3, etc. makes the email worth $ (down the road)
2. Incent for a free report makes the email worth $$
3. Incent for more information makes the email worth $$$

Facebook Advertising From Soup To Nuts by Shoemoney

Jeremy’s session was funny and helpful. I’m not a Facebook advertiser, but there were a lot of takeaways that I’ve already made new display ads because of.

• Affects CTR by percent: 70% Images, 20% Body text, 10% Headline
• Top images clicked contain: cleavage, brands, blended images, etc.
• FB titles should be/have: CTA, association, FB feel, simple
• FB body text should be/have: results, CTA, scarcity
• Smartest to start with CPC campaign

SEO Site Review/Clinic by Rae Hoffman and Michael Gray

The presentation got off to shaky start, and a panel member was missing. I used to do a lot of SEO. I decided to attend this just to see if SEO has suddenly gotten exceptionally complicated since then. Not much has changed in this area.

Strategies for Marketing to Women

I enjoyed this session more than I thought I would. When I first walked into the session, there were a higher percentage of women in this session than any other I had seen. I guess just putting the word “women” in your headlines works. (Okay, I’m kidding. Actually, not really.)

They also mentioned some cool weeking-parting and day-parting data to target stay-at-home moms.

So, essentially women want to see your ad and shout “That’s ME!” They’re right: women want benefits (not features as much), stories, feelings, and a connection to the ad. I was coming up with ad headlines and writing them down while listening to this panel (of only women). They did well, and it was well worth attending.

I laughingly thought that made them slightly biased without at least one man on the panel. I imagine the affiliates that understand women the most, have dated a lot and talk with their mother regularly. That’s probably an oxymoron, but still true for those very rare cases.

In summary… I’ve got a few great contacts. I have a lot more adcopy and campaign strategies to split test. Overall, well worth it.

Media Buying: How an Old-Fashioned Ad Made Years Ago is Still Banking Hard.

I haven’t done a post on offline marketing in a while… or much of any posts since I’ve been working and traveling too much. However, I did get this idea because of traveling.

Look at this ad:

If you’ve ever skimmed through the SkyMall in most US domestic flights, this is probably the only product you remember. In fact, it looks so stupid, it attracts attention. This is why it works:

• Attention-grabbing — There aren’t many unprofessional looking product-photos in the magazine, but this one is. That means: it stands out and it gets eye balls to look at it. You need those folks to at least glance at your ad to even have a chance at selling to them. Attention-getting elements in any media buy are vital.
• Demographics — Guess what? I have absolutely no idea the demos SkyMall distributes to, but I do know the frame of mind the people have when reading the magazine. They probably have nothing better to do than to look at ads. They’re bored and probably wouldn’t mind taking a nap.
• Relevance — Their target audience goes on airplanes occasionally and would like to sleep.
• Product — I haven’t seen this product in stores. It’s niche. Low competition.
• Copy — Not much ad copy is necessary, but the headline gets the product’s point across. The rest of the copy or description is used to build credibility with media mentions.

There you have it: ridiculous-looking sells. I’m not sure how much money this product is making, but any direct response campaign that lasts for years with large distribution — is banking hard.

10,730,681 Free Ad Impressions, Anyone?

Don’t read anymore. Watch the commercial above.

This Old Spice ad went viral and got 10,730,681 views on YouTube.

Here’s what’s awesome about the ad: The commercial is consciously talking to women — about a male’s product. At first glance, that doesn’t make any sense, but look at the demographics this commercial hit according to YouTube:

Ahem, it successfully went viral among their target audience — young males. The takeaway: try testing ad elements that are going to subconsciously affect/appeal to your audience.

Update 7/29/10:

So sales doubled because of Old Spice’s recent marketing campaigns. I’m not surprised. Viral soft selling commercials work well for low-cost items.

You Do Not Really Know Statistical Significance, Do You?

