Quick Tips for Affiliate Marketers

The promise of earning high profits without really doing any work has temped many to 'have a go' at affiliate marketing, and will continue to do so 'till the cows come home.

It's a common misconception that all an affiliate has to do is place a merchant's advertisement on a website, and bingo! the checks start rolling in...

So if that's the case, why do so many people do just that and barely make enough for a decent cup of java?

Affiliate Marketing, just like other forms of marketing takes work. Period.

Successful affiliates don't just sit back and wait for the money to roll in, they promote their merchant's business and products, while consistently working on building lists of buyers and prospective buyers.

When promoting 'think outside the box'. Marketer's who think differently are often more successful than those who seem to be walking, talking and working on autopilot. Wouldn't you rather listen to someone who opened your eyes to a different angle? For example: You're selling an ebook about gardening, the sales letter talks about learning what soil to plant your begonias in and how to build your own decking. Now take another view, 'when you master the basics of gardening, sit back and enjoy homegrown veggies cooked on the bbq your just built, while relaxing on your new decking, etc...' See the new angle you've just introduced?

If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing and if you want to continually grow your affiliate checks, you've got to be prepared to put in the graft.

Here are a few tips to help you to continually grow your affiliate checks:

Know what you're talking about and become an expert on your chosen affiliate product
After all, how can you expect to sell something that you know nothing about? Purchase the affiliate product yourself and put it through it's paces.. Tell your customers the products good points and bad points from first-hand experience. Most importantly – do your research!

You need your own website
Or at the very least, a short, easily remembered domain name. Affiliate links are ugly things and so often hijacked and your commissions stolen. Cloak your links and setup separate directories on your server for each affiliate product you're promoting to make your links clean and easy to remember.

Write your own affiliate ads
Write a review, submit a testimonial – in your own words. Entice your prospects by giving your honest opinion, telling them why you think your affiliate product would benefit them. This way, you're not putting on any 'hard sell', and your prospects will be thanking you for selling to them!

Visit forums, discussion boards and social networks related to your product
This can be a huge drain on your time, so be careful not to spend too long chatting and reading. Simply adding a signature to your posts directing people to a free report, your opt-in form or even your sales page can prove to be very effective. (Care must be taken to read individual forum's terms and conditions of adding a signature).

Publish a free newsletter or ezine
The purpose of your online publication should be to inform people about your relevant subject, lightly scattering your affiliate links in appropriate places. Don't go overboard with links; this will undoubtedly annoy your subscribers – there's no quicker way to make them ex-subscribers! Don't forget to put an optin form for your publication on your website and blog.

Create a short report
On the same subject as your affiliate product and offer it to your prospects for subscribing to your free ezine or newsletter.

What's important is that you are able to attract more traffic to your site and stimulate visitors into clicking your affiliate links. If you can master this, then your affiliate marketing efforts should prove fruitful.

ARM Your Affiliates: June's Featured (free) Software

This month's free software download 'ARM Your Affiliates' has been designed to quickly and easily create your affiliate promotional pages.

Building an Army of Hungry Affiliates increases your sales and profits. So make it as easy as possible for your affiliates to promote your products, by supplying them with a wide array of ready made tools.

Arm Your Affiliates takes you step-by-step through the process of creating text links, email ads, signature ads, pop ups, image ads, articles and pay per click ads.

Plus, your affiliates' ID is automatically embeded into the promotional tools you provide, with just the click of a mouse.

ARM Your Affiliates comes with Master Resale Rights and is ONLY available to The Smart Marketer's ToolBar Community, for at least one month. The ToolBar is totally free (you don't even need your email address), and provides you with bonus downloads throughout the month, brand new software each month, social media, tons of tools and hidden resources and the best blog posts you'll find.

Give yourself a head start selling ARM Your Affiliates before anyone else gets thier hands on it! (Or give it away to build your list).

Install The Smart Marketer's ToolBar and gain instant access to ARM Your Affiliates as well as previous software including; 'Kontent Klone Killer', 'Optin Fuel', 'Directory Submit Pro' and 'Smart Squeeze Page Generator'.

