Top Of Mind

In this day and age, competition is fierce and is everywhere.  Differentiation is what gets you noticed and keeps you top of mind.  One way of staying top of  mind is by providing gifts of appreciation to clients and vendors.

One elegant way to express congratulations to clients and employees is with the traditional gift basket. These attractive offerings come in different sizes to fit your gift giving needs (and budget), and can also be the centerpiece of any special event, including company parties, grand opening celebrations, trade shows, table favors, promotions, retirement parties, etc.

These baskets can be decorated with poinsettias, pine cones and berries and/or scrumptious gourmet See’s candy, including milk/dark chocolate, brittles & toffees, truffles, candy bars and old school but delicious lollypops.

Craving baked goods? Your business contacts may too. Convey your warm regards by sending them a muffin gift pack that includes 6  fresh muffins, some flavorful coffee eggnog, and some powdered instant hot chocolate packets.

The gift of cheese is one not to be overlooked for your lactose tolerant business contacts. Gift packs may include roasted garlic, cheddar cheese, cranberry, apple, tomato and basil cheese, gourmet mustard, Bavarian Halle sausage, beef salami, cheddar cheese spread.

Coffee connoisseurs would appreciate a java pack.  Many times these contain special mugs, and all sorts of coffee  goodies including: chocolate cookies, stuffed pastry cream puffs, chocolate caramel cappuccino, Irish coffee syrup, vanilla hazelnut coffee, some cream and more.

It’s been said that there is more happiness in giving than there is in receiving.  So go ahead – reap the emotional rewards, but enjoy the continued flow of business…

Scrub-ulous

Priests wear them.  Doctors and nurses too.  So do pilots, police and fireman.  Some children do too if they go to a private school. What is it? A uniform.  And they can make you money.

Different types of daily life activities require the use uniforms.  Some serve as a protection, others as a means of distinguishing a specific group of people within an institution, setting or activity. The diferences in normal day-to-day dress compared to a uniform could be as simple as a shirt with a logo, or a whole outfit that includes pants and a top with a pattern, such as medical scrubs.  Long gone are the days of white lab coat only doctors. Todays scrubs come in a plethora of different color and pattern combos.

And lets not forget accessories.  Some uniforms require special footwear, such as boots, and/or a vest or jacket, such as in the military.  Some require headgear  such as a beret, helmets, or a cap (police and sports oriented uniforms). Sometimes gloves tie into the  mix too.

Uniforms are a way of life.    So why not get on the bandwagon? This is a good niche to explore, and it’s recurring one, as they need to be replaced often.

PPC Explained

In recent years, pay per click (PPC) advertising has become a popular marketing strategy for online retailers. What ever niche you as an affiliate are promoting, PPC advertising can help you achieve your online marketing goals. Thanks to the diversity of advertising companies that offer pay per click (from the main search engines Google, and Bing to many smaller options) you can use PPC advertising regardless of your budget. To help you understand the true potential of pay per click advertising, here are some benefits PPC advertising can provide:

Traffic - Obviously, this is the number one benefit of PPC advertising. Due to the low cost of bidding on keywords, PPC can help drive a large amount of traffic for a relatively low price. The other PPC traffic advantage is the fact that it is instantaneous. Unlike organic traffic (which can take many months or even a year to start to get especially for the new websites), with PPC advertising you can start driving traffic to your website now!

Many online marketers are under the misconception that once you have a high organic rankings in search, running a PPC campaign is not necessary. On the contrary, the creation and operation of a pay per click campaign is very important, even if your site draws a quality organic traffic. The reason that a PPC campaign can complement the organic ranking is that it can help enhance your branding efforts. When potential visitors see that your website appears twice in search results, brand recognition and trust increases. This will result in more leads and/or more sales for you.

If creating your PPC campaign seems daunting, work with a Pay Per Click agency, such as BizzClick LLP. They provide a 24/7 support team, personal managers for each client, a great variety of tools for the creation of your advertising campaign and one of the fastest XML feeds in industry. They also have their own FiSoAp traffic ranking system which helps you get they right type of traffic by traffic sorting and filtering (which means you minimize chargebacks and reduce your chances of getting stuck with high click costs bids).

