More Ways to Build your List through Articles and Affiliates
December 29th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
Articles are a great way to make yourself known within your given niche of expertise while building your list absolutely free. Just by the simple fact that you have written an article can give potential customers the idea that you are an expert.
These are not articles you need to get published in the traditional way such as in print magazines, nor do you need to pitch an idea to editor after editor in hopes of one day, one of them may want to publish your article.
Your focus should be on the online publishers of the thousands of ezines on the Internet.
Don’t panic if you are not a writer or have never written articles in the past, it’s not that hard. The key is to pick a topic that is of interest to you and the words will begin to flow. Just make sure the article is relevant to your newsletter, ezine, product or service and is of interest to your readers, or future subscribers.
I recommend a simple formula: who, what, when, where and how. If you answer theses questions, you will end up with an article. Write your articles in a conversational style.
Pretend you are writing to a friend rather than your entire list or a massive online audience. When you are writing a letter to one friend or to an individual person, it often comes across as much more personable. That is very desirable as it helps build that important one-to-one relationship with your subscribers.
Provide a ‘resource box’ at the end of your article. A resource box is a paragraph tagged on at the end of your article that explains to the reader who you are, what you can do for them, how they can get more information (subscribe to your newsletter) and whether or not they have permission to reprint your article.
Promote your articles by submitting it to the article directories. One option is to use a fabulous piece of software called ‘http://www.articlebroadcastpro.com.’ With this software you simply cut and paste your article into the program once. It then facilitates the submission process by submitting your article to all of the top article directories in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually.
You can also contact other newsletter publishers who are in similar or related fields. Other publishers can get writer’s block just like you can or perhaps they don’t know what to write or simply don’t have the time. Whatever the case, they still will need content.
To contact publishers of ezines or newsletters, use any search engine, such as ‘http://google.com/’ or try ‘http://www.directoryofezines.com/.
You can give people who are publishing your articles in their newsletters and on their websites more incentive to do so by asking them to sign up as an affiliate of yours and place their affiliate link at the bottom or your article in your resource box. By providing this link, readers who click on that affiliate link and buy from you, the publisher of that ezine gets a percentage of the sale from that customer.
If you were the publisher and had to choose between publishing an article by an author who’s just providing content or an author who’s providing content and a way for you to make money, which would you choose?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Glen Hopkins is an internationally renowned Internet marketer and
the #1 Best Selling Author of, Lucrative List Building.
Glen specializes in helping online business owners build large,
highly profitable opt-in email lists. Get his “Top 10 List Building
Secrets” Report (valued at $97) for free at http://GlenHopkins.name
Technorati Tags: Affiliates, Amazon, Articles, Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools
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How to Get Targeted Traffic from Amazon
December 29th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
When it comes to tracking lifetime value and conversion rates, it’s easy to focus on the numbers and distance yourself from the emotional factors involved in the sales process. Because in reality, though, those numbers represent people, people with feelings.
Those people are your customers. And your goal is to simply find the best way to communicate with them so they can see the value your products can bring to their lives.
That communication process begins with your traffic generation sources, but getting them to your website is only first step. Once at your site, you need to be able to convert them into customers.
So here are some tips to help you increase your conversion rates:
- The lifetime value is the profit your customers bring you over a period of time; it’s not just the value of that first purchase.
- Knowing the lifetime value of your customer helps you accurately budget your marketing dollars so you know how much to spend to generate new leads and still turn a profit.
- A squeeze page captures your prospect’s contact information, allowing you to build a relationship with them. Once you establish a relationship with them, they are more likely to trust you and buy from you over and over.
- When writing your sales message, allow your passion and enthusiasm to show through your words. This helps tap into the emotion of your prospects and persuades them to buy from you.
- Your headline should grab attention by speaking directly to your prospect’s fears, problems and desires.
- Include testimonials in your copy to establish credibility and provide the social proof your prospect needs to help rationalize his buying decision.
- Reverse all risk for your prospect with a rock-solid, money-back guarantee.
- Ask for the sale and make the ordering process as easy as possible. Also highlight your offer in the order form while stressing the value of the product.
- TEST, TEST, TEST! Test one element at a time using an A/B test. Or test several elements at once using the Website Optimizer or the Split Test Accelerator.
