Affiliate Marketing
40% OFF – HostGator 4th of July Promotion
On July 4th, 2011, HostGator will be offering 40% OFF ALL hosting plans and ALL Term lengths.
Here are some notes about the promotion:
1 Day only (Ends at 11:59PM CST)
40% Off the FIRST INVOICE of all plans and all terms lengths. Please note VPS and Dedicated are only available for 1 month so the discount will apply to only the first month (first invoice).
Existing clients CAN take advantage of this offer. They will be required to add a new/additional hosting account and keep both the non-discounted plan (current/old plan) + this new, discounted plan active for the length of the term selected on the new plan in order to continue to receive the discounted rate.
Click on the banner to register:
HostGator Black Friday 2010 Promotion Details
HostGator Black Friday 2010 Coupons: You’ll get 80% discount for whatever you buy with HOSTGATOR from 5AM – 9AM CST, Friday 26th.
>> HostGator Announces Black Friday 2010 Promotion Plan
HostGator Black Friday 2010 Special Offer:
HostGator is offering 50% OFF EVERYTHING From 12:00AM CST – 5AM CST
HostGator is offering 80% OFF EVERYTHING From 5AM – 9AM CST WHILE SUPPLIES LAST (first come, first receive; so definitely don’t miss out!)
From 9AM – 11:59PM CST OR after 80% OFF accounts have sold out, HostGator will continue to offer 50% OFF EVERYTHING
This applies to ALL Accounts and ALL Term Lengths. So you’re visitors and friends will have the opportunity to receive up to 80% off of up to 3 years worth of Hosting! That would come out to $35.64 for 3 FULL YEARS!
That includes Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, VPS Hosting AND even Dedicated Servers! Never before have we allowed the promotion on EVERYTHING including reseller, vps and dedicated servers.
This promotion gives our customers our award winning hosting for as little as:
- Shared Hosting – $4.95/month AS LOW AS $0.99/month
- Reseller Hosting – $24.95/month AS LOW AS $4.99/month
- VPS Hosting – $19.95/month AS LOW AS $3.99 First Month
- Dedicated Servers – $174/month AS LOW AS $34.80 First Month
Black Friday 2010 Promotion will be the best DEAL in 8+ years of hosting! This is going to be a record breaking day for HostGator sales!
Black Friday promotion starts at 12:00 AM Friday November 26th CST (-6 GMT) and will run until 11:59PM CST (-6 GMT) 11/26/2010.
Affiliate marketing
What is Affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular E-marketing techniques:
An affiliate marketing scheme is also known as associate marketing scheme. This establishes a relationship in which a merchant pays the affiliate for links that are generated from the affiliate site to the merchant site. A simple example for this would be a merchant wanting to sell his products through affiliate marketing. He would offer a affiliate marketing program say X affiliate marketing program. They would provide a link or a banner advertisement to an affiliate who becomes their member. Once the affiliate is a member he can put up that link on his website. Once somebody makes a sale through his website, the merchant can track which affiliate was responsible for that sale and pay a suitable commission to them. This is the most common affiliate marketing scheme available. This is typically called pay per sale or pay per action.
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Optimizing Facebook Ads for Affiliate E-Commerce Sales
My recent Facebook Social Ads trials were aimed at driving traffic to retail websites in order to earn affiliate commissions. Here is what I did and what I learned.
Bidding
Place very low bids. Adhering to Facebook’s recommended bids will drive you to complain about how ads on social networking sites do not work. My objective was to drive lots of low cost but well qualified clicks to high value products on retail websites, and then benefit from sales that occur over the next 30 days (affiliate cookies typically last 30 days).
Headlines
Like with any ads, experimentation with different headlines and ad copy is critical. Once established, the optimized copy can deliver consistent returns.
- Well targeted headlines that were very specific worked best. For example, “Buy Books” was not as good as “Vampire Lover?” when talking to an audience of female Edward Cullen fans.
- Getting clicks is easy using truisms in your headlines and Facebook’s interest based targeting system facilitates this well. For example, a female between 18 and 25 who has an interest in Vampires and Edward Cullen is likely to be responsive to the headline: “Vampire Lover?” And a 27 year old male in San Francisco is likely to take notice of the headline: “27 and in SF?”
Ad Copy
With ad copy, I found two styles work well:.
- A compelling message that is conversational in style. For example, positive customer reviews like: “I love this set of Vampire tales! It has everything you want Mystery,Fantasy and of course romance with juicy bits! Only $88.99.”
- Other good ad-copy requires a compelling, yet specific value proposition that sounds believable. For example “Today Only” was not as good as “Until sold out” because people hear the phrases like “Today Only” and “One Day Only” far too frequently.
Coupon codes also drove good clickthrough rates and allowed me to easily track which specific combination of headline and ad-copy worked best. Interestingly, resulting conversions where very limited.
Product Strategy
Promote specific, high value items to a captive audience (people who want what you are selling) who are more than likely to become customers. This increases the probability of your ROI being positive.
Targeting
Improve your targeting by looking at which specific page or application on Facebook each of your clickthroughs come from. I ran identical Google Ads for comparison and my sales reports told me exactly what search terms people are using to trigger my ads to show. I can then add these keywords to my Facebook targeting.
Limitations of the Facebook Social Ads Platform
Currently the Facebook social ad campaign manager is somewhat limited compared to AdWords. For example, if you want to change your bid, you need to make the change for each ad manually. There is no global bid manager, although i’m hopeful we will see this option appear in the future, together with email reports. In addition:
- A recent change has meant that the % symbol is no longer allowed in ad-copy, which constrains the type of value proposition you can convey to your audience.
- I’ve tracked a number of clicks from intern.facebook.com. I was suspicious that I was being charged for these clicks, but a count of my clicks vs. charges revealed that this was not the case.
- Concluding Observations and Comments
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I was using the Amazon Associates Program until they announced they will no longer pay referral fees on paid-search-derived traffic. In any case, the system seems to work better outside of the USA.
Finally, Subway has made clever use of Facebook, displaying ads with headlines like: “It’s time for Lunch” and “Hungry?” between around 11am to 2pm and encouraging you to order online. I think they are certainly doing something right.
This is a guest post by Kunal Kripalani, who most recently led marketing strategy for Australia’s biggest online bookstore, Fishpond. Kripalani has been experimenting with Facebook Ads as a channel for affiliate e-commerce sales, so we asked him to share his tips here.