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.
Social Media Marketing | Is It better For You To Have 40 Qualified Social Media Followers Or 2000 Followers Who You Know Won’t Ever Buy From You?
When it comes to social media marketing, things don’t always work as we assume they do. For instance, if you consider the above question then the true answer is that you are much better off having thousands of followers who never buy from you as compared to keeping your reach restrained to only those people who have qualified themselves as serious buyers and your loyal clients. In social media, the audience you manage to reach directly impacts how much your content and messages get shared. The more people you manage to reach, the more you increase your business’ ability to get found and generate leads. Having a large number of followers can also extend your online footprint as a thought leader. Put quite simply, when it comes to the world of the Internet, social reach shouldn’t be a trivial factor for businesses leveraging inbound marketing such that more followers is always better.
Why you need thousands of followers online even though only a small percentage of them are likely to ever make any purchases from you
1. More followers = Access to more followers’ followers.
This concept is simple. There is nothing magical about it and there is definitely nothing hard to understand so it’s really surprising how many inbound Internet markets just fail to understand the overall importance of reach. Think about it. If every one of your followers has his or her own followers and let’s say that one of your followers has as little as 50 followers assuming we are talking about an average individual. If that person shares one of your blog posts or retweets one of your tweets, you will have exposure to 50 additional people who were not initially directly following you. All you need to understand and consider here is that when it comes to social media, there is always a small but yet distinct window of opportunity and possibility that a follower shares your content with his or her friends and followers so even if that original follower of yours was never really a client, it does not necessarily mean that none of his followers will be interested in what you have to offer. Social media marketing is a powerful marketing tool. You only need to know what to do with it.
2. Influencers sometimes have, oh well, influence
If you have an overwhelming social media presence with thousands of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, chances are, you collected a few influencers on the way. While influencers may follow but never buy from you, these people are called influencers for a reason. They can introduce you to co-marketing partnerships or to other influencers, bloggers and experts in your industry. Sometimes they can even put in a good word for you with investors and although that follower never contributed any direct revenue to your business, the inbound links you generated through the person are absolutely valuable.
3. Followers who don’t personally buy from you can refer you to other people
Indirect exposure to your followers’ personal networks can be an invaluable source of business. For instance, taking a hypothetical example here, Fargood, one of your Facebook fans may never have purchased your industrial vacuum cleaner for his tiny real estate office but if one day, his buddy, landlord Lenny, happens to need a new one for the apartment buildings he owns, Facebook fan Fargood might just refer you some highly qualified business. Even if landlord Lenny isn’t the type to participate in social media himself, his good buddy Fargood is.
4. Social shares impact SEO.
Believe it or not, the impact social media is having on SEO is only increasing. Search engines are taking social cues like social media shares into account when ranking your content, which means that the more people you can get to share your content in social media, the better.
Hypothetically speaking, let’s assume you own this professional dog grooming business, and you and one of your competitors each wrote a blog article about how to take care of a dog’s coat in between visits to the groomer. Let’s also say your competitor has 10 times as many social media followers than you do and that his article got tweeted 50 times, generated 20 likes on Facebook, and got quite a few shares on LinkedIn and Google+ as well. Your competitor will have quite a leg up when it comes to getting his article ranked in the search engines. Because social shares are now one of the factors search engines take into consideration when ranking content, you need to keep encouraging social shares for your content and the more followers and Facebook fans you have, the better.
5. Your followers might surprise you
If did your research well and you spent a lot of time developing your buyer personas then most probably you have a pretty solid grasp on who your potential customers are. That’s all great but if you have been narrow-minded about who exactly might be interested to buy from you then you could miss out on a completely different set of people who might also choose to buy your products and services for one reason or another. To make sure you don’t lose out on business, you need to make sure you get to different groups of people before your competitors do. Building up your social media presence could expose your brand and products to groups of people you might never have thought would be interested in what you have to offer.
The lesson to learn
In summary, just because your followers may not always buy from you does not mean that they are useless. Social media reach can be a powerful thing for any business, and the Internet Marketers who understand this know that continuing to build their reach online is a smart social media tactic. If building reach isn’t something you’re consciously doing at the moment then you may want to start working on attracting more fans and followers for your social media accounts.
