Technology Toolkit

Sure, things are tough on the economic front. Anyone trying to sugar coat the realities of the current economic downturn is fooling him or herself. In fact, things may get worse before they get better. Those are the facts, plain and simple. The solutions are not so simple, however.

What does all of this mean for affiliate marketers? It means that when the going gets tough, the, well, you know the rest. Now is the time to work and promote your affiliate business more. There are two reasons for this. First, there is more competition for those customers willing to spend some of their money. Second, you can present yourself as a viable business still operating to these customers.

Wishing for better times won’t bring those better times here any sooner. You will have to work harder and smarter this year at affiliate marketing. With that in mind, here are a few tips for business building in tough economic times:

Get Reviewing

One way to get the word out about your products is to write product reviews. You can employ product reviews on your website. Here you give details, details and more details about a specific affiliate product. These reviews go beyond basic generalities about a product. With these you give your experience with a product, how it performed in different situations.

You can also add snippets of customer testimonials in your reviews. People love to read unbiased user testimonials and how products benefited them. Parts of a case study can also be part of a product review.

Your article writing for your article marketing efforts can be product reviews. These will be non-promotional reviews, which compare a handful of similar products. You objectively present the features of yours and other products. You educate your target market and indirectly promote your product in this type of review.

Get Talking

Spread the word on the street and on the Net concerning your business. That means talking up your affiliate products and affiliate opportunity to people you meet. Without pressuring people or talking about it at inappropriate times let others know what you’re doing businesswise. Someone you meet during the course of your regular day may welcome your affiliate product or affiliate income-earning opportunity. You will never know unless you present it to them.

Participate in social forums. Some affiliate programs find their best conversions come from meeting others on forum sites. Here, you interact with others who already have an interest in topics associated with your affiliate product. It’s up to you to talk to them in a casual way on these topics. You then offer suggestions as to how your product or service may help them. It’s network marketing done efficiently.

Get Leveled

We mean this in a good way. Consider multi-level products. You can sell a prospect on a free or low-cost basic version of your affiliate product. This is especially applicable to software products. Down the road, you can sell your customers on an upgraded version. This is the version with all the extra features and benefits.

You can obtain high levels of sales for the premier version this way. You already have a customer who took advantage of the basic version. You pre-sold them on this higher-level version. You are now asking them to upgrade and enhance their user experience. This is often a better way then trying to sell them the premium edition first.

Get Linking

If you have not yet engaged in link and banner exchanges, this can be your year to try it. Register your site with a central exchange organization. You will then receive HTML code, which you insert into your web pages. You display banners and text links from other sites. You gain credit for displaying these links. Consequently, other sites must display your text links and banners. Exchanging links to promote traffic is mutually beneficial to all who are part of the exchange.

Don’t forget to engage in article writing and article marketing. It still is an efficient way to get your links out onto the World Wide Web. You build credibility as an affiliate marketer and build trust with your niche market through article marketing.

Watch Your Back

Again, we mean this in a good way. Here, you want to engage in back selling. First, market a core product or set of products. Next, begin regular communications with your clientele who purchased these products. Let them know other complementary products, accessories or services related to your core offerings. This is a great way to grow affiliate product sales. If they like your core products, they may well find your back-sell products equally useful.

Don’t let tougher economic times stop you from promoting your business. Use the many tools available to you to promote your affiliate business this year. Yes, the tough get going, and they’re tough to stop as they watch their sales grow.

You could have a beautiful, well designed website that promotes your product in perfect detail, but it is all for naught if no one sees it. If you can get more people to see your product, then you will have more people buy your product. It is really that simple. Google is the most used search engine in the world, and the higher the rank you get with Google, the more people will see your site.

There are various ways you can increase your Google ranking. One way to accomplish this is to put video on your website. Let me explain a little why this is so.

When people use the internet to search for a product, to capture their attention you need to have more than just text. Text accompanied by pictures is an improvement, because by stimulating the area of the brain that deciphers pictures, you are helping the text sink in and become more memorable. But by adding video with sound, you are capturing your potential customers attention in a more meaningful and lasting way. In fact, many potential customers will seek out video over just plain text.

