Online Marketing Business
Affiliate Recruitment Strategies (19 Proven Tips For Recruiting The Best Affiliates)
Affiliate Recruitment Strategies (19 Proven Tips For Recruiting The Best Affiliates)
Did you know that all affiliate marketers are not created equal? I’m sure if you are a product seller that you are only too aware of this fact!
So how do you recruit great affiliates?
While there is no one answer, there are many ways to find and recruit those key affiliates who will take your business to the next level.
OK, without further ado, let’s talk about recruiting affiliates
1. Social media
Yes, you can find great affiliates on social media. Target people who are interested in affiliate marketing and blogging in your niche.
On Twitter, search for your keywords to find who is talking about your niche, and then follow them and start interacting.
LinkedIn is a great place to meet affiliates and just network in general. You can post and participate in discussions and connect with people in a professional atmosphere.
2. Affiliate networks
One of the quickest ways to attract affiliates is to launch your product on an affiliate network. There are many to choose from, including Clickbank, Commissions Junction, JVZoo, Linkshare and Sharesale.
In some cases you might want to screen affiliates from these networks to be sure you’re only dealing with reputable people.
3. Affiliate forums
Build and maintain a presence on affiliate forums. These are great places to meet and recruit affiliates.
Here’s a few to get you started:
4. Recruit your customers
This is a great way to get new affiliates who truly use and believe in your product. These people are fans of your stuff and would probably have no problem recommending it to others, especially for a bit of cash too!
Reach out to your buyers and see who would like to be your affiliate, and take it from there.
5. Your own website
Place a link on your website! This is perhaps the most simple, yet most overlooked technique of all. Place a link at the bottom of your website, and anywhere else you choose, pointing people to your affiliate page.
6. “Wanna Promote?”
Contacting websites, blogs and other web publishers. Send them a well-written email to ask them in a very polite way if they would like to become your affiliate.
You’ll likely have to contact a lot of people to get results, but it can be totally worth the effort.
7. Use a Service
Use a service such as Affiliate Leads https://affiliateleads.net/ to locate potential affiliates by category, keyword or advertiser.
8. Bloggers
Group High http://www.grouphigh.com/ is a site that will help you find the best bloggers and influencers, as well as manage your relationships.
9. Outsource
If you have the funds, you can hire a service such as Experience Advertising https://experienceadvertising.com/ to do your outreach and recruiting for you.
10. Use PPC Search Ads
Did you know that affiliates are actively looking for great programs to promote? You can find them by running PPC ads in Google Adwords and Bing Ads.
Don’t forget to track to see which ads are bringing in the most effective affiliates.
11. SEO’d Affiliate Pages
Create a page just for affiliates. Then optimize that page for SEO results, so when people are searching for affiliate programs in your niche, they can find you in the organic search results.
12. Press Releases
Write press releases for online distribution. Press releases can be another way to gain traction in the organic rankings.
13. In Person
Trade shows, summits and conferences are great places to meet new affiliates. You might even consider getting a booth at some of these events, so affiliates are coming to you instead of you hunting them down.
14. Customer Referral Program
Tools such as Referral Candy https://www.referralcandy.com/ and Friend Buy https://www.friendbuy.com/ make it super easy to set up and run a customer referral program.
Plus it automates the process, so you can put your focus elsewhere.
15. You Promote Mine, I’ll Promote Yours
Approach other product sellers and offer to do a deal in which you promote each other’s product. A few notes about this one: Obviously you want to find product owners in your same niche. You want to love their product enough to promote it – don’t promote junk just to make some sales of your own.
And while many will tell you that you cannot be direct competitors to do this, it’s simply not true. For example, let’s say you have a product that teaches traffic generation techniques. You find another product that also teaches traffic generation techniques, so naturally they seem like a direct competitor. But the actual techniques they teach are somewhat different from yours.
I can tell you right now that your customers are not buying just one product on generating traffic – they’re buying several. You can be the affiliate who introduces them to a traffic course you truly believe in, and in return get your own product promoted as well.
16. It’s Super Affiliate!
Look for super affiliates – the top affiliate performers who can generate significant revenue for the merchants they choose to promote.
They’re going to be looking for high conversion rates and a decent percentage of the profits.
Be sure you’ve got everything running smoothly and converting well before asking them to promote. If they make a lot of sales, they may continue to promote you into the future.
But if there are technical glitches or low conversions, you will never hear from them again.
17. Spy
Watch to see who is promoting similar offers. If you’re about to launch that traffic program, so some research to find out who the top affiliates were for previous traffic programs.
Perhaps the easiest way to do the research is proactively. Sign up as an affiliate yourself so you can see who the top promoters are, and contact them well in advance of your own launch.
18. Contests
Run an incentive contest, promote it everywhere. Running a contest with cash prizes for top performers will entice new affiliates to join your affiliate program.
19. Affiliates Recruiting Affiliates
Offer an incentive to current affiliates to bring in new affiliates. Affiliates know other affiliates. And offering a percentage of profits on their affiliate recruits is a great way to incentivize them to do your affiliate recruiting for you.
