That‘s a mouthful. What do I mean this time? (Most of my friends seem to throw their hands up in disgust every time I come up with some new-fangled marketing concept craziness. They never really understand what I’m talking about.)
Expert Framing: a calculated campaign to get ‘experts’ in your field to acknowledge YOU as the ultimate expert on their blogs, websites, white papers and email blasts. Why would they want to do this? Well, money and favors of course. Framing, believe it or not, is a natural occurrence of affiliate marketing. Your affiliate partner might say: “Colin is the leading authority on video marketing today. Join Colin and I for this powerful class on Tuesday.”
There. He just ‘framed’ me as an expert. Get enough affiliates to say this and your name recognition and reputation goes through the roof. Ok. So we all have some affiliates here and there selling some of our stuff for us. For the most part, they may have one of your product banners on their site – a site probably no one is visiting. This is where most affiliate marketing fails: supplying banners and links to website owners who think they are the shit, but aren’t really. Every site owner thinks they will get traffic, but they rarely do. So you get no sales, and no framing. How do you fix that?
Article contests. Get your affiliates more involved than just pasting a lame banner on their website. Supply them with copy and resources to publish articles all over the web: article distribution sites, free PR sites, blog posts, article pages on their own sites, Tweets and Facebook… even Youtube videos. Here’s the catch: they have to write some copy in their own words about how great you are and great your product or service is, mentioning you and your products by name. Their affiliate link in the article is unique and traceable: you can see exactly which of your affiliates have gotten the most impressions, leads, clicks or sales. Then the winner gets a prize.
They get more than just a commission if they sell stuff. The winner gets a real cash prize, say $300 or more. It’s easy: whoever gets the most leads or sales wins. What do YOU get? Besides the sales and inbound links to your website? Well, framing of course. Now you have dozens, possibly hundreds, of people stating that you are the expert. And not just on their websites, but all over the internet. Depending on how many articles your affiliates submitted and to where, you could Google your name and see thousands of entries in the results with your name as the pre-eminant expert in your field. The real value is not in the sales you’ll make from this campaign, but in the ability to ask a premium fee for your services. Want to be the world’s highest paid copywriter? The most highly esteemed leadership expert?
Easy. Get everyone else to say it for you…
