Affiliate Marketing
Avoiding All The Scams In Affiliate Marketing
The internet is filled with people trying to get rich as quickly as possible. That said, there are numerous unscrupulous users on the internet who wake up on a daily basis to take advantage of those people looking to make easy money and they do this by promising them things that are nearly impossible to deliver on.
Don’t be that person who thinks that the internet has all the solutions to your money problems and that you can get something for nothing. As they say, hard work forever pays so be prepared to earn your pay; after all it is a business so treat it as such.
Affiliate marketing has presented a new frontier for internet scammers to prey on the unsuspecting public. How then can you spot these scams and avoid the stress of losing your hard-earned money to people who only want to take advantage of you?
Genuine programs do not require joining fees.
Look at the bigger networks such as Clickbank and JV Zoo; they do NOT ask for a joining fee as they make their money by taking a commission when, and only when, you make sales.
Promises of big income with little work
Some merchants will try to show you how you can be a millionaire within a few days. If that were the case then they’d be relaxing somewhere on a beach enjoying their wealth instead of trying to convince people to join their programs on the internet.
Educate yourself and always do your due diligence before jumping into any affiliate program and you should be ok.
Anyone can make a career out of affiliate marketing but not everyone who attempts to will succeed. You should be ready to work hard and choose those programs that are genuine and that will provide you with an opportunity to grow.
Affiliate Marketing on Facebook
If you are an affiliate marketer, you have probably heard that social networking sites are great for boosting affiliate earnings. But do you really understand how to use them to their benefit? Sometimes, if an affiliate marketer is too pushy they may appear to be spammy – you know the type that ends up posting their links on other peoples’ fan pages or worse – spamming their own friends and family.
There are several ways you can pursue your affiliate marketing on Facebook and it can be quite lucrative, especially considering that Facebook traffic is continually on the rise! You just need to work out how to best cater to your target audience and their needs on Facebook.
Here are just 3 ways to market on FB:
Fan pages
These are one popular way to pursue affiliate marketing on FB. Anyone can create a fan page, and yours can be for a specific brand or niche topic, like parenting. You’ll want to grow a list of followers on your fan page by providing lots of interaction, tips and yes, links to products they might like.
FB Groups
While your FB pages are usually meant for fans to follow a leader in a niche (YOU), a group is for like-minded people to be able to interact.
So you could have a parenting Facebook group for Moms of autistic children, for example. You could provide tips for working with autistic kids, and sometimes provide a link to toys that are good for autistic children or a link to an info product about nutrition and autism.
Your group(s) can be either public or private. Private groups require you to invite and approve members. You may wish to consider this option if you’re collecting names on an email autoresponder list and want to give them access as a perk. You cna even make your group secret meaning that it cannot be found by any search on FB so the ONLY way to know of its existence is to be invited.
FB Ads
Advertising on Facebook is very popular among affiliate marketers but you do need to know how to use it before you plunk down a substantial amount of money – or even invest a little and lose it all because you didn’t know what you were doing.
The thing that many advertisers like about FB ads is that you can really target your audience well and drill down into a niche, and the ads themselves are pretty inexpensive. Because of the highly focused targeting, your conversion rate can be very high.
With a Facebook ad, you’ll want to use a mix of images and text to produce a click-through although you need to bear in mind that any text has to follow strict FB guidelines and not cover more than 20% of the ad (FB does provide a tool for advertisers to check whether their ad is compliant to the 20% rule and is well worth checking to ensure your ad is approved quickly. Your mixutre of iamage and text is something you can easily split test and you can see what works best for your particular audience.
The demographic targeting options you have are very extensive; you can choose the country, age group, interests and even relationship status – so if you wanted to target single men and promote a course on how to pick up women, you could! Or if you wanted to promote your gardening site to people who garden, your ad could just go out to those individuals.
So if you are an affiliate marketer, you really should add FB to your arsenal and by using these 3 options you can really make the most of FB to drive highly targeted traffic to your affiliate offers.
