This post was unpublished, from my trip to Boston in 2006 – I think I lost the connection and it just saved to my Blogger account previously – only remembered it was there today. This was a great post – so enjoy (if only with a pinch of salt) :
Ziv Dascala takes the Podium for this session with his presentation. This was a very good session. Ziv is from Oron Online. I’m not going to bother with the others guys here, this was the pick. What makes an online market a highly competitive one?
1. Follow the money: (High volume demand) x (high margin per sale + cross & up sales opportunities) = large profits
2. Many vendors compete for the same customer
3. Vendors offering are commodities
4. Surfers are searching for information before the “buying” activity Understand the REAL value of a customer
- It is not just the sales amount!
- Know the profit margin per sale
- Figure out the profit in the cross and up sales
- Understand the customer lifetie value
- Understand the potential customer lead value opportunities
Know EXACTLY what the maximum amount companies are willing to pay
1. Bid to be 1st in the top 5 most important terms of the industry
2. Send the traffic directly to the best known branded vendor site
3. Figure out the conversion ratio
The affiliates pre-dance
- Close special deals with all the vendors
- Avoid deals with income spread over a long period
- Prepare a HUGE list of related keywords to grab
- Prepare a MASSIVE amount of content on the subject
- Use PPC campaigns to understand the most effective landing pages
The Dance
- Target huge list of related keyword with different domain names, pages and content
- Constantly issue press releases
- Spread free articles with reference to your sites
- Discuss your offering in online public and private forums and blogs
- Buy traffic from other affiliates, offer more than what they get from the vendor
- Buy other affiliate and informational sites on the subject
- Let the vendors competet between themselves on improving your special deals
The post dance
- Charles Darwin: Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest
- Your target is to control most of the SERPs (directly or indirectly) and push your special vendors deals
- Vendors visibility on the SETPs becomes much more dependable upon your traffic
- Payouts from the vendor increases all the time, since you keep the vendors compete visibility on your controlled online properties
- You keep doing the ROI calculation constantly, it all comes to how much do you get paid for each visitor to your site !
Shift of Powers
- Intially : You were working as a marketing arm for the vendor
- Mid term : You and the vendor are working hand in hand to get more clients and split the revenues
- Finally: The vendor is working for you as an oprational sales and fulfillment on a “cost”+ basis.
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