Using Affiliation as a Mass Promotion Tool
There are Hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs out there that you can choose from and all of them are claiming to be the best. Some of them will give you the impression that all you have to do is implement their banners and links and wait for the money to start rolling in. This CAN be the case at times, but this scenario usually only applies to very large sites that have massive web traffic already. For most of us, being a successful affiliate requires a little more work than that!
When you are selling your wares through a website, you will be needing as much help as you can get and that is why affiliation is such a good deal. It gives you and like companies the chance to market your wares in more than one spot. As the marketing affiliate, it is your job to get you and other companies together to do it. Most affiliates use their own sites and combine marketing strategies with others. Your website is likely not geared toward one thing in particular so affiliate’s who come in will gain a lot more from your services.
As the variety of goods and online services offered over the Internet has grown at an incredible rate over the last few years, and in response, so has the competition. Web site visitors need to have a very good reason for clicking on a link or banner. In most affiliate programs, you are offered a wide variety of banners that you can place on your site; all of them will be effective in getting attention from your target audience.
If you can gather a click through rate of at least 2%, then you are doing very well. It has been my experience, that highly colorful and picture filled banners do not perform as successfully as their simpler counterparts. The main reason for this is the time it takes to download it. If a banner is the last thing to load on your page and the banner ad is excessively byte "heavy", by the time it has loaded your visitor may already have scrolled down the page already and miss it entirely.
Heavy banner ads can also slow down the loading of your pages, or even some of the critical elements of your page and you can lose your visitors altogether. This is why A graphically rich banner can also confuse the actual message because the artwork and marketing blurb can be imbalanced. For these reasons, I would recommend that banners you implement be no more that 15kb wherever you possibly can.
Banners that have a lot of animation in them, such as rapid flashing, are also something to consider very carefully before setting them up. While these do achieve high click rates, they are also highly annoying to the average visitor. If you do decide to implement this form of banner advertising, you have to use it very sparingly.
Whenever you begin selecting any form of advertising that requires graphics you should try and keep the theme of your site in mind. In general, while graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch a visitor’s eye, it shouldn't be to the point that everything else on the page is ignored. Whenever you can, you have to make sure that all banner ads or advertising that you use uses a link that opens in a new window. That way, if a visitor does choose to visit one of your advertisers it is easy for them to return to your page and review what they actually came to your site for.
A lot of companies are now offering their affiliates the options of using pop up and pop under ads. However, the fact is they annoy most visitors and are usually closed before they even have a chance to load by automatic program blockers. It is for this reason that you should use pop-unders instead and preferably those that only display once per visit. I will talk more about pop-unders in a later section Successful affiliate marketing requires patience If you are sure that your web site can get a lot of traffic and generate fantastic sales for a certain company, you have to contact them to negotiate a tailored arrangement. If they aren't too enthusiastic to begin with, be patient because companies are approached every day by affiliates wanting to cut a "better deal".
The reality of it is that many affiliates cannot deliver what they promise, and the companies are extremely aware of this. For you as a potential affiliate marketer, you need to implement their links and banners, go the extra mile with ad articles and other unique strategies, generate some sales and then approach them again better prepared. You'll probably find that they'll have a change of heart. Finding good affiliates is very difficult and if you are performing for these companies they will keep you.
Most forms of advertising take some time to kick into gear. Putting a link up for a couple of days and then pulling it down because it is not generating any interest may not be a reflection on the product, but just in the way that it is being presented to your web site visitors. You know how fickle they can be.
If you have run successful campaigns before, try to remember the elements that made it a success and implement them again. Of course, you need to remember that what works for one product may not necessarily for another, but it's worth a try. Again, if you are having problems with promotion, contact the company. They will more than likely have thousands of affiliates and will know what strategies are working. A good advertiser may even go to the trouble of reviewing your site and provide you with some tips and hints based on their observations.
Email advertising as an affiliate marketing tool
Direct promotion that are using email has boomed over recent years, but has brought with it mountains of spam. If you intend on using email as a method of advertising products and services, you have to be sure that you stand behind the products you're promoting and make yourself available to answer any questions that may be asked. If you hide from people, they will wonder what you are hiding.
An effective promotion technique that I have found is to combine email with the ad article strategy. This generally means creating an ezine or newsletter promotion that visitors can sign up for that goes directly to their email inboxes. You can occasionally put a summary of a product or service, however, you should include just enough information to stir the curiosity of your readers in an ezine. The summary then contains a link to the ad article on our site. The benefit of this is not only that you have a good opportunity to promote the product or service, but while visitors are on your site they may also look at other sections at the same time This way you as the advertiser benefits through having highly targeted potential clients visit their site.
