FREE Affiliate Marketing Crash Course (Worth $97!)
FREE Affiliate Marketing Crash Course
(Worth $97!)
In this course, we will cover:
- Affiliate Marketing Quick Intro
- Market Research & Niche Selection
- Product Selection
- Keyword Research
- Domain Registration (Getting your own .com!)
- Web Hosting
- WordPress Installation
- Making Your Website Look Cool
- Content Creation (What to put on your website)
- Getting traffic
Affiliate Marketing Quick Intro
You probably already know what affiliate marketing is. But for the sake of completeness, I will give you a brief insight on the subject.
First and foremost, affiliate marketing is choice. This means that you are free to choose the market you want to get into and you have no obligation concerning the products you promote. Are you interested in bodybuilding but don’t feel comfortable promoting bodybuilding supplements? No problem – there are tons of other products in the bodybuilding industry, such as equipment and even online courses, without actually having to manufacture the equipment or write the course yourself. This is the power of affiliate marketing; the power of choice.
Market Research & Niche Selection
Now I know you are excited about this whole thing, so let’s dive right into the first step of your online business: Market Research.
This is a matter of personal choice. There is a product to promote in just about every niche you can imagine. For marketing ideas, you can go on Amazon.com or/and Clickbank.com/marketplace.
Sign up with Amazon Associates program here
Sign up with Clickbank as an affiliate here
Placing your mouse on a category will expand into smaller categories (like I did with the Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry section).
Same thing on the Clickbank marketplace. Tons of markets (and more if you scroll down).
What I personally do when choosing a niche to get into, I try to follow this rule:
“This should be a niche that I like AND that is desperate or a raving hobby among the target market”
Actually, I consider a niche golden even if I have no particular interest in that field if it is in the desperate market.
Examples of desperate niches are: weight loss, getting your ex back, seduction etc. These are niches that people will continue to buy till the end of the world.
The first hobby niche that comes to my mind is: golf. Golfers are rabid buyers. They’ll sacrifice food and clothing to buy golf equipment! So it’s a good niche to consider.
Content Creation Habits You Need To Adopt
It is not, was not and never will be a debate that if you are doing any form of business online, you need content. It could be in the form of blog posts, articles, e-books, giveaway reports or any other format, but content is an essential component of your marketing.
With the ever-evolving world wide web, we all need more and more quality content for promotion.
With that said, there are a few habits that quality blog writers and ghostwriters seem to have in common. This post will try to dissect them so you can yourself adopt them to have the ability to create more and better content.
1. Deadlines
Without deadlines, you are unlikely to get much done. You will feel like it’s okay to complete this or that in the afternoon or the next Friday. Sometimes it really is, but when you are postponing everything, something is definitely wrong.
Setting a deadline allows you to get things done quickly and efficiently. You may think that your quality might be compromised if you are writing in a hurry, but this isn’t true. Instead, you will focus on just writing the essentials instead of fluffing up just because “you have enough time”. Your readers will actually love you for being to the point.
2. Scheduling the writing
Writers have fun too; they’re only human. However, they have their writing times too. And if you want to write, you’ve got to schedule your writing as well. So maybe on Monday and Tuesday you will write a report, Wednesday a blog post, Thursday content for guest posting etc.
If you have no idea how you will plan your weekly schedule, then think about how much you want to get done in 2 months from now? Maybe you want to have 1 e-book that you can sell, 1 report for lead generation, 15 articles on your blog. Well, then just spread the tasks out on 8 weeks! 1 ebook, report and 15 articles sound like a complete system. But if you divide them across 8 weeks, you’ll find that you have plenty of time to do it AND plenty of free time as well.
In your first week you can test out various strategies to see what works best for you on a daily basis. For example, you can try working on your online business 2 hours in the morning and another 2 in the afternoon. Or maybe you are better at working for 4 hours straight. Only trying it out will tell.
3. Reading
Loads of mistakes could have been avoided if only the writers just spent some time reading. Reading makes you better. It teaches you when to put an “s” or when to write “you’re” instead of “your”. If you are in any serious niche, chances are your target audience is not dumb. Improper english will raise doubts on your expertise. And if you can’t be trusted, you can’t make money.
4. Writing for the audience
Too many people get so lost in themselves that they forget that they are writing for OTHER people, and not to feed their own ego.
