Saturday, August 15, 2009

Maximize Your Profits With Affiliate Programs For Affiliate Marketing

Obviously, affiliate marketing is a huge draw for budding entrepreneurs or you wouldn't be here reading this article. Most affiliate marketers look for affiliate marketing opportunities that cater to the consumer market. This makes sense because there are far more consumers surfing the web than small business owners. That said, there is a growing market for B2b (business to business) affiliate marketing. Affiliate programs for affiliate marketers fall under this heading.

Whatever the business, every web owner is going to need to track traffic and incoming keywords, not just affiliate marketers. Unlike some other B2b programs, a site-tracking program caters to every type of business.

B2b affiliate marketing products are either product or service based, much like B2c (business to consumer) affiliate marketing programs. When it comes to affiliate marketing, you have to look at those programs that affiliate marketers need most. Just look how this site itself is set up. We provide affiliate links to web hosts, site meter software and more.

Affiliate Programs For Marketers

Affiliate marketers have specific needs compared to other types of business. Of course, some of these affiliate programs can cross over into other types of business (such as web hosting). Let's look at affiliate programs specifically aimed at marketers.

Web Hosting

As mentioned, this could apply to all ebusinesses, but as affiliate marketing is web-only, this is a highly important affiliate program for marketers. What's also good about a web hosting affiliate program is it can be placed on virtually any affiliate marketing site. It's always recommended that affiliate links be on topic with the main purpose of the site.

Basically, any type of affiliate marketing site could include a web-hosting program and remain on topic. Even more importantly, web-hosting programs have some of the better payouts of all affiliate-marketing programs.

Site Tracking Software

Every affiliate marketer needs keyword tracking software. Again, this type of program can be cross-topic, like web hosting. Whatever the business, every web owner is going to need to track traffic and incoming keywords, not just affiliate marketers. Unlike some other B2b programs, a site-tracking program caters to every type of business. Check our site for available software programs for both affiliate marketers and other web entrepreneurs.

The other affiliate programs we mention online are demographic specific: poker, education, dating, etc. Every affiliate marketer could add links to both web hosting and web software, regardless of the main theme of the website. As these types of programs also have a high payout, there's no reason not to offer these programs on any affiliate marketing site.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Demographic Targeting for Affiliates

Advertisers are constantly looking for ways to make their marketing efforts more effective. The first realized benefit of the Internet for advertisers was the ability to "blast" advertisements to millions more people than before, quickly, cheaply and easily. The problem with this approach is that the advertising is still reaching a great many people who can or will never make use of it, which is not the most effective approach. New Internet technologies allow advertisers to modify their Internet sales techniques by adding precision targeting, focusing on many consumers, but only ones likely to be interested in their product. One of these precision methods is demographic targeting.

Demographic targeting is a method by which advertisers focus on sites that specifically target certain demographic groups.

What is Demographic Targeting?


Demographic targeting is a method by which advertisers focus on sites that specifically target certain demographic groups. For example, an affiliate marketer sells a product that you feel will appeal particularly to women ages 21-34 with children. A demographic targeting application can search for websites that appeal to these three specific groups. The marketer then knows which sites he wants as affiliates.

Why Is Demographic Targeting Useful?


Demographics is a science. More women will buy bras than men. More people with children are going to be buying diapers than people without children. Making sure that ads for products that certain groups are more likely to buy are directed at those groups is an efficient way of generating sales.

How Can Demographic Targeting Help Affiliates?


When affiliates design their sites, they should keep demographics in mind. Try to build sites that will either appeal to a broad range of demographics or that will appeal very strongly to one or two large demographics. This may get the attention of advertisers who will wish to take you on as affiliates.

Monday, August 10, 2009

The Eight Best Publications on Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to make money on the Internet. Even still, it helps to have an understanding for how the system works. As with any industry, the more you know about it, the better your chances for success. Thankfully, there are a number of notable publications available to help you reach your affiliate goals. Here are the eight best publications on affiliate marketing (in no particular order).

