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.

 

 

Give Them What They Want

You can’t make everyone happy, right? You’ve heard that before.  And it’s true.  The only people you should care to make happy are your paying customers. And it could be very difficult.  Here are some tips on how to get some.

Conversions happen because the product or service purchased fills a need. Therefore, give people what they want, and they will pay handsomely for it. Start by building a list and trust.  Perhaps give away information for free in the 1st strings of emails. Then on the 3rd one, try asking for the sale.  If you’d helped them before, chances are they’ll feel you’ll be able to assist them again that they’ll want to pay you. Remember, you just so happen to have the perfect solution for their problem.

In order to have the perfect solution, you need to make sure the information you are offering is  relevant to the targeted niche you are going after. For instance, say you are promoting a service such as ceramic tile cleaning tips through a website such as http://www.thesteamteam.com. If a visitor lands on your site and provided info on carpet cleaning instead of tile, it gives the wrong impression. Remember, give them what they want, and they will give you what you want.

So remember, it really boils down to this: making the customer happy and giving them what they want, no matter what. That’s not always pretty, but it does get results.

Making Money With Articles

Article directories are internet sites that house free articles. These articles are normally place by whoever owns the trademark to them as a promotion method. Each article has the owners byline placed under it so that people who eventually read the article will know who wrote it ( or at the very least who owns it) and will be in a position to get in contact with or visit their internet site for further facts.

Articles directories are a great place to put your articles so that they will make you cash. By utilizing this technique, people who are interested in your product or service will see your article, view you as an expert in the subject, and will visit your website. Even though you cannot write or do not have any knowledge on the subject on that you are promoting ( for example for you run an affiliate website), you can always employ a writer to do the work for you. Getting quality articles written will be costly up front, but they will pay for themselves in no time, either through affiliate sales or selling your own services, and everything from then on is pure profit.

Let us take a real life example. Imagine that you are an accountant working out of your home. You write a piece on an accounting topic and put it on different article directories. People who are searching for the subject you wrote about will read your article, see that you have the knowledge and skill that is required to do a job for them, and go to your internet site or speak to you via e-mail. Your article just gained you a new customer who may make use of your services regularly, but will surely give you a nice profit at least once.

Moreover, as you have posted it on a free article directory, other people who have affiliate internet sites about accounting will in the end use your article for their web site. Since they need to attach your byline to it, this will bring you even more exposure for every website that re-posts your article. This since you will be benefiting of off the traffic that they get to their website.

There are numerous article directories out there for you to use. Your bet best is to put a copy of each of your articles on every person for maximum exposure. It will eventually help to bring lots of traffic and customers to your website, that will result in new sales and profits…

3 Information Product Ideas that Work

When you think about information product creation, what comes to mind? Do you get stumped at some point and can’t think anymore? One of the greatest problems that online marketers have is that they don’t think differently and don’t come up with new product information ideas. However, it’s really not that difficult to create an info product if you look into varied directions. In the following article we shall be looking into 3 unique information product ideas that you can use to get your creative juices running.

Recording an information product on your own is one of the easiest ways to create such a product! All that is required for you to do to quickly create an information product, even if you don’t know what you are doing, is to record yourself as you talk about the subject in question. Let’s presume you are a “Dog Training” expert but aren’t really happy with the idea of writing a book or something similar. All that is required is for you to download a program like Audacity and record any information you wish your customers to have. It doesn’t matter whether they are a few ideas, some tips or a strategy they can use. You can offer virtually anything you like. As long as you offer value people will be quite happy. Pick that microphone up and start talking because your information product could be ready in a few hours.

You can also provide your customers with individual coaching for a price. This is a very popular business model because everyone wants to be shown how to do it. If you have information in a particular area or a skill that you can show others how to do, it would be easy for you to start personal coaching times on the phone. If you want to advance to the next level, you can also give out internet coaching sessions where you teach many people all at one time. This is an extremely good way to make high value info products because giving lessons is usually seen as being valuable. You can get more cash from clients than from other types of things. The best part about this is that it doesn’t take much of your time and all you need to do is help others with your knowledge and get paid for it.

Last but not least; if you’ve conducted a few teleseminars or webinars over a course of few months, you can actually sell them as a package. people love to get information products that are recorded in a live format. You can give them great content by giving out these bundled up webinars.

In conclusion, this article has presented some extremely effective ways to put together effective, unique products. It requires little time to create a product and the best bit is that you work only once and you keep on earning. Besides that, once you start creating information products, you’ll discover that there is a never ending demand for knowledge and you’ll be able to sell it for a price.

Google Alerts Has Unlimited Applications

How do you keep abreast of new information on your marketing niche? Google Alerts™ is really an excellent tool to build your business intelligence. Here are some great ways to use this tool!

Learn When You Appear in the Search Engine Results

For instance, I have my name and company name entered into Google Alerts. So every time it sees those parameters in the Search Engine results for Google and its partners, alerts sends me an email and shows me the referenced URL and a summary of my information. I can quickly see what blogs and article sites are publishing my articles, who is linking to our website and blog, as well as see, the buzz and conversations about me and the company I work for.

Keeping Up with Your Competitors and Partners

You can enter any set of parameters into Google Alerts. Things like: product names, new services, company names, people’s names- the sky is the limit. This will in turn provide you a wealth of information in real time. You can keep track of what your partners and employees are doing. This is a fantastic tool to gain that intelligence you need to keep competitive edge. It helps with your market positioning as well.

