The holiday season is fast approaching. I’m seeing stores with Christmas decorations up already and hearing reports that people are hearing Christmas music in stores. And it’s not even Halloween yet.

Hopefully you’ve done some work on gearing up for the holidays. If you haven’t, now is not the time to procrastinate. Poor economy aside, people are shopping already.

What you need to get done depends on the kind of business you’re running. Some will need more preparation, others less.

This is the time to spend more on your advertising, for example. You want to get those shoppers who are already buying for the holidays. Shopping early is an easy way to spread out the expenses of holiday gifts for many families.

You should also make sure that any holiday themed merchandise is easily found. This is the time of year it will get moving.

If you write about products, now is the time to start thinking about what products will sell well for you through your articles. What do people need to know in order to buy through your links? What’s going to capture their attention?

What else do you do to get ready? How early do you start planning?

Marketing your business on forums is a common piece of advice. A good forum can provide access to a number of people who are interested in the products you’re trying to sell.

So why does it fail so miserably for so many people?

1. Trying too hard to sell.

Many people who try to market affiliate products on forums go about it all wrong. Marketing their product is all they do, and they aren’t the least bit discreet about it. They may post all over the forum telling people to check their product out. They may try to squeeze a mention into every conversation, whether relevant or not.

They think of their efforts there as entirely to market a product. Not to become a trusted resource.

2 . Ignoring forum rules.

Working too hard to sell is just one way people can ignore forum rules. It’s the big one, though.

However many forums won’t allow you to advertise a business in your signature, or may require that you pay for the privilege. They may not allow affiliate links within posts, even when the product is perfectly relevant.

3. Signature line isn’t compelling.

Some people do better at participating in the forum, but still fail to do well as marketers on forums. Some will put just their affiliate URL in their signature. Sure, that gives a link to click, but what is it?

Or, if the link is followed or preceded by a description, the words aren’t the least bit compelling. Most forums allow you to use BB Code, which allows you to link to your site through your words, which looks much better.

4. Too irrelevant.

You’re not going to do that well marketing pet supplies on a crime forum. Sure there will be some pet owners, but that’s not what people there are looking for. Try to have some relevance in your signature to what people are talking about. It doesn’t have to be perfect, though.

5. Too relevant.

Too close a match can be a problem as well, although perhaps not as often. You don’t want to be offering something that pretty much everyone in the forum already has. Try to come up with a product that will intrigue the people who read your signature.

6. Too many links.

Most forums have limits on the number of characters you have in your signature. Some limit the number of links you may include.

Both of these things are good for you.

People aren’t generally going to read a really long signature line. They also may ignore excessive links within your signature. Keep the number of links down and be sure your signature is easy to read.

7. Never, ever changing your signature.

Remember, even if a forum has thousands of active members, after a time just about everyone interested in your current signature has seen it. Changing things up, even if you’re still offering the same product, can bring in fresh customers.

8. Fail to test your signature links.

Test. That’s right, test, test, test. And test again. Then change things up regularly.

Forum marketing is just like any other kind of marketing. An ad may be pulling well and then suddenly quit working.

But beyond that, make sure your links actually work. It’s amazing how often forum signature links just don’t work because you didn’t get it quite right. Strange things sometimes happen between typing your signature and hitting the Submit button.

But What About Successfully Marketing on Forums?

There are a few keys to successfully marketing affiliate products, or indeed any business on a forum.

1. Be a contributing member.

Don’t just focus on yourself, your business, and your products. Give advice anytime you have something well thought out to say. Make friends.

2. Participate regularly.

Try to not vanish for months on forums. It’s much harder to build up a reputation if you aren’t a regular participant.

For many forums, daily visits may be best, but you can often get away with every other day or so. The busier the forum, the quicker posts disappear off the first page, and the fewer people will read them. The more you participate, the more often people will read what you have to say.

3. Do not overdo the time you spend on forums.

The biggest catch to forum marketing is that they can be huge time wasters. Limit the amount of time you allow yourself to be on forums. They should be a part of your marketing mix, not your sole focus.

