Affiliate Trust

Earbuds and Potato Chips…

I originally posted this in a members only section of the Affiliate Trust Forum and the members seemed to like it so I decided to publish it as a follow up to the last blog article about cellphones. I promise I’ll get back to business with some new affiliate marketing posts soon.

I’m new to the earbud thing. To me a good quality headset is one that fits over the entire ear and has nice soft cushions to seal in the sound. Had I been using this kind I might have attracted hecklers, but I wouldn’t have had the trouble I experienced.

I paid for higher quality KOSS earbuds as I wanted to gain every advantage in listening to the tinny minuscule audio produced by my new phone. My wife is out of town helping her dad, so with the fully charged phone, the new earbuds and the necessary adapters in the stylish little spring closure pouch in hand, I trekked to the nearest Panera Bread to enjoy some soup and a sandwich while listening to a podcast of an old radio drama, “The Shadow”. The restaurant wasn’t busy so my food arrived promptly. I sat down in a two person booth, and after preparing my sandwich with all the condiments I could muster, I set my phone on the table and pulled out my new earbuds. I spent the next five minutes untangling the wires. Now, in order for earbuds to produce any bass at all, they must be tightly seated into the ear to produce a good seal. So I inserted and twisted until I was satisfied that they were secure. The first thing I noticed about these earbuds was that when they’re properly inserted, don’t plan on being able to hear ANYTHING from the outside.

So I scooted forward in the seat and leaned back in a relaxed posture, picked up the phone and loaded the podcast. This particular one was fairly low in volume and sounded like it was recorded from the actual broadcast on an old fashioned AM radio. There was quite a bit of bleedover from adjacent stations, which really added to the nostalgia. Turning the volume all the way up made it comfortably loud. Ah, this is going to be good. So I listened for a couple minutes and then took a bite of my sandwich. Whoa! Chewing is really loud in here (in my head) when outside sounds are totally blocked! Well, that’s ok, I can still hear. Then I pulled out one of those potato chips, which are extra crispy at Panera. Man alive! There may as well have been a jack hammer running in the next booth! I could hear nothing but crunching potato chips. I tried chewing very slowly, but it didn’t help. So back to the sandwich.

My next bite revealed a whole new problem. When chewing there’s no way to keep those earbuds in your ears. The chewing action of the jaws quickly works the earbuds right out of position. First the left one lost it’s seat, then the right one, then back to the left one. I was constantly cramming the things back in my ears. So my relaxing meal with The Shadow ended up not being so relaxing after all. Guess I’ll have to stick to Starbucks if I want to get away from the office with The Shadow… unless drinking coffee sounds like getting a swirly!

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Business Cellular on a Budget

I usually blog about affiliate marketing, but every once in a while something related to business comes up that’s worth passing on. This is not a promo for any particular product or service and there is no compensation involved. This was intended to be a post at the Affiliate Trust Forum but was becoming a book, so here it lands…

Whenever I get mail from Qwest that doesn’t look like the regular bill, I just toss it because it’s usually a special offer or promo. I got another one a few days ago that I’m glad I opened. Had it not been in a large manila envelope, it would have suffered the demise of the others.

Turns out that Qwest is closing Qwest Wireless services and apparently becoming an agent of Verizon. I currently subscribe to Qwest business services that ties my cell service with my business landline service through what they call “one number”. So how will this impact the communications I’ve relied on for so many years? It’s not pretty! No more one number service that automatically routes calls for either the landline or cell number to the cell phone when it’s on, or either number to the landline when the cell phone is off. When unanswered our office voicemail system picks up the call. Not only this, but it’s goodbye trusty Motorola V710. This cell phone will become obsolete and worthless when the change is complete in September. I’ll salvage the micro SD card, but that’s it.

