August, 2010
CPA + PR = PR4? | public relations
For those of you not au fait with CPA, it stands for Cost Per Action. Basically if an affiliate sends traffic to an established offer through say a trial or sales promotion, the affiliate receives credit for that action.But how does this all relate to public relations?
Well firstly we need to distinguish the difference between page rank and public relations. Unfortunately the two abbreviations are linked but are different functions. Today I am talking about public relations primarily but good public relations does affect page rank.
Back to CPA then. If you are promoting a product, there are many tools that you can use. Press releases is one of them. Now, I have been sending out press releases since time immemorial, mainly tio newspapers, magazines and radio stations.
I must admit to having been rather cynical about how online PR can help affiliate marketing. After all, it’s not you that has created the product. It’s someone else’s. However the trick is to drive traffic to your websites.
Finding a new story is absolutely essential to this process. Basically no new story, no coverage. many CPA networks all very strict about what you can send out about their products. So firstly don’t make the mistake of sending press releases that have not been approved by your CPA network.
You have two options open to you. Firstly if you feel that there is a strong story related to the product in question, run your idea past your CPA representative. Remember that they are interested in shifting goods too. So they would be happy to work with you on any additional promotion that you can offer. There might be some benefits for example that you have experienced as a result of using the product. E.g. if you have been applying a skin care product and the results are impressive, then you could generate a human interest story as a result of that positive experience of the product.
What do we mean by human interest story? Journalists and readers alike prefer pieces of editorial which they can empathise with. You have seen the weight loss editorials- yesterday I was 20 stone and a virtual recluse, and now I am belle of the ball at 10 stone. that’s a very simple yet effective way of creating that instant relationship with the reader.
Distribution is as equally important is writing a press release. As usual in Internet marketing there are free options and paid for options. Over 40 press release sites with fairly high Google ranking exist. Other Internet marketers have demonstrated through forums that these sites can work if you do have a strong story to sell. No change there then. Simply having a press release online or offline is not a guarantee that it will be read. In addition, they have reported -and this is borne out by my own experience-that some press releases have a longer shelf life than others. Broadly, the stronger the story the longer it will stay in the in the top 10 of the search engines. Why? Because people are reading it and readability means link juice.
Sites like PR Newsire, PR Web and PR Leap are expensive and yet they can afford to be. Each of those sites are highly ranked by Google. So the $149 a throw might not be such a large price to pay if resulting sales can justify the expenditure. This is of course the perennial question in any form of affiliate marketing. If the product is being sold at $29.95, then the simple math would indicate that you would need to sell seven units to make it worth your while, using a paid press release site. My advice would be to begin with the free sites and if these are providing good rankings, stick with them.
In this brief article on how public relations affects SEO, it is not possible to cover all angles but I hope that this has given you a taster of what you can achieve by relating public relations with affiliate marketing.
CB Predators Review
You just won't
It’s not often I have occasion to “slag off” a product. In PR terms it’s called “Black PR” and it’s a practice I have avoided over the years. But let me express my frustration on my own blog about timewasters who promise that you will get rich in 18 clicks.
There’s nothing wrong with making a claim of this nature but if it can’t be backed up, the Goodwill Gasometer plunges. So why am I breaking my rule?
Like thousands of others, I signed up for a “not to be missed opportunity” at CB Predators. The basis of the offer is this. it’s an affiliate scheme involving Internet marketing, weight loss, anti-ageing type products. You are offered these products around a month before the official launch so that you can gain a head start on other affiliates. The biggest selling point for me was that it was offering a review site template which could easily be optimised.
However these templates simply did not work. After numerous tickets to the so-called technical support department, and waiting ten days for any response whatsoever, I finally gave up. But this was not before I visited some forums to find out what other people were experiencing. I found, to my amazement, the others were describing a mirror image of my own situation.
Rather than whinge until I’m blue in the face, my point is more about customer confidence than anything else. Here you are reading and negative review about product, whereas their sales strategy is built upon the notion of building a series of positive review sites. How ironic!
So what is the moral of the story? Public relations is about building sustained relationships between stakeholders in your business. Customers are a major stakeholder for obvious reasons. Many of the successful internet marketers who offer similar types of product take the trouble to over deliver on their promises. There is no doubt that Chris and Jerome are successful Internet marketers using other products and strategies, but they have so much to learn about ensuring that customers like me and countless others not left to struggle on their own with a defective product.
I can honestly say with hand on heart that if I had put my customers through this frustrating treadmill, I would have given the product away free. I would not be able to sleep nights in the knowledge that my reputation has been tarnished as a result of poor communication. Avoid CB Predators like the plague.
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