Posts Tagged ‘Affiliate Marketing’

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Affiliate Marketing: A Simple & Highly Effective Way of Earning Money From Your Computer

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

Imagine, if you will, a trendy cocktail party; the drinks are flowing, the guests are mingling and the air is filled with light chatter and friendly laughter. A young woman is shyly explaining to a young man how she would love to sell books on her website. However, this man is not just any Tom, Dick or Harry; he is Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com . This young woman set Bezos’s brain buzzing… why not have her link her website up to Amazon.com and receive a commission for every book she sold? It was a simple but very effective idea and not long afterwards the Amazon Associates Programme was born. Amazon associates would simply place an Amazon banner, text link or product link on their website and earn a commission each time someone clicked on the link and made a purchase.

Now I am sure there are not many of us reading this that are in the Amazon league… well, not quite yet… but there is no reason why we cannot put these principals to work ourselves. Nearly everyone who is anyone runs one type of affiliate programme or another nowadays and with all the money flying backwards and forwards across the ether I want to help you get a piece of the action!

If you are:

A Website owner (webmaster, publisher)

i) Ensure that your ads are relevant or in some way related to the content of your website or webpage to attract more clicks e.g. there is not much point in having a link/banner for dog food on a baby website

ii) Try to make your ads fit seamlessly into your webpages as if they are part of the general content. It’s also a nice idea to try to integrate them with the colour scheme and general design of your site.

iii) It is generally thought that text links to products have a much higher click-through rate (i.e. attraction to visitors) than banners. Try to write a short summary of a product (or borrow from the actual sales page of the product) with perhaps a relevant picture and then add something like read more… for your visitor to click on for more information. The read more… link will obviously be your affiliate link to the product.

iv) Try to make sure the ads are updated fairly regularly so that repeat visitors have new products to look at and something to look forward to each time they visit. You will soon get a feel for what sort of products attract your visitors and what they like buying.

v) It is not essential but I would personally recommend that you try to promote and associate yourself with good quality products and/or products that you have tried yourself. If you recommend rubbish your visitors will not be happy and will not return to your site. You will also feel this in your `pocket’ when your buyers start asking for refunds and your affiliate earnings diminish. If your visitors feel that your recommendations and opinions of a product are trustworthy then they will return again and again because they trust you. It is very tempting to pick a product to promote that pays a lot in affiliate earnings but remember that these are not necessarily always the best products to promote for your website.

An eBay Trader and/or you do not have a website

i) If you are a reseller of other peoples’ products on eBay i.e. eBooks or software, you can still add your own affiliate products to these items. Why not add an extra file to the zip file that you send your customers containing a) a page showing a link to your website and b) a page with, say a small paragraph each for, say, two relevant or similar products to the item your buyer has just purchased with links for your customers to `click here to read more”. If your buyer has just purchased an eBook on astrology from you then they may well be interested in other similar items about astrology that you are affiliated with.

ii) If you do not sell digital items on eBay but sell, say, curtains or drapes, why not look for products on home decor, home improvement, or say, how to make your own drapes, perhaps relevant books on Amazon or indeed products from one of the other major affiliate websites (see details below). When you mail your product to your buyer, send them a short email letting them know that their item has been dispatched and sign the email something like this:

Best wishes

Joe Bloggs
Your eBay user ID or eBay Shop URL

This is known as your `sig’ or `signature’. Always add your `sig’ to every single email you send. It might not be an affiliate link that you wish to add to your sig, you might want to add your eBay store URL (make it an affiliate link, though, become an affiliate of eBay!!). There are several emails that you can send through eBay and you can edit all the standard emails in your `My eBay’.

You will see, there is an opportunity to email your customer five times in the above scenario and to each of these emails you can promote a relevant item or your website URL in your sig. I have never known a buyer that has complained about these emails, on the contrary, they are usually very impressed that you are being so solicitous to their needs and are grateful to be kept well informed of the buying process.

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Affiliate Marketing – #1 Way To "Capture" Success