Try this experiment. Go to the Google home page. In the upper left hand corner, you will see the words web, images, maps, news, shopping, mail, and more. Click on the word more, and then click on the word video from the drop down menu. Enter the information on what your website is about, and click search videos. You will then see how many videos are available on the subject you are interested in. The more people who watch your video, the more people who visit your site. Now pick a video and watch it. At the end of the video, you will see an embed option. This option gives viewers the chance to take the video and put it on their site. This is free advertising for your website. Also, the more people who link to your site, the higher your Google ranking will become.

If you still need more convincing, try this experiment. Do a web Google search on the subject your site is about, and then click the number one response listed. As you are searching through the number one Google ranked site, do you see any video? Nine times out of ten, the answer is going to be yes. Now, if the number one ranked site has video, does not it make sense that having video on your site will increase your ranking and traffic?

Now that you know that putting video on your web site will increase your visibility, its up to you to make the video and get it posted to your site as soon as possible.

You’d probably like to learn how article writing can reward you, and what affiliate marketing is all about. So let’s begin with an understanding of affiliate marketing.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing has to do with earning a commissions when you sell a products. You can help sell a products by article writing, and this is how it works.

Sign up for an affiliate network via internet.

Choose a reliable affiliate network. An affiliate network is a platform where businesses seek affiliates.

The merchants of a product will choose their publishers, and pay them based on their performance.

How To Make Your Article Sell

The basic requirements are:

Write a quality post
Create a perfect resource box

You’re probably familiar with article writing tips, and you may even be a good writer already with loads of experience. Here are some basics you need to know about what a resource box is.

The Resource Box:

The resource box contains information about the author, and is provided at the end of the article. It’s a very important marketing channel, and be sure to make this a mandatory part of your article writing. The success of your articles depends a great deal, upon how well you craft your resource box.

Information you should have in your resource box:

Your name: This is obviously one of the most important items. Include your name with your title as an option.

Your website address: Provide a valid URL, for example http:// your name.com.

Your slogan: This is usually a 2 to 3 sentence brief about you and your product that shouts “Read me”. This should be unique. This is also known as your USP (Unique Selling Proposition).

Your call to action: Use power words to lead them to your website. For example, you could write something like: “To know more about this product / subject visit: XYZ.com.”

Your contact information: Be sure to include valid information about your telephone number and contact address. Remember, once your article is published it’s no easy task to retract.

The “dos and don’ts” of article writing

Don’t dilute your website by posting a large number of irrelevant URLs.

Don’t let your article writing go off on a tangent. Stay focused on the subject or the product. Avoid writing too much about your accomplishments. Nobody really wants to know. Rather focus on the benefits your article can accrue to the reader.

Keep your resource box text short. It should be no more than one-fifth the size of your article.

Article writing is indeed a powerful tool to boost your marketing strategy. Incorporate writing articles for affiliate marketing, and enhance your brand image by leaps and bounds.

To a newcomer to the affiliate sales system, getting an affiliate site up and running quickly is a daunting prospect. However, by following a simple five step plan, what first appears a single difficult task can be broken up into more manageable segments.

1 – Finding a Product

The first step is finding a product that will sell. A high quality product is important because it avoids refunds, but more important at this step is locating certain features in the sales page that improve higher conversion rates.

Good sales copy and reasonably professional graphics are two basic components to look for, but there are a few more advanced elements that vastly improve conversion rates. One time offers, exit agents, and auto responders all offer powerful incentives for visitors to either buy now or come back later.

2 – Researching Keywords

Once you’ve got a good product selected, some research needs to be done into what sort of keywords people are looking for. Even just plugging phrases into a free system like Google’s Keyword Tool will give you a better idea what sort of advertising you should be looking into. If you use a more elaborate tool that gives more detailed information, remember that the size of the market important, not just the cost per click.

