Adult Affiliate Guide

When it comes to online marketing, social media is dominating the conversation. Specifically Facebook, but also Twitter, LinkedIn, and a handful of other social sites are becoming a much greater force in search engine optimization (SEO).

These sites have hundreds of millions of visitors, and that amounts to raw power in external linking and traffic building.

How big?

Here’s a rundown of the most recent estimates of these sites’ sizes:

• Facebook: more than 600 million users
• Twitter: more than 400 million users
• LinkedIn: more than 100 million users

Earlier this year, major search engines Google and Bing stated that social media links from Facebook and Twitter do indeed have a direct impact on a website’s SEO rankings. That was a shift from prior conventional wisdom, which held that social media links were “no follow”, contributing not at all to a website’s PageRank. (Some SEO experts, though, never bought that line in the first place.)

The result is a big shake-up of to accepted SEO practice.

Social Media’s growing SEO power

In 2010, when it looked like no other site could possibly compete with Google for search marketing impact, Facebook started to surprise some people.

In mid-year, the social media juggernaut became the first website that could challenge Google’s numbers. In November 2010, Facebook traffic was reported to have risen some 60 percent, and Facebook visits accounted for “almost one-fourth of page views and 10 percent of Internet visits,” per Information Week.

“Today, Facebook provides account holders with more content than YouTube; in fact, the social media site delivered 24.27 percent of page views compared with YouTube’s 6.39%,” the Information Week article continues.

“In addition, Facebook delivers far more content than Google, which provided 4.13 percent of page views and Yahoo, which gave a mere 0.54 percent of page views.”

Web Pro News cites a study by Outbrain that says Social Media sucks at driving traffic to your site While the study does show that users are tweeting and sharing content, it also shows that they are hesitant to click on links that take them out of Facebook or Twitter.

As we all know, Facebook is the second-most highly trafficked site on the web, after Google. But this study finds that Facebook drives a fraction of traffic compared to content stalwarts Google, Yahoo and MSN. Google remains the leader in traffic referrals with more than 30 percent of traffic referrals while Facebook and Twitter range from 1 to 2 percent.

Now that I know this, I’m going to wonder whether my Uncle Floyd is really reading all of those articles he’s sharing from the New York Times, Huffington Post, etc. every day.

As an affiliate, you will eventually face a Catch-22: The majority of your time is spent juggling menial day-to-day tasks like customer support requests and administrative duties, leaving you unable to work on the more important tasks like increasing conversions.

At the same time, you don’t have enough cash to hire and train a new staff member to alleviate the situation. Could outsourcing to offshore contractors be the solution you need to take your business to the next level?

Why Outsource?

The main reason to outsource is that it is very cost effective for affiliates.

Countries like India and China have relatively low costs of living, yet their citizens are well educated and have good internet access. This means that skilled and experienced staff can be hired at a fraction of the cost as an employee of the same caliber in the US, Canada, UK or Australia.

For example, hiring an experienced graphic designer costs around US$45,000 in the US, and around US$8500 in the China.

By that same token, an experienced software programmer could cost you $US70, 000 in the US, but just US$13,000 in India.

You also save money by not having to provide your outsourced staff with health benefits, a computer, desk, internet usage, office space and software. Most contractors will take care of these requirements themselves.

Reduce the Risk of Hiring In-House Staff

Another very good reason to outsource is that you reduce the risk of taking on permanent staff.

Taking on a new full-time employee is a huge financial commitment for any business. While it’s often an essential step in growing your business, it can be hard to predict whether you will have enough income to cover their costs 12 to 18 months down the track.

Hiring contracted staff eliminates this issue by giving you the flexibility of staff on demand who can contribute to changing workloads.

Twitter marketing receives a lot of attention these days, yet many affiliate marketers still struggle with how to make it work as an effective affiliate marketing tool. In fact, quite a few people I’ve spoken to recently aren’t sure if Twitter is even worth the effort.

Although Twitter doesn’t make affiliate marketers money in the literal way that a newsletter series or article marketing does, it’s still a very powerful weapon in your arsenal because it gives you a way to build relationships with people.

Last week I talked about why building relationships is so essential to email marketing, and addressed those that are skeptical about any ‘relationship building’ channel because the results aren’t immediately obvious to them. This concept also applies to social media marketing and you should read the full post here if you haven’t already.

In a nutshell: People buy things from people they trust, so putting effort into establishing your credibility through online relationship building can win you loyal customers for life.

Now that we’re on the same page about why it is beneficial to build relationships using Twitter, let’s take a look at how to go about doing it.

Just to be clear, the goal of your Twitter profile is NOT:

a) To get the most followers you can. Twitter shouldn’t be used as a popularity contest. Not every follower is of equal value to you; you want to focus on the ones that are of most value.

b) To post a continuous stream of content or affiliate links at your followers until they block you.

The goal of your twitter profile is to build meaningful relationships that will in turn help you sell, and to do that you have to talk to your followers as friends.

Okay, so where do you start?

1. First up, you need a Twitter account. Go to Twitter and set one up (it’s easy!).

I’ve been getting quite a few questions lately about Facebook advertising as a viable option for affiliate marketers so I wanted to address it and give you guys an idea of how it works, what I like about it, and whether it’s a good place to spend your advertising budget.
What is Facebook Advertising?

For the most part, Facebook advertising should look familiar to any current or former AdWords marketers. You create an ad, choose your demographic and bid on ads at a per-click rate. There are some major differences, however.

To start with, Facebook ads are based much more on the demographic of your potential prospect than on keywords. With AdWords, you can choose location and a handful of local characteristics, but for the most part, you’re bidding on those long tail phrases. With Facebook, you’re betting largely on the profile of the prospects to which you’re showing ads.

In the targeting section where you create a new ad, you can choose your location – down to the city in which you live, the age range, the sex, specific likes or interests that appear on their profiles, specific groups or events to which they are connected, birthdays, sexual interest, relationship status, language, education, and even their workplace (phew!)

In short, you can use any piece of public data on a prospect’s profile to determine if they see your ad. That’s some serious power. But it’s also some serious research. Facebook ads are not inherently cheaper because they are not on Google. You won’t find the $5 per click quality scoring black holes, but you will also find $.50-$1 per click averages for a lot of age groups. So, I recommend you spend a lot of time on sites like Quantcast and Compete.com learning who your ideal prospect is and narrowing them down.