Just in the span of last few months, I have witnessed a couple of powerful competitive intelligence product that is being made available to the public for use in affiliate marketing. These kinds of tools used to cost a lot more and were privy to high end customers. Now, the average Joe can get their hands on it and it’s turning the heat up on the affiliate marketing space and for businesses advertising online.
The two hot tools are Keyword Spy and Google Cash Detective.
It basically allow users to monitor who’s making money on the advertising side and more so , if they are affiliates doing it. Then you can reverse engineer what keywords they use, what campaigns they put up and even swipe their ads. Ouch for those who have been doing old Googlecash style promotions with direct linking.
Many people are using it and having profitable campaigns within 1-2 months. To the unsuspecting affiliate who has been advertising using their affiliate links, they will suddenly notice a drop in their traffic. I have already seen such instances by new unsuspecting marketers who’s campaign’s been swiped and wondering what happened. It’s not difficult to do and the data is out there.
For the more sophisticated marketer, this represents a acceleration in identifying profitable programs and reverse engineering those models. Chris Carpenter’s videos showed a great example of how a seemingly unprofitable campaign on the surface actually makes money on the backend and how hewas able to take that apart and duplicate it and be profitable.
One other site that came up is spyfu.com. You can see what a site is advertising, keywords optimized for and how much they pay for adverts. All you got to do is copy and improve on that plus reegineer the sales funnel and you got yourself an instant business that is very likely to be profitable.
The world of affiliate marketing especially with paid advertising (PPC) just got a lot more competitive and exciting. Whether you like it or not, the time for the lazy/Bum marketing types are up. In fact, many companies are overpaying for Pay Per Click advertising simply because they aren’t measuring their ROI down the keyword and through the conversion process.
I have done a few case studies that I share with clients to show them the right way to do it and the reaction has been very positive. Usually shocked.
I’ll talk more about tracking, sales funnel and backends in uture . That’s where the difference is going to be made for those who’s going to make positive ROI in their online marketing.
It’s not about just one thing or tactic or tool. It’s the sales chain.