Red and Blue Ocean Marketing
W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne first coined the terms red and blue oceans to denote the market universe.
Red oceans are all the existing industries where industry boundaries are defined and companies try to beat the competition to grab a greater share of the existing market. Cutthroat competition turns the ocean bloody red.
Blue oceans refer to industries not yet in existence, unexplored, uncontested market space untainted by competition. Like the blue ocean, it’s a vast, deep and powerful in terms of opportunity and profitable growth.
In simple terms, blue ocean marketing is the process of finding exciting new ways to market your affiliate products as opposed to using the same tired old tactics. It’s thinking out of the box and what follows are some examples of how you can start thinking this way and developing your own blue ocean strategies for marketing.
Thinking Beyond the U.S. Market
Everyone tries to get in on the US market—whether they’re marketing in the US or a dozen other countries from around the globe. But, if you’re tired of finding your pages on page 10 after months of hard work, consider moving your sites to UK, CA, or AU search engines instead.
Do a quick search for any major niche in the US market and you’ll probably find lots of high-ranking sites that dominate the listings. But go to another Google site, like Google.co.uk, and you’ll find fewer sites from that region on the list. Google likes to place sites from the region the search engine is serving, but if too few sites are available, it will start going down the list to the .coms and other options.
So, if you find that optimization for “get rid of acne” in the United States is too competitive inthe United States but less so in the UK market, think about buying a site like www.getridofacnenow.co.uk and market that site instead. The actual market of buyers in the UK is about 25% of the US market, but if you’re on the front page and it takes less time to get there, you’ll still rake in a higher percentage of profit.
The same thing goes for all non–US English markets, including .CA, .AU, and .NZ.
Alternate PPC Marketing Platforms
Since it was launched in 2002, Google AdWords has been the king of Internet advertising and while Google still gets the lion’s share of search traffic in the world, there are other search engines that can offer quality paid traffic for a fraction of the cost.
Yahoo!, Bing, and YouTube offer PPC advertising that is much less expensive than Google. The bids are usually less because there’s less competition and while you’ll get fewer impressions and clicks, chances are that you’ll make more of a profit from those sites based solely on the smaller upfront investment required.
In addition to using alternate PPC engines, consider using image matching in the Google Content Network. This let’s you submit a banner ad to Adwords that appears on content sites alongside related information. Banner ads are quick and easy to create but are much more effective than standard text ads.
Thinking Beyond ClickBank
ClickBank is one of the top affiliate networks out there but it’s far from the only one. There are literally hundreds of other affiliate networks you can experiment with. And you’ll often fidn the largest standalone products with huge profit levels are on private networks or CPAs as covered in previous chapters of this course.
The Internet Marketing Niche
So I guess you’re wondering what the old, venerable IM niche is doing in the blue ocean chapter? Well, when you’re just starting out in this niche you can’t market yourself as an “expert” if you have no experience but there are plenty of other ways to make money in this niche.
For starters, get yourself a quality WordPress theme (like any of the ones from MyThemeShop.com) and create a log or website. Use that as a platform to outline your expertise and build a following. Even if you are just starting out, you can target other newbies and explain that, even though you are fairly new to the field, you have amassed a wealth of knowledge you’d like to share and your site can be a place for you and other newbies to share your collective experiences as you all grow together in the IM field.
The next step is to build an email list (as we detailed earlier in this course), offering a free bonus that you’ve either written or purchased giveaway rights to, that will entice them to give you their email address in return for the freebie.
Finally, when you actually promote an affiliate offer you must do something that makes you stand out from the crowd of other affiliates who will all be promoting the same product! So offer at least one or more useful bonuses that are relevant to the affiliate product so people will decide to purchase it through your link. Most affiliate product vendors themselves will provide you with one or more bonuses you can giveaway with the sale of their affiliate product – all you have to do is ask them.
To really do the affiliate marketing promotional thing right, you should review the product prior to the launch date. If you ask for a review copy and you actually review the product you will be years ahead of most affiliate marketers who receive review copies and just copy the vendor’s promotional material and even use the vendor’s sales videos and call it a “review.” In the beginning, you may have problems getting review copies but as your reputation grows as an honest product reviewer who sends some sales their way, vendors will love to give you a review copy. Vendors love to help their affiliates promote their products and why wouldn’t they? Vendors wouldn’t be able to sell nearly as many of their products without a strong affiliate system. And that system will, eventually, include you!
Our Course Ending is Just Your Beginning…
Here’s a few final important points to remember:
- Everyone makes mistakes even top super affiliates – they just make mistakes faster than everyone else and you should too!
- Dreams are great but taking action is the only way your dreams will ever come true!
- If you’ve read through this entire course, you’ve learned a lot but not everything you’ve learned ere will be effective all the time. When something isn’t working for you, switch gears and try something else!
- Be persistent in what you want in life and never stop making forward motion and you will eventually reach your goals.
- The only people who ever fail in life are those who quit!
Thank you for taking the time to read this information. There is plenty of cash to go around in the affiliate marketing business and it’s time that you stopped reading this and started taking action to build your own affiliate marketing empire!
Here’s to Your Success!
-Tiger Bill and the TigerMixSolutions Team