And after you test your ideas, test them again. Continual testing is the best way to improve your conversion rates because it’s based in fact, not theory. So keep testing, and you’ll soon find the lifetime value of your customers will keep rising. When the lifetime value rises, so does your net worth.
Glen Hopkins is an internationally renowned Internet marketer and
the #1 Best Selling Author of, Lucrative List Building.
Glen specializes in helping online business owners build large,
highly profitable opt-in email lists. Get his “Top 10 List Building
Secrets” Report (valued at $97) for free at http://GlenHopkins.nam
Technorati Tags: Affiliates, Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools
Related Tags: Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools, Amazon, Articles, directories
Ten Tips for Maximizing Affiliate Traffic
December 29th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
Once your affiliate center is filled with products, promotional tools and AFFILIATES, your site should start experiencing increased traffic volume.
And here are ten things you can do to maximize that volume:
- Make it EASY. Make it as easy as possible for people to join your program.
For the bigger JV partners who are very busy, sign them up yourself and write all their sales copy. A program that gives them something (money) for nothing (no work because you did it all) is extremely appealing. And the traffic these people can generate for you should inspire you to want to do all the work.
- Update often. Your affiliate center is an ongoing marketing system that deserves constant attention. New and exciting copy gives your affiliates a reason to continue promoting for you. If you allow your affiliate center to become dormant, so will your affiliates. When your affiliates become dormant, the traffic they once generated ceases to exist.
- Offer a free gift for joining the program. Create some sort of digital product valued at $97 and use it to bribe people to become affiliates for you. They may only join to get the gift, but once they’re in, you have the opportunity to persuade them to start promoting for you.
- Give a bonus for the first referred sale an affiliate makes. This tactic motivates your affiliates to begin promoting you immediately. Inform them that the only requirement to qualify for the free bonus (a product, service or cash prize) is one referred sale.
This results in quick sales for you, plus a lot of your new affiliates will generate more than one immediate sale.
- Reward your affiliates for reaching a certain number of sales. This reward could be in the form of a higher commission rate, a prize, a cash bonus or some other type of gift. Be sure to notify them when they are approaching this magic number to motivate them to get the sales that will result in their reward.
- Provide a free copy of your products to top affiliates. Although you can’t offer this review process to everyone who joins your program, (or you would end up with a ton of affiliates but no customers), your super affiliates will be able to give you a stronger endorsement if they’ve had a chance to review your product before they promote it.
And a stronger endorsement from these affiliates means more traffic and more sales for you.
- Offer to promote for your super affiliates if they promote for you. Or you could suggest other types of reciprocation such as a service you provide.
- Maintain an affiliate blog. Post updates often, particularly during a pre-launch to a new product. A blog is also a great tool for training.
- Communicate with your affiliate team. You must stay in contact with your team on a continual basis. Notify them when you add new content, advertisements or training materials.
Make sure they know when you have new products coming out so that they can promote you and maximize traffic to your site. You must also be available to answer any questions your affiliates have.
Some communication methods to consider are:
- Post notices in your affiliate center.
- Sending a weekly newsletter out via email.
- Publish announcements via email.
- Create a forum your affiliates can participate in and come to for announcements.
- Teleseminars.
- Have an affiliate contest. Create a contest in which your top producing affiliates earn extra cash and announce it in your affiliate center. The idea is to get their egos involved so they compete against each other. When they’re competing against each other, you win due to all the traffic and sales generated as a result of the competition.
Although your affiliate center may take time and effort to setup and maintain, it is a critical aspect of your business and THE best way to generate free traffic to your site.
Glen Hopkins is an internationally renowned Internet marketer and
the #1 Best Selling Author of, Lucrative List Building.
Glen specializes in helping online business owners build large,
highly profitable opt-in email lists. Get his “Top 10 List Building
Secrets” Report (valued at $97) for free at http://GlenHopkins.name
Technorati Tags: Affiliates, Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools
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How to Attract Affiliates Via Directories
December 29th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
Manually searching for partners isn’t the only method of recruiting affiliates. You can also attract them to you through affiliate directories or ads.
To begin with, submit your program to as many affiliate directories as possible. AssociatePrograms.com is a great place to start, and you can find more through Google.
By searching the Google directory for affiliate programs, you can view an index of all such programs. Since they’re ranked in order of popularity according to their PageRank system, just start at the top and work your way down. That way you’ll be sure to get your program listed in only the most valuable sites.