You cannot talk about “becoming more aesthetically pleasing” when you are writing for a bodybuilding blog. Well, you can, but your readers would feel more “at home” if you instead write about “gaining slabs of muscle” or “packing on lean mass next month”. Use their language.
How to get to know about their language? Do #3, but in the niche you are in (reading). After reading 12 articles or so on bodybuilding.com, you are bound to get acquainted to the terms bodybuilders like reading. Same thing for golfing or betting. Find an authority website in the niche, and read a few forum posts and blog posts.
It just takes some reading to “get it”. And once your readers feel home, they’re much more bound to get their credit card out of their wallet to purchase something that you recommend.
5. Ask for feedback
Ask your readers if they like what they read or if they want something different. Maybe your information is good, but they would like to have it presented in a more entertaining way.
For instance, I know people that are into Internet Marketing are not really interested in reading Shakespeare-style sentences. They like simple stuff. This article is almost as if I’m talking to you, right? And admit it, you like it :P
This is what I’m talking about. Investigating…okay, maybe not investigating, but looking for what your readers want from you.
The wrap
Again, only 5 tips shared. Take 100% of it; it’s easy. But it’ll only be useful if you implement them!
How To Make Your Website More Efficient & Usable
Cracked the SEO code? Or maybe you are paying dirt cheap on Adwords to drive tons of traffic on your site? Traffic is only 1 part of the equation. Once you’ve figured it out, you need to be able to keep the visitors you funneled right onto your website. It’s of no great use to have people land on your website just to leave immediately without ever coming back.
This article will give you guidelines that should help you to have the page landers do what you want on your site.
1. You have 3 seconds
Web surfers are fast moving. Okay, maybe not in real life, but when they are browsing the web, they do click fast. And hitting the ‘Back’ button is something they’re used to doing. You need to keep them from doing that by passing the “3 second test”.
How? First, your website needs to show credibility, trustworthiness and professionalism.
Next, it needs to look like your visitors are in the right place will be getting what they are looking for.
Design is not everything in a website, but it sure plays a major role.
Here are some quick tips
No flash as far as possible: Flash increases page load time. iPhones don’t support Flash, and it happens to be that loads of people browse the web with their iPhones. Also, other media should be limited to only the minimal.
Clean layout: Nothing is worse than a cluttered website. Have a look at Google’s home page. Simple, but neat. There is no reason you cannot make your navigation and content area clean.
Limited colours: Using every single colour that HTML allows you to is not the way to go. You should be good with a maximum of 4 colours (and a minimum of 2). Your visitors will quickly be able to understand that 1 colour is for links, another is for the content and the other 2 are for things that are important or that you want to stand out.
Fonts and stuff: Great content is of no use if it is illegible. If you don’t know what font to use, pick one of those 3: Arial, Verdana or Tahoma, and you should be good! Provide sub-headlines and bullet points to satisfy your visitors’ need for scanning the page. And to finish this section, if you are not sure about the colours, use what works: black text on a white background!
2. No one wants a gf or bf who has mood swings
Same applies for websites. Google has a certain layout, and it’s nice. Facebook has its own layout, and it’s nice as well. Now imagine performing a search on Google’s homepage and having your search results displayed on a Facebook layout! It’s going to be a complete mess!
You don’t want that. Instead, keep the same logo, the same colours and the same overall layout on all your pages. Of course, your squeeze page has to be slightly different, but the overall look has to feel the same.
3. A bit more about your navigation
A good navigation allows your visitors to see if they can get what they want on your website. If they think they won’t get what they want on your website, they will leave, and that would be really sad if you have what they want, but it’s just that it’s buried too deep in your links.
Some tips to help with the navigation:
1. Keep the top navigation bar simple
2. Have another nav bar in your footer
3. Use breadcrumbs
*A breadcrumb shows the user in which subsection they are, for example:
Women > Jewellery > Rings
All three are links to their respective sections.
4. Too deep is not good.
Ex. Women > Accessories > Jewellery > Neck > Gold > Small > Earrings
No one will bother checking out all the sections. But if you have only 3 levels, they are likely to visit each and every page.
5. There is no use of overwhelming people with navigation to all your pages. Your homepage is NOT a site map. Neither are the rest of your pages. (Imagine having 100 articles on your page…).
6. Have a search bar at the top to help them search for what they want.
7. Text > Graphics > Javascript for navigation, plus text is easier!
I’m not here to overwhelm you with information. Takeaway 100% of the little information discussed here, and you will probably increase your website’s efficiency by 100%! Don’t be lazy, change up your site a bit, it’s only a one-off thing, and you’ll reap the benefits for years to go.
