Ever heard of affiliate programs? These are forms of Internet advertising that rewards the affiliates for driving traffic to the advertiser or for other transactions. The advertiser pays the affiliate to place a link on their website, and the affiliate sends traffic to the advertiser in return. Simply put, it’s about paying commissions to people who help you make sales. It’s that easy. NOT.
Affiliate marketing has its ups and downs. It could be draining if you are not armed with updated information and the technical how-tos. But this article’s sole objective is to reach out to you and not to badmouth affiliate marketing.
Here are the following reasons on why web marketers go gaga over affiliate marketing as a form of Internet advertisement.
1. Low cost
Many are scared to go on a home based business because of the capital required. In affiliate marketing, you don’t have to spend much to start raking in moolah.
2. Inventories not included
Product management fuss could be very stressing. An inventory is not asked to be maintained. The merchant does the maintenance required.
3. Unlimited income through leverage
When you have a paid job, your monthly income mainly relies on whether you go to work or not. With affiliate marketing, your affiliates could all just lead traffic to your site without having to lift a finger after providing them your ad copy and links. Though not every web marketer earns limitless, it still is a fact that all the necessary matters for the advertiser or Internet marketer are all there to be successful.
4. Go worldwide
With affiliate marketing, you are dealing with a global market place. All you have to do is choose a niche product and prepare all the necessary tools for your affiliates to lead traffic from just about anywhere to your website.
5. Low risk
The very main reason for Internet marketer’s enthusiasm with affiliate marketing is its having a low risk factor. Especially for those with low budget set aside for advertising, affiliate marketing is just the way to do it.
6. No closing time
With affiliate marketing, your business works every single second of the day while targeting a worldwide market! What could be better than that?
But all of these will be put to waste if you don’t have the right niche product and all the other important tools to make it big in affiliate marketing, i.e., well-SEO-ed website. So better work on this first before ever considering those benefits.
October 19, 2009
10 Easy Ways to Promote Your Website
Promoting your website can be a daunting task: it feels like there are thousands of ways to do it, but all of them take a lot of time or money for no guaranteed return. To help solve this problem, I’ve compiled a list of ten easy ways to promote your website.
1. Advertise in the Media. Now, you might have already ruled out advertising in newspapers and the like as too expensive, especially since the chances are your audience doesn’t live in any specific local area. That mostly rules out radio, too, and TV is even more likely to be out of your reach. What you might not have realised, though, is that you should stop looking at the general media and start looking at the specialist media for your area. For example, if you run a house-buying website, you could advertise it in specialist property magazines, and even on ‘lifestyle’ cable channels that show programmes about moving home.
2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If your business has any physical objects, whether it’s a product, a carrier bag or just the front of your office, make sure to write your web address on there. Even if people don’t keep or remember the exact address, it at least lets them know that your website exists.
3. Give Out Leaflets. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can. The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific demographic rather than an area, but the post office will be surprisingly helpful when it comes to getting your leaflets where they need to go, if you ask them.
4. Go to Specialist Events. If there’s some kind of trade fair for the industry your website is in, turn up to it and promote your website. While there might not be all that many people there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get your site talked about.
5. Put it on Business Cards. It should go without saying, but once you’ve gone to all that trouble to set up a website, don’t forget to put it on your business cards. After all, if you’re relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option of reading more about you on your website?
6. Astroturf on Forums. An often overlooked way of getting traffic to your website is to participate on forums related to the subject and put your web address in your signature. This gets you more traffic than you’d think, especially at very popular forums.
7. Create Controversy. A great trick to promote your website is to use it to say controversial things: as the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. This works best if you say something that you know will be provocative to a certain kind of person, getting it linked from all over the place. Bear in mind, though, that this strategy is better for advertising-driven websites than it is if you’re trying to build a reputation and make sales directly.
8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more businesses are starting blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you’re using your blog to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it’s useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, ‘views not news’ – make sure your blog has something interesting to say.
