Affiliate Marketing Rules

So you have been wanting to get into affiliate marketing, and want to know the rules. You have your website and or blog all set up and ready to go. You have chosen your niche and market that you want to promote and make money off of. You just need links to start making money. Promoting others services and products is not something that is difficult to do. However, you will find that with all of the many companies that offer affiliate programs, and referral options, they all have their own rules that you must follow.

Affiliate marketing is pretty easy to follow, that is unless you have many different programs that you are a part of. When you start getting so many that you cannot remember the rules, or the guidelines that you have to follow, you might have a problem. This is because the rules for affiliate programs are as different as the companies. Each company is allowed to make their own rules. However, you might see many similarities. That does not mean that they are copying one another, or cloning their affiliate program so to speak, but yet it means that they have the same rules.

Affiliate marketing rules can be so very different. They can range from not mentioning the brand names that they sell anywhere on your website, to not have that particular market in your website URL. Because they are so different for each program and company that you promote, you are going to have to be sure that you read each one well and make sure that you understand it fully. If you all ready have your URL for your website, you may not be able to participate in some of the affiliate programs. This is because you will not meet the requirements for the rules.

Another rule that you are going to see often when you are into affiliate marketing is the page rank rule. Some of the companies that will allow you to promote their services or products will not want you to have a higher page rank than they do. Nor will they allow you to have a website that is higher in the search engine rankings. For example, if you were promoting coffee, and you wanted to become an affiliate for Folgers coffee. Your website would not be able to come up above the official Folgers coffee website in the search engine results when coffee, or Folgers coffee is used as the search term. The companies that have this rule in place for their affiliate marketing programs feel as if your website were higher than theirs for the product that they are selling, that it would hurt their business tremendously. And, it just might. They would rather have the straight sales any day, than the commissioned sales. Who wouldnt?

Keeping a spreadsheet of the affiliate marketing programs that you are a part of and their rules is a great idea. This way you are never confused and know just where you need to stand to be a part of that program. This is the best thing that you can do for your affiliate marketing business. Not only that, you will also find that some of the sites that have broken rules and have been caught have resulted in law suits. Cover your tracks and make sure that you are following the rules that are set by that company for the best results.

You will also find that there is a thing that is called affiliate marketing software. If you can find a program that fits your needs and will help you keep everything straight, you may not have to worry about keeping track of them yourself. Use your software to keep track and make sure that you are doing your affiliate marketing the right way. Your efforts will pay off eventually, and you will be glad that you went by the book and followed the necessary affiliate marketing rules.

Good Companies Grow No Matter What

Every business demands growth, and double-digit growth is the dream of every dedicated business owner, even when lackluster results show up at quarter’s end.

 

Most entrepreneurial business owners need a guide to navigate their way toward substantial, sustainable growth. It can be done even in a slow economy as demonstrated by such companies as Harley Davidson, Starbucks, and WalMart. Even smaller companies such as Paychex and Oshkosh Truck have been able to make gains in revenue, gross profits and net profits.

 

Here are 5 disciplines of sustained growth:

 

1. Retain Your Customer Base: Keep the growth that you have already earned by coaxing customers into complex relationships that make it a hassle for them to switch to your competitor. Tailor your products/services using data gleaned from your customers giving you an advantage. Proactively managing customer defections will help you anticipate and pre-empt them. Bonding with customers wherever emotion is tied to an interaction is another great way to retain them.

 

1. Gain Market Share at the Expense of Your Rivals: Give customers a reason to abandon a competitor’s product/service for yours. Do what it takes to lower the switching costs. Pulling customers away from a competitor can be difficult, so you must devote many resources to raiding their customer base. Offering higher value and quality are crucial to this end. Buying a competitor is another way to do this.

 

1. Exploit Market Position: Show up where growth is going to happen by spotting it early. This can be done by watching the industry for shifts in buying criteria, product or service innovations, and population trends. You must be able to spot positioning opportunities to make the most of them by continually using a systematic approach to the process.

 

1. Invade Adjacent Markets: Before moving into a nearby market, decide whether it offers significant long-term growth and profitability. Determine whether you have an advantage over a competitor, and ensure you can match its standards of quality and value.

 

1. Invest In New Lines of Business: If you take this approach, never overpay for a new line. You must find simple strategies instead of complex ones, and partner with the new business by assessing its leadership team and balance sheet.