There are quite a few misconceptions about determining statistical significance in a simple A/B split test. More often than not, naive online marketers say they’ll use a “rule-of-thumb” to determine when to keep or optimize a landing page. Their “rule-of-thumb” is typically as simple as sending 300 clicks to landing page 1 and another 300 clicks to landing page 2 and toss which ever converts less. That’s a mistake.

The problem with using a rule-of-thumb is that you’ll either:

1. Spend more money than necessary on a certain advertisement — resulting in testing less advertisements and taking much more time to find that optimum ROI.
2. On the other hand, marketers will many times pull an ad too early — never learning that that advertisement may have been profitable given enough time.

So, what we want to do is find the exact amount of time to run both advertisements A and B to maximize profits.

How you should start a campaign

Obviously, everyone will tell you to start out with as many landing pages and advertisements as possible. “As possible” might mean ten or more, but who really does that? I’ve told myself that I’d do that, but that hasn’t happened yet. It’s not that I’m lazy because I’m not. It’s because I’m impatient. Here’s what I do:

I create two or three of everything – not ten. First combination (or two) is what I think will convert the best. The other is completely different. I’m not talking about telling your designer, “surprise me,” because we all know that won’t work. “Completely different” is usually a spontaneous thought I’ve had that I believe may work – but is unlikely, or it’s from an offline example of persuasion or marketing that I’ll try in some way to apply online.

After I calculate statistical significance, I’ll split test another set of ads against that. Typically, the results of the initial split-test give me more ideas to test.

Two ways to calculate statistical significance

Confidence intervals

This is done using confidence intervals from statistics. If you’ve never heard of confidence intervals in college, I’d imagine you didn’t learn anything from college that’s helping you in online advertising currently. Anyway, back to the subject… Several analytical programs calculate winning advertisements using this method. By using this free tool by Split Test Accelerator (opens in new window, type random data in it to try it out), you can determine which landing page or ad copy would perform the best at what percentage of the time. For a quick example, take a look at:

1. Landing Page Optimization: Call-to-Action Buttons

Essentially, if you have an advertisement that has a 95% confidence, that ad would be most effective 19 times out of 20. If the campaign is important, I aim for at least 99% confidence.

A/A (or null) split-test

This is the second way to determine statistical significance. Personally, I use confidence intervals, but I wanted to be sufficiently extensive so I’ll briefly explain what’s referred to as an A/A split-test.

Typically, in an A/A test, you’ll split test the same advertisement. You make a duplicate of an advertisement and track each ad as if they were different:

Finally, you need to decide your sample size and set up the criteria for success. To decide your ultimate sample size, run a “null” test with your A/B test. The null test is really just an A/A test, where you are running the control against itself to determine where the convergence of results matches up (typically within 0.05 percent of each other, but that’s up to you)…. – Mike Sack, executive VP of Inceptor

If you run an A/A test and then a A/B test at a later date, then conditions will be different since the timing is. So, the way to do this is to do an A/A test during an A/B test.

In summary, I know most of you aren’t going to use the A/A test, so just use confidence intervals through a tool or analytics program. Remember, you’re wasting valuable time if you’re not using statistical significance in your testing.

PS: If you know who came up with the Hathaway shirt ad, you’re awesome.

These 10 Words Are Proven to Make Your Ad Headlines Sell

Image credit: Stemack

This is a short post, but it’s right to the point.  John Caples tallied up all of the meaningful words from Schwab’s 100 good (mostly direct response) headlines. Below were the most frequently used words from these top 100 headlines as well as their number of occurrences:

• You (Used 31 times)
• Your (14)
• How (12)
• New (10)
• Who (8)
• Money (6)
• Now (4)
• People (4)
• Want (4)
• Why (4)

Notice that the word “buy” did not make this list.  Most consumers are seeking entertainment or information (i.e., on how they can can solve their problems). Only until you persuade and build credibility with the consumer – is when they’ll be ready to buy.

Bookmark this page – for when you need inspiration to write an awesome headline.