Archive for March, 2009
The Best Paying Products to Promote
Let’s face it, the people that don’t make it online don’t make enough money to pay their bills. One of the reasons why they can’t is because they don’t sustain and maintain a steady stream of income.
Income level goes up and down up and down. With recurring income you can pretty much set a bottom level on the low end of your income and set the bottom. From there you can’t go anywhere but up!
What can you do to get recurring income? Well, one great thing that you can do is find products or services to promote that provide a recurring commission and become an affiliate.
Membership sites that provide recurring affiliate commissions are great things to promote. You want to make sure that the membership site is very good and provides good value to it’s members and has a good sales page, but once you find them, they can be a gold mine!
I don’t care what niche market you’re in or what niches you want to pursue. Chances are that there are plenty of paid membership sites and most of them have affiliate programs that you can sign up for.
Other things that you want to target are services that offer recurring commissions. The possibilities are really endless for this. There are so many different niche markets and there are so many different services for each niche.
Paid newsletter’s that send out a newsletter to their subscribers. There are newsletters in all kinds of different niche markets. Think about all of the services that are provided online.
They have online services for pretty much everything now. Everyday more and more things are getting automated. That’s more opportunity to affiliate online services.
Think about it this way. You’re making one sale and potentially getting paid every month for it, for potentially years! That’s a great thing, my friend. You’re making a lot of money doing that and it’s a lot less work to promote because one sale can equal many sales if you’re promoting products or services that pay a one time commission.
Just remember that recurring income is your friend and you should seek it out anytime that you can!
The Pre-selling Process is Vitally Important
I had an understanding of it, I went to college and majored in Business Management with Marketing emphasis. Well, bookwork is one thing and the real world is another thing.
Went I got out of college, I worked as a salesman for Best Buy. I didn’t give the whole sales process much thought. All I was concerned with was talking to someone, gaining their interest and closing them. That is about all that I really thought about, but there was a lot more to it.
You see, Best Buy, just like any other business that sells products has a pre-sell campaign in place. They spend millions of dollars on it every year. I saw their commercials and their ads, that they sent out, but I didn’t think about it much.
I think that the reason I didn’t concern myself with it is because I wasn’t involved with it. It wasn’t my job. My job was to sell people, in the store, when they came.
I thought that I was doing a lot of the work. I was personally selling them because of my talent as a salesman. That was all true, but plenty of them had experienced a sense of pre-selling before they ever even walked in the store.
Sure, some of them were just casual shoppers and were just walking by and I pitched them and sold them, but most of them had seen some form of advertising for similar products that I was pitching to them. They had probably come to my section of the store because they had seen an ad somewhere.
So what is so different about the sales process when you’re running your own online business. The answer is, not much of anything, the only differences are that it takes place online and that a lot of times, you’re responsible for it.
That is the big difference. When you’re running your own online business, you either need to be in charge of the pre-selling process or hire someone to be in charge of it. If you want to sell a product online. Having a good pre-selling campaign cannot be understated. You’re going to have a much better conversion rate with that process in place, believe me.
Remember it is About the Offer and Not Just the E-Book
I look at the competition, but I also let the customers decide what they’re willing to pay. If the sales letter keeps converting and the customers are happy with the offer, I will keep on raising the price.
One mistake that I see so many people doing, that are selling information products, is that they don’t offer bonuses or if they do, they don’t offer enough. Sure, the main product can be the main part of the offer and get a lot of attention from your sales copy, but don’t forget about the overall offer.
People could be charging so much more if they would just add some good bonuses. If you’re really involved in a niche, chances are that you have acquired some rights to certain products or know of some great free information products or videos to offer.
They probably don’t know that they’re free resources. The Internet is a really big place. You just have to make sure to check the rights of the product.
Even if you’re providing links to free websites that will help inform someone. I’ve even put links on my download page for people to sign up for certain mailing lists that I find very helpful. The download page can be a one stop shop for your customers. They can keep coming back to the download page and from there they can navigate to all the links over and over again.
You can augment the offer with other e-books, software or videos that you acquire the rights to. It isn’t that much work to upload some more bonuses to a download page. I just get the sense that some people are just too lazy to do it.
You can even get creative. I offer free consulting to my customers of an e-book that I’m selling. That can be very important. The vast majority of people who sell e-books, just send you to the download page and you never get to talk to them again.
I know that just by offering that, my conversion rate has grown by quite a bit. It is an e-book about making money online and people love the fact that I will help consult them on their own business for free. Some people just read the e-book and don’t bother with the consulting, but the people that do are really thankful that I offer that.
Selecting the Best Affiliate Programs
If you’re going to get all of these refunds, it just isn’t worth it. A sales page that converts is something that can’t be understated. I don’t care how good the product or offer is, they must have a sales page that converts. I’m not going to waste my time sending traffic to a sales page that doesn’t convert.
Another major factor that comes into the equation is how much money that I think that I have to spend promoting it. It isn’t about the amount that I will spend, it is about the amount that I plan on gaining, the net.
I don’t care if I’m making $100 a sale or $5 a sale. It is all about the net gain and how many times that I can replicate that net gain. I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about.
