10 Things You Didn’t Know About Performance Marketing (But Should!)

This is a guest post by Murray Newlands, a marketing professional, entrepreneur, advisor, author, and keynote speaker. Murray is a regular presenter at major events in Europe and the U.S. and focuses on social media marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing, and affiliate marketing.

In the age of the Internet, terms like analytics and ROI reign supreme. With brands constantly looking to get the most out of their advertising dollar, and marketers on the hunt for great offers and high payouts, there’s a lot to learn when it comes to success in the Internet marketing industry. To help answer common questions about performance marketing here’s a list of 10 things you probably don’t know about the industry.

• Lots of companies, large and small, run affiliate programs—Amazon, eBay, and Barnes & Noble are just a few of the major companies who will pay you to promote their products, however, they’re not the only ones. A lot of smaller businesses are also looking to the affiliate space to help spread their brand awareness, as well as their products and services.
• Attribution is one of the best indicators of a profitable program—According to guest author Adam Riemer, “Attribution is one of the most important things you can look at when evaluating the value of an affiliate, or your program. By setting up a cross channel attribution model and properly crediting the right channel you can know where to spend your budget, which partners or channels are working to funnel off sales and cost you more money, as well as which affiliate partners you should remove from your program.”
• Successful affiliates create and promote offers that they love—In the third chapter of the book, we cover how to choose offers to promote if you are an affiliate. The main takeaway from the chapter: “People are more likely to succeed in the long term with content sites about something they care about, talk about, and have friends in common to talk about related topics. One of the common killers of affiliate projects is that people simply become bored with a content site.”
• Email marketing is a viable method, but there’s a lot that goes into successful campaigns—Email marketing is a great way to send highly targeted online advertising, however, if you don’t spend a lot of time and pay careful attention to the messages you’re sending, recipients are likely to banish your email to the spam box forever, which ultimately hurts your business.
• Always be testing! If you ask any veteran Internet marketer, they’re surely tell you to always be testing different variables of your campaign. Be it subject lines, images, offers, even background colors—different combinations will yield different results, and you should do your best to find the optimal combination!
• You should be doing competitive intelligence!—Competitive intelligence is the equivalent of Internet spying, and if you are practicing it as an Internet marketer, you’re more than likely losing money. Knowing where and what types of ads your competitors are running will not only help you identify what works in the marketplace, but it will give you a leg up on them and help you maximize your revenue.
• You can make money on the domains you own but are not using—In the section about redirect traffic, Affiliate.com and Redirect.com owner Scott Richter explains how you can cash in on empty sites through products like his own at redirect.com. Basically, “in order to make money from the domains you own (and not waste money collecting them), you must either set up a content site and run your own ads, or utilize a domain parking service to help you monetize your unused domains. The alternative is to simply redirect that traffic. This is a quick, easy way to instantly monetize all of your unused traffic and domains with almost zero effort.”
• All good press releases look similar—No, we don’t mean that all press releases use the same aesthetic elements. However, good press releases do exhibit a number of similar attributes. According to the book, those attributes are length, quality, quotes from significant people, and releasing it to the appropriate sources.
• A great landing page can be the difference between success and failure—In the fast-paced world we live in, brands and advertisers have to capture their customers’ attention almost instantly, and if they don’t, chances are they’ve missed out on a sale. A big part of getting a customer’s attention comes to creating an awesome landing page. The book’s advice on this: “Remain focused on why visitors are coming to your page. Figure out how you can get them to the sale or lead page as efficiently and effectively as possible, while still keeping the promise from the original advertisement.”
• There’s a lot of money to be made in media buying—With the ever-increasing use of social media, there is more and more display ad space and general media buying available, which means there is also more room to make money by doing that. Whether you’re buying banner ads or Facebook ads, media buying is fast becoming a massively lucrative industry.

I’ve teamed up with John Rampton to write “Performance Marketing for Professionals,” an all-inclusive introduction and step-by-step guide to online marketing success. With 14 chapters in total, it’s difficult to sum up all of the great information in this book in just one blog post, but if you are intrigued by some of the things in this list, you can purchase the book on the Kindle for $1.

Author

Becky is the Senior Content Marketing Manager at TUNE. Before TUNE, she led a variety of marketing and communications projects at San Francisco startups. Becky received her bachelor's degree in English from Wake Forest University. After living nearly a decade in San Francisco and Seattle, she has returned to her home of Charleston, SC, where you can find her enjoying the sun and salt water with her family.