Archive for the ‘Rafi’s Insights’ Category

New Affiliate Stats and Don’t forget Pharm4All!

Thursday, August 4th, 2011

We’re always trying to figure out now things to do for you guys. So yesterday I thought of something pretty simple, but something that I think will be pretty helpful. That is, end of the month stats. We can say as much as we want about our conversion, but when you see it in your email, it’s undeniable.

As in: “Dear Affiliate Guy or Gal,

You made 300 sales this month at a conversion rate of 13%. Your average order was $130. This is an improvement of 8% from last month in sales and a 10% increase in average order!

Your affiliate manager

Rafael

Would you love to get a letter like that in your mailbox? If I were an affiliate, I would. Track your stats easier. Have a staff that actually goes out of their way to help you track your campaign every month. Optimize together, make more money, and continue to grow.

This is the Cashadmin way. And stuff.

Who’s on the other end? Afiliate tracking!

Sunday, July 24th, 2011

When you’re an affiliate in any industry, you never really know who’s on the other end of line. The manager you’re talking to could be anyone, anywhere, in any time zone. Except maybe North Korea. South Korea is a maybe. I’m not in Korea though.

It’s easy to join a program. It’s not easy to start sending traffic to that program. This is why, I think, the most important thing that we do here is provide an affiliate’s first payment. It’s really the pinnacle of our network/affiliate relationship. If we’re late on the first payment, then things can go sour very quickly. He doesn’t know who we are until we pay him. When we do, he knows we have kept our word and will continue to do so.

One of the unique things about Cashadmin is that we track by database!! Meaning, once a customer puts his name and address in our database by ordering once, any time that customer orders again, you get the order, no matter what IP address he’s using, no matter what computer. Some companies only track by cookie. This is bad.

Another thing? Phone sales. How does the customer service know to credit you if someone calls in? The answer is there’s a code on the top right corner of the screen. The customer can’t complete the order without that code. That code is your commission.

No affiliate order slips by us. Maybe that’s why our conversion rates are so high…

Which RX Company Should you Affiliate With?

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

This post is meant to convince you that you should affiliate with Cashadmin. We’re biased, but we’re also correct.

There are 4 main ways that any online store makes money, in any industry.

1)      Direct SEO traffic

2)      PPC

3)      Email campaigns

4)      Affiliates and advertisements

Big companies make most of their money through direct traffic. Type in “buy Viagra online” in Google and you’ll find the huge companies on the first page. You don’t want to affiliate with these companies for several reasons.

1)      They don’t need you because they get direct traffic

2)      They don’t want you because you take away their profit margins

3)      You want get much attention because they don’t care about losing you

4)      Big companies can close down their programs any minute to focus on direct traffic and up their profits

Type in “buy Viagra online” in Google, Yahoo, or Bing and you won’t find any Cashadmin sites on the first page. But play around with some high traffic terms and you’ll find some really great Cashadmin affiliates on the first page, making a nice chunk of change referring to us.

Since we’re not on the first page, you know that a lot of our attention is going to affiliates who ARE on the first page. That’s you. It pays for us to give you attention, to give you commission raises when sales go up, to make sure you’re safe and secure, to actually pay you on time every month. You’re part of our company, and we treat you that way.

But not only that. Precisely because we pay attention to you, we invest lots of research and effort into making our sites CONVERT for you. If we don’t have conversion, we have nothing. That’s why working with us will get you the most attention, the most conversion, and the most money.

That’s why you should be a Cashadmin affiliate.

Rx affiliates webmastering – Random thoughts for May 5

Monday, May 9th, 2011

On Design

I’ve seen many successful RX affiliate sites in my day that look amazing. Great design, real professional, makes their users feel good and secure and gooey and all ready to buy a bunch of stuff. Works great. I’ve also seen sites with the exact opposite strategy. They look so basic and bare that the message basically is this, “Quick! Whoever you are! Get the heck off this ugly site as soon as possible by clicking one of my links NOW!