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and most effective ways to make money on the Internet. Even still, it helps to have an understanding for how the system works. As with any industry, the more you know about it, the better your chances for success.

Must-Read Affiliate Marketing Publications

A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing: Quick Reference for Affiliate Managers & Merchants by Evgenii Prussakov

- Published in May of 2007, this guide is both timely and well organized. Prussakov targets affiliates and merchants in this indispensable book, answering many common and not so common questions about affiliate marketing. An expert on affiliate marketing, ABestWeb.com has voted Prussakov "Best Outsourced Affiliate Program Manager of the Year 2006."

Make a Fortune Promoting Other People's Stuff Online by Rosalind Gardener

- This publication on affiliate marketing can help affiliates get their businesses up and running quickly and easily. Gardner includes a five-step plan designed to make you a pro affiliate in no time flat! Allan Gardyne of AssociatePrograms.com said, "It took me years to discover many of the techniques she spells out in her book. I wish it had been available when I started."

Internet Riches: The Simple Money-Making Secrets of Online Millionaires by Scott C. Fox

- As one of the top e-business consultants in Los Angeles, Fox has a client list that includes such notable names as Larry King and Bill O'Reilly. In this publication on affiliate marketing, he offers secrets that can turn anyone into an Internet Millionaire. Included are inspiring interviews with those who have already done it!

Affiliate Millions: Make a Fortune Using Search Marketing on Google and Beyond by Anthony Borelli and Greg Holden

- In his first year, Anthony Borelli managed to make over a million dollars using affiliate advertising and paid search marketing. In this publication, he promises to help you achieve the same level of success, if not more!

The Complete Guide to Associate & Affiliate Programs on the Net: Turning Clicks Into Cash by Daniel Gray

- This comprehensive guide collects information from the top 100 associate and affiliate programs and makes them easily accessible in one volume. Additionally, you'll learn which affiliate marketing programs are legitimate and which ones to avoid.

Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants by Shawn Collins and Frank Fiore

- Written in 2001, this publication stands as one of the most relevant resources on affiliate marketing. Collins and Fiore break down the advantages a business will gain by using affiliate marketing in this hugely popular title.

31 Days to Millionaire Marketing Miracles by Tracy Repchuk

- Tracy Repchuk has taken all of the most important information on affiliate marketing and condensed it into this excellent, easy-to-read publication. This is among those new to Internet marketing, as well as seasoned professionals.

Online Marketing Success Stories: Insider Secrets, From the Experts Who Are Making Millions on the Internet Today by Rene V. Richards

- Get the secrets direct from the people who have actually used them to perfection! In this book, Richards provides the reader with tales of inspiration, practical advice and the tools one can use to harness the potential income-generating power of affiliate marketing.

To sum up

These publications offer a wealth of information that can greatly increase your chance of affiliate marketing success. Taking the time to read just one is vital -- reading all eight is time very well spent! It doesn't matter whether you are a merchant looking to start an affiliate program to promote your product or service, or an individual in search of a way to increase your income, these books will certainly help you reach your goal.

In early 2008, the Atlantic Publishing Company will release "The Complete Guide to Affiliate Marketing on the Web: How to Use and Profit from Affiliate Marketing Programs." Once printed, this book will definitely be included on the list of "must-read" affiliate marketing publications.


Friday, August 7, 2009

Six Business Plan Tips For Your Online Business

Every business needs one. The dreaded business plan. Creating the business plan is quite possibly, the least exciting part of starting your own online business. It takes a lot of time, plenty of research and it can be quite bland.

A mission statement is the backbone of a company. It houses the core values of the company and what it represents. Come up with a solid mission statement so everyone who reads it can understand your intention, desire and goal

However, whatever you do, don't short-change the process, as this is a very important step in starting your business. That is right, you can run your affiliate marketing business online, but a concrete business plan is still crucial for your success. To make things a little easier, here are six tips for creating an affiliate marketing business plan.

