Stepping Stones to Affiliate Marketing – Chapter 1

It’s an evident fact that Affiliate Marketing has come out big with its highly innate and powerful potential to sell. That’s probably why you googled it and ended up here. Everybody who doesn’t shy away from earning some extra bucks is doing affiliate marketing today! So without wasting any time, let’s quickly sail through the nitty gritties of Affiliate Marketing and your first steps to it.

Ever since the the trend of internet marketing started, the savvy marketeers as well as the technologists have been profoundly indulging themselves into the phenomenon, discovering new, innovative and better ways to sell. With the advent of social media and internet advertising, sales soared to a level, that lured every single business to advertise on the internet.

In 2017, ecommerce was responsible for around $2.3 trillion in sales and is predicted to hit $4.5 trillion in 2021.

– Statista

Soon marketeers started picking a third form of advertising called Affiliate marketing. Following fictional scenario will let you understand the gist of Affiliate marketing and it’s origin:

A Healthcare IoT tech company, XYZ launched a new watch that rests on your wrists and monitors your heart rate. Now the marketing team of XYZ has set its pace to quickly market and sell the watch. In the parallel world, Ana is a gadget freak who buys new gadgets, writes down reviews on her website of the newly launched products in the market, her website get millions of page visits a day. Now XYZ approaches Ana with a deal. Ana writes a review of the watch on her website and also pins a link to buy it on the review post. In return for every sale that is made through Ana’s website, she earns a commission. Guess who are two very happy people now?

Here’s a diagrammatic representation of how it works:

Source

Hence, Affiliate marketing surfaced as a processed and polished process of writing raw reviews of the products or just simply putting a link to the product page on your website and thereby earning a commission on the sale. It is a way for websites and blog owners to earn a commission on the sales that are made through their websites and posts.

Already excited? Me too!

Now let’s quickly get to how you can get started with building your own affiliate network.

Starting your own affiliate marketing

Here’s a step by step process for how to start affiliate marketing:

First thing that you need to do is start your own blog or a website. If you already have a website, make sure it’s getting some form of traffic before you can start putting the affiliate links. Make sure to choose a niche that suits you, I recommend starting on with something that interests you. Let’s say you’re a hobbyist painter, you can start your website that sells paintings, or start a blog about paintings or a photo gallery.

The next thing you need to do is list some products that can entice your readers, for instance, people interested in paintings would potentially buy painting props, or paints or some new and unique paintings on the market. After you have decided on the products, search for the “product name” affiliate program. Here is a list programs that you’ll probably find: Top 15 Affiliate Marketing Websites & Programs For 2019.

After you find a suitable affiliate program for your product, Sign up for their affiliate program. After your account gets activated, go to the product links section of your account, and embed the HTML code or the the link into your website. Make sure you place the link according its relevancy. The most irrelevant products can increase your bounce rates and lower Click through rates(CTRs).

Incorporate as many products as you want on your blog posts, your products website, or your business or eCommerce websites, and watch out your analytics boom. And you’re all set. Merry around while your readers make you money!

Now how exactly the link is going to work and earn you money? Understanding the working will help you enable the technical correctness of using links on your website.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Your Affiliate Program Partner can employ a number of different ways to track the affiliate link that you use. It all starts when some website visitor on your page clicks a link on your post or page.

The most common and basic type of tracking is via a cookie. When your readers click an affiliate link, a small piece of data called a cookie is stored on the users computer. If the reader buys the product, the merchant will be notified that the sale was made through your referral.

There are also more advanced methods based on the email used or IP address – but we really don’t need to care about all those.

Commission rates vary from merchant to merchant. For the lower limit, you’ll earn atleast about 5% of the sale but, with some other merchants or products, you can also grab as high as 50%, typically when promoting some high end products or events. There are some affiliate programs that offer flat rate per sale rather than a percentage.

While this is only one simple aspect of Affiliate Marketing, it takes much more advanced, and intense set of mechanics, and practices that drive actual profit for the newbies.

After building one after the other affiliate networks for a number of start-ups and mid-scale industries from India and abroad, I have gained a holistic understanding of the concept ant it’s implementation. But there is still so much left unexplored given it humongous prevalence in almost every industry, and also with merchants having different terms and practices for their affiliates. I intend to post up every lesson that I learnt through my personal experience with affiliate marketing. I started with this book called “Affiliate: The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing (How to Make Money Online Selling Other People’s Products)” by Anthony James. You can check out the book and buy one for yourself.