Say that I’m using pay-per click traffic and I’m using landing pages to get to the affiliate sales page. If the payout is $100 and it costs me $90 to get a sale, I’m only making a $10 net. If the payout is only $25 and I pay $10 to get a sale, the $25 payout is more fruitful.
There are other things that would go into that equation. I may be able to scale up the $100 payout campaign and it doesn’t cost me much more and I can make a lot more sales. The $25 payout may cost me a lot more to scale that campaign up and it may not be as fruitful as the $100 payout, in the end. It is all about testing and variables.
The last thing that goes into picking an affiliate program is my infrastructure in that niche. What I mean by that is how many assets that I already have in that niche market. If I already have a mailing list in that niche, it is pretty obvious. It also helps if I have a website or blog in that niche and if I have promoted a product or service in that niche before.
Promote High Quality Products
I see so many affiliates these days just going to www.clickbank.com grab a high converting product and pitch it. They may make some good money doing this.
The problem with this is if the product or service is crap, you’re going to get a bad reputation. Reputation is so vitally important for any business and especially an online business.
Make no mistake about it. If you’re an Internet Marketer you’re running a business and if you’re running a business you need to have a good reputation as a straight shooter, if you want your business to survive for the long-term.
Think about how you promote products. You promote them on websites, write articles etc. People think that they can only get repeat business from people who buy products from them, not true.
Affiliates can get repeat business too. If your website helps them and the product or services that you promote help them. They will remember that and come back. If you don’t help them, they won’t.
If you become an expert in a certain market and write articles about it and affiliate products. They will remember your name for one of two reasons. You helped them or hurt them, it’s plain and simple. You could get repeat business and good word of mouth publicity or it could work the other way.
I’ll give you an example. When I got into the make money online business I bought into the hype of taking online surveys and thinking I was going to make all of this money online.
Didn’t work that way. You had to be in certain demographics to take most of them and there weren’t that many to take and you had to give your e-mail address and get 100′s of e-mails and they are always asking you to sign up for offers. I made exactly $2 from my online survey experience.
Well, after I found out it was over-hyped and people were peddling it because the products were converting so well. Any website that promoting that stuff or any person that promoted it, I not only avoiding like the plague, I went on and told everyone that would listen about my bad experience with it.
That’s a big reason why you don’t want to promote garbage. They might of got my sale one time, but they certainly won’t get business from me again and I have told countless people about my bad experience and they won’t get their business either.
Build Your Mailing List Through Joint Ventures
When people think of joint ventures, they typically think about people getting affiliates and having them promote their product. There is so much more to a joint venture partnership. There is an almost endless amount of ways that you can joint venture with people.
I’m always looking for new marketers to work with and new joint venture partners. One thing that I do is look for marketers that put out good free products that they use to build their mailing lists.
I look for these people for two reasons. One is that I’m always looking for new free products to promote to my lists. The second is that I’m looking to work out joint ventures with them, where I’ll send a message to my list promoting their product, by giving a link to their squeeze page and they, in return, do the same for me.
It is free publicity. You’re also making your list happy by giving them a quality free product and you’re building your list, at the same time. It is a really cool thing.
The possibilities are really endless with this strategy. I don’t think that you will ever run out of people to work with. There are so many marketers out there, in about any niche that you can think of and there are always new people coming into Internet Marketer or expanding into new niche markets.
Again, with all Internet Marketing strategies, you have to put them to use. Create your free product or use some really good private label rights and create your squeeze page and start scouring your niche for people.
Internet forums are a pretty good place to look. After you find what you’re looking for, just start contacting people. Let them know how much they would benefit from this.
Let them know that they can please their list by giving them a great free product and they get their list built, for free and all they have to do is send a message to their list.
I even offer to write the message to send to their list for them and the message that I send to my list, if they don’t want to do either. So, that makes it even easier on them and if your product is good, a lot of people will take you up on your offer.
Is Affiliate Marketing for You?
People get into affiliate marketing for many reasons. They don’t think that they can put together a product or offer. That may or may not be true, but the important thing is that they believe that they can’t. If they can’t, they don’t really fancy having to hire someone to write it or do it for them.
They don’t think that they can create a good sales page. Again, that may or may not be true and they don’t want to shell out the big bucks and hire a professional copywriter. They might not want to handle the customer service.
Affiliate marketing can be a great thing. Anyone can get into it and you can make a ton of money without having a lot of resources, but it can be a lot of work.
There are reasons why people like me create our own products and write our own sales pages and handle customer service or pay the big bucks to outsource them. One of the reasons is that we can get affiliates to do some of the dirty work for us.
As an affiliate you have to realize that you may have to really roll up your sleeves and get to work. It will entail a lot of research. You have to research products that you want to affiliate. You have to see how their sales page converts, how much you can make a sale, what their refund rate is etc.
You also have to research how you’re going to market this product to people or the group of people that you have built relationships with. You have to research how you’re going to stick out from the crowd and the competition and just how you’re going to go about this.
You have to figure out what strategies that you’re going to use to promote the product or offer. A lot of successful article marketers will write between five to ten articles a day.
