What is Reverse Marketing?
If you are trying to sell a product or service on the web, then you understand how hard it is to get traffic to your site. Web business seems to be completely driven by the sheer volume of traffic you can get to your web site. It doesn’t seem to make sense because you know in your heart that thousands of mass e-mails and site hits do not always equate to sales. There has to be another dimension to your goods and services, and you are probably curious as to how to market these quality items without seeming like a complete pest.
The truth is that traditional internet marketing techniques can plain wear you out. It is not enough that you have a good product and a good web page, but now you have to try your hand at viral marketing, advertisements, e-mail lists and catchy web gimmicks. For most people this means flooding the market with news about your product or services. Sometimes this can make you feel cheap and like you are annoying to potential customers by continually spamming them all the time. Sometimes the traditional type of marketing can actually backfire on you, driving potential customer away.
Well if you are interested in marketing your goods and services in a less invasive way then reverse marketing might be something you want to look into. For some people this is a much better approach because they can back their quality products and services with supportive content that sheds an attractive light on your company. In this way you can gently sway buyers to purchase your products. You will earn a great reputation and will have a more loyal fan base.
Sounds great, but what exactly is reverse marketing? Reverse marketing is a simple concept but you still need to have a great plan of attack. Rather than running web banners or advertisements on TV and radio, in reverse marketing you might strategically place essays or e-books on various topics that people look up on the web. You could post helpful tips or a website dedicated to home repairs. Of course, you place a tag line for your website at the end of the helpful “how to” article. This way, you attract people after demonstrating that you know what you are talking about.
Reverse marketing seems like a great way to attract customers because you are showing your expertise in an area or many areas. People who have been helped by your article or tip will tend to purchase a product from you before they go somewhere else. It is all about putting seemingly unbiased information out there but woven into a thinly veiled advertisement for your goods and services. You can plug your product out in the open, but not too overtly.
Reverse marketing can seem like a godsend for those who are sick of running the rat race of traditional internet marketing techniques. Instead of just spamming the world to see if you can convince someone to buy your product, you simply be ready to capture those quality buyers who are all ready to make a purchase. This kind of marketing—allowing customers to seek you out—can feel much better for you
Neil Bartlett is the founder of MyIMCoach.com. My IM Coach provides aspiring Internet Marketers with Tips and Techniques for getting started and/or improving their marketing skills. To learn more INSTANTLY grab his FREE report “How To Make It Online”
Affiliate Marketing – How to Stand Out from the Rest
There are many people out there that have made a very nice living in Affiliate Marketing. Chances are greater than not that there are a few people that have made enough money to quit their fulltime job and live the life they want promoting the exact same product you are right now. Why did people buy the product or service from that person and not you? It is the same product… isn’t it.
The answer to that question is going to surprise you… because it’s no. Yes you may be promoting the same company product, your banners are identical, the ads you place that have been approved by the company are the same… and if you are with a company that offers their affiliates a webpage then you even have the EXACT same webpage. Confused? The product that all of those people bought from Joe Shmo isn’t the product you are holding… they bought Joe Shmo.
Let me explain. The key to making money in affiliate marketing isn’t in the product you decide to go with. The key to making money in affiliate marketing is to make yourself the product that you are promoting. Yes it helps if you have a product that people want… that works… and that people are going to recommend to other people. But what you are selling to people is you.
Think about it this way. You are driving down the road in new town. You are really hungry, and you want a hamburger. You see, “Joe’s Hamburger,” “The Greasy Spoon, “ “Burger Galore,” and just a little way up the road you see the Golden Arches. Which place are you going to stop at? I would bet that you are going to drive a little way up the road and visit McDonalds. Why? Because you now McDonalds. You have eaten there before, you know what to expect, they have the best fries in the world and really who can beat the Big Mac or the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. Now all of these places have hamburgers, and honestly one of those other places could have better hamburgers… but you KNOW McDonalds.
You are going to get customers and close more sales because people know you, they can depend on you and what you have to offer is reliable. This is what is known as self branding. Why is it so important to your success? The products and services that you have are going to change, you are going to find better products or you are going to offer different services. The only constant in your business is going to be you. This means that people need to know you and they need to trust you.
McDonalds did not make millions off of the Big Mac, it made millions off of the hamburger. The longer McDonalds is in business the more they expand their menu to meet what there is a demand for. But McDonalds never changes.
Neil Bartlett is the founder of MyIMCoach.com. My IM Coach provides aspiring Internet Marketers with Tips and Techniques for getting started and/or improving their marketing skills. To learn more and INSTANTLY grab his FREE report “How To Make It Online” go to http://www.myimcoach.com/specialoffer
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!
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
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.
Is Affiliate Marketing for You?
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.