9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem to think it’s some kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising can work very well, especially with keywords that aren’t already cluttered with ads. If you do it right, you can get very targeted ads very cheap – indeed, ironically, the more targeted the ads, the cheaper they tend to be.
10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally, if you’re selling something, don’t forget that old standby of web marketing: the affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they can sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you’ve got a crack sales team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan is that everyone is doing it, so you’ll need to offer a high percentage of your profits to your affiliates to make the offer attractive to them.
1. Advertise in the Media. Now, you might have already ruled out advertising in newspapers and the like as too expensive, especially since the chances are your audience doesn’t live in any specific local area. That mostly rules out radio, too, and TV is even more likely to be out of your reach. What you might not have realised, though, is that you should stop looking at the general media and start looking at the specialist media for your area. For example, if you run a house-buying website, you could advertise it in specialist property magazines, and even on ‘lifestyle’ cable channels that show programmes about moving home.
2. Write Your Web Address on Things. If your business has any physical objects, whether it’s a product, a carrier bag or just the front of your office, make sure to write your web address on there. Even if people don’t keep or remember the exact address, it at least lets them know that your website exists.
3. Give Out Leaflets. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of old-fashioned paper promotion: leaflet as many areas as you can. The chances are that your website is targeted to a specific demographic rather than an area, but the post office will be surprisingly helpful when it comes to getting your leaflets where they need to go, if you ask them.
4. Go to Specialist Events. If there’s some kind of trade fair for the industry your website is in, turn up to it and promote your website. While there might not be all that many people there, the ones who are there will be influential, and can get your site talked about.
5. Put it on Business Cards. It should go without saying, but once you’ve gone to all that trouble to set up a website, don’t forget to put it on your business cards. After all, if you’re relying on them to get people to phone you, why not give them the option of reading more about you on your website?
6. Astroturf on Forums. An often overlooked way of getting traffic to your website is to participate on forums related to the subject and put your web address in your signature. This gets you more traffic than you’d think, especially at very popular forums.
7. Create Controversy. A great trick to promote your website is to use it to say controversial things: as the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. This works best if you say something that you know will be provocative to a certain kind of person, getting it linked from all over the place. Bear in mind, though, that this strategy is better for advertising-driven websites than it is if you’re trying to build a reputation and make sales directly.
8. Keep a Good Blog. While more and more businesses are starting blogs, few of them are doing it right. If you’re using your blog to publish product announcements in corporate-speak, it’s useless. You need to remember a simple mantra, ‘views not news’ – make sure your blog has something interesting to say.
9. Buy Search Engine Ads. Many people seem to think it’s some kind of admission of defeat, but search engine advertising can work very well, especially with keywords that aren’t already cluttered with ads. If you do it right, you can get very targeted ads very cheap – indeed, ironically, the more targeted the ads, the cheaper they tend to be.
10. Start an Affiliate Program. Finally, if you’re selling something, don’t forget that old standby of web marketing: the affiliate program. Offer visitors a cut of the profits if they can sell your products for you, and all of a sudden you’ve got a crack sales team raring to go. The only trouble with this plan is that everyone is doing it, so you’ll need to offer a high percentage of your profits to your affiliates to make the offer attractive to them.
January 3, 2009
Top 5 Ways to Market Your Online Business
Marketing your online business can be a huge part of your budget especially when you’re first starting out. Finding ways to get your name in front of your customer that doesn’t cost a fortune will help you draw sales while you’re working on getting ranked in the search engines.
Below are the top five ways to market your business on the internet. The ideas listed are not only inexpensive but are highly effective as well. However, before you even consider using one of these strategies, there are two things you must first do.
The first is to write a formal marketing plan. If you’re getting close to opening your business, a marketing plan should already be done as part of your company’s business plan. However, it’s true that many who start online businesses fail to write a business plan. If this is the case, just be sure to at least get your marketing plan formalized before you start doing business. Getting your marketing plan thought through and documented is the minimum you should do for your business. When writing your marketing plan, consider the who, what, when, and how you will do your selling and get your brand in front of your customer. Then decide which of the following strategies you will implement in that plan and explain how you plan to carry out those strategies.