I know it’s exciting, but before you plunge in, it’s wise to do a plenty of research. Who all are doing Affiliate Marketing? Is Affiliate Marketing for you? What products to promote? What affiliate programs to choose? These are all the questions that you need to answer before you can start on with a plan.

In the upcoming blogs, I’m going to answer more questions linked to affiliate marketing along with the ones listed above with more detailed tutorials on how to build successful affiliate marketing websites. So stay tuned for more!

May happiness be yours today! 🙂

How Product Giants are Going Big with Microservices

For the past couple of decades in the arena of Information technology, a product’s success is directly driven by the ability of a producer to quickly absorb the contemporary technology and deliver to the dynamic customer expectations. The ones that don’t, succumb to the market unpredictability and technological disruption. 

A report by NGINX about 1,800 IT professionals state that 75% of the organizations are on their way to adopt microservices architecture, while the rest 25% are already using it in production.

The Genesis Of Microservices

Microservices today is a diligently adopted development methodology by some of the big players of the internet. Ever since Dr. Peter Rodgers first introduced the term “Micro-Web-Services” during a presentation at the Web Services Edge conference in 2005, it has come a long way in bringing about a radical change in software development.

At the Top of the Ladder

Walmart was failing consistently for two Black Fridays after it replatformed it’s archaic application architecture in 2012 only to see Conversions go up by 20% literally overnight and mobile orders by 98% instantly saving them tons of computing power and money.

Amazon serves millions of customers at a time with a seamless interface. Similarly, the tech giants like Spotify, Netflix, eBay, Twitter, SoundCloud, PayPal and many more have come out to be a huge success with microservices. 

What are Microservices?

Before moving on to how adopting microservices helped these internet giants in obtaining an edge in such tough competition, let’s first look at what microservices are and how they function:

Microservices architecture is another groundbreaking software development technique that break the monolithic application development into smaller independently managed modules that perform indisputable and discrete tasks, and are connected to one another with universally accessible APIs.

The main idea behind the architecture is to differentiate tasks into processes that can be independently managed.

Here is how scaling property of microservices differs from the monolithic development approach of applications:

So each service runs one process and manages its own database. This lets development teams work with a decentralized way to build products and also lets each service to be deployed, redeployed and built independently. 

Why Product Giants are the Most Influenced?

Though monolithic architecture works well for many applications, many developers find it a cumbersome approach in certain cases, particularly the product based enterprises that have to address an ever-growing consumer base. Let’s take the case of Netflix, a revolutionary entertainment service that streams about 350 million hours of video content per day for approximately 120 million subscribers in about 200 countries.

With this amount of complexity, broadcasting quality video content in a matter of seconds to the user is not a piece of cake. So, Netflix breaks down the entire application into around 700 microservices, each to control one of the parts of what makes up the entire Netflix workflow: One microservice stores the programs you watched, one charges the monthly fee from your account, the other one lets your device play the correct videos and so on. Now Netflix engineers can make changes to any 700 of these microservices and can incorporate new changes making sure that the rest of the services in the application works fine in the meantime. That’s the recipe that works!

Now that you know how microservices work, let’s take a look at some of the key takeaways that every enterprise gets from using Microservices:

Microservices Architecture: Benefits At Glance

• Modular Approach: Microservices have given firms a modular approach of building applications so now each functionality of their app can be deployed and then redeployed independently without having to trade-off the integrity of their application. 

• Continuity due to Modular Independence: If one module stops working within a framework, others will continue to work. This does wonders in larger applications that remain unaffected by the failure of one of the components.

• Linguistic Versatility: Code for different services can be written in different languages based on what works best for which service. 

• Instant integration and continuous delivery: Microservices enable using open-source continuous integration tools such as Jenkins, etc. and makes continuous delivery possible at every stage.

• Ease of Modification with Organised Code: Microservices eases the work of developers manifold. It helps them do away with redoing everything from scratch everytime a change is desired by making that particular module modifiable as a single entity.

• Scalability, Reusability, Efficiency: With Microservices, a company that aims to grow by leaps and bounds has an architecture that can scale. Just like Spotify has done with multiple components spread across multiple servers and data centers.

• Good Security Monitoring: Microservices give the companies a reliable security monitoring with the isolation it provides to all the modules. A security problem that is bound to happen in one module can be avoided in rest of modules in time. 

As the technology and user consumption patterns keep evolving, newer and better techniques of software development continue to resurface. But the real fruit here lies in due diligence in understanding what works best for a particular use case. Where a microservices architecture works best for one enterprise, another enterprise may find a monolithic approach much suitable. 