8 Things You Can Do To Promote Your Email Click-Through Rate
If you are into email marketing then you would know that technically it’s not that email open rate is not important. It is, no matter what some Internet marketers think. No one can redeem your email offers if they don’t open the emails you send out in the first place. That’s pretty logical. However, with the prevalence of preview panes and the emergence of tools like Priority Inbox, the metric that gets email marketers salivating most is their email click-through rate otherwise referred to as CTR.
If you’ve been running your email marketing campaign for even a few months now then you probably have enough data to be able to anticipate the click-through rate of each of your email campaigns. After all, that’s what inbound marketing analytics is all about. However, this is a new year. The year 2012 and it’s time to start thinking big. How about you include on your New Year’s resolution list improving your email click-through rate to really give your CMO something to smile about.
If you are willing to do something about improving your email click-through rate but you are unsure about what you can do to promote your email campaigns then here are 8 ways in which you can improve your email marketing strategies. Remember that email marketing provides a prime opportunity for A/B testing. As such, you should employ it in all of your email marketing campaigns to ensure you’re always improving upon emails to get the most ROI possible.
8 things you want to improve on when it comes to your email campaigns
1. Test your subject lines
Believe it or not, the subject lines you choose to use for your email offers often have a lot to do with their click-through rates. For successful email marketing, you first need to get the recipients to click open your emails. Once you’ve nailed email deliverability, you should start A/B testing the subject lines you’re using until you master the expertise of writing click-worthy email subject lines.
2. Quantity is not important
Although many people tend to think that longer emails tend to perform better, when it comes to email marketing, this is not technically true. As far as you can, write shorter emails to increase the likelihood that the email recipients encounter your offer before getting bored and deleting the email altogether. When it comes to email marketing, being concise and getting to the point using as small a number of words as possible is a technique many Internet marketers fail to assimilate. Don’t be one of them.
3. Include in your emails social sharing options
Not so long ago, Econsultancy published results finding that emails, which contain at least one social sharing option, generate 30% higher click-through rates than emails without any social sharing links. That CTR also jumps to 55% higher when you include in the content you send out 3 or more social sharing options. Even if your readers don’t want to redeem your email’s offer, they might know a friend who does. Give them the opportunity to spread the word without having to go out of their way by including social sharing buttons in your emails. Then all you will have to do is sit back and watch your click-through rate soar.
4. Divide your email list into segments
An email marketing strategy often neglected by Internet marketers, email list segmentation prevents you from annoying your email recipients with irrelevant offers. In addition to that, list segmentation also lets you provide a more targeted offer, increasing the likelihood that your reader will click through. As a matter of fact, according to email marketing statistics, research shows that marketers who segment their email list enjoy 18% more transactions, 24% more sales leads, and 24% greater revenue.
5. Keep your content targeted
To present targeted content to your audience, list segmentation is absolutely crucial. This is because when you send out content, you want to know who you are sending it to and whether or not these people have any interest in what you have to offer. For profitable email marketing, you want your email offers to answer your recipients’ needs. It’s a no-brainer really. To receive more clicks with people redeeming your offers, you want to send the offers to people who actually need them.
6. Personalize your emails
To improve your email campaigns, you have to give your recipients some credit. You have to assume that they have a brain, which is functional. To further target your list and the content in your email, include in the content you send out elements of personalization. Part of effective lead nurturing is knowing about your prospects’ and customers’ purchase history, download history, satisfaction score, and website activity. This will allow you to provide the most relevant offers that will receive more click-throughs due to the targeted nature of your emails.
7. Do not include distractions in your emails
Just like when you are crafting your landing pages, it’s important to remove distractions from your email templates. Resist the urge to include a header that includes a navigation option to website or to include multiple offers in a single email with the hope that at least something in the email will compel readers to click. In reality, this is nothing but a sure signal that your email doesn’t have a specific enough goal. Step back, and consider the objective of each of the emails you send out. What is the one thing that you want the recipients of your email to do? If your goal is to get more Facebook fans with a particular email, then that’s what you should write about and that’s the call-to-action you should highlight in your email.
