Making Money Selling Others People’s Stuff

If you are new to this blog, welcome! You probably are interested in earning a recurring revenue stream by becoming an affiliate.  But to sell products online, you don’t need to own a unique product, it’s perfectly fine to sell others peoples offerings, in fact, thats what becoming an affiliate means – you promote other people’s products.

There are a ton of affiliate companies and networks you can join.  An oldie is Amazon.com.  They sell everything from address plaques to anything else under the sun.  In fact, they are probably the largest bookstore in the webosphere, where you can buy almost any book that you can’t find at a local brick & mortar bookstore. Their affiliate program is quite simple and represents what most are like: just refer people to their site through your affiliate link.  The visitors that came through you and buy earn you a percentage of the sale – your commission. This program is typically called a CPA deal (Cost Per Acquisition). Why do use  I use Amazon.com as an example? Because they were among the pioneers in the affiliate space. Things have changed since the new days, especially where taxes is confirmed (more on that in a future post). Today, most affiliate programs use the low-rish CPAa model, giving you the ability to promote their products and services in exchange for financial compensation. That is, you get a piece of the sale every time someone buys through you.

Other models to explore are pay per click, meaning someone  pays you for each click to the website you generate and CPL (cost per lead), which means you send peoples contact info to a company, such as insurance or attorneys. In order be be successful in any of these models, relevant and targeted traffic is a must.  Just because someone sees a link doesn’t mean they will click and buy.  They need to have a reason to do so.  And when they have THAT reason, they usually convert.

So start doing your homework on affiliate programs.  See what peaks your interests, and start testing.  You may be surprised as to how exciting and lucrative the Affiliate space really  is.

Affiliate Marketing Basics

New here? Then welcome!!! If you’re planning on starting out as an  affiliate marketer, let me briefly go over the basics.

One of the things you have to consider is having your own website, a professional landing page. How do you build an effective site? First, decide on the theme of your site. It would be better if you already have an idea of ​​what products or services you are promoting, as this will help you plan the design and layout of your  pages. If you are promoting timepieces, such as the Aquaswiss watch (one of my personal faves) then your site should revolve around watches.

Next choose a domain name. The domain name is your website’s internet address, so pick one that is relevant to your niche and is easy to remember. If your name has relevant keywords in it, all the better.  Then make sure your name isn’t taken and register it.  I use Godaddy.com as my registrar of choice. This is more of a personal thing, but try to get a .com address instead of an .info or .biz, etc.

Then, select your webhost provider.  In selecting your web host, consider the security of servers and up time guarantees.  Now you can start creating your webpages.  Do not be discouraged if you know little in this field. There are wordpress templates out there you can use that are cheap and easy to update. Then start building traffic.  There are many ways to to this: you can use PPC, SEO, but the easiest one you SHOULD always use, even if you use the former, is good content . This is precisely the reason why visitors choose to enter into your site. What they want is information and when they do not find that information, they will go elsewhere. Therefore it is necessary to publish interesting content  related to the subject as it will cause frequent visits and re-visits to your site.  If you do not have the time or ideas to create contents, you can use PLR ​​articles as the basis your content. Remember,  if there is no good content, there are no good visitors (people with a buying intent), which means no sales and ultimately, no commissions.

I wish you continued success in your affiliate endeavors. Feel free to  have a look around for more info and stay tuned for more affiliate tips…

How Much Bandwidth?

As you build sites for your different niche products, and then see huge spikes in traffic, you need to sit back and ask yourself; “How much bandwidth do I need?” The answer is: it depends.

For example, a static website with no animation or user interaction may require less bandwidth than one with audio and video files. It’s been suggested that a website with 10 pages or 6 images hovers around a need of 2MB. But the amount of data transfer also determines your bandwidth requirements – the more data you transfer, the higher your bandwidth needs.

So here are some points you should consider are:

• Good tech  - The webhosting provider you choose should be technically equipped to provide good data transfer speed and the required bandwidth. Otherwise, the site will be very slow when multiple, potential clients come visiting at the same time

• Keep it simple – Usually, your best bet regarding overall website design is: the simpler the better . A site with a lot of flash animation can actually detract visitors and thus, conversions

• Sweat the details – For instance, use the appropriate image size and image file types

After considering all these factors, if you are unsure of how much bandwidth your site needs, contact a reputable hosting company.  Read their hosting FAQ, discuss your needs with them, and evaluate their offerings to see if its a good fit. Ask for a list of sites they host and see how they load.  If the design is similar to yours, see what plan they have.  You  may have just found and look for a suggestions on the best plan of web hosting available.

Go For The Gold!

Their seems to be a lot of talk in some financial circles about the unique benefits of gold as an investment.  And, did you know there are Gold Coin Affiliate programs? I did a little bit of research into this niche, and here are some of the selling points:

Discovered about 5 millennia ago, throughout history, Gold has been used not only as jewelry but also as the most popular investment. Since it’s not a paper investment (such as stocks or bonds), gold helps to diversify an investment portfolio.  What’s more, gold is a tangible asset, such as a home – but this one has beauty and romance that you can literally hold in the palm of your hands. When purchased in the form of legal tender bullion coins, gold can be affordable, easy to buy and collect.