As you adopt one trending methodology, there will be some key challenges and glitches in terms of infrastructure management, development techniques and team management. So, take time to understand and plan and stay tuned for more on microservices on our blog!

Tata motor’s latest debut rolls out a niche brand

Tata Motors has launched its brand-new performance sub-brand TAMO and a new Commuter Vehicle (PV) plan under which the company will expose its superior product, the Futuro on 7th March 2017 before the forthcoming Geneva Motor Show. TAMO, the organization, says, “will act as an incubating center of innovation towards innovative technologies, business standards, and partnerships to define future versatility solutions.”

TAMO is not just an added sub-brand such as Land Rover and Jaguar under Tata’s reign. It will not wind run of the mill cars either. Instead, TAMO cars will be the low amount and small investment models with stress on the base value of ownership, eco-friendly drivelines and a modular architecture. To achieve this, the first step that the company has taken is the reduction of platforms from six to just two.

Foreseen to be launched in 2018, the Tata Futuro will be the prime sports car by Tata Motors and is awaited to be priced around Rs 25 lakh, ex-showroom, Delhi. According to the company, the car will be “a stunning-looking car for the money” and will be outlined in-house. The Tata Futuro is a two-seater sports car and will be offered in limited numbers, 250 units initially.

The Tata Futuro will use nebbish body construction, which could be a blend of both, carbon-fibre and aluminum along with new technologies and innovations. Tata Motors currently uses six vehicle platforms, but the TAMO will use only two in favor of a lean and efficient working approach. The Futuro will be based on the compliant Advanced Modular Platform (AMP) to diminish the overall weight and will weigh around 700 kg. Aforementioned, it will give the car a fair power-to-weight ratio and will moreover aid the little effusions and fuel competence of the car. The AMP platform is proficient of producing a broad range of vehicles ranging from a hatchback to a sports car.

Tim Leverton, president, and head, Advanced and Product Engineering, Tata Motors, said, ”With TAMO, we are starting a new era. The idea is to find new and innovative ways of experimenting. Their focus will be to hunt for new technologies and to track down opportunities at the innovation centers across the globe and to work with start-ups in the new spaces.

Masterpiece

If you’re one of those folks who wants to become an entrepreneur, you’re not alone. Diamond movies like The Social Network and Steve Jobs have put the passion of entrepreneurship in the limelight. Thus, it’s not any surprise to know that a lot of people out there are planning to embark on their entrepreneurial journeys.…

via These 8 Reasons For Becoming An Entrepeneur Will Cause Failure — ShoutMeLoud

10 Passive Idioms that will knock you off your socks!

Idioms are a very alluring and colorful way of communication and using them often make you look winning. But what is the most interesting part of coming across an idiom? You often cannot guess what an idiom means by the word semantics, in fact, the actual meaning might sometimes be downright opposite of what it appears to be, and meaning of the individual words do not at all add up to its meaning. Let’s browse you through some incredible idioms that you may not have heard or known before:

1. Her magpie stands high: Is rather an ingenious and funny way of saying someone has long legs. Magpie is a form of a bird species and is considered to be ill, or a good omen, depending on the place you’re in. Example: The new Miss beauty pageant is a tomboy, and her Magpie stands high.
2.  You are my Orange half: This phrase has widely used a form of endearment and is usually used to refer someone as your other half, or your beloved one or soul mate. He referred her as his Orange Half while proposing her for the wedding.
3. To pedal in sauerkraut: This idiom means to have been sabotaged in your thoughts and processes or to be at a complete loss, and it’s origin dates to the races in Tour de France, in which the losers were featured on Billboard advertising sauerkraut.
4. Schadenfreude: Is not an idiom but you may rather call it a German-derived English word that means, pleasure derived from the misery of others.” Schaden” means harm “free” means joy. Example: The Schadenfreude he exhibits calls for some serious atrocity from his dear ones.
5. On the QT: This idiom signifies something that is done discreetly or secretly. For example, They got hitched last autumn on the QT.
6. Uncharted waters: If you happen to be in a situation that you’ve never been before, and have no clue about what is going to happen, you are into uncharted waters. Example: The Uncharted waters he got into compelled him to rush back to his hometown.
7. All these geese are swans: This expression refers to a situation much exaggerated that it is. Example: Don’t let them impress you with their products. All their geese are swans.
8. Yellow-bellied: A yellow-bellied person is diffident, cowardly and easily intimidated. Example: the yellow-bellied passengers flew away the moment the robbers attacked the bus driver.
9. In vino veritas: This idiom has a Latin derivation meaning “In wine, there is the truth,” can be used to say that wine makes people speak more freely and reveal true feelings. Example: He couldn’t hide the secret after the party and revealed everything in vino veritas!
10. Laugh all the way to the bank: It refers to a situation where a person makes a lot of money quickly especially through someone’s idiotic move. He is then said to laugh all the way to the bank. His friends were stumped at his cleverness as he laughed all the way to the bank after the gamble.