Tip No. 1 -- State Your Mission

A mission statement is the backbone of a company. It houses the core values of the company and what it represents. Come up with a solid mission statement so everyone who reads it can understand your intention, desire and goal. This is like a roadmap for your business. Use it to shine a light on your short-term goals and your ultimate vision.

Tip No. 2 -- Remember The Customers

Just because you have a great idea for a business doesn't mean that the world will be on board with you. Take the time to discover if your business will be filling a need that customers have. Look at your target audience and see if you can address their needs or desires. Work this into your business plan as how you plan to attract and keep customers.

Tip No. 3 -- Market Research

Having a firm grasp of what is happening in your market is important to the creation of a solid business plan. Take the time to research your industry, your competitors and your customers. This way, you'll have a good idea of what kind of budget you are going to need, as well as what kind of financial forecast you can present.

Tip No. 4 -- Accept The Risks

Starting an online business takes courage, fortitude and a determination to succeed. The Internet is a huge landscape, and your business is but a spec of sand on a beach of competitors. Your business plan should help you manage and minimize your risks by helping you avoid making reckless decisions. Your business plan should anticipate bumps in the road and help you maneuver around them.

Tip No. 5 -- Keep It Unique

While there are many business plan programs available to help you create a business plan, the truth is, you should only use them as a guideline. Cookie-cutter business plans are never well received. By keeping your business plan unique, it can give the reader an idea of the personality behind the business and sometimes, that's the decision maker.

Tip No. 6 -- Get A Second Opinion

To you, your business plan may look perfect. Like a babe born of your hard work, sweat and tears. Before you go ahead and send it to a potential investor, have a trusted source look at it. Sometimes, a fresh perspective can help catch any problems or inconsistencies before your business plan makes its way out into the world.

As stated earlier, creating a business plan can take a lot of time and work, but with these tips, you should be able to streamline the process into more manageable chunks and thus be up and running in no time!


Thursday, August 6, 2009

Why You Should be Using Google Analytics

Affiliate marketing is an industry in which it is extremely important to stay on top of the traffic flowing to and from your website. Google Analytics makes it easy to monitor and track that all-important traffic. It can help you adjust your marketing strategies to increase your conversion rates and experience greater success.

Google Analytics allows you to track the success of everything from affiliate campaigns to how well your keywords are performing on Google and other search engines.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a full-service website statistics generator that features a multitude of additional components and benefits for anyone interested in tracking and comparing the performance of their website. It's provided free of charge by the leader in search engines, Google.

How To Use Google Analytics

First, you have to set up your Google Analytics account. If you already have a Google AdWords account, then you can use Google Analytics directly through the AdWords interface.

Next, you will have to add the tracking code into the html of your website. Once the code is embedded into the pages of your website, it immediately begins to track your visitors.

The Benefits Of Using Google Analytics

With Google Analytics, you can effectively compare and track all of your advertising and marketing campaigns. You can adjust the strategies of the ones that aren't working well and make the necessary changes to increase conversion rates. Google Analytics allows you to track the success of everything from affiliate campaigns to how well your keywords are performing on Google and other search engines.

Google Analytics is also extremely easy to use, so now, even beginners can implement these powerful tracking tools. Google Analytics is extremely flexible. All companies, from the smallest, one-man business to the world's largest conglomerations can equally experience the benefits of its unique capabilities.

Google Analytics also seamlessly integrates with Google AdWords, making it easier than ever to calculate your ROI from keyword tracking data. This helps to save time, money and effort.

Additional Features Of Google Analytics

Identify revenue sources easier than ever before through Google Analytics' Ecommerce tracking capabilities. You can even track revenue to specific campaigns or keywords. You can find out exactly what's working and what isn't.

