I’ve noticed from some time that people who managed to gain success with the affiliate marketing campaigns have pivoted to other long-term projects where they have full control of the project/product.
In general eCommerce has been the main go to direction, followed by services or other types of projects.
For instance, Affiliate World Conferences, Snow teeth whitening, BlackFire, Adplexity, and many other brands/companies are all successful projects build by affiliates.
Such moves are really great, cause running affiliate offers doesn’t leave you with a real asset that you can sell or scale using nontraditional techniques.
All these brands have been able to achieve great results thanks to the previous affiliate marketing experience. Mostly through paid traffic and affiliates, but most of the time it’s not just paid traffic we generally tend to speak about.
There are other growing strategies and techniques we do not to talk much about in here and honestly I wanted to hear some thoughts around the alternative channels of not just driving traffic to a dead simple funnel.
Activities like:
- Blog Posts/Publications
- Webinars
- How to Videos
- Influencer Partnerships
- Branded Cross-Promotions
All great alternatives that fall under “content marketing” and help a brand/product/service get recognized in their area, as well as, build audiences, collect leads, generate sales, etc. In short stuff that able deliver great results.
Some really cool examples of alternative approaches are:
Neil Patel's website and videos are a huge example.
This Taboola article about content marketing has some really neat examples too (especially Billie's IG video - weird one).
Meguiar's Car Detailing YT Channel (for car maintenance freaks like me) is another great content marketing example, not to mention other youtubers under their referral program.
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Real use case: Around 3 months ago I got inside the stats of a niche-specific company operating in Italy. They had virtually $0 ad spend history (just a few hundred $$$ per quarter spent randomly), practically nothing we're used to see everyday. Yet they were claiming that over 50%-70% of their sales were coming from their online activity. Mostly through organic traffic with extremely low spend promotions. Thing which looked weird considering the current organic reach of social networks, however when I checked their GA stats, it turned out to be true. Sales made through a terrible website that I wouldn’t spend a second browsing there, not even thinking of buying. (FYI: The company was billing over $3.5M a year)
Although we know pretty well how fast simple funnels on paid traffic can help you scale, but really, has anyone had hands-on experience with this kind of activities?
What are some of the strategies you’ve tested or seen that made you say “F#ck, why haven’t I thought or done of this for XYZ project”?
One interesting tactic is to focus on building out tools and giving them away for free.
Neil Patel has a free SEO tool on his blog.
PersonalCapital / CreditKarma built out robust free tools as lead generation.
You can do this without investing six figures.
NerdWallet built a lot of traffic from free tools like compound interest calculators. https://www.nerdwallet.com/banking/c...est-calculator
IIFYM for dieting https://www.iifym.com/macro-calculator/?gender=Man
These two examples are cheap and fast to build out.
For SAAS tools related to SEO, I see quite on a regular basis companies hitting servers with a forged User Agent or a forged Referrer (more common as it appears on Analytics). I am not sure it works that well, as I ban them immediately, so can not really comment on how long they keep doing that.
Here is the last one I banned:
2021-06-11 23:05:53 HEL50-C1 885 34.96.xxx.xxx GET xxxxxxxx.cloudfront.net / 200 - Expanse, a Palo Alto Networks company, searches across the global IPv4 space multiple times per day to identify customers&%2339; presences on the Internet. If you would like to be excluded from our scans, please send IP addresses/domains to: scaninfo@paloaltonetworks.com - - Hit 7Ov53cEpNsO3WAkVieZBB9jhYQ_sMfdwhON5VlWebaAH4Vo2dU-R1Q== xxxxxxxx.com http 326 0.003 - - - Hit HTTP/1.1 - - 41311 0.003 Hit text/
Another clever strategy I saw was from the director of a bullion storage service. He realized journalists where asking him all the time for photos, so he released photos on image libraries, with the caption starting with his name and company.
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/n...hoto/156811078
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/f...cias/480265119
Then, when they use his pictures, he get his company mentioned in the caption:
https://www.cnbc.com/id/100903713
found this blog post not sure why/where/when, interesting read about offline strategy
quote from the article that explains what is that about
"What I found started in my small home town and led me all the way to the secret guerilla marketing infrastructure of a multimillion-dollar company…"
https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2008/11/06/single-lawn-signs-conquer-the-american-landscape/