Getting Started As an Affiliate Marketer
If you are a beginning Internet Marketer and you do not actually have any money to work with the best way to start marketing is by using the payperclick
search engines. The truth is, when you are a marketer products are not the things that actually sell, it is the traffic that sells. However true this is you still want to promote the programs that meet certain criteria. If you are wondering what the criteria are they are listed below and are as follows:
1. Look for programs that offer to pay you over $10.00 per sale. If not that then at least search for programs that pay you $50.00 per month or more in residual income because just one customer can be worth $1,200.00 to you in 10 years.
2. Look for products to promote that don't have more than one or two external
links to that connect to other programs. If you're going to pay good money to send people to a web site, you should at least make sure that you're sending them to a good money resource and not a resource that has with 50 holes in it.
3. Look for products that have limited ordering options because you don't want to send people to a site if you only get credit when they pay by credit card. The result will be that you will lose people because the site also accepts payment via PayPal and the average person doesn’t know how to integrate PayPal with their current affiliate software or some other more complicated payment method like direct checking.
4. Try to find sales sites. You can check out associateprograms.com and find five programs that meet the criteria. It will take some digging, but they are there if you look for them. Let's say you're promoting sneakers, for example. What you are going to want to do now is find as many applicable keywords as you can that are directly relating to sneakers. You can find lists of keyword variations for any products or services by going to jimtools.com and clicking the 'keywords' button at the top.
How this works is that you can do keyword searches and find every variation of the word sneakers that you can think of. If you save all your keywords in a text file you can place bids at all the major payperclick search engines. Here is a list of some of them:
http://www.overture.com They are very critical and will bring you the most leads.
http://www.findwhat.com delivers pretty good traffic
http://www.bay9.com
http://www.ahha.com
http://www.kanoodle.com
http://www.sprinks.com
http://www.searchandconquer.com This one is Free
http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com
There is a trick to making huge profits with payperclick search engines and one of them is to bid on as many keywords as possible. How it works is that you bid on a 100 keywords and it is the exact same thing as getting 100 links back to your web site. When you are submitting your listings, you must always be sure to put the price there as well. The key factor here is that you want everyone who clicks through your site to be prepared to divvy up some cash.
If you don't do this, you'll loose a lot of money from the people who are always seeking freebies every single time. With this in mind, say you submitted 350 keywords that are relating to sneakers to each and every one of the search engines above. If all of them are totaled together they will give you a combined total of 150 clicks per day. This is assuming of course that only one out of every 300 people make their purchases because this is a particularly popular item.
If you sell one pair of sneakers and make $10.00 per sale that's one sale every two days. If your average bid is 10 cents per lead, it's costing you $3.00 in
advertising costs just so that you can make $10.00. So each month you could average $800.00 from just this one product in net profit per month. That is pretty good, but if you are pushing 5 different products you will have $4000 in one month’s profit.
The next thing that you have to do is try to find five products that are just like the first one. If a company/website doesn't have an affiliate program setup, try calling them and asking if you could strike a special deal with them. The best part of using this marketing technique is that after you set up one income stream using this method, and you've tested it and it's working, you can start on another one right away.
You can promote one or 100 companies if you want to it is really up to you. You can literally set your own desired income this way. Plus, by doing this, you get the chance to build long lasting working relationships with the owners of these programs most of the time. It is like out of nowhere, you suddenly have a network of people you're working with.
If you follow this article closely you'll be drawing more targeted traffic to programs that you promote than most of the high traffic sites that just have a simple link to the product in question. You can do all of this with little to no money at all in the beginning.
Once you start making enough money with the payperclick search engines, you can start investing some of your money in your own idea or business on the Internet that you want to start; which when you think about it just makes sense. You can simply take the easy way out and make more and more money promoting other people's programs. As Internet marketing gets more sophisticated in the next few years, there will be more and more companies that are offering solid moneymaking opportunities to experienced resellers, so it is best that you do your homework and learn this stuff while you can because eventually everyone will be trying to cash in on this ‘then ancient’ method.
The craft of Listing
Owning a list is the most profitable online marketing tool out there today.
As an affiliate marketer, you are going to have to get used to listing. In fact, there's not a time when you can send out your mailing to the A+ Marketplace where you won’t make $300.00. You can build your list with little to no effort to over 6,800 subscribers within five months and have over 35,000 subscribers by using some highly effective tactics. Let’s take a look at some of those tactics now.