 

Although a successful growth portfolio might not include all five of these disciplines, it must contain more than one. Only a balanced growth portfolio can keep an organization growing when the market shifts dramatically.

Million Dollar Sales Letters for Online Entrepreneurs

SECRETS OF MILLION DOLLAR SALES LETTERS –

FOR MAIL CAMPAIGN & INTERNET

 

 

    Regardless of what you’re trying to sell, you really can’t sell it without “talking” with your prospective buyer. An in attempting to sell anything on the Internet, the sales letter you send out is when and how you talk to your prospect.

 

    All winning sales letters “talk” to the prospect by creating an image in the mind of the reader. They set “the scene” by appealing to a desire or need; and then they flow smoothly into the “visionary” part of the sales pitch by describing in detail how “wonderful” life will be and, how “good” the prospect is going to feel after he’s purchased your product. This is the “body or guts” of a sales letter.

 

    Overall, a winning sales letter follows a time-tested and proven formula: 1) Get his attention 2) Get him interested in what you can do for him 3) Make him desire the benefits of your product so badly his mouth begins to water 4) Demand action from him – tell him to click the right button or send for whatever it is you’re selling without delay – any procrastination on his part might cause him to lose out. This is called the “AIDA” formula (Attention, Interest, Desire and

Action) – it works.

 

    On your website, your sales page should be the length of what it would be

if were doing a mailing, or longer if you’re using bullets to emphasize benefits to build the desire. Of course on the Internet you don’t have to worry about letterhead stationery or the cost of postage, which is a considerable savings. If, however, you want to also do a mailing campaign then the following would apply. The sales letters in mailings that pull in the most sales are almost always two pages with 1 1/2 spaces between lines. For really big ticket items, they’ll run at least four pages. – on an 11 by 17 sheet of paper folded in half. If your sales letter is only two pages in length, there’s nothing wrong with running it on the front and back of one sheet of 8 1/2 by 11 paper. However, your sales letter should always be on letterhead paper – your letterhead printed, and including your logo and business motto if you have one.

 

    Regardless of the length of your sales letter, it should do one thing, and that’s sell, and sell hard! If you intend to close the sale, you’ve got to do it with your sales letter. You should never be “wishy-washy” with your sales letter. You do the actual selling and the closing of that sale with your sales letter – any brochure or circular you send along with in your mailing will just reinforce what you say in the sales letter.

 

    There’s been a great deal of discussion in the past few years regarding just how long a sales letter should be. A lot of people are asking: Will people really take the time to read a long sales letter? The answer is a simple and time-tested yes indeed! Surveys and tests over the years emphatically prove that “longer sales letters” pull even better than the shorter ones, so don’t worry about the length of your sales letter – just make sure that it sells your product for you!

 

    The “inside secret” is to make your sales letter so interesting, and “visionary” with the benefits you’re offering to the reader, that he can’t resist reading it all the way through. You break up the “work” of reading by using short, punchy sentences, underlining important points you’re trying to make, with the use of subheadlines, indentations and even the use of a second color, and leaving lots of white space around it. On your website, the sales letter should run down the middle of the page so the viewer doesn’t have to keep adjusting the screen to see the whole sentence. This is very distracting and more apt to send that client to another website than losing patience reading a long letter.

 

    Relative to the brochures and circulars you may want to include in your mailing with your sales letter – providing the materials you’re enclosing are of the best quality, they will generally reinforce the sale for you. But, if they are of poor quality, look cheap and don’t compliment your sales letter, then you shouldn’t be using them. Another thing, it will definitely classify you as an independent home worker if you hand-stamp your name/address on these brochures or advertising circulars instead of having them printed.

 

    Whenever possible, and so long as you have really good brochures to send out, have your printer run them through his press and print your name/address – even your telephone number and company logo – on them before you send them out. The thing is, you want your prospect to think of you as his supplier – the company – and not as just another independent entrepreneur. Sure, you can get by with less expense but you’ll end up with fewer orders and in the end, less profits.

 

    Another thing that’s been bandied about and discussed from every direction for years is whether to use a post office box number or your street address. Personally, I don’t like Post Office Boxes in a business address – because it transmits an aura of instability or temporary location. If your business is run from home, get a mail box from a post box vendor that has a street address. Then your address looks like, 1234 Willow Lane, #567, Your Town, and the box number could appear to the reader as a Suite number. However, if you live in a remote area where your address is 7890 Main St., RFD 42, Box 123, Your Town, then you have no choice but to include both your post office box number, AND, your street address on your sales letter. When doing it strictly for your website, put your street address, telephone number, and email address at the bottom of the page. More than likely, the customer will contact you by email, but it conveys dependability if that Internet buyer sees that you’re willing to give your address. This kind of open display of your honesty will give you credibility and dispel the thought of you being just another “fly-by-night” mail order company in the mind of your prospect.