Above all else take care of your best affiliates and keep them happy. Affiliates can make or break your business. If just one affiliate has a bad experience with you, they can potentially tell dozens of others to steer clear. Once this happens, you’ll find it very difficult to recruit new affiliates.
But when you treat your affiliates well, they will send you sales – often a surprising number of them. Just think – all it takes is one really good affiliate to add 5 figures to your business.
A half dozen of these affiliates promoting you on a regular basis can move you into the 6 figure range. All for just recruiting and taking care of your best people.
OK, there you have it; 19 top tips to add to your affiliate recruitment strategies to help you attract and recruit the best affiliates.
Increasing Lifetime Customer Value (sales funnels explained) Pt 1
Increasing Lifetime Customer Value (sales funnels explained) Pt 1
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If you have ever been to a restaurant or fast food chain you have probably been exposed to a “sales funnel.” Think about it; when you go out to eat don’t they always try to get you to buy dessert or have fries with that? And when you shop at retail stores they always try to get you to buy one more thing as you are checking out, normally something which enhances your original purchase.
These are basically cross-sells and are a tried-and-true way of increasing the value of your shopping cart; in short, they are a sales funnel at work. In this series of 3 posts, we’re going to discuss this and two other ways to increase your profits.
What Are These Types of Sale?
What we’re talking about is the practice of encouraging customers to purchase either products which enhance the original purchase at a fraction of the original cost (add-on), or more expensive products (upsell), less expensive alternatives or entry level (downsell), or just additional products – sometimes complementary and sometimes just related (cross-sell). In other words:
- Add-on – Encourage customer to buy additional product which further enhances the original purchase but at a fraction of the cost e.g. accessories.
- Upsell – Encourage customer to buy a more expensive item instead of the item they thought they wanted.
- Downsell – Encourage customer to buy a less expensive item if they are wavering about buying the first item.
- Cross-Sell – Encourage customer to buy additional products, sometimes complementary to the first purchase but sometimes just related products or services.
It’s important to understand how and why each of these practices helps increase your revenue. Even if you get the terms mixed up, as many people do, these options should always exist in your business practices. Luckily, with technology it’s easy to set up your funnel so that all of this is automatic.
How Do They Work?
Most people who are in a buying frame of mind don’t really like leaving without anything. They also like to feel as if they’re on the inside and getting a good deal. As a business owner, you want to ensure that you never leave money on the table. As a customer, you want to ensure that you get a good deal.
Upsells, downsells, and cross-sells all work by playing into the idea that the customer doesn’t want to lose out. In some ways, it’s a psychological trick that feeds into the customer’s ego, but it’s so subtle that it doesn’t make the customer feel pushed or coerced.
- Add-on Example – Let’s say that you sell digital products online, and you are promoting your “Guide to Sales Funnels” for $27 dollars and your customer clicks on that item to purchase it. When they checkout, you may also have a handy checklist to help them implement the training quicker and easier and you offer this for $17. And because this enhances the original offer AND is cheaper, many buyers will take you up on the add-on offer.
- Upsell Example – Let’s say that with your “Guide to Sales Funnels” you also have a “done-for-you” option for $127. This means that right at checkout, you can offer anyone wanting to buy the 27-dollar guide the option to upgrade to the “done-for-you” option and get the guide for free. This is a wonderful example of upselling.
- Downsell Example – Let’s say that your customer goes to the sales page for the 127-dollar offer for the done-for-you sales funnels, but they’re not really ready, so they leave the shopping cart without checking out. You can set up the page to send them directly to the 27-dollar guide offer, or you can use remarketing ads and send them to the 27-dollar guide offer.
- Cross-Sell Example – With either of these options, you can include some additional options. Right on the checkout page or after they check out, you can send them to the download page where you can offer additional items to them. Either way, these additional items are somehow related to the same topic as the original offer.
So, for example, you may have an affiliate link to software such as Leadpages.net or ClickFunnels.com that you can recommend. Or, you may have a graphics package that will work for them to help create their sales funnels that you can promote now. Or, any number of reports, books, or offers that relate. The point is that the offer is in addition to whatever they’re buying.
The reason this works so well is that your customer was either in a buying frame of mind already, or really wanted to buy but could not afford your original offer. The point is they are in your shopping cart and inside your funnel now, and you need to take full advantage of that fact.
Getting Started with Upselling, Cross-selling, and Downselling
The key to creating just the right sale at the right time is to understand your customers’ buying process. But, unlike most sellers, you’re not going to stop when they choose to buy.
Most buying processes are similar and look something like this:
- Awareness – How does your customer find out about your offerings? They usually search the internet, ask friends, or look on social media. This means that you’ll need to have social media updates, blog posts, articles, and information out there so that your customer learns about your solution.
- Investigation – When your customer is doing their research, you want to ensure that you have enough information for them. Usually, at this point they might sign up for your email list to get a white paper, eBook, view a webinar or get other types of industry reports that you’ve created.
- Evaluation – At this point your customer likely has signed up for other people’s lists too, so you need to ensure that you are filling in all the gaps of information by offering case studies, demos, testimonials, free samples and anything you can reasonably offer so that they can make the choice you want them to make.