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

If you have ever tried or are currently trying to succeed with affiliate marketing, I can almost guarantee that your system of trying to make money looks something like this:
1. You decide that you want to make money with affiliate marketing.
2. You sign up free at clickbank
3. You choose the most popular product that you think will make you the most money.
4. You advertise your affiliate link
5. You hope that people join so you can earn money
This is actually what I call the “Failure Formula.” If you try to make money with affiliate marketing following that the same failure formula that most people do, you are guaranteed to fail.
While there are dozens of things wrong with the 5 step process above, I will focus on 2 of the main items left out. In fact, it is estimated that only 2% of all people involved in affiliate marketing use the following two steps on a regular basis. It is no surprise though that they are the most successful 2%.
First mistake: In the scenario above, the affiliate link was advertised directly. You never, ever, ever advertise your affiliate link directly. If you want to have any success in affiliate marketing, you MUST get your own url. You can get a URL for under $10 so there is no excuse for not having one.
Nobody, and I mean nobody is going to click on those ugly clickbank links. In fact, it is estimated that you will get as much as 900% more clicks on your link by using a personal url. Think of what an increase in clicks of 900% can do for your bottom line.
all you have to do is purchase your own URL for under $10 and then forward it to your affiliate link, right? WRONG!
Having the url is not enough. If you want to build a successful LONTERM affiliate marketing business, you also need a capture page.
Second Mistake: In the scenario above, all traffic was being directed directly to the sales page. So what happens with all of that targeted traffic that you worked so hard to get to your site? Well, one of two things happens. They buy and you make a one time commission on them. Or, most likely, they stay on your site for 30 seconds or less and leave.
In either case, you lose out. In the first case you may be thinking, but wait, I earned some money on that person. This is true. But, if you had “captured” that personas name and email address you could be profiting from that person for years and years on multiple products. It is a proven fact that most of the profits made in affiliate marketing on on the “back end” or in “upsells” after somebody buys so you are losing out on tons and tons of money.
In the second case, you just wasted all of your money and time that you spent on advertsing. If you had set up a capture page, you could have captured the name and email of the prospect before they went to the sales page. Then, you could continue to market to them and eventually create a sale. In affiliate marketing, and in marketing in general, it takes on average 7 exposures for people to buy. If you are only giving them one exposure, you are again throwing money out the window.
So, before you get started in affiliate marketing, it is absolutely necessary to have two things:
1. Your own personal URL (should be specific to the types of products you are promoting).
2. Your own capture page that collects the name an email of visitors BEFORE they go to the sales page. This not only builds a targeted list for you, but it allos you to create more sales, back end sales, up sales, and offer additional products in the future.
Remember, those experiencing the most success in affiliate marketing are doing the 2 things above. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Affiliate marketing is much, much easier when you follow the successful systems that have already been proven for you.

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Boost your Online Profits With Affiliate Commissions

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Copyright (c) 2008 Donna Gunter

One of the income streams in my business comes from affiliate commissions, or money I make from the referral of another’s products or services. Affiliate commissions are a very viable way to add another income stream to your business where you can make a couple of hundred dollars a month to several thousand dollars a month, depending on how much time and effort you want to put into the process.

Several years ago I felt guilty for sending others to a product or service through my affiliate link because I believed I was manipulating them in some way. However, now I have a clearly defined set of rules for myself before I recommend a product to someone else:

1. I usually personally own or have used the product

2. If I don’t own it or use it, I rely on many trusted reviews before deciding to recommend. In most cases, I don’t choose to send someone through an affiliate link if I don’t personally own or use the product.

3. I have either a verbal or written review/testimonial about the product.

4. I am honest about the product’s pros and cons.

5. I can usually tell a story about how the use of this product/service has impacted the business of one of my clients or my own business.

6. When responding to an email inquiry or forum/discussion list post, I disclose my link is an affiliate link.

Because it’s very easy to get caught up in the lure of affiliate commissions, perpetuated by the constant bombardment of “opportunities” to promote someone else’s products and services, you must be very discriminating in the products and services you recommend to your contacts. All is takes is one or two poor recommendations, and you begin to lose credibility with your audience. Your email list will also lose faith in you if you bombard them with affiliate email promotions. In some cases, I receive more affiliate promotions than email newsletters or announcements from some of the lists to which I belong. Consequently, because of the trust my email list has in me, I rarely send solo email affiliate promotions to them, preferring to make affiliate recommendations in my ezine and on my website.

One problem that affiliate marketers often encounter is their visitor’s aversion to clicking on an affiliate link. The visitor will remove the affiliate portion of the link URL instead of crediting you for helping them to find out about the product or service. I find this a bit silly now, as they are paying the same either way, but since I used to do the same thing (I have to chalk it up to ignorance, I suppose), I know that it happens frequently. Or, the visitor will attempt to substitute his affiliate ID in the URL. Most reputable businesses now have a clause in their affiliate agreements prohibiting using your own affiliate ID to make purchases for yourself. However, in many cases, it is still possible.

Here are 4 strategies you can use to “cloak” your affiliate links.

1. Use a redirect service. Many affiliate links are long and cumbersome. If you use a service like TinyURL.com or SnipURL.com, you can both shorten the length of the URL as well as prevent any URL tampering, as the final URL provided by the redirect service gives the visitor no idea about the final destination.

2. Simple website redirect. You may be able to redirect a long URL through a page of your site with the commands in your web hosting control panel or FTP client or through a 3rd party software loaded onto your hosting account.

3. Dedicated domain name. This is my favorite strategy. I buy a domain name that’s clearly seen as my brand, and add a defining word to indicate to me and to my visitors about the nature of the product, and then use the services of my domain registrar to forward it to my affiliate link. So, for example, if you’re a professional organizer and are known under the name “Best Organizer”, you might buy something like BestOrganizerAudio.com, for example, so that you have an easy-to-remember domain name to which you can refer when mentioning this audio recording product in client consultations, teleclasses, and articles.

4. Online Rolodex site. Create a site or a page containing all of your valuable recommendations, and purchase a corresponding domain name to use with it, i.e. JaneDoeRecommends.com. You can tell your clients that this site contains your Rolodex of trusted resources or is your library of trusted resources, and they can refer to the list any time they are seeking a trusted resource or referral to help them solve a problem.

Take time to set your parameters for affiliate recommendations and inform your clients and email list of those rules. Then, use one of the affiliate cloaking strategies to make your affiliate marketing as easy and painless as possible, both for you and your contacts. As you begin to see your affiliate commissions grow, you’ll wonder why you didn’t start this process sooner!

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