 

    Above all else, you’ve got to include some sort of ordering page or coupon if you’re mailing. The coupon has to be as simple and as easy for the prospect to fill out and return to you as you can possible make it. The order page on your website should already be filled out, with perhaps just the shipping left to choice. If your product is an eBook or software to be instantly downloaded, then you don’t have any options to be chosen. A great many sales are lost because this order coupon is just too complicated for the would-be buyer to follow. Don’t get fancy! Keep it simple, and you’ll find your prospects responding with glee.

 

    Should you or shouldn’t you include in your mailing a self-addressed reply envelope? There are a lot of variables, as well as, pros and cons to this question. Overall, when you send out a “winning” sales letter to a good mailing list, a return reply envelope will increase your response tremendously.

 

    Tests of late seem to indicate that it isn’t that big a deal or difference in responses relative to whether you do or don’t pre-stamp the return reply envelope. Again, the decision here will rest primarily on the product you’re selling and the mailing list you’re using. Our recommendation is that you experiment – try it both ways – with subsequent mailings and decide for yourself from there.

Common PPC Mistakes #8: Resting On Your Laurels

The old saying which goes ?a watched pot never boils? is there to dissuade us from micro-managing everything in our lives. It is important, though, to recognize that just as intricate, obsessive following of details will do us more harm than good, the best way to do things is not the exact opposite of micro-management ? rather, it is somewhere in the middle, between too much and too little focus on the point. Therefore, when you start placing PPC ads it is important to realize that there is such a thing as too much ?laissez-faire?.

The statistics that come with any PPC account are important. You will see where your clicks and referrals come from. This will not only be the search engines that feature your ads, but also the networks to which they distribute those same ads. All of the major search engines do this, but they cannot control absolutely the quality of the networks they send your ads to. This can end up in a very low conversion rate for referrals from those networks ? which will generally turn out to be fraudulent. If you have referring domains with a bounce rate around 90%, it will be fraudulent. Some search engines will ask you to call them to remove these sites from your list and save you from paying for useless traffic ? however, Google allows you to move them into an ?excluded sites? folder. Don?t just let this go ? it can cost you money for no benefit, and can drain a budget if left alone.

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Common PPC Mistakes #9: Fixing Your Eyes Too Firmly On The Prize

There has been some discussion already of the problem of breathlessly chasing the number one ranking for a certain keyword. Some people will get involved in a bidding war to have this ranking, in the belief that it will result in big-time PPC results ? but all too often they are wrong. Certainly, there is a very real chance that you will end up spending too much for the price of a keyword to really be justified in terms of what it pays out to you. And this is all the more regrettable, because there are real advantages to not being right at the top.

We?ve all done a bit of window shopping in our time ? and there are as many of us who will not take the first choice offered to us as those who will. This means that just being in the top three, four or even five ads will have positive results for you. If you have done a good enough job of selling the product on the landing page then you may well find that the lower price you paid to be slightly lower on the ranking was excellent value, because people will check a few different sites before settling on a final decision.

The prize, after all, is not just being in first position on a list of rankings which are decided on he basis of who pays most. The real prize is the income from clicks and sales which can only really be achieved by good selling on your site. By all means aim for number one on the list of rankings, but if you fall a little short it really is not the end of the world.

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Maximize Your Potential

The Internet is a global marketplace, and allows people living in small villages in one corner of the country to trade with someone half way across the globe in a similar village. Twenty years ago, such trading would have been enormously tricky and would have taken a lot of time – by which point a customer could well have reconsidered, or circumstances made the deal impossible. With the increase in efficiency that the Internet has brought it is now possible to move goods, services and money between nations at almost instantaneous speed. While this may have removed some of the browsing time, it does mean that you can make money quickly.

Although there are many reasons why people go into business, we would be kidding ourselves if we claimed that there was not one factor which motivated business above all others – money. Being able to make money at the click of a mouse has made the Internet an indispensable item for those who have become used to it – and there are several businesses now which will not trade any other way. The costs that a business used to incur have disappeared in large part, and every bit of money you make can be a profit if you do things the right way. The advantages that the Internet has bestowed on us are really quite startling.