This submission process can be tedious, but it’s worth it. You only have to do it once, and it does provide long-term exposure for you.
Affiliate program announcement services, however, can save you from this time-consuming task.
Although a service such as AnnounceYourAffiliateProgram.com does cost money, they submit your program to the major directories for you. It’s certainly worth the investment if you have the budget to pay for it.
Next, be active at affiliate marketing forums. Dozens of these forums exist and many are high-trafficked sites. By asking questions, providing answers or posting general comments, you can attract affiliates if you do two things:
- Post quality content. Demonstrate your expertise by making your messages helpful and informative.
- Provide a resource link that stands out. Think of your link as a headline that needs to grab attention and persuade readers to click, not a post-script that people naturally skim over.
Third, advertise in high quality affiliate newsletters by purchasing ads and/or solo mailings.
An ad or mailing may cost you $100, but think of that money as an investment, not an expense.
By investing in your affiliate program in this way, all you need to do is attract one quality affiliate to earn back your investment and more through the referrals that affiliate generates.
If you don’t have $100 to invest, try $2.
Several places online like Partenon.com sell classified ads in newsletters for a mere $2. While it’s unlikely you’ll be flooded with an abundance of new affiliates from these ads due to the large number of ads being sold, just one new affiliate more than pays for that investment.
Finally, buy pay-per-click ads on AdWords, Overture or other PPC search engines. Just make the search phrase extremely targeted: “keyword affiliate program” like “dog training affiliate program.”
This method may not generate a lot of visitors to your affiliate center, but those who do visit will be very targeted and thus likely to join.
If all of this sounds like an overwhelming amount of work that you simply don’t have time for, you can do one of two things: use specialty search tools or hire someone to promote and run your program for you.
As far as tools go, several excellent software programs can slash your research time dramatically. They do cost some money but are wonderful resources for finding new affiliates.
A few of these tools include:
Or you could hand the entire recruitment process over to services such as the one at www.partnerific.com. By putting someone else in charge of recruiting affiliates, you can focus on recruiting customers.
Glen Hopkins is an internationally renowned Internet marketer and
the #1 Best Selling Author of, Lucrative List Building.
Glen specializes in helping online business owners build large,
highly profitable opt-in email lists. Get his “Top 10 List Building
Secrets” Report (valued at $97) for free at http://GlenHopkins.name
Technorati Tags: Affiliates, Customers, directories, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools
Related Tags: Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools, Amazon, Articles, directories
Seven Ways to Find Affiliates to Promote Your Products
December 29th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
Having an affiliate program is a great way to generate targeted traffic, but you have to know how to find affiliates to promote for you. Here are seven ways to do just that.
First, start by subscribing to lists in your niche. As you “plant” your name on these lists, pay special attention to the product launches and reviews. Note both the owners of the products and the people promoting them. These are your ideal affiliates, so contact them.
Another way to find ideal affiliates using this method is by studying the ads in the newsletters. Get in touch with the people running the ads and the people paying for the ads.
Since you will be getting a lot of email, it’s a good idea to subscribe with a secondary email address. That way your primary inbox isn’t flooded with an overwhelming amount of messages.
Second, enroll in joint venture partner networks. Some of these networks are free while others require a fee to become a member, but all exist to connect partners in related fields. Once you join, you’ll be able to post notices about your affiliate program. Other members then have the option to become your affiliates.
You can find these networks by searching for “joint venture network” in Google, but here are a few to get you started:
Third, visit the Clickbank marketplace. Select categories related to your products to find out who is selling things similar to you. All of these people are potential affiliates.
Fourth, search ezine article directories like GoArticles.com or EzineArticles.com.
Look for related articles and take advantage of the resource box at the end of each article. The authors make it easy for you to find them by providing their contact information in that resource box. Use it to invite them to join your program.
Fifth, utilize blog directories to find active bloggers. Search for those who have blogs similar to your area of expertise and contact them about becoming an affiliate.
Sixth, frequent forums and note those who participate. Pay particular attention to posts that demonstrate a level of experience, knowledge or expertise. Those are the kinds of people you want promoting your products.
Seventh, make the most of Google. This search engine has an impressive database and is an excellent research tool for locating affiliates.
To find potential affiliates with Google, try any or all of the following methods:
- Conduct a keyword search and look for those advertising in the AdWords section on the right side of the page. These are serious marketers willing to pay money to advertise products, so these are the people you need to be in contact with about joining your program.