SEO Keyword Tool

Getting alerts in certain keyword strings can quickly help you determine whether the keyword string is good for you and if so, how to approach your Online Marketing Strategy so you can take advantage of the market opportunity. The internet changes quickly, but these alerts can keep you ahead of these changes, capitalizing on the opportunities presented.

Industry and Market Trends

See what the experts are writing about concerning your industry and market. Another great data input for your Effective Business Plans.

Tracking Social Media and Networks

Social media changes minute by minute. How do you track and keep up with results? Understanding how your social media strategy is working is really important and sometimes hard to define and quantify. Google as a search engine pays close attention to the social networks in real time. Use alerts to gain that critical intelligence about what is happening and hot in the social networks. You can find and apply real time data. This gives you great opportunity to address any problems or emerging opportunities immediately. All this with a free tool!

Unlimited Applications

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am sure you have a bunch of ideas on how you can use alerts to bolster your company’s business intelligence. Ask your Business Plan Company about it today!

About The Article Author – Frank Goley is a Business Turnaround Consultant for ABC Business Consulting. He is an expert in business planning, marketing, strategic planning, business turnarounds, online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). Frank has written over 135 Business Success Articles and E-Books. He is author of a Business Plan Book and writes the Business Success Blog. Frank really enjoys helping companies to succeed!

The 2% Affiliate Club

It’s been said that out of all the affiliate marketers out there tauting products and services, only about 2% make it to Super Affilate status – the elite income generators. Why? It’s their Mental Attitude. The lack of motivation, or losing motivation hurts the other 98%. So how can we keep motivated?

I read an interesting post today from Ted Murphy. In it he ponders on his home’s buying/gutting/refurbushing experience. Most of the work he did himself, and he did a fanstastic job. His quandary deals with being bit hard by the construction bug and wanting (needing) to keep building, albeit not knowing what. I don’t think that appetite may ever be satisfied, as he is always building, be it houses or business, and he’s very good at it.

Which brings me back to performace or affiliate marketing. Are we always building? If we are to grow our IM businesses, we need to set bigger goals. Amit Mehta describes a very powerful technique for doing so as “Shooting For the Moon”, which focuses on setting “impossible” goals, instead of “realistic” goals. Some would argue this sounds like nourishing the propensity for failure. But that’s not it at all. The idea is to set a goal that motivates you to excel by pushing you out of your comfort zone. For example, after evaluating your present income stream, “shoot for the moon” by setting a goal that is 10X your present revenue. The “impossible” becomes possible because we tune our minds to believe the impossible is realistic, which breeds a new level of success that is fueled by forcing our minds to think at a higher level.

Too bad only 2% of affiliates think this way…

PPC Affiliate Keywords – Going Wide Instead of Deep

It seems like a daily ritual: a client calls me wanting assistance with his SEO initiatives and asks me what keywords he or she should optimize. I, of course, appreciate the vote of confidence, but I’m not his SEO consultant. Which brings up a good question – what are the best keywords?

This same question comes up as a PPC Affiliate Marketer. You start a campaign and now need to generate an Adwords keyword list to send traffic to your landing pages. This can be tricky, as many newbie affiliates loose their shirts in PPC, because they THINK they have a great keyword list when in fact, it’s too deep, and not wide enough.

One of the 1st things Amit teaches in his affiliate training is that effective keyword research is one of the most important skill sets you’ll need to develop as an Affiliate, especially if you are to reach Super Affiliate status. So lets go over going Deep vs. Wide.

Suppose you’re a newbie affiliate, promoting a hypothetical virtual car dealer. You know nothing about cars, so you head over to wordtracker to come up with a bunch of keywords to bid on Google.

Your “thorough” list includes all the fathomable keywords with the root “car”. So you take your list thinking you’ll make a killing, only to find out you generated very litle traffic and consequently zero commissions. Here’s why: When you are searching for a “car” on google, more than likely you won’t include the word “car” as part of your keyword, but probably will use sports sedan, convertible coupe, Lexus IS250, Cadillac Escalade, SUV, etc. These are descriptive or synonimous keywords (as Amit describes them) that people will search for. That’s the difference between going deep vs. going wide. So always go wide first. When when you find which of these keywords provide the best traffic, THEN go deep.

I have this conversation multiple times each day with clients. Hmm, maybe I am their SEO consultant.

I need to charge more…

Super Affiliate 101

I’ve been following Super Affiliate Marketer Amit Mehta for quite sometime now. He was a guest visitor on the Black Ink Project that Jeremy Palmer masterfully (seriously!) put together earlier this year and I was captivated by his success and his wealth of knowledge in the space. Affiliate PPC marketing is something I’ve always been intrigued with and wished to learn. Amit is a PPC guru and his blog posts consistently provided tips of the golden nugget variety.

As it turns out, Amit decided to teach others what he knows in an online coaching program called PPC Classroom2. The course offers a series of in-depth modules on becoming an affiliate shogun. The course teaches students how to:

Find & evaluate Affiliate offers and niches that will perform
Create effective keyword lists
Create profitable Adword campaigns
Create presell landing pages that convert
Do split testing and bid optimization

I joined the course to test the waters and it reached capacity right after I enrolled. I’ll periodically post about my progress and setbacks (gasp)…