The Internet is a way for potential businesspeople to maximize their potential and make money fast – money which they can use to streamline their business further, make more money, and make it faster.

Making Contact

Before the Internet made its way into almost all of the homes in the developed world, making contact with people was a great deal more limited. The quickest way was to pick up the phone, but this required the person you were trying to contact being on the other end if you wanted to get information to them in any meaningful way. Due to the Internet, we have now got the magic of e-mail, which allows us to put down exactly what we want to say, spell check it and read it through before sending it – and even if the person we are trying to contact is not at their computer, they can read it when they get there.

E-mail has been superseded in many cases by the advent of the Instant Messenger. For many people, this is a waste of time, as they feel that it is easier to pick up the phone and speak to somebody. In some cases, it will be. But if you want to have ready access to information that may not be on the tip of your tongue or on paper in front of you, the Internet is impossible to beat. You can send links and photographs via an IM service, and as a result you will be able to showcase the full range of your talents and the reach of your knowledge.

The Internet has made getting in contact a great deal easier than once it was, and allows us to get our message across in a more measured way. Some of us are not possessed of a really good phone manner. In such cases, the Internet is more than useful – it is a gift the like of which we could not dream of.

Outsourcing Using the Internet

Sometimes in business, as skilled as you may be, there are things that you are unable to do. A customer will come through with a very specific brief and, although you will be able to do most of it, there may be a part of the job that poses you problems and prevents you from completing the task. In this respect, it may often seem that you will have to turn down the opportunity. But it is not necessarily the case. With the Internet at your fingertips, you have ready access to a skills base that means you can complete on that job even if some of the work is outside your own remit. Welcome to outsourcing via the Internet.

Thinking of it as a non-Internet situation for the moment, imagine that you were an interior redecorator who specialised in hanging wallpaper, painting and plastering. It may just be that a job comes through that involves all of that plus laying a hardwood floor. You’re good, but you’re not experienced in laying down floors. With the use of some contacts, you could pay for the services of a person who is capable and experienced in that part of the job. By paying them to take those duties on, you can accept the job and move forward.

There are many workers out there who do business via the Internet, and to contact them all you need to do is pick up the phone. If you cannot complete a job all by yourself, but it will pay well, there is no need to give up. Just log on, find a contact and get the job done.

Freelancing

The life of a freelance worker before the Internet was a very different thing to what it is today. In the past, any freelancer would need great mobility or a very sympathetic pricing plan from their phone company. In order to get around to pitch yourself to potential customers, you would require boundless energy, and an ability to deal with being told “no” face to face or over the phone. So much of freelancing is about speculation, after all. You can try and sell yourself a hundred times and could be told “no” a hundred times – and the chances are that you will get at least fifty rejections even if you are excellent. Although the Internet offers no guarantees of acceptance, it does make things a bit more equal for the freelancer.

There are many sites on the Internet that offer the opportunity for freelancers to pitch to potential customers on specific jobs – a searchable database means that you can even check for jobs that match up perfectly with your own specific skills and abilities. You can name your price and tell the customer how quickly you can turn a job around. The days of having to get out there, pound the pavement and then be told “sorry, we’re not interested” are more or less over. Not to mention that the Internet provides a truly monumental research tool for the jobs that require a bit of extra knowledge. The internet is nothing less than a launch pad from which to set your career in motion.

What You Need to Get Started

Although the Internet has made it a lot easier for people to make a start in business, it is still worth making sure that you maximise your potential as a businessperson by having all of the possible tools you could need to get things up and running. In order to start, you need comparatively little compared with a bricks and mortar business – but the better equipped you are, the more possibilities you can turn into definites.

A computer and an Internet connection are obviously the base minimum. As you are reading this, you have access to those at least. It is then a matter of what you need to add to these. If you want to put photographs of yourself or things that you are selling onto the Internet, you will need either a digital camera (preferable) or a scanner (just about acceptable). You will also need somewhere to put the photographs – a website (which requires you to buy webspace) or a blog (which does not). A website is more customisable, so if you have the know-how to do this, it is preferable.

To sell things at the click of a button you can ask your bank to set up a business account with scope to take electronic payments, or you can open an eBay account. Using eBay you will be able to auction items or services off to the highest bidder, and receive payments almost instantly through PayPal. The benefits of having the Internet mean that you can do all of this from a chair just in front of your computer.

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