Archive for June, 2006
Ask questions first before you join an affiliate program. Do a little research about the choices of program that you intend to join into. Get some answers because they will be the deciding point of what you will be achieving later on.
Will it cost you anything to join? Most affiliate programs being offered today are absolutely free of charge. So why settle for those that charge you some dollars before joining.
When do they issue the commission checks? Every program is different. Some issue their checks once a month, every quarter, etc. Select the one that is suited to your payment time choice. Many affiliate programs are setting a minimum earned commission amount that an affiliate must meet or exceed in order for their checks to be issued.
What is the hit per sale ratio? This is the average number of hits to a banner or text link it takes to generate a sale based on all affiliate statistics. This factor is extremely important because this will tell you how much traffic you must generate before you can earn a commission from the sale.
How are referrals from an affiliate’s site tracked and for how long do they remain in the system? You need to be confident on the program enough to track those people you refer from your site. This is the only way that you can credit for a sale. The period of time that those people stay in the system is also important. This is because some visitors do not buy initially but may want to return later to make the purchase. Know if you will still get credit for the sale if it is done some months from a certain day.
What are the kinds of affiliate stats available? Your choice of affiliate program should be capable of offering detailed stats. They should be available online anytime you decide to check them out. Constantly checking your individual stats is important to know how many impressions, hits and sales are already generated from your site. Impressions are the number of times the banner or text link was viewed by a visitor of your site. A hit is the one clicking on the banner or text links.
Does the affiliate program also pay for the hits and impressions besides the commissions on sales? It is important that impressions and hits are also paid, as this will add to the earnings you get from the sales commission. This is especially important if the program you are in offers low sales to be able to hit ratio.
Who is the online retailer? Find out whom you are doing business with to know if it is really a solid company. Know the products they are selling and the average amount they are achieving. The more you know about the retailer offering you the affiliate program, the easier it will be for you to know if that program is really for you and your site.
Is the affiliate a one tier or two tier program? A single tier program pays you only for the business you yourself have generated. A two tier program pays you for the business, plus it also pays you a commission on the on the sales generated by any affiliate you sponsor in your program. Some two-tier programs are even paying small fees on each new affiliate you sponsor. More like a recruitment fee.
Lastly, what is the amount of commission paid? 5% - 20% is the commission paid by most programs. .01% - .05% is the amount paid for each hit. If you find a program that also pays for impressions, the amount paid is not much at all. As you can see from the figures, you will now understand why the average sales amount and hit to sale ratio is important.
These are just some of the questions that needed answering first before you enter into an affiliate program. You should be familiar with the many important aspects that your chosen program should have before incorporating them into your website. Try to ask your affiliate program choices these questions. These can help you select the right program for you site from among the many available.
June 29th, 2006
It’s been a busy few days for us as we have been working on the early stages of several new projects which we are really excited about.
During my time in Internet Marketing our focus has been on providing high quality information to our visitors and subscribers to enable them to take action to improve their lives. So the concepts of Social Bookmarking Sites (where you save your “favourite” links so that you can access them from any computer and also share them with others) and Social Networking Sites (where you can interact with others and use a variety of features) really appeal to us.
The sites which have been developed so far in both these areas have been very generic i.e. they are aimed at everyone! As a Niche Marketer I believe that there are a whole range of Niches in which these sorts of sites will have great appeal. They will provide the Internet Marketer with an opportunity to provide a valuable resource, to grow subscriber lists and to market targeted products to those lists and the general site visitors. I believe it offer enormous potential to continue to operate in markets which you are passionate about and generate income.
Now turning to Tag and Ping which for the Internet Marketer is one of the easiest ways to generate high volumes of traffic to your sites and blogs relatively easily. I have been carrying out an experiment over the past few weeks using the techniques outlined in Lisa’s Tagging Secrets which has seen an increase in our Blogs Traffic over the last 3 months of 656% Yes! 656% and as you might imagine I cannot recommend enough that any Internet Marketer looking for traffic should grab a copy of Tagging Secrets!
June 28th, 2006
A couple of people have dropped me a line telling me that they love the idea of setting up their own Social Networking Site in Niches which they are passionate about. However, they are wondering how they would go about promoting it. So I have put together a few ideas.