Next thought… hmm, perhaps now is my chance to catch up with technology (again!). My wife and I… well, let’s just say we’re behind the times. My youngest son, his girlfriend, and my daughter all have G-Phones. My older son has an I-Phone. Every time I’m with them something comes up that sends them scurrying to search Google using their phones. I sort of pat my Moto and watch longingly while they access the world at their fingertips.

So I began a qwest (sic) to see what I can do to catch up. And sorry, I just don’t use the phone enough to make the purchase price of an I or G phone worthwhile, along with their exorbitant monthly connection fees.

Enter the Samsung Omnia… it seems you hear so much about the I and G phones with their touch screens that you may not realize there are alternatives with similar features. Verizon offers a selection of touch screen phones. I spotted the Omnia and did a little research. There’s a good review with video at cnet reviews. This is a “smart phone” running MS Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional with Microsoft® office Word Mobile, Excel® Mobile, and PowerPoint® Mobile; Adobe® Reader® LE PDF viewer, and Opera™ Mobile browser. It’s Wi–Fi Capable, plays DivX movies, and includes 8GB of additional internal memory. Wow! And the good news, with the Qwest 25% discount and the rebate that comes with the phone, it’s costing me about $75.

So for you fulltime Internet marketers who desire mobile business and communications access, the Omnia may just fit the bill.

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Affiliate Marketing: How Nichie Can You Get?

Niche is a word that most affiliates struggle with. They ask how, what, will??? If you’re lucky enough to hit on a niche that’s popular but not saturated, you can make money… but only for a while. Profitable niches are fleeting. Other marketers inevitably find out and your competition only grows, never shrinks.

Consider a niche within a niche. We run an eCommerce site that targets a particular audience. The variety of products that appeal to that audience is virtually endless. But call that target audience our top level niche. Now within the top level we offer a variety of product categories. Each is the next level niche. There may be several categories within categories. All of these are niches that become more narrowly defined as you drill down to individual products. Individual products can be even nichier if you want to consider colors and sizes. For instance, large size product niches can be lucrative.

What led me to this discourse? One of our product categories contains a selection of about twenty items with various features, prices, and brands. There are several brands that we carry just one product each of. We sold one of these single items this morning. I was curious as to why this one instead of another brand with a number of different choices. So I checked the traffic stats and found that there was a Google search for this particular brand that resulted in the sale. I’ve found that this is a pretty common occurrence. We sell more products through targeted searches than through more general searches where the shopper browses the site. Though the stats show that this shopper spent ten minutes on the site and viewed seven pages, she still settled on the product she originally searched for.

Though we continually promote our brand and hope that shoppers are attracted to our home page, this simply is not where the traffic arrives. It virtually always arrives at the very nichiest of pages, the individual product pages. So though you build a great website from the top down like we did, your traffic will usually arrive at the bottom.

This concept becomes critical to PPC (pay per click) advertising. I can imagine a graph in my mind. One line represents nichieness (an imaginary quantity) and the other represents CTR (click through rate). CTR will unquestionably follow nichieness proportionately. Add another quantity, [PPC] cost. Cost will graph inversely proportionate to nichieness and CTR. So theoretically, the nichier your campaign, the lower your advertising cost.

There’s a lot of talk about the magic bullet. Most experienced affiliate marketers insist that there is no magic bullet. I contend that there IS a magic bullet, but you have to mold it yourself. It can’t be purchased at the magic bullet store.

So how do you mold the magic bullet? Don’t labor so much over your top level niche choice. Build a top down website that gives you the flexibility to experiment within an established base. Build it to facilitate easy product additions and updating. Add appropriate products with unique detail pages and images. Optimize for searches at the nichiest levels (products) rather than the categories, or your website brand. Never remove non-performing products, but continually add products. When you hit on a success, leverage that success before it disappears by giving that product more attention than non-performing products. Fine-tune SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC campaigns. Let demand drive your promotion rather than promoting to create demand.

And… get nichie!

For insights and discussion about this and many other topics, visit the Affiliate Trust Forum.

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