8. Improve your calls-to-action
No matter how tired you are when writing an email that you intend to send out to your email list, never fail to ensure that your call-to-action is above the fold, bright, bold, and impossible to miss. Do not assume that your reader is dumb. If you land on a dumb person then lucky you but as far as you can, you want to write emails to cover the worst-case scenarios. If you make your reader think by forcing them to scroll all the way down to the very last line of your email, hunt for your call-to-action, or question what they’re supposed to do then you can bet you won’t receive a click-through. Instead, you’ll get sent straight to the Trash and that’s not where you want to land.
Bad Content HURTS Your Inbound Marketing
Content is the skeleton of the World Wide Web. Bad content is like a faulty bone. Is it true? Is good content really that important for your business, or is it just something that good bloggers like to popularize?
The truth is, bad content really brings your business underwater. If you are even remotely thinking that you are saving money by “investing” in crappy content, you are kidding yourself, banging your head against a wall, filling your room with butane gas and then putting it on fire. Okay, maybe not, but you are just spending money that will not bring you anything good.
Mere statements are not enough to make you change your mind? Okay, maybe the points I’ll be illustrating below will get you to re-think.
1. Do you link to every crappy video you find on YouTube?
What? You don’t link to even one of them!? Well, most of the Internet surfers are like you: they only link to the GOOD stuff. And having people link to your pages from their blogs or Facebook profiles not only drives traffic to them, but also gets you backlinks.
Imagine having hundreds of bloggers link to an article on your website.. Hundreds of links and targeted traffic from them..! Is it possible? Only with AWESOME content.
2. Do you share every bad article with your friends?
WHAT? Again no!?? Well, again, most people with an Internet connection are like you. They only share the GOOD stuff. The popular guys on Facebook never share what they deem to be crap (they will stop being popular!). Instead, they share the cool stuff that they think their friends (or followers in the case of Twitter), will like to read or view.
Again, to have the popular guys share your content, you need to have…GREAT content!
Some people say that they don’t need to be found as their marketing team does a pretty good job on its own. Well, you would really refuse a compounded result of your marketing team’s effort? It’s the difference between having your pdf downloaded 100 times and 5,000 times. When your marketing is good, people find you. If your content is good, it goes viral, and you rank high in the search engines. Don’t risk page 1 or spot #1 on Google. Invest in GOOD content.
3. Have your friends been torn apart by the Panda?
If you are regular on the popular Internet marketing forums, I’m sure you are familiar with the Panda’s horror stories. If not, then here is what it is.
Google Panda, or Google Farmer Update is an update from Google that kicks the websites with poor quality content down to page 42. Well, not exactly 42, but you got the point. If you put up crappy content on your pages, Google will push you down the SERPS.
Avoid being hit by the Panda by writing original articles that provide value, educate and engage your readers. How will Panda know? Don’t ask me; I don’t know! But Google seems to have had its best tech guys on it!
4. How about your reputation?
This blogs will be learning you how to make sum cool monies on ze interwebs.
If I had this sentence at the beginning of this page, would you trust me? You would probably press the ‘Back’ button faster than you clicked to reach here! Same for your readers. And it doesn’t only depend on orthography. The readers that identify your factual mistakes will make sure to let the others know that you are NOT a source to be trusted.
And people don’t give their credit card information to people who they don’t trust… Again… Invest in high quality content!
5. Would you come back?
This blogs will be learning you how to make sum cool monies on ze interwebs.
Imagine this article being full of sentences like this one. The only reason you would stay, is for a laugh. But even then, would you come back? Probably never, right? Thanks to Google, people are used to getting the information they want FAST. When people land on your page, they quickly scan the place to see if it’s for them. If it’s not, it’s bye bye forever… Avoid this with good content.
I think that’s enough of convincing, right? You got the point here. See you in the next post!
If You Are An Internet Marketer Then Here Are What Your New Year’s Resolutions Should Look Like
This is it people! We’ve waved goodbye to 2011, putting behind us a year that brought us whatever it did, whether good or bad. If you’ve had some failures last year then here is your chance to get things right. If you did well last year then 2012 can just be the year when you outdo yourself, improving what you got right last year. 2012 is indeed finally here and if you didn’t spend any time thinking what went well and what went bad with the marketing strategy you implemented last year then now is the perfect time for you to take some time and reflect on your past mistakes and good decisions. Whether you wish to acknowledge this or not, increasingly more and more companies are catching on discovering and experimenting with the most effective strategies for getting found online and generating more leads and customers. At this point in time, the future of inbound marketing is looking more competitive and cutthroat than ever. Do you have the weapons you need to survive the competition out there?