For most people, that isn’t an easy task. Not with all the distractions that come with the proposition of working from home. I’m not saying this to discourage anyone, but it’s the truth. I don’t care what strategy that you use, you better realize that you’re going to have to put some real time and effort into it, for it to start bearing some real fruit.
Using Facebook to Build a Mailing List
The great thing about using Facebook to build your mailing list is that it is FREE! I’ve done the whole squeeze page thing with pay-per click advertising. In most of the niches that I market in, pay-per click advertising is too expensive to pay to build a mailing list.
You can say, well put up the squeeze page and then redirect the people who sign up to a sales page. Well, I don’t always have my own product and sales page in the niche. I don’t like using pay-per click and redirecting to an affiliates sales page because you probably have to wait so long to get paid. I’m not a patient person.
With Facebook you can find people that are interested in your niche. That means that they are targeted. You can slap up a profile and get started right away. Just keep in mind that your limit for requesting friends is 50 a day.
You might say, well that doesn’t sound like much, but in a week that is 350 and in a month that is 1,500. It is free and doesn’t take that much work. You don’t have to set up pay-per click campaigns, write articles etc. All you have to do is go to groups in your niche and add people. It takes me about 10 minutes a day. If you’re using pay-per click, it is often times more than a $1 a click in the bigger niches. You’re getting all the Facebook leads for free.
You can say, well not everyone will accept your friend request and they might not, but if you can increase that my having a little note with your friend request saying that you have that common interest, you will help improve friend conversion. When has a squeeze page converted at 100%? When has everyone clicked on the link in your bio box? That never happens. You throw out a net and you catch some fish and some get away.
All they have to do is hit one button and they are your friend. They don’t have to give you their e-mail address. You may be asking, how do you get friends on your mailing list?
You do that by starting a group. When you have a group in Facebook, you can send a message to all of their profiles, at the same time. You can do any number of different things. You can use your group to get traffic to websites and do any number of different things.
Using Testimonials the Most Effective Ways
Testimonials are vitally important to a sales page, especially if they are good and utilized properly. You would be surprised at how many sales pages either don’t have them or don’t utilize them properly.
I see a ton of sales pages. I see as many as I can, not because I’m constantly consuming, but because I’m ALWAYS looking for ways to improve my copy writing.
I’m always looking for new strategies to improve my sales copy. The best way to do that is to always be on the search for new ideas. Sure, I can come up with my own ideas and I do, but I get just as many ideas from other people as do by thinking of them myself.
One of the ideas that I get from other copywriters is how they present their testimonials. Customers provide the testimonials and we obviously can’t do much to augment what they say.
There are a couple things that a copywriter can do. One is to highlight or underline certain points in the testimonial to make them stand out. There is one method that I have noticed that is very effective.
Most people that use testimonials on their sales pages will have a box and say testimonial on the top of it and have the testimonial and it is really basic. What you should do instead of having these boring, here is a testimonial headline, is to engage the reader with the best part of the testimonial as the title.
There are many reasons why this is very effective. For one, if you have a bunch of testimonials, people might not take the time to read them. If they see that headline, they at least read that and that is positive momentum towards your sale.
Lets face it. There are a ton of people that skim a sales page. If they are skimming a sales page and you have these headlines from on your customers instead of the boring testimonial title, people are going to notice that.
Another thing that can be very effective is the placement of the testimonials. Don’t just lump them all together, which screams to the reader, boring and go ahead and just skim or skip them all together.
Use your testimonials to illustrate points. Make sure to make a point about your product and if possible, use a testimonial right after that point to help illustrate it and re-enforce it.
Finding Ideas to Improve your Online Business
I’m the type of person that is always trying to improve things. I want to be in better shape, I want to eat healthier, I want to improve my online business etc.
One thing that you have to do if you want to improve your online business, is to come up with new and innovative ideas. Where do you come up with or find these ideas?
There are a lot of ways that you can generate ideas. There are simple ways that are often times overlooked. I’m a product creator and I get people asking me all of the time, how do you come up with so many ideas?
One thing that I do is take advantage of the mundane times in my life to think about new ideas to write about and to improve my online business. Think about all of the times that you’re waiting in line or in a waiting room or driving etc.
I try to think about business while I’m in these situations. There’s nothing else better to do anyways. What are you going to do, sit there and space out while you stare at the floor?
No. You’re going to be thinking of new ideas. I always keep a pen and paper on me at all times, so I can write down these ideas. That’s just one way that you can think of new ideas, but there are plenty of other ways that you can find new ideas.
I love to visit Internet Marketing forums. I do it to network and build relationships, but also to generate new ideas for improving my online business.
Forums like www.warriorforum.com are breeding grounds for generating new ideas. You know the old saying that two heads are better than one. There’s about 50,000 heads on that forum, you should be able to come up with plenty of ideas.
There is just such a wealth of great information on there for improving your online business, it’s scary! I don’t care what type of online business you run, there is more than enough great information on there for everyone!
When I visit these forums I come up with new ideas, each and every time that I visit them! I feel like a kid in a candy store. The possibilities are really endless and you are really missing out if you don’t utilize them.