Speak Soon,
Steph.

Smarter Marketing: TrendWatching

If you’re anything like me, you’re always on the look out for hot new trends. What are people searching for? What do they want? What do they need?

But what is a trend? And how is it different from a fad?

Unlike a trend, a fad is a short lived ‘craze’, within a relatively small group of people. Recently The BBC reported live videoblogging from a mobile phone, as a current fad.

Only a small number of phones actually support this function and many people don’t blog or vlog at all, so the chances of live videoblogging becoming mainstream are fairly remote.

However, live videoblogging may be an up and coming trend amongst tech savvy mobile bloggers with Nokia phones!

Trends tend to appear over longer periods of time and are adopted by the mainstream. More of a general tendency. The TimesOnline reports of an increasing use of virtual reality to treat medical conditions. As a general enhancement to our lives, the use of medical technology continues to grow in the mainstream.

Applied to Internet Marketing, fads and trends can be observed here too.

Take Social Media. The likes of Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Digg (and I could go on…) have truly revolutionized the way we use the internet today. Making friends and chatting as we work, swapping ideas, asking (the Twitterverse) for answers, links and solutions.

A good example of an IM fad would perhaps be pixel ad websites.

Back in 2005, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old entrepreneur from the UK, hoped to pay his way through university by selling a million pixels as advertising space on his Million Dollar Homepage. He actually went on to sell all million pixels for a dollar each (you do the math:)

Many cloned Alex's idea as these strange looking ‘mozaic’ type pages sprung up all over, – but none (to my knowledge) were ever as successful as the original and many ended up giving pixel ads away.

Can you imagine Social Networks going the same way? No, neither can I.

Now we’ve established trends from fads, I’d like to share with you some of my favorite ‘TrendWatching places’…

SiteVolume takes up to five words you want to compare and shows a graph of how many times each word appears in Digg, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.


SpringWise has a global network of ‘spotters’ who scan and report inspirational new business ideas.


At Epinions users submit reviews on millions of products and services. Scroll down the page until you come across the ‘Epinions Top 10’


HobbyThing has a tag cloud dedicated page. The bigger the tag, the more popular the subject.


Check out Amazon Movers and Shakers for hot software, apparel, video games, music, electronics, cameras and phones.


And not forgetting ‘popular’ categories on some of the more well known services …





Flickr Tags

Blog Catalog’s Tags

Del.icio.us Popular

Digg’s Most Recent

Technorati – What’s Popular

AOL Hot Searches

Ask Top Searches

Yahoo! Buzz

Google Hot Trends

Article Marketing: Your Questions Answered

Article Marketing is one of the most effective link building strategies in existence. You see, article directories allow you to include a resource box at the end of each article you submit. Used wisely, a resource box can drive Quality Traffic to your website. That’s a free backlink for every article you submit. Ten Articles equals ten backlink! There are thousands of article directories online – thousands of backlink! Of course, your articles have to be quality pieces to be accepted.

Many article directories have a high Google page rank – PR4 or PR5, and some are even PR7 or PR8. Backlink from a high PR website are looked on very favorably by the search engines, giving your site a significant boost in the rankings.

So why isn’t everybody achieving great success with article marketing?

As with any other traffic generating strategy, article marketing takes WORK! This is one area of Internet Marketing where Private Label Rights (PLR) products don’t get you an easy ride. Duplicate content is cursed by article directories, and many ghostwriters who sell PLR packages stipulate their articles may not be submitted to directories ‘without Significant’ rewriting.

To be successful with your article marketing campaigns, you need to be Original and consistent in your writing.

So if I submit the same article to many article directories, won’t it be classed as duplicate content by the search engines?

No. Since we’re dealing with high-ranking websites, search engines will assume that the submitted content is their original work. So directories can be quietly confident about the articles they display. However, directories don’t want to be seen as a dumping ground for junk, so PLR articles and articles highly peppered with affiliate links, just won’t make the mustard.

So that means I can display my submitted articles on my own web pages, right?