With the right tools, an optimized PPC campaign not only gives you  insight as to how much money your website is generating, but also how  much to spend. You monitor site visitors, see what they are looking for and what they are buying.

With some creativity on your search phrase choices, you can target the right people who are willing to do business with you. And that’s what marketing is all about…

Sell, Sell, Sell

Since the 90′s, we’ve gradually stopped going to the store, the store comes to us.

Affiliate Marketing is like direct selling.  Direct Selling carries the potential of awesome financial rewards for individuals who learn to maximize this kind of distribution channel. Why do major corporations such as MCI, U.S. Sprint, Coca Cola, Colgate Palmolive, Gillette, Avon and Fuller Brush, among many others, take part in direct marketing?  Because it works! It’s a cheap and effective way to garner market penetration.

According to the Direct Selling Association, this selling approach sets in motion some 12 billion dollars annually on products in the U.S. alone, from vitamins to rain chains. Within its membership, the DSA has recognized 200 companies and about 16 million sellers. Total sales for 2010 $16 billion. 

The trend is clear, the most renowned economist of the past few years, Paul Zane Pilzer, predicts that the next trillion dollar industry is the health and welfare and its distribution through network marketing or direct sales.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor estimates that 20 percent of the workforce in the United States is already working on their own. If forecasters are right, that number can approach 100 percent in the coming years.

Experts have long predicted that the twenty-first century is an era of luxury, Internet, health and welfare, a world of abundance designed specifically to accommodate the expectations of consumers. And it will. But this opportunity is only available to those who make smart decisions. 

In the coming years, our survival is primarily determined by the decisions we make today,  and on the strategies we choose to build our businesses in this Information. Those who choose to work in network marketing today are taking a giant step in the right direction.

 

The Basics

Affiliate Marketing has become one of the most effective online advertising methods. It is also a great vehicle for anyone with a website to earn money online. There a ton of big-wig affiliates in Canada.  Could a move to Canada be warranted? International movers, anyone?

But seriously, lets review what the Affiliate Marketing space is: it’s basically an agreement between a merchant and owner of a website. The web site owner uses his website to promote the  merchant’s products. In exchange, the merchant pays a commission on all sales generated by the affiliate. When someone clicks on the link on the affiliate website and proceeds to make a purchase, the affiliate gets a commission. The merchant pays the affiliate only when a customer clicks on the product link and makes a purchase.

Benefits?  The merchant gets a t0n of exposure on the affiliates dime. The more affiliates a brand has, the more traffic it gets that can be converted into sales. Affiliate marketing is the equivalent of having an army of sales people doing advertising, who only gets paid if the customer buys. For the affiliate the benefits are:  no upfront cost of joining an affiliate program, a healthy revenue stream, with no inventory to buy and stock, since all order fulfillment is done by the merchant. 

There are thousands of products and services you can choose to market. And many are back my reputable affiliate managers that are there to help you to become successful. And if you do not make money promoting a product, simply choose another

So there you have it, and easy high-level overview of the affiliate spacen and no international moving required. In a future post, we’ll discuss some strategies on how to become a super affiliate.

 

 

Website Promotion

So you got your site up! Now what? Now you need to get people there. There are a ton of ways to do is. Some are cheaper than others, some take time (and time does cost money). SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a key factor in getting noticednes, but there is a lot involved with doing it right. If you’d like to hire someone to do the work for you, there are many companies out there who would be happy to do so, and they’ll be sure to empty your pockets. However, don’t skip the basics. A website without any personal touches isn’t likely to draw in any new customers. Now let’s start with these basic first steps, before worrying about everything else that comes with Search Engine Optimization.

Content Rules- Make sure you understand how far great content can take your site. A website that’s doesn’t have any engaging resources for it’s prospects is going to lose visitors fairly quickly. Be aware of how much information your site contains. Include details about what your company provides to its clients and customers, its background, and personnel bios. You want your website to be a place that prospects can turn to for a complete picture of what you offer. If you’re successful in providing all of the pertinent information, then you’ve decresed your chances that viewers will look elsewhere for answers.