You wouldn’t believe it, but sometimes the second group converts even better than the first group. That is, I’ve got affiliates these days that are converting at 20% with a handful of very basic, small sites they’ve pushed up to the top of search engines. It amazes me, really.

On Calling up Affiliates

Sometimes it gets quiet behind the desk. I’m busy typing and writing emails, staring at an LCD monitor. It’s fun though to pick up the phone sometimes and actually call one of you guys. Sometimes people are even surprised and over appreciative that I actually call them, but hey, you’re kind of like my coworkers, you’re making me  money and vice versa, you deserve a phone call!

On Payment

How much trust is inherent in assuming that a guy you’ve never met is actually going to track all your clicks and pay you real money month after month? I’ve rolled the idea around in my head many times and I’m thinking, you’ve got to trust (key term) the software, the manager, the company, all to work and be honest and not let something slip through the cracks. Maybe that’s why payday is my favorite day. First, because it gets me out of my daily routine and I get to do something different, but mostly it’s because it makes me proud to know that I’m part of a mechanism of honesty and integrity, paying people for their time and effort.

Affiliate tips #5 Banners, Links, or Tables?

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

Banners, Links, or Tables?

After all the SEO is done, after all the social marketing is up and running, and after all your content is fleshed out and ready for the world to see, the bottom line is, what portal do you use to actually drive the traffic from your site to Generic4All, Pharm4All, and Herbal4All?

There are three choices.

1)      Banners

2)      Links

3)      Tables

From what I’ve seen from an array of all of Cashadmin’s affiliates, the answer depends on what site you have.

Banners are generally most effective on a site that meets the following criteria

1)      The site is not directly related to RX

2)      The site does not have many banners on it to begin with

Say you have a political blog that attracts traffic from middle aged men. You’ve got a blogroll with a bunch of links in it, then links of your recent comments, links of your recent posts, a whole bunch of sidebar links. Then one Cashadmin banner sticks out there, and since it stands out, you’ll get more clicks to it. Obviously if you just put a link that says Generic Meds on it or something, it’ll get lost in the crowd. What you want on these sites is a banner.

Banners are designed to distract a reader from what he’s looking at and bring his mind to a subject other than the one he’s reading on your blog. If he’s interested, he’ll click. If he isn’t he won’t.

Text links and banners are much more effective on sites that are directly related to Pharma and RX. If you have a pharmacy compare site, or a review site, or a forum, or a pharmacy blog or whatever it is, then your readers are already focused on the subject you want them focused on. There’s no need to distract their attention with a banner back to the same subject. They’re looking for what they want in the meat of your site, so give it to them!

In a very obvious place, either stick the words “Buy This Thing Now” (of course I’m being slightly facetious) and make it big and bold. Or build an HTML table and put it right smack in the middle of your site, listing price per pill, quantity, and everything else you can find on G4A, P4A, and H4A.

On Sketchers, Microsurgeons, Wrecking Balls by Rafi F

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

People often ask me, “Rafi, what keywords should I go after?” These people think I’m the Goddess of keywords. But the problem is, I’m a male, so I can’t possibly be a Goddess. But what I can say is this. There are three kinds of affiliates that work with Cashadmin. There are the sketchers, the microsurgeons, and the wrecking ball crews.

The Sketchers are the affiliates that have day jobs and partner with us for a side income. They don’t have the time or the inclination to sit at their computer all day doing SEO work and social promotion to make the big bucks, and that’s OK. They quickly sketch up a site, looks alright, they do an hour of work or so a night, and it makes a few sales. We’re happy to dish out all the money we can for all the sketchers.

There are the big professional workers. They don’t have day jobs. Working with cashadmin is what they do. And when you work full time for us, you’re really trusting our ability to convert for you. It makes us all warm and gooey and stuff to know that we are your livelihood. We take it seriously.