- Conduct a keyword search and look for those with a high “organic” rank on the left side of the page. These are the marketers who understand search engine optimization, so you want these people on your team as well.
- Conduct a specific search for your competitor’s products. This shows you exactly which sites are promoting for your competition. Since they already have at least one product similar to yours, the chances are high that they’ll want to add your products to their sites, too.
- Conduct a search for article titles. You’ll have to first visit some popular article directories to find the titles of articles in your niche to search for. And when you do the search, be sure to put the title in quotation marks. This will give you an accurate listing of the sites that have posted those articles. Contact them and ask if they’ll add your articles to their sites.
- Conduct a search for topics related to but not in direct competition with your offer. For example, if you have a product about dog training, search for “pet supplies” or “grooming.”
- Conduct a search for authors and experts in your field. Visit the sites who mention those names and find out which ones are promoting their products. Contact those who are using affiliate links and introduce yourself and your program.
- Conduct a search for keywords or phrases contained in URL’s. You do this by using the search string “inurl.” For instance, you wouldn’t search for “grooming”; you would search for inurl: “grooming.” Then every site that has the word grooming in their URL will be listed.
Your affiliates are out there waiting for you; now go find them!
Glen Hopkins is an internationally renowned Internet marketer and
the #1 Best Selling Author of, Lucrative List Building.
Glen specializes in helping online business owners build large,
highly profitable opt-in email lists. Get his “Top 10 List Building
Secrets” Report (valued at $97) for free at http://GlenHopkins.name
Technorati Tags: Affiliates, Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools
Related Tags: Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools, Amazon, Articles, directories
How to Get Your Affiliate Program Noticed
December 29th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed
Your job as the leader of an affiliate program is to attract affiliates.
That sounds simple enough, but you’re not alone. Your competitors also have affiliate programs, and you’re competing with them for the attention of those interested in promoting other people’s products online.
Your potential affiliates are trying to decide which programs to join and how to differentiate one from another.
So how do you differentiate yourself and make your program attractive? You set it up in a way that gives you an edge over the competition.
To do that, you need to know the seven major questions people ask themselves when considering becoming an affiliate. And you need to know the answers:
- What is the commission structure? Making a commission from a one-time sale is a great start, but residual income is even more appealing. By offering your customers numerous products, you can offer your affiliates a commission each time a customer they referred buys from you.
- What is the payment history? No one wants to join a program that has a history of making late payments or no payments at all. Be reliable. Let your affiliates know they can count on you to pay them promptly. If you say you pay on the first of every month, you better make sure your affiliates get paid on the first of every month. When they can trust you, they’ll stick with you.
- Is this program easy to implement? Complicated systems and complex instructions confuse and frustrate affiliates. The best programs are the ones that are easy to understand and simple to follow. It’s hard to get confused when your instructions say something simple like “copy, paste, point and click.”
- Are the products offered valuable? Despite the abundance of information products available, many simply aren’t that good and thus lack value. To separate yourself, fill your freebies like reports, ebooks and articles with high-quality information. And always work to increase the value of your products.
- Does this program have a support structure in place? Most affiliate programs focus their attention on the super-affiliates, the ones with the most experience who produce the greatest results. The majority of affiliates, however, don’t know how to become “super” because they have no support. By reaching out to these people and supporting their efforts, you can help them increase their profits.
- Does this program allow interaction with others? Everyone wants to feel like they are a part of something special. So create a community within your affiliate center by giving your affiliates a way to interact with each other through a medium such as a forum.
- BOTTOM LINE: Is this program profitable? Affiliates go where the money is. They want to invest their time and money promoting the products that convert well and provide them with the most profit possible.
If you have a residual commission structure, pay promptly, have a process that’s easy to implement, offer valuable products, support your affiliates and offer a sense of community but don’t help your affiliates make lots of money with you, you are certain to repel rather than attract affiliates.
Glen Hopkins is an internationally renowned Internet marketer and
the #1 Best Selling Author of, Lucrative List Building.
Glen specializes in helping online business owners build large,
highly profitable opt-in email lists. Get his “Top 10 List Building
Secrets” Report (valued at $97) for free at http://GlenHopkins.name
Technorati Tags: Affiliates, Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools
Related Tags: Customers, Listbuilding, Traffic, Travel Agent Internet Marketing tools, Amazon, Articles, directories