You can also check each link on your site, as you surf, to view the traffic and conversion information. Plus, you can discover the origination of many of your most affluent visitors, so you can target your affiliate marketing campaign directly at them.

Google Analytics also incorporates a powerful email dashboard that allows you to send personalized reports to the people you need to. The emails are customizable and you can also schedule them for a specific delivery time.

To learn more about Google Analytics and how it can help your affiliate marketing business to find the success you desire, visit www.Google.com.


Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Online Marketing Strategy For Beginners

What is the fun of making a product, which does not sell? What is the fun of making a movie, which nobody wants to see? We live in the marketing world. What is in your mind when you buy a product, write down it in your personal diary, it sounds funny but it is very useful when you are selling a product. You must know about your product and keep in mind, why other people buy it?

When a famous football or tennis player promotes a branded television, or a famous actress or actor promotes a branded computer, we are buying these items why? They are good in their field, but do they know about television or computer hardware technology? Not, so how can they say, it is a good product. So why we are buying these items? Because they are very popular and people love them. It is simply a marketing strategy, companies make profit, and we are becoming fools. When you are going to market and buy something, it is always good to consult a professional who knows very well about that field.

Online Marketing is a process to popularize products and services, which are sold them easily. Marketing of a product, service, blog, or any other thing, is an art. In online marketing Design,Advertisement, Sale, Time, Content play an important role. Online marketing is a simple and less costly method. A company through offline marketing does not approach many people, in online marketing there are no boundaries.

Therefore, when you are marketing your product you should know everything about that product as a professional. You are promoting product as a professional. At this stage, research and knowledge are very helpful.

At initial stage, you should think about your target audience. You can start by making a marketing strategy, targeting specifically your targeted audience, and determining the various ways through which you can effectively reach this audience. A target audience can be any group of people with a specific need for desiring to have your product or service.

Your audience could be made of:

i. Males, whether from office or home.

ii. Females, more from home than office.

iii. Married couples.

iv. Singles.

v. Adults.

vi. Professionals.

vii. Students.

viii. Doctors, for them, a product, which specially appeals to them.

ix. People with a specific interest or hobby.

x. Any other group of people.

When you have clarified in your mind about your target audience, decide exactly what message you are willing to get across to this audience. What are you trying to accomplish with your marketing, advertising, and promotions? Are you trying simply to make people alert of your company or brand or service? Do you want them to visit your Website? Is your target for potential customers actually to get order of your product online?

If you do not have a well-defined, reliable target audience, it will be extremely difficult to reach the people on the Web who will be most curious and interested in what your online business has to offer.

The second step is to do research to determine the best ways to reach your audience. The next step is to discover the best ways to get your message across to them.

Strategy

Design and graphics should be attractive and readable.

Graphics should be easily open on Net.

Content should be matched with your products.

Flashy and animated graphics avoided.

No huge contents shown on the Homepage.

Background colors should be light, so contents are read out easily.

Order options must be many so easily take many orders

100% security

Advantages

Reach many peoples in less cost.

Easy to buy products.

Possibilities for taking orders 24 hours.

Time saving.

Increasing day-by-day offline advertisement costs.

No salespersons required.

There are many such advertising companies, which can market online; you can hire them, In online marketing strategy Cost Per Click, Banner Advertising, SEO etc. are included to provide you by these companies.

Monday, August 3, 2009

How To Find Targeted Twitter Followers

One of the questions I hear the most is, "How do I find people to follow in twitter" and more importantly, "How do I find people to follow me?" During the next few minutes I am going to explain to you how to find people on twitter that you would be interested in and how to get people follow you and your interesting tweets and conversations.

The most important thing to remember is that Twitter Search is your friend. You can really use it to find any person or any tweet in the twittersphere. These days you get loads of cool twitter clients like Tweetlater, Twitteriffic, Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, etc. They are very useful to get targeted twitter followers. These allow you to run a constant Twitter search of the Twittersphere for a query (in Twitter's search syntax), basically turning the search results for that query into a real-time feed of people having a conversation about a given topic. You can use this way of searching tweets to find people that you are interested in or people that share your interests.