Sure, being social and making friends is an important part of forum marketing, but that doesn’t mean you need to check back several times a day. Schedule your forum time so that you get plenty of other work done on your business.

A good commission rate can be a big consideration when you’re looking at affiliate products to promote. A nice big commission sure feels good to get, after all. But the little ones can add up too.

In my experience, large commissions are nice. Sometimes very, very nice. But they don’t do a bit of good if you can’t make the sale. In fact, the one high commission product I do really well on is the one I understand the best. That shows in how I market the product. I’m enthusiastic and honest about it.

That’s what it really comes down to. Can you sell the product? Can you sell enough of it to make your efforts worthwhile.

For a lot of high cost products the answer is no, not unless you can find a way to stand out from all the others who really do understand how to sell that product.

The higher the cost of the product, the more sales resistance you’re going to have to beat down. You still need to be honest in what you say, at least if you want people to still respect you after making their purchase.

Fortunately honesty can make the sale rather than break it. If a product has a weakness, admitting it shows that you aren’t just in it for the money. You find it worthwhile despite whatever the problems may be.

When you’re earning less per sale you need to look more at your potential sales volume. Selling a lot of little stuff can be more profitable than selling a few big items.

This is where conversion rate comes in if you’re comparing two very similar products that will pay you different amounts of commission. Just as if you’re considering which kind of product overall to sell, you want to sell the product that is going to earn your the most overall.

For me, that includes looking at whether I’ll keep the respect of those I sell to. If I don’t, I lose out on potential future commissions from people buying other products from me. This makes quality as much of a consideration as immediate earnings potential.

I’m getting to be quite a fan of datafeeds for marketing. Sure they’re a lot of work, but they can also bring in the sales. And there are some great tools to help you along.

Now one of the first things you need to understand about datafeed affiliate marketing is that you cannot just throw up the entire feed and expect a ton of traffic. You might get bits and pieces but you really need to do something to make your pages unique. Without that you aren’t going to get the natural search engine traffic.

With some of my sites, the very first thing I looked for was programs with a datafeed I could use. That’s one of the things I love about ShareASale - free datafeed access for affiliates. Commission Junction only gives it to you free if you make enough sales. And of course there’s a lot you can do with Amazon or eBay feeds, although these are run differently from the ones at ShareASale.

If you aren’t a programmer, however, you’re going to want some software to put the feeds up on your sites. And you’re probably going to need to clean up the feeds (merchants can be sloppy with them) and figure out how on earth you’re going to make your little datafeed site stand out. We can’t all replicate the entire Amazon site, after all.

Here are some of the tools I enjoy using:

Build a Niche Store (BANS)

An absolute delight if you want to sell products that are being auctioned on eBay. I’ve reviewed this product in the past, and things have really picked up for me again since eBay’s transition to their own Partner Network.

You might be amazed at some of the niches that do well through eBay. You can get pretty creative with your sites. And the cookie is good for more than just the auctions you refer people directly to, so you never know what’s going to come up.

The Affiliate Datafeed Profit System (ADPS2)

My favorite tool right now for ShareASale datafeeds. It works within a WordPress blog. All you have to do is find the merchants you want to represent who have datafeeds, sign up with them, request FTP access to their feeds, activate the plugin and put in your information. These are all really easy steps, and many merchants auto-approve affiliates.

Once it’s set up, ADPS2 can download the datafeeds for you, and you click a button to have it create posts to the specifications you select. You choose the number of products per post, the number of posts created and the category posted to. ADPS2 will randomly date these, with a few being posted in the next couple hours and the rest over a number of days. How many depends on how many posts are being created.

You can have up to 5 merchants going on this, and the posts will mix them up. Keeps things more unique.

This is a great addition to a blog that you have some content already, and need products. As with many things It’s not going to do you a lot of good to use it without some content you’ve created and promotion of the website.

PopShops

The two systems above cost money. So now here’s one that can be free, if you choose. Or you can pay for additional features.