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Every business desires to make profits by getting as many customers as possible and in the process increasing sales. There are many ways to drive sales, and one of them that is very convenient and preferable to many entrepreneurs is affiliate marketing. Some people are familiar with the term because they’ve probably heard it thrown around from different quarters. So what really is this type of marketing and what does it entail?
In simple terms, it is a form of internet marketing where the affiliate (person referring customers), signs up for a merchant’s affiliate marketing program. The affiliate then recommends the merchant’s products to customers and earns a commission on every sale made. It’s similar to what used to exist before internet marketing became mainstream; where sales representatives would go out and get customers and then be paid a commission for every sale made. To some extent, this type of marketing also intertwines with some internet marketing methods because affiliates use conventional advertising methods to create product awareness. Some of these methods include making use of search engine optimization tools, email marketing and pay per click.
Affiliate marketing should never be confused with referral marketing as is often the case because the two are very different. The main motivation behind affiliate programs is financial gain as a way of driving sales while referral marketing uses personal relationships and trust to increase the amount of sales. By relying on loyal existing customers and business connections, a business can use referrals to increase revenue generation. In affiliate marketing, you only get paid commissions when you bring in customers and they actually make purchases.
This marketing program requires the affiliate or publisher to use an affiliate link anytime that they mention the advertiser or merchant on their website. When a potential customer visits the affiliate’s website and clicks on the link, he or she is taken to the merchant’s website. At the same time, a cookie gets dropped on the customer’s computer. The customer then makes a purchase from the merchant’s website. As he logs out, the merchant finds a cookie that belongs to a specific affiliate and thereafter makes a credit for the sale in accordance with the initial agreement. For transparency purposes, the merchant avails reports showing breakdowns of the amount of traffic from the affiliate’s link and the sales made. This ensures that the publisher is paid his rightful dues without being taken advantage of by the merchant. The commission payments are usually made after certain durations, on most occasions on a monthly basis. At least that allows the merchant to receive a reasonable amount as opposed to the payments coming in small bits.
The most common compensation method is the one described above where the affiliate is only paid commissions for actual sales made. The cost per click method of compensation is not favored by many merchants because there is always the danger of the marketing program not resulting into reasonable sales numbers. An affiliate can also just sit around and earn money for actually doing nothing. Affiliate marketing is sometimes referred to as performance marketing because of the compensation method.
Writing Persuasive Copy for Your Landing Page
Being able to write persuasive copy for a landing page is one of the most important skills you can develop as a digital marketer. And this applies whether you’re planning on selling a digital information product, or you plan to become an affiliate marketer.
The whole purpose of the copy on this page is to demonstrate why your product is good value and the key features that should make your potential buyers excited. You want to take them from being unaware of your product to becoming paying customers; this is commonly known as ‘converting’. It’s probably the single biggest factor that will have a direct influence on your number of sales and therefore your revenue, turnover and profit.
What is the key to writing copy that converts?
The Journey
Taking a prospect who has never have heard of your product and persuading them to buy it is a key part of most sales copy. There is a structure that many copywriters follow and this is called AIDA which stands for ‘Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action’. This sequence acknowledges that people don’t know anything about the product at first but that they will eventually end up happy to buy it.
The big question is; how do you move them through these steps? The first challenge is actually getting noticed in the first place! After all, most people on the web are there because they’re doing something important. Most people nowadays are in a constant rush, have work to do and certainly don’t want to spend their valuable time reading sales pitches that just want their cash. As a writer, your job is to change their mind and to make them actually want to keep reading.
One way to do this is to use a narrative structure i.e. tell a story about your product or service that will encourage them to keep reading. If you have a personal story that resonates with your audience you can include this too. This works well because we are naturally inclined to want to read stories and we find it very hard to end a story early. Stories are highly relatable and always interesting.
The Value Proposition
You will also need to focus on your value proposition. A value proposition is a key selling point of your product and beyond that, it is what your product does for someone and how it changes their lives. Does your product help people by making them richer? Does it improve their physical shape so that they’re stronger, healthier and happier? You also need a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) which will demonstrate why your product is different to the others and why it will work for them. Focus on the ‘dream’ that will sell your product in your pitch.