But Idioms have a pitfall when it comes to using them in another language. You might end up committing a gaffe if you do. For example, if you might want to convey that you’ve had enough food and wouldn’t like anymore, you’d probably say “No, Thank you, I’m full.” But if that happens while you’re dining with a French family or a corporate client from France, you well may get a jaw dropping response by him because I’m full would in French though mean Non, merci. Je Suis pleine. But its intended meaning would go like: No, thank you, I’m pregnant. Lol! Isn’t this fun?  So while you go about bragging about your advanced proficiency in the English language, make sure you are well-versed with contexts and know what you’re using.

Deception rules the marketing!

The statement seems too good to be true, right? But there is an inherent truth lurking behind it. Plato said “Those who tell stories rule the society,” looking at the current marketing field and the influential political proposition, it can be seen evidently that the wisdom still applies, in fact, our world seems to be more interesting, flooded with new flavors with this exceptionally adept art. Applying this on a macroeconomic scale, when you have that ability to measure people and know who you’re dealing with in your business correctly, things take a different course. And, this has come out to become the most important skill in gathering or conserving power, especially in a driven business environment where profits of the organization have the top most priority after individual growth. And there are possible instances no matter how hard we play, no matter, however, powerful we are, there will always be a deceptively stronger person in the queue who will come out to be the unsung hero.

How intact is it within our Markets?

Talking about the marketing business, seen the Duracell lasts even longer Ad? They got sued by US customers claiming their alleged involvement in deceptive Marketing, they were more expensive than regular batteries although did not provide longer life than regular alkaline batteries.

Would you buy a body lotion that promises you weight reduction? Lol! I guess most of us would. But Nivea had paid a lump sum of $900,000 as settlement for the misleading advertisement, ultimately had to stop producing it.

And you won’t believe these ads got sold in 60 seconds!

I guess your business can cover here itself behind fictitious names and exhibit superfluous proficiency in various topics, there is a greater chance of acquiring customers who don’t know better. They have the option of hiring affiliates to do the illegal, dirty work of convincing people for them.

Also, it seems that people who inherit this art tend to do a lot better in life than others, especially when they have a superfluous pool of excuses they keep telling themselves, they’re happy and the best part, nobody can snatch it from them! Something reassuring under this scenario can be that it attracts some noble people into its palace who marvel at keeping up its spirit and brings under its influence the young entrepreneur minds.

Jio’s 50 million subscribers on a Chill Wind!

With the year end, Jio user’s salad days have taken a leap, the full bouquet though will end on March 31^st, but the welcome offer ended right when the clock struck twelve on 31^st. The fair usage policy limit of 4GB has been slashed to 1GB now. The dawn of New Year will change a bit on how you’ve been exploiting you Jio sim!

The extended plan broke the Portion of Jio users into two categories, the welcome offer users, ones who’ve been owning one since day 1 i.e September 5 until December 4 and, the new year offer users, all those who’ve been using its services since December 4. The New Year offer users will continue using the extended offer right from December 31^st which includes following:

• The daily data usage limit has been reduced to 1 GB, after which the download speed will be slashed to 128 kbps.
• However, for the freaks that are too over-possessive of their free services will have an additional option of cheap booster packs which includes INR 51 for 1 GB of Data and INR 301 for 6GB of Data.
• However, the welcome offer users will get the services as the extended ones from January 1^st.
• All the Jim apps will offer free services until the end of next year, so you can still stream your favorite movies, TV shows, songs, and stuff till a very long time.

But the extended offer move by Mukesh Ambani intended to consolidate the customer base, may not yield the desired results. With its counterparts already slashing the rates of their services will make up for some its lost customers, a number of users are switching back to their trusted Operators.

Read more to find out:

Why switch back? A freebie is a freebie!

Why switch back? A freebie is a freebie!

A freebie is a freebie, you can’t go and fight for its problems like you would have normally done for a paid service. The freebie avalanche that Mr. Mukesh Ambani threw was supposed to bring about a digital upheaval. India is the land of poor internet connectivity, with bad call rates and unavailability of networks in the rural area, a considerable portion of the population lives in a derelict in terms of digital device usage, internet connectivity and consequently they’re missing out so much they could make use of. The move, when strategized and implemented, could have done so much for the middle class and the rural people.