Wrong! Since the search engines will assume that the higher ranking websites are the originators of your content, you may be penalized for duplicate content, which could mean being ‘sand boxed’ or de-indexed and your pages will no longer show up in search results. Not good, not good at all.

Should I submit many articles to many article directories?

Absolutely. This is exactly how a traffic building strategy works. But remember, write great content, don’t include tons of affiliate links and be as consistent as you can – success doesn’t happen overnight.

Build your backlink slowly and steadily. Search Engines, particularly Google, are wary of websites whose backlinks suddenly explode. Make it look natural. Submit an article, and then wait a couple of weeks before submitting a new article.

But does Article Marketing really work?

Yes it really works!

If you’re not experiencing steady traffic growth, ask yourself…

• Is the subject of my article interesting?
• Does it cater to my target audience?
• Is my title enticing enough to draw my readers in?
• Does my article offer value to my readers?
• Is my article comprehensive?
• Is it easy to read and digest?

These are the most common factors, which may contribute to low traffic statistics. Try re-editing your article, spell-checking and improving grammatically or adding new content.

Another factor to take into consideration is the popularity of the article directories you’re submitting your articles to – some have thousands of readers, while others much fewer.

Ok, my article’s good to go. How can I be sure that my work will be kept intact by other publishers?

You can’t be sure, but you can run a check from time to time searching for unique phrases in your article. Determine if the Webmaster is honoring their publishing rights. If not, contact the Webmaster directly and politely ask for your resource box to be included – if this doesn’t work, you can file a complaint with the article directory and they can act on the matter.

I hope this post has answered some of your questions about article marketing. Please feel free to add a comment below and continue the discussion.

Regards,
Steph.

P.s. If you’re looking for free software to compare articles for duplicate content, or a directory submission tool, look no further! Kontent Klone Killer and Directory Submit Pro are downloads of the month for Feb and May respectively. Install The Smart Marketer’s ToolBar and download your article marketing tools today!

Do You Twitter?

Social Media Rocks.

Whether you love or hate the likes of MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo, Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Flickr, etc, they're here to stay. So if you can't 'beat 'em' do you 'join 'em'?

One of the most debated of hot apps is Twitter.

So What Is Twitter?

Twitter is a MicroBlogging platform, described by some as "stupid" or "time-sucking" and certainly the latter can be true - in fact Twitter can be quite addictive!

But the simple beauty of Twitter is your ability to communicate, in Real Time on a global scale with people from all walks of life, young and old, rich and poor. How or where else can you do that?

What people 'tweet' about varies enourmously, from mundane daily taks and occurances to a new blog post or website announcement, offers of private beta invites, quick polls, joint venure opportunities, births and birthday wishes, good news and bad news...

Many bloggers make announcements FIRST on Twitter, even before mailing thier subscriber lists, often giving Twitters a golden advanage when early adoption is paramount.

Let's have a look at few examples of the diversity of Twitter...

In 2007 @nateritter tirelessly tweated updates about the Sandiego Fires. For several days Nate gave out phone numbers of emergency shelters and aid, warned of impending evacuations, kept the world informed on the progress of fires, linked to pictures and help pages and even let people know when it was safe to go home.

@andybeal over at Marketing Pilgrim put together an excellent list of interesting and informative marketers worth following.

@SethGodin follows no-one, but more than 4,000 Twitters follow his wise words.


@drmani raises awareness of his work with The Congenital Heart Defects Foundation.

@CaseStevens keeps the community informed of useful links and additions to his valuable blog 'Affordable Internet Marketing'.


@WarrenWhitlock and @CoachDeb are currently creating 'The Twitter Handbook' - collaborating with Twitter users, via Twitter, for 'Twinterviews' and other ideas for the book.


@JeremyPalmer has a dedicated Twitter account set up for his @blackinkproject students.


Other brands feed Twitter automatically from thier blog's rss feeds, like @bbcnews


So how do YOU use Twitter? Not started twittering? Why not give it a whirl and let me know what you think and leave your comments below?

@Riquochet

...And don't forget to get your copy of The Smart Marketer's ToolBar - May's Brand New Software will be uploaded in a couple of weeks.