The Co-op Marketing Advantage For The Affiliate
Without a doubt, the most effective way to market anything online is to start a Co-op. When I started my online marketing adventure, I found it to be quite challenging. Someone eventually introduced the idea of the Advertising Co-op to me and it made a huge difference. Now, I’ll pay it forward by introducing it to you. It turns out that working with other people to accomplish a common goal is much more effective than trying to go it alone. If you are an independent affiliate, find at least two other people who would like to start their own online businesses and sign them up.
Most marketers agree that there are two basic ways to promote any business online: paid advertising promotions and free marketing methods. Although there are many types of paid and free marketing methods, the two that I’ll use in this example are the two primary methods that my co-op uses. By now, you most likely know that when you sign up as an affiliate to promote any company, you are given an affiliate link that you use to promote the business. So, in our example each of our co-op members have their own unique affiliate links.
The key to creating a co-op is an algorithm known as a ‘rotator’. The rotator is usually hosted somewhere and it has it’s own specific URL or web address. After placing the three individual affiliate links of your co-op members into the rotator, you can put the rotator URL into your paid advertisements and marketing efforts. When someone clicks on the rotator URL, in a nanosecond it will select one of the three affiliate links you loaded into it at random and redirect the person who clicked the rotator link to one of your co-op members affiliate links.
What this allows your co-op members to do is effectively share traffic and pool resources. Let’s say that you want to buy advertising. Maybe you’ve discovered a few targeted e-zines that you want to run solo ads in. Since you have three people in you co-op, you may be able to pool funding and make bigger ad buys. Instead of only being able to afford one solo ad which goes out to 20K people, you can now afford three or four at once and now your ad will bee seen by many times that number of people.
One of our favorite free marketing methods is article marketing. There are thousands of article sites that you can submit content to. Most of these sites allow you to post articles that include a live URL or website link. Of course, this would be your co-op’s rotator link. The articles you write must be relevant to what you’re marketing but they must not be an advertisement for what you co-op is promoting. When someone reads your article, sometimes they’ll click your rotator link to get more info and again, you get to share this traffic evenly between co-op members.
Link building should be the ultimate goal of your co-op, because it is this activity which will contribute most to the profits your co-op members will realize. Your members must concentrate their efforts on getting the rotator link into as many online sites as possible. When a person searches the internet for related information, each of your co-op members independent affiliate links will receive traffic because of the rotator. Once you’ve achieved critical mass, and your articles end up on the first page of the search engines, it won’t be hard to bring on new co-op members. Why would anyone pass up on being a member of a co-op where traffic to their affiliate link is a given.
When you search for the perfect business to become an affiliate of, we know that you will find many people who promote each business you research as affiliates. Although they may have some important insights on that business which help you to make a better decision, 99.9% of them just want you sign up under them. They may tell you that you will be joining a team. They may tell you that you will have great support. Once you sign up under them, they’ll show you where to buy leads. UGH. If they had an advertising co-op, now that would be a great reason to join them. Do yourself a favor, no matter who you join under, start a co-op of your own.
James Warner, founder of the Marketing Income Network is an experienced Affiliate Marketer who believes that building a Co-op Marketing Team is the ultimate key to affiliate marketing success.