Show your personality- Visitors enjoy feeling like they can relate to you. Win prospects over before they even visit your office, with personalized content and photos. Most of us trust our neighbors more than a stranger in another zip code, so help your prospective clients understand that you’re right nearby. You can even include your personal favorites (foods, movies, travel destinations) in your employee profile. This helps prospects see more of your personality, which helps to build a connection. These little touches will help your site to vary greatly from other basic websites for accountants that your competitors may use.

Pay attention to your dentist, grocer and dog groomer. What do they do to stand out in your mind? Are they friendly? Prompt? Professional? Think of those businessmen/women when building your site, and remember to include your standout qualities. Building connections through personalized content is the best first step in building impressive websites for accountants. Then you could take the subsequent step and put your focus on optimizing your accounting firm’s site for search engines.

It’s In The Mail

One of the first things you’ll need to master to promote yourself online via email is writing powerful Subject Lines that focus on benefits, encouraging people to click your links and buy your products.

If you’re just like me, you try to leverage all available webmaster tools to attract as many people as possible to  your site. And chances are that you get frustrated by not being able to do the same with email. Although an email message does not take as long to create as a whole website, many sales can be generated if you have a good list, create unique and compelling messages that motivate people to read through them and click through to your site.

But the frustrating part is this: after spending all that time finding and generating a potential subscriber list, encouraging them to visit your site and opting them into a email list, you must now persuade them to open future emails you send them.

Some may not realize how problematic this process can be. I’ve seen marketers manage email campaigns with an open rate of 15%. Yes, you read that right: only one in six people open the emails. You could have 1,000 people on your list, a good deal from any perspective, and only get 150 of them open the message. And this does not even represent the rate of conversion, but just the open rate.

Well, if you can get more people to open your messages, but the conversion rate stays the same, logically from the increased amount of readers you will earn more money. But how is it done? What will cause readers to click your link to find out what you offer? Think of how people respond to unsolicited mail in their literal mailboxes.  What helps those ‘open rates’? If we can answer that, we can transfer the same strategy to electronic mail

1st is brevity. On standard 17 ” computer screens or 16″ laptop screens, the average email will only show the first five to ten words of your message. So if you write a headline in 20 words, your recipients will only see half.

Then you need to customize or personalize your Subject Line. Don’t just write, “Read this now!” Instead, write a personalized message to your reader, using the function [! Firstname_fix} provided by Aweber. Usually people are  more prone to open an email with their  name on it, even if they tend to not to open emailed newsletters.

You should also find ways to nurture their natural curiosity about the niche you are marketing. Despite being skeptical beings, we are naturally very curious creatures. If you play your cards right, you can motivate them to click to find out whats in store for them.

Even the most creative and simple subject lines such as “5 Ways …” or “The Hidden Secret to …” may not motivate many people to open a message.  But you can increase the number of readers using subject matter that in itself may not make sense, but is humorous. For instance, if you were to sell a subscription to a magazine, you might attract people with a:”{! Firstname_fix} You’ve been canceled!” It makes no sense because people know that their subscription has not been suspended, but they are likely inclined to  click through to see what you mean.

Of course, sensational headlines may fail if you push the envelope to far or lie in an attempt to motivate people to open your messages. And just like people throw away junkmail from their residencial mailboxes, certain buzzwords are synonymous with junk mail in most inboxes. Words like “Free” or “Dowload” may cause your messages to end up in their spam folder, so be careful.

So there you have it – some surefire ways to increase your email marketing performance.

Why So Many Affiliates Fail

Many people have been lured into affiliate marketing spance and you could be one of them. In fact, affiliate marketing has proven to be one of the most effective means of generating a full-time income via the web. Compared to traditional advertising schemes, affiliate programs are more effective, safer and cost-efficient. But then why do people still fail in affiliate marketing? 

