Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category
Affiliate Marketing Basics: Let’s Talk About Traffic
April 13th, 2009 | 
Author:
One of the most important things to learn when getting started in Affiliate Marketing concerns traffic- particularly what it is and how to get it.
Why?
Because if you want to be successful then the truth is “the money is in the list”; not the list of the people whose product you are selling, but YOUR list!
Here’s why. As an affiliate, your job is to find people who want to buy the products you’re promoting, right? So to do that, you need to write an ad (or hire a copywriter to write it for you), and send people to a Website where they can buy the product.
BUT – there’s a serious problem with using this method. Do you see what it is?
Anywhere from 60 to 95% of the people you send to the sales page probably aren’t going to buy the first time.
1. Most people want to be certain that they’re making the right decision, so they usually need to see or hear from you between 5 to 12 times before making a buying decision.
2. If you’re paying for the ad and sending people to the seller’s Website, the ones who don’t buy disappear forever. (And neither you nor the seller will benefit.)
3. Of those who do buy, if you’re only sending them to the sales page, YOU still lose them forever because you have no way of knowing who they are.
Here’s the solution:
1. Write your ad and send prospects to a well-written squeeze page – YOUR squeeze page. (A squeeze page is a single page Website that has one purpose – to convince prospects to give you their contact information. Squeeze pages should be simple – no flash, no links, and if you use a graphic or photo, keep it simple and make sure it relates to the purpose of the page. How do you convince prospects to give you their contact information? By giving them information that is what they’re expecting to find and that’s useful to them.)
2. Offer them an incentive to give you their contact information. (This could be a free report, a free newsletter, an audio or video product – just make sure it’s related to the niche or affiliate product.)
3. After they’ve opted in to your autoresponder, send them to your affiliate sales page.
4. Follow up with them on a regular basis – mixing good information, free bonuses from time to time and additional affiliate products.
Lather, rinse, repeat. (Once you’re making money from your first affiliate product, move on to the next and then the next and the next.)
The best thing about this is that you can set most of it up on your autoresponder, so you turn it into a “system” and it runs “almost” on autopilot. (There is NO SUCH THING as a business that runs 100% on autopilot – and don’t believe anyone who tells you differently.) Any business – real business – takes work and effort. But by setting this system up this way, your autoresponder does the majority of the work, and you will only need to do simple updates and make sure you keep fresh information flowing.
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Posted in Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Articles | 
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, bonus page, squeeze pages | 
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Advertising Your Affiliate Programs
With most affiliate programs you will receive textual ads and banners for online advertising placements. There are several free ways you can use these ads and banners.
One of the most popular ways are Traffic Exchanges. You register with various traffic exchange programs, upload your text ad or banner, and your banner will appear on various registered web pages throughout the world. The number of times you banner or text ad will show will depend on how many points or clicks you accumulate through “surfing” the traffic exchange. The more points or clicks you have the more your ad will be shown to others. This is a very effective method of advertising. It can be time consuming but doesn’t have to be…you just need to organize yourself to do 5-10 different exchanges each day.
Once you sign up for a traffic exchange bookmark the signup page in a folder with all exchanges. Then using Firefox as your browser, right click the folder, where it says “open all in tabs” click on that and all your exchanges will open. Sign in and start to surf.
Traffic exchanges are relatively easy to use and FREE!
The other two types of advertisement placements are online classifieds and paid placements.
Online classifieds is one of the easiest ways to get your product in front of customers on high traffic websites; and it can be done for FREE. Type in your search “online classified” or a similar phrase and look to see what the rules are for placing your advertisement or banner. Several major website will allow you to place classified ads for free. While others, like Yahoo, will charge a fee for placement. These can be very effective depending on the volume of ads being submitted at any given time. If it is a high traffic site, your ad will only appear for a matter of hours before it is pushed down by new advertising submissions. Daily attention and resubmission is necessary to an effective ad campaign on free sites.
Paid placement of advertisements is a very broad category and covers many different scenarios. You can do a PPC campaign (pay per click); where you only pay the site for clicks to your sales page. This can range anywhere from 0.05 to 5.00 a click, depending on what you are willing and can afford to pay. It is best before you start to read as much as you can about PPC campaigns because if you aren’t careful you can spend a lot of money very fast with little or no results. You must keep very close track of expenditure and income for this to work.
There are also the paid advertisement placement sites that will charge you a set fee to place your ad on their site for a designated period of time.
You can also use affiliate-networking sites to sell your products, but each site has different criteria so you would have to contact them directly to see what they offer in terms of tracking and costs. These too can become expensive unless you are an experienced marketer with a unique product to sell.
Ezine or E-magazines are another great source of free and paid advertising. Ezines can range from sites that will accept articles with your bio and link to your site for free. The advertising part comes in the form of that bio. Some sites will not allow you to put an affiliate link in the bio, that is another reason why in a previous article I suggested a “doorway page”.
There are also Ezines that have an opt-in option for you to receive emails from other clients. In exchange for you putting your article or advertisement on their site you will agree to receive emails from various members. This is not considered “spam” as you have to agree to receive this email before you can place your ad (word of advice, use a separate email account). This is all free advertising.
This is just a brief overview of the methods with which you can place your advertisements online. In all of these examples it is best to build your own content rich website. This will be the most effective for advertising.