PopShops is nice if you want to use a datafeed from Commission Junction, LinkShare and so forth, but don’t want to pay for the privilege of accessing them. It also handles updating and removing products for you, which is very convenient when you’re using datafeeds. And you can mix the merchants up to suit your site.

The free version runs on JavaScript. In other words, it’s not going to attract search engine spiders for you. But if you have some content going and want to test the waters, it’s a place to start.

You pick the categories and your layout. Then the products. It’s a simple drag and drop interface. They brag about it being so easy a 3 year old could do it, and even have a video to prove it.

You can pay a monthly fee to get a PHP or ASP version for your site. This is, of course, much friendlier to the search engines. The Pro version is just $5 per month or you can go for even more features for $30 a month. But even in the free version all your commissions are your own. Just make sure you sign up for every program you put in your shop. You can even create widgets for your blogs.

The disadvantage, of course, is that you have to trust to their cleaning of the datafeed. But since you can mix up the products as you like you can still make some pretty unique pages.

Associate-O-Matic for Amazon

Now this is one I haven’t tried, but looks promising. The most recent update to the script was May 10, 2008 as of this writing, and it has been around for a few years.

It has a free option that costs you 10% of clicks rather than an upfront cost, or the full version is $99 for the first year, $20/year thereafter.

Amazon, like eBay, sells just an amazing range of stuff. The disadvantage is that they have a very short cookie life, one day as I recall. Compare that to 30 or more days for many other programs. But people trust Amazon, it’s familiar and they buy lots of stuff there sometimes. There are affiliates making very good money through that program.

Why Use Datafeeds?

With all this information about it, the reason why you should use a datafeed may not be quite so apparent.

A datafeed allows you to get traffic for the individual products, potentially. No guarantees, of course. But if someone is looking for a product they aren’t going to find your site if all you do is link to the merchant’s home page.

A datafeed site also has a lot of pages generated automatically for you. It can come down to more pages being more ways for visitors to find you.

No, datafeed affiliate marketing has not made me rich. It sure would be nice. But it has opened up some areas that I am developing sites that should bring in some income I’d have trouble earning otherwise. My datafeed sites have had some very promising beginnings.

A great niche is one of the requirements for a successful online business. You aren’t going to do well if you don’t stand out in some way or if you try to market to everyone.

Researching a niche is generally frustrating, though. Pretty much any niche you can think of will have a lot of competition in it. How are you supposed to stand out? More important, how are you supposed to earn anything?

One important thing to consider right now is that very, very few niches lack for competition anymore. At least not if they’re profitable. A great number of people have been trying to or succeeding at making a living online, and many of them have come up with some great ideas.

This isn’t as bad as it may sound. If someone’s making a living at the niche you wanted, you have know there’s a market there. If no one is, either you’ve stumbled across a very rare gem or you’ve found one of the many niches where there are no buyers.

The Big Secret - They Aren’t All Serious Competitors

Just because you see a website in your niche doesn’t mean that they’re serious competition. Many people do well in a niche because there aren’t any really good competitors in it. Just think about how many times you see ebooks telling people that all they have to do is throw up a quick affiliate site and they’ll start earning the big bucks.

If that’s your main competition, you may be able to do very well by putting in more serious effort. Go over what the competition is doing, and figure out how to do it better.

Sometimes standing out is just that simple. You find a way to do it better. You might provide better information, you might keep your site more up to date, you might be more helpful on a personal level.

Heck, you might just have a generally cooler site.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know about the Build a Niche Store software I use occasionally, and the transition of the eBay affiliate program from Commission Junction to their own eBay Partner Network.

And if you read around other sites, you may have heard many rumblings of discontent as many sites lost significant income in the process.  If you haven’t, I’m talking about people who went from mid to high 4 figures, to low to mid 3 figures or worse. It was pretty ugly, despite eBay’s insistence that all tracking was working just fine.

I’ve mostly been sitting back, gritting my teeth to see what would happen. I lost quite a bit of income in this process too. But I’m happy to say that I’m starting to see signs of life at long last.