2012 is a brand new year so let’s start with a little optimism here. Whether you already have a strong marketing campaign in place or you’re just starting out, when it comes to Internet marketing, there is always room for improvement mostly because the world of Internet marketing is evergreen but also highly volatile. To do better this year as far as your business marketing strategy is concerned, here are 10 New Year’s resolutions you want to include in that long list of New Year’s resolutions you made which if I take a wild guess would include getting more serious, getting a life outside your workspace and hitting the gym. Pretty much everyone’s New Year’s resolution list contains those 3 things but this post is not about that. I am here to talk about what you want to do different this year as far as the marketing of your business is concerned.
10 New Year’s resolutions for a new and most importantly successful marketing strategy this year
1. Building a killer keyword strategy and getting your business to rank higher in the organic search results of the authority search engines
So why should you have this resolution on your list? Quite simply, we all know that when consumers look for a product or service online, in the majority of instances, they turn to the search engines for answers. In fact, hundreds of millions of search queries are conducted on the search engines every day. A successfully optimized search campaign can help your business generate more leads and get found by a larger volume of potential customers. The key to successful SEO is concentrating on long-tail keywords that pertain to your business and products. As far as Internet marketing is concerned, it can be absolutely crucial for you to craft your list of keywords carefully so you can optimize for search better and ultimately rank higher in the search results.
2. Building more inbound links to your website to really rock your off-page SEO
When it comes to search engine optimization, inbound links are a marketer’s most powerful asset. In fact, off-page SEO as opposed to on-page SEO accounts for the majority of a web page’s ability to rank for a particular keyword. Building authoritative and relevant links to your website from external sites should be a critical part of your SEO strategy.
3. Taking advantage of your business blog as a lead generation tool by writing tons of awesome and educational posts.
Most people might not be aware of this but nearly 40% of US companies use blogs as a tool for marketing purposes. Companies that blog attract 55% more website visitors. These facts speak for themselves. Marketing data clearly shows that blogging is a critical component of the inbound marketing methodology and as a result, it directly correlates to better business results.
4. Putting super attractive calls-to-action in your blog posts, email sends, and – well – almost everywhere else.
In order to survive in today’s economy, you need calls-to-action and you need good ones. Calls-to-action have the power to grab people’s attention and direct it to your offers. In other words, CTAs point traffic to your offers and help you generate leads better than any other marketing strategy.
5. Building stronger relationships with your prospects by engaging with them more in social media.
These days, using social media to direct traffic to your website and generate new leads should be an indispensable part of your marketing mix. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ all give you the opportunity to engage with your prospects and build relationships with them, making it more likely that you’ll be able to convert them into leads for your business. Don’t neglect this amazing tool!
6. Optimizing your website for mobile marketing and learning more about how to make the most out of mobile marketing.
It is a fact that 85% of mobile devices will be web-enabled by next year, and it’s likely that by 2013, the #1 way consumers will access the Internet will be through their mobile devices. With such rapid growth in the smart phone industry, marketers simply can’t afford to ignore mobile phone users and mobile marketing.
7. Building seriously stunning landing pages and optimizing them for converting more visitors into leads.
Landing pages are one of the most important elements of lead generation and as such, building effective landing pages allows you to direct your website visitors to targeted pages and capture leads at a much higher rate than you would under normal circumstances.
8. Generating more leads for your sales team so you can get some crazy lead-to-customer conversion going.
This particular New Year’s resolution should be simple enough for you to figure out. After all, what business doesn’t want more revenue-generating customers? The way to get there is to drive as many qualified leads as possible with all sorts of tools, including social media, blogging, and content creation.
9. Making your lead nurturing campaigns more personal and relevant because, hey, your emails deserve to be read.
50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. So if you’re not nurturing them, you are simply burning money. Lead nurturing is all about understanding the nuances of your leads’ timing and needs. Lead nurturing enables marketers to establish contact fast.
10. Experimenting with marketing automation and using it to provide helpful content but not sales pitches or spam.
Marketing automation is an extremely powerful tool but still, many marketers abuse it. For successful Internet marketing, it can be crucial for you to keep your emails customer-focused and relevant to the need of your prospects; not using them to pressure your leads to buy. When used correctly, marketing automation can drastically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your lead nurturing strategy.