3 – Organizing Advertising

Now you’re ready to set up your advertising. Since you’ve taken the time to get a good idea what people are looking for and a product they’ll want to buy, this step should be a breeze. For now, you can just set your affiliate id link as the destination of your ad and let the product’s sales page do the actual conversion. You just need a snappy ad that will draw people’s attention and get them to click, and hopefully the owner of the product will be able to do the rest.

This is sometimes considered the last step, and it can serve well enough if you’re only interested in getting people from the ad to the product’s sales pitch. However, generating more organic traffic isn’t terribly difficult if you’re willing to go a few steps further.

4 – Create a Landing Page

This step is sometimes considered optional, though I recommend performing it whenever possible. A good landing page doesn’t need to be incredibly complex or large to improve traffic.

While you can organize your advertising so all clicks move through to the product’s sales page, this doesn’t offer the same Google ranking advantages genuine content brings in. Even if you don’t have a lot of experience with marketing or web design, there are a number of software solutions available that let novices create decent websites with little to no knowledge of html.

Be sure to remember to redirect those ads you set up in stage three to your landing page. It doesn’t do you any good if it’s just sitting there with no visitors.

5 – Tracking Sales

Strictly speaking, this step is more follow up than getting sales up and running, but it has been proven to drastically increase income over the long run. Tracking is important because it not only saves money now, but also helps the affiliate learn. Checking what works and what doesn’t with split tests and minor tweaks could help avoid both major and minor mistakes that could cost an affiliate a huge amount of money over time.

Following these five easy steps turns a difficult process into a handful of simple tasks. If you stick with it, and learn from your mistakes by tracking what works and what doesn’t, you should be making money in no time.

Each year, the number of small web site owners and bloggers who promote third party products continues to grow. Affiliate marketing has become popular for the simple reason that it costs little or nothing to start selling third party products and begin generating commissions.

Due to the competitive nature and low barrier of entry associated with affiliate marketing, Internet marketers are seeking new ways to differentiate their offering and encourage web site browsers to buy from them versus a competitor’s site.

One of the most popular methods of differentiation is by offering bonuses upon purchase. In this scenario, affiliates provide individuals who purchase products from their web site, access to free bonuses in the form of software or information.

In the past this type of offer was very tedious to provide. Affiliates had to require purchasers to email them with a receipt of their purchase to validate that a sale was made. Once the affiliate received the confirmation, they emailed each customer with a link to access their free bonuses. For small affiliates, selling only one or two items per week, this was never a real issue. For large affiliates, also referred to as supper affiliates, this task was extremely time-consuming.

New products however have made the process of offering bonuses, the most effective way of generating affiliate sales easier than ever. There are a variety of tools to help manage the collection and distribution of bonus offers when web site visitors complete a purchase.

Based on my review of a variety of affiliate based software to manage bonus offers, I understand the value of eliminating time wasting activities associated with bonus set up, delivery, and coordination.

One of the best features of many affiliate software tools is the ability to establish an ongoing dialog with purchasers after a sale is made. This provides value in the form of a house list that allows you to up-sell and cross-sell related products.

One of the key components of any affiliate bonus management software is the auto responder function. After initiating a sale, affiliates can benefit from automated follow up. This allows for heavy lifting to be completed automatically and reduces the timing and labor necessary for one-on-one selling.

Many of these tools offer the ability to create a unique follow up campaign for each bonus you offer. This is essential when offering a variety of bonuses across multiple products. each unique bonus, you are able to set up a unique auto-responder. Often, you may leverage existing auto-responders that you’re using with Aweber or Get response. This simplifies the process, eliminating the need to start your email communication stream from scratch. If you do not currently have an auto-responder, setting one up is easy and can be done for less than twenty dollars.

Bonus management software answers an ongoing need among affiliate marketers. Efficiently managing the set up and delivery process associated with affiliate product bonuses and establishing a dialog with purchasers, is an effective means for generating a significant affiliate income. Complete customization allows you to adapt your program to be aligned with your current offerings and support new affiliate products you are selling today or may want to sell in the future.