Not quite the income from before yet. But it’s early days yet, as it’s been about a week of income coming in, more than the few dollars I got last month. Hard to say if it’s actual new sales or if they’re quietly correcting tracking problems. But I’m seeing a difference that I hope keeps up.

Affiliate marketing can be very interesting work, but it’s challenging too. It’s hard to sift through all the information out there and figure out what works for you.

However, one thing many people strongly recommend is redirecting your affiliate links. The logic is that many people just feel more comfortable clicking a link they can understand. Also, some have a bias against clicking a link when they think you might get a commission off of it, even though they’re no impact on their cost. Just an odd bit of human nature.

There are advantages beyond your clickthrough and sales rate to cloaking your affiliate links. I find it is simpler to remember my links. You don’t have to go looking for your link every time; just use the redirect link you created. If they’re well named you won’t have to look them up very often.

There are a number of ways to redirect your links. How you do it depends on what you’re comfortable with and what you can do on your server. You can buy a variety of solutions for this if you want link tracking, or create your own free solutions.

Free Solutions

The basic free version is to create a page and do a meta redirect. The one trouble with these is that they can be a touch slow. But all you have to do is create a plain HTML page with META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”5; URL=html-redirect.html” in it. The 5 indicates that the redirect will take place in 5 seconds, and you can bring it to 0 if you want a fast redirect. And of course if you’re directing to a new domain you will need to include the full address.

I’m most fond of the 301 permanent redirect using my .htaccess file. You can create one of these using Notepad (not Microsoft Word or other word processing software), but before you upload it to your server, be sure there isn’t one there already, as it will mess up your site if you overwrite an existing file with a new one that doesn’t have the current information. But if you have one there already you can edit it to add the new redirects.

The code is simple: Redirect permanent /filename addressyouareredirectingto. Once again, if you’re going off site that means you will need the full address. This works only on Linux servers having the Apache Mod-Rewrite module enabled.

You can also do this in PHP. Within the brackets to start and finish PHP commands, place the following code:

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );

There are many more ways to create redirects, and if you aren’t using them already I strongly encourage you to investigate them. They make your affiliate links look cleaner and may help with your sales. Just check that the tracking is working properly when you use them.

Paid Solutions

There are quite a number of paid ways to cloak your links. The advantage to these is that some are stronger cloaking, and may hide your affiliate link even on the merchant site. However, you do need to be careful that your cloaking does not break the merchant’s Terms of Service. It’s a pain to have to change out links and find a new merchant.

That said, I found a couple that do look interesting.

The first is specific to bloggers using Wordpress. Wordpress Link Cloak allows you to declare keywords that you want linked to particular links. It sounds good to me both as a quick way to create links in a blog and to keep you from forgetting to monetize a post, one of my own failings.

The other that caught my eye is more general purpose. It’s called Super Affiliate Link Manager. It allows you to create cloaked links so you can brand them and track them. Being able to track your links is something I feel is key when you’re using a paid solution. It’s just nice to have a way to track your links beyond what the affiliate program itself provides.

No matter whether you go free or paid, take the time to cloak your links. It might just help you to increase your earnings, and make your site look a little neater.

As a general rule, I have a feeling for what’s coming in, moneywise. I know what most of my sites tend to bring in monthly and plan around that.

But there’s an exception to that, and it delighted me today with a surprise $1000+ commission check. Obviously a very nice surprise.

You see, one program I belong to doesn’t have a way for me to track my sales. I get checks pretty regularly from the company with records of my sales, but I can’t follow it online. Only the fact that they do pay well on sales keeps me going with them. Normally I do $50-100 per month with them.

So over $1000 was quite a pleasant surprise in today’s mail.

Of course I’m hoping that trend continues. That’s not a bad income at all for a site that doesn’t require tremendous maintenance. A little, sure, but less than many of my sites that earn less.

No, no clues as to niche or affiliate program. I get to keep some secrets!