The other thing you need to consider is search engine optimization. It is essential to learn how to optimize your website so it will eventually get ranked in the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The sooner you get started with optimizing your site, the faster it will get ranked. Until some of your pages are ranked in the search engines, your traffic will remain minimal. Consider investing in a book, ebook, ecourse, or program of some sort to learn how to optimize your site so you can use the information as you are building it and adding your content. Be sure you’re learning the most recent information because the rules change frequently.
Now on to the Top 5 Ways to Market Your Online Business.
1. Find Your Niche. Imagine trying to sell your product or service to the entire world. Consider the marketing budgets of companies like Coca-Cola and McDonalds, these are companies that are trying to appeal to everyone. Selling your product or service to a small but focused group of people will allow you the luxury of advertising to a smaller but more interested group of people. Since they are more interested, a higher percentage of the group will buy but you will have spent less money pursuing the smaller group. Once you are successful selling to one niche, if your product or service is appealing to another niche, you can create another website and repeat your success using the same strategies you used on the first website.
2. Link Exchanges. Exchanging links with other websites that have complimentary products or services will not only give you direct traffic from the link but it will also help you with your pursuit to get ranked in the search engines. At the time of this writing, Google is the most widely used search engine, and it’s widely known that they consider the number of links pointing to your website as part of the determination where to rank your website.
3. Write Articles. Writing articles with information that is interesting and useful for your niche market will help you gain traffic to your site. When writing an article, include a resource box at the end of the article that includes information about the author (that’s you) and a link to your website. Then distribute the article to article directories for other website owners to use on their site or in their newsletters and ezines. This does two things, you gain traffic when someone sees your article on another website and clicks your link and you get a link that points back to your site for the search engines to use to rank your site higher.
4. Using a Signature Line in Online Forums. This is a strategy that could be quite time consuming so don’t let it take up huge amounts of your time, however it is quite effective in drawing traffic to your website. Join forums and messageboards that are useful to your niche market and then become part of the community. When you make a post, be sure it’s useful and relevant to the information that is being discussed, then at the bottom of your post, sign-off with your name and little blurb about your company with a link to your website. These are often referred to as “sig lines”. Be sure to read the forum’s guidelines to be sure you’re using the proper etiquette in the forum and to be sure signature lines are allowed. If they are not allowed, do not use this strategy in that forum as it could cause you to be banned from that forum.
5. Start A Newsletter. Having a newsletter is one of the best ways to market to your customers and potential customers. You will need to have a service that will host your list and allow you to send your newsletter. Then you put a sign-up box on your website and your visitors will sign-up. Periodically, you decide how often, you send those who have signed up an email with information that is relevant to your niche. This information could be general info or it could be specifically about your product. To get your visitors to sign-up you can offer a special report, e-course, ebook or anything that would entice them to give you their email address. When you choose the service that will host your email list, be sure they do a double opt-in confirmation of those who subscribe, it’s now the law.
In this article we covered the top five ways to market your website and a couple of things you need to do before you ever even start. Now it’s time to get out there and implement some of these strategies.
How to Succeed with Google Adwords
Google Adwords is the most sophisticated and popular pay-per-click advertising system on the internet. Unlike regular search engine listings, which are listed for free according to “relevance,” as defined by the particular search engine involved, Adwords are small text ads which usually appear to the right of the unpaid listings. Advertisers bid on specific “keywords”, which determines where the ad is displayed. However, unlike other search engines, where placement is completely determined by the amount of the bid, Google uses a complex calculation which also takes into the account the popularity of the ad as well. Thus, an ad which gets clicked on a lot can end up in a better position than one with a higher bid. That’s how Google rewards the ad for relevancy, so it pays to create an ad that will invite clicks.
