Affiliate Business Tips

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If you’re not preselling, you’re losing money

The number one strategy to increase your affiliate sales is preselling.

Before we begin, we need to first define what preselling is. Preselling is both an art and a science. The goal is to get your reader prepped to make a purchase. Then sending them to the product sales page to make the purchase. When done correctly, your reader will not even notice.

In a nutshell, you provide value. And then refer them to the product website. We’ll get into how to do it correctly in a minute. Before we get into that, you should understand what’s in it for you. Here are a few benefits of preselling:

  • It helps your reader trust you – Readers who trust you are more likely to click your links. And the more traffic you can send to the sale page, the more commissions you’ll earn.
  • It takes your reader out of defense mode – When you’re not hyping or pitching a product, your reader lets their guard down. And in turn they read to understand what you’re saying. So your content get absorbed.
  • It preps them to buy – Now they trust you and feel open to your message. Being open means, they are open to everything you give them. This includes the sales website you send them to! Sending them to the sales page in this state makes them more receptive to the actual pitch.
  • It increases your sales – You’ve prepped them and referred them in the right state of mind. With a feeling of trust and openness. The only thing that can result is increased sales!
  • It boosts customer loyalty – Your referral now feels like they decided to buy. Instead of being manipulated into buying. So they are happier with their purchase.
  • It boosts your profits – Happy customers ask for refunds much less often. And that translates to more commission staying in your affiliate business.

The need to presell is clear. You increase your profits. And increase your customer satisfaction. That’s a clear win-win.

How does it work?

Now you know whey preselling is critical. So, hopefully you’ve decided to start preselling. You’re ready to learn how to do it properly. As I mentioned earlier, it’s both an art and a science.

The art of preselling

First, you have to gain the trust of your reader, so they let their guard down. Honestly, the only way to do this is to provide real value in you content. The art of this is to provide enough information to be of value, but not enough to satiate the hunger. So you send them to the product website with a hunger for more of what the product provides. Plus they’re not guarded, so they’re more open and likely to purchase the product.

It’s also a science

There’s also a specific formula you need to follow.

The first is how you present the information. You have to have your end in mind. Your end goal is to make a sale of the product you’re preselling. How can providing information accomplish this goal? The first method is to provide enough info to get them started, but not enough to finish. The second way is to provide all the information and let your reader discover how hard it is to actually implement it. Whichever method, you send them to a product website that solves the problem you just created.

But you can’t link to your affiliate link. Instead, you use a direct link to the product website. This increases your clicks. But how will you earn affiliate commissions if you don’t use your affiliate link? Well, that’s part of the science of this whole process. You use an image tag to cookie your reader before they leave your site.

The next trick is to hyperlink specific words and phrases inside the content of the article you’re providing. It’s habitual to click on words and phrases that are hyperlinked. And when the words are in context like this, it makes perfect sense for your reader to click them.

Putting all of this together creates a powerful affiliate marketing formula for success.

Unfortunately…

Doing all of this right is really hard! Let’s look at the skills required to pull it off: Good content. The entire process depends on your being able to provide useful information to your readers. This means you have to be able to write well, and have enough knowledge to be useful. Writing to presell. Yes, you must providing useful content. But, you also need to know how to present the information in a way that give value to the reader. And still leave them wanting more. The other approach is to reveal a self-evident problem through the information.

Picking products. You also need to determine what products you’ll be preselling. Even if you get the article written. You’ve wasted all your effort if the product doesn’t sell well.

Techy stuff. One of the keys to this system is using “covert cookies” for the tracking. This is fairly simple – you use a 1 X 1 image and set the “source” to your affiliate link. (But if you mess it up, your referrals won’t be tracked.)

In closing:

Now you know what it takes to be a Presell Pro. Preselling properly will boost your affiliate profits up to 500%! The important thing is to use these techniques for everything you promote as an affiliate. Please don’t be lazy. Make the extra effort required to propel your affiliate business to the next level.

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Traffic Generation Tips

The most important thing in any web business is traffic – lots and lots of traffic. Obviously, this assumes you actually have a reason for wanting this traffic. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. So, the critical step is to generate a steady flow of visitors.

How, then do you get traffic to your site?

Here’s a short list of great, free traffic generating methods:

  • Web 2.0
  • Article Websites
  • Video Sites

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Methods

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. The benefit of this to you is that your content is now considered as part of these sites. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong “vote” in favor of your sites – lending you credibility in the search engines. This is the hidden benefit of using Web 2.0 sites. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don’t have time to get into here, but this will get you started.