For the purposes of the exercise imagine that your social network is for Gardeners. I always find it useful to be able to focus on a specific group when i am trying to write about something like this.
Well the first thing to do would be to issue some press releases “Green Fingers Grows Gardeners MySpace” type of thing - Okay I know it’s a corny title LOL. You could issue them through http://www.prweb.com using their free service. Perhaps you could even get a bit controversial with something like “MySpace abandoned by Gardeners!” - not sure about that but you get the idea?
Now don’t just limit it to online press releases - get yourself down to your local magazine store or library and start going through them looking for the Editors email address and send your press release to them. The Editors are always looking for news and something new or different.
Here in the UK I would also be writing to the BBC and other channels through their websites or whatever means was appropriate to get the news in front of the people that host the plethora of gardening and garden makeover programmes.
Then of course there is the normal route of forums - adding value to the forums by posting helpful postings to answer questions posed by members - I do this all the time on Genealogy Forums. Of course you would have your Gardening MySpace link in your signature but how about also approaching the Forum Manager/Owner and asking whether they would be happy to do a review of your site?
Then of course there are all the local Garden Centres, Landscape Gardeners etc etc how about offering them a free promotion in return for putting information about your site on their tills or wherever is appropriate. I remember we promoted our Dog site by getting a couple of the local vets and pet stores to have a little leaflet on their receptions and tills!
Then there are blogs - for instance I run quite a few gardening type blogs (yes I do honestly LOL) and get lots of visitors - how about getting a few blog owners to review your site or leave meaningful posts with of course a link back to your site.
Those are literally off the top of my head ideas. I am sure there are others that could add much more and refine what hopefully is the beginning of a marketing plan.
June 25th, 2006
One of the most amazing things about the hugely successful MySpace website is that it’s success is in large measure down to the activity of the members.
The members of MySpace create the content (which is regularly spidered by the Search Engines), the members routinely promote the site to their friends, colleagues and associates without MySpace having to do anything. There have been a lot of products recently which have focused on how an Internet Marketer can tap into the potential of MySpace.
However, whilst there are miliions (80+ million at the last look) of users of MySpace the biggest problem is that they are a very diverse and untargetted group of people. Therefore tapping into the potential involves an immense amount of work!
Having said that though for the Internet Marketer Social Network sites do offer an opportunity to absolutely dominate any niche that you are involved in or want to be involved in.
But you might be think that creating a site with the capabilities of MySpace seems like an overwhelming prospect! But just imagine if you were able to bring together the people in the niche you want to dominate by creating a MySpace clone for that Niche and properly target the members?
There is a solution which does not involve you spending tens of thousands of dollars in having a site created for you by a coder. The people at phpFox have put together an affordable (you can buy or lease the product) price and it’s an amazing product. Take a look at it by clicking on the phpFox link.
June 25th, 2006
As we have now been running with the Tagging and Pinging approach with Social Bookmarking for a little while now based on the information in Tagging Secrets I thought that it was worth giving you an update! One of the questions I posed at the outset of this thread was whether it was sustainable in terms of generating traffic.
The answer so far seems to be a very definite yes! Traffic has continued to increase on a day by day basis at about 48% with some spikes when there are postings as one might expect. In fact I have just been looking at the Alexa Statistics and our 1 week average has broken the 100,000 barrier which seems good going to me.
The other thing that I have found that we are able to do is to drive traffic to a new blog or website fairly easily which has to be a good thing.
So in conclusion yes Tag and Ping coupled with Social Bookmarking as outlined in Lisa’s Tagging Secrets works. I will of course be continuing to test and evaluate.
June 25th, 2006
Wow now that was quick!
I posted about the friend of ours who is looking at Starting a Homebased Craft Business and had gone to make myself a cup of coffee! I came back to the computer and one of our subscribers had written saying “Paul I have just read your item about starting a homebased craft business and wondered whether you could recommend anything to help me with setting up a Candle Making Business from Home” - gosh some people leap onto things very quickly when they see a good thing!
As it happens only the other day I had been looking for the exact same thing for someone else and had been able to track down a really excellent product all about Setting up a Candle Making Business from home - if you want to take a look at it then just click on the link!
June 24th, 2006
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