As in other types of businesses, a large share of the profits in affiliate marketing depends on the affiliate’s advertising, promotion and sales strategies. As the affiliate marketing industry expands, competition increases and so an affiliate marketer must be creative enough to employ unique and effective ways to convince potential buyers to purchase or make use of special offers.

Affiliate marketing is not as simple as directing customers to a merchants the business site. If you want to earn big, you have to the invest time and put in lots of hard work in promoting your products/services.  Your niche may be very competitive, and shoppers are always looking for a better deal.  Why should they buy from you?

Merchants are selective on who they invite into their programs, you should be too. To be sure you have the best product and support so that you can succeed. If you are a newbie, you  need to prepare well  in this space which involves research. When marketing your site, you don’t just want visitors – you must attract your targeted demographics. You can get valuable information by joining affiliate forums, comparing different affiliate programs and reading articles on affiliate marketing for tips from experienced affiliate marketers on how to choose the best merchants and products with high conversion rates.

Learn, learn, learn.  And when you think you got it, start learning again!

Buy Now Pay Later

‘Buy now pay later! It’s the American way.  Purchase all you need on credit, and hopefully you can pay the debt back later, right? Most of us use this method, especially in Affiliate Marketing.  Our marketing dollars are paid via a credit card, and we hope, with good campaigns running, that we can pay Google back from all those click we generate via Adwords.  But if credit cards are so intrinsic in our lives, it behooves us then to make sure we have the best ones.  How so?

Choosing a credit card isn’t easy, you need to read carefully what advantages one has over the other, and we aren’t just talking about money-back perks. When evaluating multiple credit card offers, consider the following before completing an application: Interest rate; Rewards Programs; Annual Fees - Member Benefits. Let’s look at these one at a time

1. Interest rate  - if you pay the full balance every month, having a low interest rate will probably not matter too much. However, it’s been said that about 45% of cardholders have an outstanding balance and pay monthly interest. If that holds true for you,  low rate credit cards could save you money a ton of money
2. Rewards programs are something most issuers provide.  You use the card, you get a little money back. If you travel frequently, using this type of card may provide you with free plane tickets every year. Bear in mind however that you must accumulate a significant amount of points before earning such rewards, and points may expire, so this type Card does not prove beneficial if you don’t use the card often
3. Annual fee – normally the special rewards cards get you have a cost: an annual fees. You need to evaluate whether the benefits outweigh the costs. For example, if the card is not used enough to accumulate any rewards, will the annual fee be worth it? Many credit cards don’t annual fees
4. Member Benefits – These vary from card to card. Some offer travel assistance. Others offer roadside assistance. Such benefits can be useful if it suits your lifestyle. Evaluate the pros and cons of these benefits. For example, if you don’t travel frequently, it won’t help you to have a travel benefits card.   Try to get the same benefits elsewhere at a cheaper price. For instance, if you are a member of AAA, the advantage of having roadside assistance through that new credit card does not make it a compelling reason to sign up for it, does it?

These are the steps I use when evaluating credit card offers. The next time you apply for a credit card, consider these steps and select the card that best suits not just your credit rating but also your lifestyle.

Risk FREE SEO Services

Need to drive quality traffic to your affiliate site? Aside from PPC ads, if you have a niche site that you feel is going to be around longterm (this is the recommend route right?), then SEO should be a part of your marketing strategy.

Large corporations have their own SEO departments. These are filled with their hired guns to make sure they rank well for strategic and competitive keywords. SEO is a crucial to their cause, as most people today do their research and buy online.  But what if you have limited budgets? You probably won’t be able to  hire SEO employees, but you can leverage SEO companies to do the work for you, with NO RISK and NO MONEY.  How?

What if there was an SEO company that worked like affiliates do, meaning they only get paid when you start ranking better?  Well there is.  One such company is AffordablePop.com. Their affordable SEO business model is genius! Tell them what you want to rank for, they will give you some suggestions, they get working on link building campaigns, and if you don’t rank, you don’t pay.  See the video below:

 

Ranking for keywords is serious business.  It takes time, money and time is money.  For help with your search engine ranking initiatives, AffordablePop’s guaranteed SEO services provides a unique, risk-free solution that is hard to beat.

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