An important measure of any investment is its liquidity, right?  Yes. And just how easy is it to unload it, you ask? As a liquid asset, it trades worldwide – everyday. Meaning at any given moment, the market is open to trade somewhere in the world for you to sell or buy gold bullion.  Cool eh? So, including Gold in any investment portfolio  can provide a safety net for when the stock market dips, which reduces risk.

All this adds up to one thing: this niche becomes a golden opportunity (no pun intended) for the ever so savvy affiliate- you! So go for the gold…

Don’t Make These Adwords Mistakes

Google AdWords can be an awesome advertising tool to give  your business ginormous exposure if used correctly. If you’ve never tried it, don’t be put off if it seems confusing at first. Because once you’ve mastered the skill of making an AdWords campaign work, you’ll be able to see increased profits. Here are three mistakes to avoid:

When starting out, many simply throw together a campaign without doing much market research, and this is a serious mistake. You shouldn’t start an AdWords campaign until you are confident that you know your market well. For instance, lets say you are in custom labels niche (for industrial purposes, military specification and commercial applications), what keywords could you target? You could target “Custom Labels” or “Custom Label“, but ask yourself – is that going to get you converting traffic? How many times was that keyword searched for last month? Adwords will tell you.  You also want to have a good sense of who your competition is and what they’re up to. You want to see what keywords your competitors are targeting and how much they cost to bid on so you can calculate your own strategy. Fine tune your keyword list with a keyword tool. Taking the time to do your market research allows you to get off on the right foot with your AdWords campaign. Remember to stay relevant and laser-focused with your keywords. If you don’t, this could affect your Quality Score.

Displaying your ads through the content network of Google is another common mistake. This network consists of all those partnering websites that show Google ads through their AdSense program. These ads could prove to be a distraction to people viewing your add, since these sites are not that targeted. In the end you may even achieve a high click through rate, but low conversions. It’s not unheard of  those losing large amounts of money on ads by leaving the content network on, which translates into a poor ROI. So you might consider not using AdSense until you feel comfortable working with AdWords.

When starting out, Test, Test and Test.  Keep learning and not only will you increase your experience but also your profits…

Niche Marketing

As discussed previously, niche marketing is focusing on a specific vertical and creating a marketing campaign for it. You can build a Web site or blog and design a marketing plan around it for a tightly focused niche.  You take a broad category and drill down to long tail keywords that can be targeted more specifically.

What are the advantages? The main benefit of a smaller and more defined vertical is less competition. When building SEO for your sites, you’ll have an easier time optimizing more descriptive and less competitive keywords, thus ranking quicker. And since these terms are more descriptive in nature, they are more targeted and prone to higher conversion rates.

Choosing a niche is easier if the category is something you are familiar with or have a strong affinity to. If you a passion for cooking, you can cater to a specific type of cooking or type of food, says Latin American. You can create a tightly focused Web site with Spanish food cookbooks, ingredients, utensils, etc.  Then get your keyword list created. Research your competition looks like for others on the keyword phrase. Your domain can have the keyword in it.  Then start your optimization and some PPC and watch our niche take off…

SEO Basics

Is your landing page up yet? How serious are you in making it successful? If your answer is ‘Very!”, then SEO should be part or your marketing plan. But if you know next to nothing about it, then here’s the lowdown on SEO basics. If you can master the basics, then the rest will be much easier for you.

Let’s start with keyword research. How can you optimize your website if you do not know what keywords you should be targeting? Which ones are you going use? For instance, the identity theft niche has been hot for a few years now. Suppose you were marketing the IdentityHawk solution. Well, ask yourself: What keyword or search phrase, when typed into a search engine, should display my website as part of the results? Could you use “identity theft protection“? You could. Which keywords get the most traffic? Which ones are “informational” keywords (which may drive traffic but low conversions), and which ones are  ”buying” keywords (conversion-centric)? What is your competition ranking well for? How many inbound links does their website have? The answers to these questions will help you come up with a good keyword list.

After your keyword list is generated, you’ll need to them for your on-page optimization. What this means is that your keywords should be visible in the web copy of your website. You should put your keywords in the title, the H1 tag, the image alt tag, the meta description and of course, in the body of the text. Don’t overdue it (keyword stuffing), as this could get your site de-indexed.

Next comes Link building. Links are the most important factor in search engine optimization. Your goal should be to get as many quality links as you can. Quality being subjective, think of links that are surrounded by fresh, unique, relevant content on pages with adequate page rank.

These are just some of the SEO basics that you can do for your own website. Practice these and you can see great results within the coming months.