The 8 Critical Elements You Need To Include On Your Homepage If You Want To Generate More Leads From Your Website
If your website is no longer working for you or it never worked for you to start with and you are considering redesigning it so you can generate more leads then you need to know that a website is highly unlikely to work if its homepage is not good to begin with. The homepage of a website is the page of all pages and it is undoubtedly the most important area on a website. A website’s homepage can be thought of as a virtual front door. It gets the majority of the traffic. That alone is enough fuel for most website owners to pay particular attention to the homepage of their website making it look and feel nice but for many, despite the dedication and attention to detail with which they create their homepage, the performance of the homepages tend to leave a lot to be desired. This is because it’s not good enough for a business to have a good-looking homepage. The homepage needs to include certain critical elements in the absence of which the homepage is highly unlikely to generate any lead.
The first thing you need to know about a homepage is that a homepage is not the same thing as a landing page. A homepage tends to be less targeted as compared to a landing page because it needs to appeal to a greater and more diverse audience who happen to land on it while browsing the Internet for some information. Because homepages are hardly meant to get people to use their credit cards, you can’t expect your homepage to have a conversion rate as high as your landing page but nevertheless, your homepage should be bringing you at least some leads. At the very least, the page should be good enough to make people want to go to the different inner pages of your site ultimately getting to your landing page where you will have your best shot at converting the visitors to your website into buyers. Whichever way you look at it, getting the homepage of your website right is absolutely essential to your success as a website owner and Internet marketer.
How to increase the conversion rate of your homepage
For your homepage to work, it needs to contain certain key elements. These elements serve as lures that will educate and pique the interest of the people who accidentally tumble across your website or people who got directed to your website from the organic searches of the search engines. In general, for a homepage to work, it needs to include 8 elements, all of which we will discuss by the end of this post so if your homepage is currently not doing much for you, you might want to read on.
The 8 critical elements every homepage must absolutely have
1. A headline
Obvious, I know. Who would be dumb enough to create a homepage without a headline anyway but believe it or not, many Internet marketers fail to understand the concept of a headline. The headline of a homepage should be able to tell a visitor to a website what the site is offering within 3 seconds. That’s all the time you have to get the attention of a person who’s been redirected to your site before they click the back button because they could not even begin to figure out what you are offering in the first pace. It does not matter if you are a fan of Hamlet, the headline of your homepage is not the best place for you to let loose your literary side. A headline should be simple and clear, no fluff.
2. Sub-headlines are important
Although many websites tend to go for blocks of text when it comes to their homepage, ideally, the information you are giving away should be segmented under appropriate sub-headlines. The sub-headlines together should be enough to give a visitor a very good idea about who you are and what you are offering through your website. For your sub-headlines, avoid complex sentence structures and advanced English vocabulary. Keep your sub-headlines simple making sure each one of them is conveying a specific but brief piece of valuable information.
3. Benefits
Your homepage should tell your visitors why they should pay any interest to what you have to offer. If you are offering custom wristbands, you want your homepage to tell your prospective clients in no uncertain terms why you are better than your competitors and why they sshould choose you over the crowd out there. Failing that, your homepage is not likely to do you much good.
4. Calls-to-action
A homepage must include multiple calls-to-action. Again, if you are offering custom wristbands for instance, you want the body of your homepage to include several call-to-action subtly driving your conversions.
5. Features
Depending on the service you are offering, the part where you talk about the features of your business can sound and feel a lot like the benefits of the service. Bear in mind that you do not want to rehash the same words over and over again. The features of a service and the benefits of the same service are different things. You only need to be clear about what it is you are offering in your head.
6. Customer proof
Customer reviews and testimonials can be a powerful tool in the hands of any Internet marketer and customer proof should be included on the homepage of every website in a very prominent and conspicuous position. To make your testimonials feel and look more real, you might want to include names and pictures to your testimonials.
7. Success indicators
If the product or service you are offering has had some success that has been quantified and qualified via studies or controlled experiments, provide their success indicators on your homepage. People love facts and numbers in all their genres.
8. Navigation
The key to success when it comes to Internet marketing is to know how to keep the visitors to your website on there as long as it takes for them to make a purchase or to bookmark it to come back to it later. For that to happen, once a person lands on your website, you need to provide them with a clear navigation pathway from one page to another until they get to your landing page where you will have your best shot at selling them something. The homepage of a website should have a clear navigation.
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.