And sure it managed to do a lot, apart from establishing an indirect monopoly; it benefited its users a lot and the first few days after the launch was like living a dream. Downloading all the media from Google Drive, while streaming music on Gaana app, was something that would have been impossible on any other operator. But anyways, Jio did it.

Then what’s the Achilles heel?

Once hoards started using Reliance Jio, which is an assumption based on the outcome that Welcome Offer opened to all on September 5, the network turned sluggish. Normal browsing and chatting were smooth or less. The speed became lower than the promised speed but is something you can call decent until it stays near its higher limits. But the bigger problem is fluctuations and inconsistency.

Normal calling became worse. A normal call over Reliance Jio network was something very unpleasant and annoying. The whole conversation had been sounding like more of a morose code speaking. Calling on other operators like Airtel or Vodafone has been next to impossible. Reasons being unknown can be attributed to conspiracy from other operators, or some technical glitches. But the problem continues to remain serious. We don’t know how this is going to play out in the future. Will it get better? Will Jio deliver its services as promised? Or will it get worse, as more and more people join the network?  But until the services go commercial for real some people are going back to their trusted operators keeping a watch on trends.

 

 

 

Facts you didn’t know about Sasikala: the soul sister story!

People of Tamil Nadu are in close ranks with the decision of Sasikala being the successor of Jayalalithaa after she showed no disinterest in taking up all obligations in place of her motherly friend. And guess what’s on binge regarding the wise old lady’s confidante? Here is what’s been talked about her lately:

• Sasikala used to run a video renting and recording shop in the 1980s when Jayalalithaa was then the Propaganda Secretary of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).
• Sasikala has a large family, it was alleged that some members of her family ran a parallel government by misusing Sasikala’s proximity to Jayalalithaa.
• Jayalalithaa had to face criticism because of Sasikala’s family. In 2011, Jayalalithaa expelled her and 13 of her relatives from the party.
• Along with Jayalalithaa, Sasikala was sentenced to 4 years imprisonment by a special court in Bangalore on 27 September 2014.

But what is that that makes us call sasikala, Jayalalithaa’s confidante despite her having such an obnoxious image pertaining to corruption charges?

It is believed that when a faction of ADMK party was opposing her taking over the party after Marudhur Gopalan Ramachandran, safety former CM passed away, Sasikala and her family supported her in her salad days of becoming the CM. Jaya was even believed to have safely guarded by Sasikala from physical assaults by providing hideouts. Deaths of her mother and then MGR must have left a void in her. She was just 43 when she became CM, someone had to be with her in the pressure of being a CM at such a young age. Sasikala may thus be righteously called her confidante.

Covering up the cashless Economy

With the scrapping away of 86% of the high denomination 1000 and 500 notes worth Rs. 15 trillion by PM Narendra Modi has brought to light a number of allegations against the NDA government claiming that it has “blocked” the money of the poor through currency ban to favor a “handful of industrialists”.

While this is the primary political issue being raised, there is no dearth of the perspectives one might have, with all sorts of debates coming up pertaining to various pros and cons of the move.  With Arun Jaitley offering excessively large discounts and attractive offers on digital transactions, some see the battle transforming its course from “scrapping away of the black money” to “digitizing the Era”. But this too has a number of hurdles coming into its way that include the inability of people to use digital payment modes due to illiteracy and poor penetration of internet services in rural areas. Consequently, a substantial number of people have formed allies with rebels raising voices for the fleeting cashless economy.

The politicians on the other hand who once seemed to be really laid back with the problems of the working class, the small businessmen, and the peasants, suddenly have become the sole bearers for understanding their problems and looks like they would go bananas to prove expedient the actions of the present government.

Various issues have also been raised regarding the poor implementation plans by the well behaved critics against the demonetization move, who clearly seem failed to understand that, a currency worth of 20 trillion could not be printed on one go unless the same has been gradually channelized into the markets.

One Undeniable fact underneath all the commotion that is going on is that Modi Ji is struggling with the economy and he would go to any extents to live up to the expectations of the people. Even the poorest of the people realize the exigency of the move that has been taken, the only problem lies with the cashless situation which by all means is curable and will subside once the government eases the withdrawal limits after 80% of remonetization. Whatever be the scenario, the long-term benefits of the move definitely seems to obfuscate the chaos and the petty accusations that are being made against the government without having any clear pieces of evidence of the same.