Article Websites

Article marketing really builds on the Web 2.0 concept. Article directories fall under the category of web 2.0 sites. Article directories are sites where users (including you) can upload articles they have written. And because they are also considered authority sites by the search engines you get all the benefits of other web 2.0 sites just by putting your articles on them. And the hidden benefit here is that your reach grows as other people take your articles and put them on their blogs and sites. And because the terms of the directory say they have to include your “resource box” you get links back from all these other sites, too. In order to get the most free traffic make sure you:

  • First, spend the time to determine your keywords
  • Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
  • Use anchor text links in the article and the “resource box”

Video

Our discussion would not be complete without talking about video. Once again, this is really a sub-set of web 2.0. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. And if all that wasn’t enough, you also stand a much stronger chance of getting a high search engine ranking for the keywords you want with video than you do with text-based content.

Here are just a few video marketing tips:

  • Set up your YouTube account
  • When people view your videos, you want them to visit your site, so turn all the other modules in your profile off
  • Put relevant “tags” in your profile
  • Add a link to your website
  • Add 1 or more videos to your profile
  • In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Putting it all together.

If you take action on the items listed here you’ll have free traffic in no time.

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Membership Niche Selection Tips

Let’s talk about niche selection. This is very important to ensuring the profitability of your membership website.

Step 1 – Find a Fanatical Market

The number 1 thing you have to do is find fanatics if you want a profitable membership website. Fanatic is defined as someone with an irrational enthusiasm. These are the people you’re looking for because they are so enthusiastic they’re willing to spend money on their topic of fanaticism. Here’s how to find fanatics:

  • Look at magazine racks. This is an often overlooked, yet extremely simple way to find niches that people are interested in. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to run a print magazine. So if you see one on the shelves you know they are making money, which means that there are enough people interested in what they’re saying to make it profitable. This is a very good indication that it’s a good niche for you to go into.
  • Watch and listen for fanatics in your daily life. Pay attention to conversations, social events, TV, restaurants, public places to see what people are talking about. If people are talking about something, they probably want to know more about it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
  • Conventions, clubs, and organizations. Once again, if there are enough people interested in a topic to create a club or organization, then there are enough people to build a membership business around it. Conventions are expensive to hold and attend, so if one if going on that’s another strong indication of a good niche to go into with your membership website.
  • And of course there are all the things you have an interest in, too! If you’re interested in something, it’s highly likely others are, too. The icing on the cake here is that you get to build a business doing something you love.
  • Google Trends. This is a great way to figure out what people are interested in. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. These topics are the hottest topics because lots and lots of people want information about them. Building a membership business around things people are actively searching for is a great way to ensure your success.

Next – Figure out if there’s money in it

After selecting a possible niche to build your membership site around, the next step is to find out if it’s a profitable niche to be in. The quickest way to find out is to determine if others are profiting in your potential niche.

Here’s how to determine if you can make money in your chosen niche

  • Find out if there are blogs or forums related to it. Just search Google for “YourNiche blog” & “YourNiche forum” and see what comes up. This tells you there are people who are actively interested in your niche.
  • See if other people are creating and selling product in this niche by searching in Google Shopping, ebay and Amazon. What you’re trying to figure out is if anyone is making money in this niche, and if people are selling products it means they are making money.
  • Look at Google Adwords for the same ads are running over time. If people are running the same ad over time it means they are making money in the niche. They would not continue to spend money on the ads if there were not making a return from them.

Finally – Figure out your barrier to entry

OK, so you found a hot topic and you know other people are making money on it. Will you be able to get involved and do the same? How do you gauge the ease of entry?

  • Product types. What kind of products are being sold in the niche? You’re looking for a niche that sells info products. That’s because it’s much easier to build a membership business around information vs. any other kind of product.
  • Competition. How many other people are trying to sell to this market? You want to start in a market that’s not completely saturated with competitors.
  • Unless the market is just so big that it doesn’t matter how many competitors there are, you want to limit the competition. So evaluate the size vs. the competition.
  • How ready is the market for marketing messages, and how willing are the fanatics to buy. Every market is different. Sometimes people are looking for information and are ready to pay for it right now. And sometimes it takes weeks, months or even years for them to make the decision to purchase.

In Summary

OK, now that you’ve figured out what niche you’re going to go into. Determined there is money to be made and that the competition is not too strong to break into it. You’re ready to start your membership business. If you’ve followed along with these steps you’re success in practically guaranteed. The only thing left to cover is exactly how to run your membership business

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