Advertising with Adwords has many advantages. First, the ad is displayed immediately, as opposed to waiting for sites to show up in regular listings, which can take months. Second, they can be highly targeted, meaning you can make sure you’re only paying for clicks by customers who are sincerely interested. Third, Adwords allows you to run several ad campaigns simultaneously, so you can test the results and experiment on the fly to constantly improve the quality of the ads. You can even track the “conversion rate,” or the actual number of sales generated by a given ad. This is extremely precise marketing.
The first step is to come up with the best possible list of keywords. This is extremely important, because if you bid on the same ones everyone else is bidding on, you will end up with very expensive clicks. You can use any of the many keyword search tools available (wordtracker.com has a popular one) to determine which keywords have lots of searches but not too much competition. If you bid on enough low-cost keywords, you can do as well or better than if you had placed an expensive bid on a popular term. You can also place a limit on your budget, so that you can control how much your total expenditure is per month. You can also specify certain words you do not want included, so that you don’t attract a lot of clicks from people looking for something related that you don’t offer.
The ad itself consists of four lines: a title of no more than 25 characters, a description with two lines of up to 35 characters each, and a line for your url, also limited to 35 characters. The title is what really attracts attention. It should include the keyword you’re targeting, and should be as striking as possible so as to stand out from the crowd. If it’s truly attention-getting, it could end up getting more clicks than other, duller ads higher up on the page. Some suggest that it should be in all caps, and include a price if possible.
The description should include the major selling point of your product, and also include enough information to discourage clicks by unqualified customers. Make sure they know what you’re selling and what to expect, as well as what sets you apart from the competition.
Finally, make sure the URL listed takes them to the most relevant page in your site for what they’re looking for. Make sure the link is up to date and functioning correctly.
That’s it in a nutshell, although the nuances are quite a bit more complex than we can deal with here. Many resources are available on the net which go into greater detail. But now that you understand the basics, you should be armed with the information you need to explore one of the most potentially lucrative marketing tools on the internet.
Advertising with Adwords has many advantages. First, the ad is displayed immediately, as opposed to waiting for sites to show up in regular listings, which can take months. Second, they can be highly targeted, meaning you can make sure you’re only paying for clicks by customers who are sincerely interested. Third, Adwords allows you to run several ad campaigns simultaneously, so you can test the results and experiment on the fly to constantly improve the quality of the ads. You can even track the “conversion rate,” or the actual number of sales generated by a given ad. This is extremely precise marketing.
The first step is to come up with the best possible list of keywords. This is extremely important, because if you bid on the same ones everyone else is bidding on, you will end up with very expensive clicks. You can use any of the many keyword search tools available (wordtracker.com has a popular one) to determine which keywords have lots of searches but not too much competition. If you bid on enough low-cost keywords, you can do as well or better than if you had placed an expensive bid on a popular term. You can also place a limit on your budget, so that you can control how much your total expenditure is per month. You can also specify certain words you do not want included, so that you don’t attract a lot of clicks from people looking for something related that you don’t offer.
The ad itself consists of four lines: a title of no more than 25 characters, a description with two lines of up to 35 characters each, and a line for your url, also limited to 35 characters. The title is what really attracts attention. It should include the keyword you’re targeting, and should be as striking as possible so as to stand out from the crowd. If it’s truly attention-getting, it could end up getting more clicks than other, duller ads higher up on the page. Some suggest that it should be in all caps, and include a price if possible.
The description should include the major selling point of your product, and also include enough information to discourage clicks by unqualified customers. Make sure they know what you’re selling and what to expect, as well as what sets you apart from the competition.
Finally, make sure the URL listed takes them to the most relevant page in your site for what they’re looking for. Make sure the link is up to date and functioning correctly.
That’s it in a nutshell, although the nuances are quite a bit more complex than we can deal with here. Many resources are available on the net which go into greater detail. But now that you understand the basics, you should be armed with the information you need to explore one of the most potentially lucrative marketing tools on the internet.
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