You can usually do two kinds of searching. You can search tweets, for instance, "marketing", and follow all the people that are having interesting or useful conversations about "marketing" or related things like "internet marketing". This way, some of these people will also follow you back and you will find targeted twitter followers. Sending regular personal messages to these people will also help to get them to notice you and follow you back if you share the same interests.

The second kind of searching is when you search bio's. If you search the people's bio's you will find what the people are all about. If you do a bio search in twitter for "internet marketing" you are sure to find a whole bunch of people that have the words, "internet marketing" in their twitter biography description and then you know that you have the same thing in common. Just follow these people again and build up a relationship with them by sharing your opinions and knowledge about "internet marketing". You are sure to find good targeted twitter followers this way.

There is unfortunately a huge downside to these ways of finding targeted twitter followers. It is painfully slow to build up a good targeted following, especially if you want your twitter following to grow massive with targeted followers in your niche. So what can you do to speed up this process of making friends and getting interested people to follow you on Twitter?

You actually get some pretty good applications that help you to mass follow people, but these applications usually don't help you to find targeted twitter followers and if you keep on mass following and unfollowing people, it could get you banned.

But luckily there is a new system out there that automates this whole following process. You set it up so that it automatically follows the people in your particular interest or niche up to the twitter limits or the limits that you set. It also automatically unfollows the people people that don't follow you. You can setup everything so that the system automatically finds you targeted followers and automatically sends tweets as well. This way you can actually turn your Twitter account in to an ATM, making money with it on autopilot, even while you are sleeping.

This system is really getting excellent reviews. After I setup this system, I was very excited to find over 1000 targeted twitter followers in under 4 days! It really skyrocketed my traffic to my website. You can see my proof and read my short Twitter Online System Review here. You also get a great exclusive bonus of 12 free money making ebooks on that site.

Well, I hope you keep on tweeting and expand your personal twittersphere and remember the most important rule of Twitter - Be friendly!

by Bertus Engelbrecht

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Using Marketing Materials in Promoting Social Awareness

Your marketing collaterals such as your posters or custom posters are more than just promotional materials that help to increase your business profits. They can also be effective tools for your company to improve on your image through social awareness.

Your promotional materials can be utilized to foster social awareness with your community. Whether you are a big enterprise or a small one, it is not always about profits; your organization can find it worthwhile to build recognition through community involvement. Hence, your poster printing for example can help you build a much better place not only for your target clients but also for humanity in general.

Some of the easiest ways to do this with your collaterals such as custom posters or catalog prints to deliver your social message are:

By spreading the word. This is the easiest and simplest means to make your target clients aware of their community and environment. Your custom posters for one can spread the word and get your social message out to the public. Just like the ubiquitous flyers, your poster printing can be tools that can reach out to your audience of how important it is to get involved socially. You do not even have to spend so much. You can always design and print your own posters and it will not take much of your time to post them in conspicuous places.

By adding something for 'free'. By adding the word 'free' to your message, you are more than likely to get as many people interested in what you have to say. Let us face it. Your strategy of giving out free items may be manipulative in a way; but the first step to getting your message read and understood is to attract your audience. People in general love free items. So add a few promotional items that your target audience would appreciate.

By having a ball. Balls and charity events are very popular social gatherings for raising funds and awareness from people. You can always raise funds for a cause by selling tickets for a formal dinner. On the other hand, you can print souvenir programs in the form of brochures and catalogs. Again, there are the promotional giveaways that you can auction or give out during the event.

Finally, you can also make a buck from selling your promotional materials. You just have to remember that you have to add a social cause to your marketing items. Bear in mind that social awareness is the main message you would want to establish. So be sure to get the bottom line as a way to earn profits for your charitable causes. By Katie Marcus