Popup Emails:
This method is 10x as easy to get once you visit the Opt In Lightning site or any other site that Opt In Lightning is installed on. When you do this, you'll notice that it captures the visitor's email address without the visitor having to fill out a form when they sign on for it. They just have to click “OK.” Instead. This is commonly known as Auto Info Capture, and makes it 10x easier for people to subscribe to your mailing list. The basic principle here is that the easier you make it for people to subscribe the quicker your list grows.
When you use Optin Lightning programs, you can nab any email address from the visitor's client browser. The number of Hotmail and Yahoo addresses is that you can pick up is practically zero. The few Hotmail or Yahoo addresses you do capture are those that they configured in their browser, and will go right into their main inbox anyway instead of them having to retrieve them over the 'net.
This is commonly referred to as your "Pull Ratio."
When you use a regular or "traditional" subscribe box, what you are doing is subject your list to what can be called pollution. What I mean by this is that, nothing is stopping people from populating your list with FFA confirmation email addresses, Auto Responders etc. If you ever decide to sell ads, your advertising clients are going to get very angry as your list grows because they will expect that their own ads that they paid good money for to pull more.
Using the old method over an extended period of time will eventually hurt your business. This is why Internet Marketing experts all agree that Ezines that get larger lose all or most of their pull. Now you know why. Someone using the traditional subscribe method can put all their friends etc. on your list, and force you to deal with spam complaints. This is called "List Bombing" and by using Popup Email Capture only, you will be able to avoid this completely.
If you can avoid these problems from the start, you'll slowly and steadily grow a solid clientele hungry for your products and services.
Personalizing email
You should always personalize each and every email that you send out because this gives people who are on the list a feeling that you’re not just another newsletter editor, but their friend and that you truly care about their success. Doing this can increase your sales by at least 200%. You have to think like a marketer as well as a consumer. If you start to think like a salesman, you will loose customers. The competition here is fierce but if you work on it, you will succeed. You want to shoot for the feeling where you actually become one with your list. By personalizing your emails, I mean that you can write as if you were sending a note to your friend. That's when you know for a fact that you will have a following.
Send Emails on Friday
I always send my newsletter on Friday at noon because it reaches the East Coast at 3:00 p.m. This way your readers will have the entire weekend to read it, when they are relaxed and comfortable. During the week, your consumers have to work, deal with family and home matters etc. They simply do not have the time to really give your emails much thought. When you wait till the weekend to send the mails, you can take the weekend off and come back Monday to find a stack of orders just waiting for you.
Offer Incentives
Offering incentives like free bonuses just for subscribing with no obligation to remain a subscriber can really boost your orders. Doing this builds a level of trust with new people who don't know you. You see when you start by offering freebies, you will attract a whole new crowd of consumers.
Follow up your Emails
By using an AutoResponder you can deliver your follow-ups without effort. Each follow up should be a sales letter to a residual income product you’re selling, an MLM program you’re promoting or a product you’re selling. There should not be any free content and these sales letters don't beat around the bush. I make thousands per month using email follow up alone. You can get an occasional flame and some unsubscribes, but this is exactly what you should want.
You want to be building up your client list and the follow-ups actually WEED OUT people who aren't ready to make some kind of monetary commitment which will make your job a great deal easier.
No free content
Do not offer any free content because this gives the reader nowhere to go. They either get involved with what you’re doing or they get off the list. Besides when you are offering free content, all that you are really accomplishing is you owing more money and having less bandwidth to work with.
Don't accept any form of paid advertising
By accepting paid advertising, you only succeed in polluting your list and This takes attention away from whatever your newsletter's main theme is. You want to keep your readers informed of MLM and Residual Income
Programs because this just another way of building and keeping their trust in you.
Don't put copyright on it
Some lists add copyright information and I really don't know why. It is best to simply forward this information to anyone that might be interested. It's a lot easier than using a script and it's been working for me. In any case, most people generally don’t care anyway.
Purchase Subscribers
Every email address that you could possibly get is like potential gold to you so if you are going to purchase any email addresses from the many lists that are available for purchase, however, you have to be very specific in who you choose to buy from so watch out. You can purchase 1,000 subscribers for as little as $197.00 with some companies. It helps to be on the lookout.
Talk about yourself a bit
This may sound a bit strange, but people like to do business with people
they know and trust. When you include SOME personal information about yourself, people will get to know you as a person. This helps break the ice and makes it a lot easier to do business with people. I don’t know about you, but I always respond better to a business person that is willing to be a bit more friendly and personal with me.
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