There are two kinds of full time employees. The microsurgeons set up a whole array of different sites and focus on different keywords for each site. Conversion numbers come in for the month, and they throw out the nonconverting keywords, focusing on the converting ones, upping their conversion rates every month until they get to a saturation point and when they do, they add another site and start another affiliate campaign page. In this way their campaigns get bigger and bigger and they make hundreds of sales a month. We of course pay them higher commissions in return.

The other kind of full time cashadmin employees are the wrecking ball crews. It takes a lot of energy to move one wrecking ball. Have you seen how many controls there are on one of those machines? Each control is like another minisite, all pointing to the giant wrecking ball, moving it faster and faster. These affiliates have so many good sites pointing to their main page with 4 or 5 main keywords that the main affiliate page gets so much traffic where the conversion rate is just a little bit less, but the huge traffic quantity makes up for it handily by smashing everything in its path with sales.

If you can combine the microsurgeon with the wrecking ball, you’ll be rich, because we’ll have to pay you a lot of money.

Affiliate Tip #4: YouTube, MeTube, and Viral Affiliate Marketing, a True Story

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

YouTube, MeTube, and Viral Affiliate Marketing, a True Story

A friend i know for years, doesn’t believe in “viral” marketing, as in when something just spontaneously proliferates out of control because it stumbled onto the right people who sent it out to the whole world who then sent it out to the rest of the solar system and so the entire alpha quadrant of the Milky Way ended up hearing about it.

He thinks that these things are planned meticulously, invested in heavily, and released by marketing engineers who know exactly what they’re doing. In many cases I’m sure he’s right. But I wasn’t so sure if he was 100% correct. I still thought you could just throw something out there and if it was original enough, it would catch fire, without one having to shoot himself in the head online to get attention.

So it was that last week, I was at work as I often am, managing accounts and listening with one ear to online news reports about the immanent federal government shutdown and such, and I came across something quite odd. I knew it was a mistake and that it would be taken off the site in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, so I whipped out my trusty Snagit and captured the video, using my headset as a microphone in a devilishly amateurish attempt at my first YouTube video.  When I got home I uploaded it to YouTube.

The response totally blew me away. YouTube emails started flooding my inbox like there was no tomorrow. Hundreds favorited it in minutes. Comment after comment of people yelling at one another about my video, pissing each other off and cursing, the occasional constructive response…and then the spammers came. Joining my YouTube “channel” even though there was only one video, throwing video responses at me to try and piggy back off the popularity of my video, sending me comments on my profile telling me that I should join such and such a video network, friending me on YouTube. YouTube itself emailing me several times about applying to be a YouTube partner and do a rev share off my “popular video”.

When the effect wore off 3 days later, the burst resulted in nearly 130,000 views and over 500 comments.

What does this have to do with affiliate marketing? Viral marketing is out there. It’s possible. You just have to find something original and amazing and put it up and then attack Facebook and Twitter to get the ball rolling. Attach your site to the video so the 100,000 plus people see that you have a site and that it can sell them things. Put an affiliate link in your YouTube channel. Do whatever you can to make the people who watch your video know that you want them as a customer.

(If you want to know what video it is, email me and I’ll give you the link. :) )

Rafi F.

Affiliate Tip #3 : Match the Content to Your Users

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Yesterday I was speaking with an affiliate who has been sending me traffic, but it wasn’t converting very well. In fact, it was converting way below our average. The problem was, he has a good site and our products were featured, so I couldn’t understand why his conversions were low.

Could it be the countries he was driving traffic from, the layout of his site? I checked, and no. There were sites much more basic than his that are converting with Cashadmin at extremely high rates, some even above 1:10. I suggested that he take a look at the Alexa statistics for some successful RX affiliate sites and see what terms are bringing them their traffic.

And then I figured it out – why didn’t it occur to me before! I checked the Alexa search statistics for his own site, and found that most of his traffic was coming from a search terms involving allergy medication. The problem is, this particular affiliate was promoting ED meds!