Going for the Goal

I just bought a house.  If was a shortsale.  Needs some work.  But I’m slowly making it mine by refurbishing it just the way I want it. It’s got a nice sized front lawn, a 10′ deep pool, a brick fireplace in the family room, and a 2 car garage, in a quiet, “established” neighborhood.

This house buying was not something done on a whim.  It was a goal I set over a 1.5 years ago and was blessed to make it happen. It was process though.  But I had a plan: check my credit score, save, line-up financing, shop around for the right house in the right area and finally make a  purchase. Mission accomplished – goal realized!   How about you? How are you doing with YOUR goals, on and offline?

Have you heard of a SMART Goal? The SMART Goal is a Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely goal. However, the biggest and the most common mistakes of new affiliate marketers is not being smart by setting unrealistic goals when starting out.  How does this happen? Many are misled by those super affiliates, selling the idea that you can make millions of dollars on the internet in a blink of an eye. It’s not possible to achieve a million of dollars overnight if you’ve never sold a dime online. It takes great expertise to reach such a lofty  goal. So set realistic but modest achievable goals. First crawl, then walk. Only then can you run.

Think short and long term. What are some goals you can set?

Short term goals may include:

• Increasing the Number of Subscribers in Your Lists
• Increasing Daily Targeted Traffic Flow
• Increasing Sales Conversion by 5% every month
• Write More Reviews & Articles for a Blog

Then some long term goals you might consider setting:

• Increase Profit by 20% every year
• Develop Your Own Affiliate Products
• To Become Six-Figure Super Affiliate
• Quit Your Boring Job and become Full-time Affiliate Marketer
• Replace Your Day Job and Spend More Time with Your Family

So the 1st step is to set your goals. But how do you achieve them? You’ll need an action plan log.  Write down your goals, their benefits, the timeline to reach it, people who could help you reach them, the obstacles.  Write it all down.  Be specific. Goals can be easily made but never executed so a clear action plan will enable you to succeed. When I first pulled my credit to see how I would fair in getting a loan, I saw some discrepancies.  I had to ensure it was accurate.  So I requested the changes and rechecked my free credit score and it improved. Likewise, review your action plan periodically to check your progress.  Make modifications when necessary, but stay on track. These are YOUR goals.

Goal for it!!!

The Delicate Art of Preselling

When doing affiliate marketing it’s imperative that you keep your eye on small but important details.

No. 1 in my book: Please avoid the conversion-killing mistake of trying to hard sell. Take a look at your bounce rates: if site visitors are only at your sites for a few seconds, could they feel as if you be trying to hard sell? Your responsibility as an affiliate marketer is to “presell” your readers before they get to the actual sales message from the vendor.

No one wants to read a sales pitch, and they don’t want to see anything resembling it on a website. So keep in mind that you only presell, and the person who made the product does the selling part. Your presell efforts will create a desire to know more and also make the person feel comfortable about clicking through to read more. You’ll discuss the benefits of the product in an objective manner and even talk about the negatives. Be honest – it’s critical that your readers feel and believe they are reading someone’s objective and unbiased review of a product.  Remember: your visitors want help making a decision, and if you do that then you’ll help enough people to decide to buy from you.

The better affiliates build a sense of community with their sites. You can too. Try to have your target audience participate at your site. Make your site interesting so that your visitors stay longer, perhaps with some video production. Add a cool voiceover, perhaps a female voiceover.  And don’t forget social links so that visitors can tweet or share something from your site on facebook. Remember, preselling is giving valuable info to your vistors so they can decide to buy something they need.

So give value –  and receive value in return…

Niche Marketing Ideas

Niche marketing involves choosing a subset or a finite portion of a much larger market that has specific needs and problems, and then providing the solutions needed. This isn’t new, as business has always been about solving a problem with a unique solution. Every single industry has elements of niche marketing within it. New niches are being developed by businesses all the time, and that is only good news affiliates. For instance, a unique niche is commercial lockers. Sometimes the nichey-er, the better, and the following methods can be employed:

One effective strategy is to market to different social categories using the same offer. We’re not talking about reinventing the offer or product, just repositioning it. You may be surprised at how effective and doable this has been across the board. Consider that ‘school lockers‘ and ‘steel lockers‘ are all lockers. Of course something like this requires some research and a little creative tweaking, but if could be worth it to expand your customer base.  No matter what new niche you choose, the rules will always apply. Once you know what a market needs, you can then fulfill that need.This creates maket differentiation and your target market will be more than happy to pay for your solutions if they feel that you cater to their industry better than your competitors.

Something else to consider with your niche marketing is local markets. Presently local search engine marketing is hot because more and more people are searching for solutions that are in their specific geos.

So for instance, if your niche is “employee lockers“, you could go more specific with it and get more customers – “employee lockers in California”. Such targeted keywords are easier rank for in search and thus enhance your niche marketing efforts.

Niche marketing is not just a trend, but an awesome way to cross promote your products and services in a unique way, garnering more exposure and sales conversions. Try it! You won’t look at marketing the same again…

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