So they were coming to his site looking for allergy meds, and they were leaving when they didn’t see it immediately! So the solution was simple. Promote Cashadmin Generic allegra on the home page, big and obvious, and they’ll find what they’re looking for!

Lesson of the day – make sure you’re promoting the right products. Meaning, make sure the products you are promoting match the traffic you’re getting. Check your analytics and you’re Alexa profile. If you’re getting ED traffic, promote ED. IF you’re getting antibiotic traffic, promote antibiotics.

Your visitors have less than five seconds a day to listen to you. Make sure you catch their attention in time, and you’ll convert very, very well.

Affiliate tips #2: The sale process – keep it simple and clear

Sunday, February 27th, 2011

There are two kinds of affiliates in the RX business, or any other business for that matter. Let’s describe them in terms of gardens in the Amazon where everything is in infested with mosquitoes and such.

One affiliate has a garden in the Amazon. It’s got apples, pears, pomegranates, grapefruits, passionfruit maybe. The only problem is that the garden is a crazy disorganized wild thicket that is not tended by anyone and isn’t fenced in protected. Whoever goes into it to pick something will get scratched by thorns, bitten by mosquitoes, and may have to end up taking quinine to counter malaria.

What I mean is, there are some affiliates who have a store of a whole bunch of products that are disorganized, and what these affiliates are basically doing is dropping their users into a wild thicket, expecting them to thrash around and pick a pomegranate, from which you’ll get commission.

The other kind of affiliate has a beautifully organized garden, protected from mosquitoes, with personal ferrying service to the exact tree that his user wants to pick from. If his user wants a 100 gram apple, he’s taken to the tree that grows 100 gram apples and he picks one. If he wants a half kilo pomegranate, the ferrying service floats him right to there.

The crazy disorganized garden has the same stuff. But the user is confused. He doesn’t have time to look around. His wife is nagging him to get off the computer and come to the dinner table.

Your users are short on time and patience. They need to be led exactly where they want to go, so if they want 25 50mg tadalfil tablets, send them directly to the 25 50mg tadalafil page. That way your affiliate garden in the Amazon will send him to the correct tree.

Don’t just send everyone to the homepage. That’s a disorganized garden. If you lead your traffic to the right place, your conversion rates will go up.

Affiliate Tip #1 : Upping CTR by being Interesting

Monday, February 21st, 2011

A lot of our affiliates ask me this question. It goes something like this, “Rafi, how do I up CTR?” There are variations on the theme, such as, “Rafi, how can I make people click on the links more,” or “Rafi, need clicks, how,” and the occasional, “Rafi! I followed your advice and now too many people are clicking on the links and my server just exploded in flames and burnt my house down! Plus I made a lot of sales!”

I’m exaggerating (slightly) on the last one, but what advice am I giving these days? Simple. Be interesting.

There are three main reasons that people click links or ads.

1)      They want to buy something and are looking to spend their money.

2)      They’re surfing and click out of curiosity.

3)      They’re doing research and they like the information you gave them, they trust you, so they click on your recommendations or ads.

Reason 2 is very rare. You can’t rely on it for sales. But reasons one and three are quite common, and they need something in common in order to work. That is trust.

Trust is generated when someone is genuinely helped by your website. When the information you provide is useful, interesting, original, well-researched. If you have too many links up and not enough useful content, the user will grow suspicious of you and think you’re simply trying to make a buck and don’t care about him. He won’t click on your links.

But if you provide him with useful content that he can use and appreciate, he’ll go to where you lead him. And your CTR will go up.

So if you have a site that deals with weight loss and you’re pushing our weight loss products, research the topic and provide some good advice and content. Post stories, post questions and answers, post videos, get your posts on link roundups and social networks, health forums. Whatever makes people interested in your content will in turn make them interested in your links.

And if they’re interested in your links, they’ll buy from us. Because we’re good, which is why you work with Cashadmin.

Written by Marketing Manager Rafi F.