- Commitment – Finally your customer decides to buy what you’re offering. This is where most people stop. But this is not where you will stop if you learn to create powerful funnels using upsells, cross-sells, and downsells to keep people inside your funnel and increase their lifetime value.
Once you’ve worked out your customers’ buying cycle, you can focus on what happens after commitment. What do you do after they buy? Now is the time to focus on upselling and cross-selling. Depending on what they’ve bought, you should determine whether customers who buy that item will want additional add-on items that you can cross-sell, or whether you have a bigger and better offer for them that they can switch to.
In the next post, we’ll look at how to best use these effectively and how to position yourself for the biggest Return On Investment (ROI)…
Five Reasons Your Online Business Needs Social Media
Five Reasons Your Online Business Needs Social Media
As many (if not all) marketer know, online marketing continues to evolve and grow and these days social media tends to take a front seat in most online marketing strategies as supporting the growth of business. The reasons to use social platforms to engage and reach customers are plentiful but here are 5 of the main ones that you need to consider.
1: Organic Reach
Why do social media managers spend countless hours planning, posting, testing, and perfecting their social media presence online? Simply because social media works if you do it right. Here are some facts and figures to prove that social media is worth adding to your business strategy.
- There are 3 billion active Internet users and 2.1 billion of them have social media accounts.
- YouTube has more than 1 billion users, more than a 1/3 of all web users. Each and every day web visitors view hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube that generate billions of views.
- Facebook has nearly 1.4 billion users, that’s 47% of all Internet users. 4.5 billion Likes are generated daily and nearly 75% of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile advertising. 936 million Facebook users login in at least once daily and 52% of marketers found a customer on Facebook in 2013.
- Twitter has 316 million monthly active users that 500 million tweets each day
- Google+ has 363 million users that hit the +1 button on 5 billion times per day
- Pinterest has 100 million users, 85% of which are women. 47% of Pinterest users purchase a product based on pins, with the average sale being $58.95. 67% of pinned content is from a business site and 82% of Pinterest users would rather follow a brand than a celebrity.
Are you impressed yet?
These stats are just one reason to use social media to market your business that really illustrate the reach that social media can have on your business, be it online and brick and mortar. Here are 4 more reasons to make social media a part of your marketing plan.
2: Building Relationships
Social media allows you to reach people at a more personal level. Many social media marketing experts explain that social media is about relationships building, that as a side effect brings about conversions for calls to action. When you connect with people and they connect with you, they are more likely to follow your brand and all it has to offer.
3: Showcasing Your Best Content
Social media allows you to show off your best content, and highlight all your brand has to offer. Whether you use text, images, video, or all of the above, you can tailor your campaign to present and impress your target audience with the very best content, products, and services that your brand has to offer. Tailoring your campaign through social media allows you to meet many objectives, including, building brand reputation, customer engagement, a better customer experience through valuable information and any other goals that meet your marketing needs.
4: Steady and Reliable Traffic
Who isn’t sick of fighting for organic traffic when Google keeps wiping sites off their SERPS with one after another of their ongoing updates? Social media can bring a steady, long term, reliable and ongoing stream of traffic to your sites and blogs, without having to worry that some entity will come along and wipe you out.
5: Control
One of the greatest benefits of social media is that you have full control of what is presented about your company, brand, and website to your target audience. You can tailor your marketing plan to meet specific goals and not leave anything to chance. The multitude of tracking, and testing tools available, such as, Klout, SumAll, BuzzSumo, and TweetReach, just to name a few allow you to enhance and tweak your campaigns as needed to constantly improve your efforts to boost conversions.
Bottom Line
There is no better time than now to take advantage of all social media has to offer. If you have an online business and do not have a social media presence then you are behind the times, it’s really as simple as that and you need to remedy this as soon as possible.
There are many expert guides online to get you started, and educating yourself on the intricate process that is social media marketing is critical to your overall success.
Of course, there is also the option of hiring a social media marketing expert. Take care to choose a competent professional, it will not be cheap, but may well be worth it when they bring the results your business needs to succeed.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing Guide (7 Tips To Make The Most From Amazon)
Amazon Affiliate Marketing Guide
(7 Tips To Make The Most From Amazon)
Do you want to earn money online with affiliate marketing the right way? It’s not just finding a good product and pasting the affiliate link everywhere. In this post book we’re going to talk about some powerful techniques you could use to make money online with Amazon Affiliate.
Look, I know how difficult affiliate marketing can be if not done right; I’ve been there! But this post will highlight 7 quick and easy tips to maximise your Amazon affiliate marketing efforts.
OK without further ado, lets’ talk about affiliate marketing through Amazon.
Create Value Content
One of the most important pillars for a website is to produce quality content that provides great value and interest to visitors and especially to help them solve a problem. If your content is good and helps people, this can help you keep users interested and get them back to your website.
This quality content will help your website to rank higher in search engines and will also help you convince people to buy.
Creating original content using your own style will help you to differentiate yourself from the competition.
You can also share that content through social networks to reach more people.
Careful Selection of Products
It is important to take enough time to choose the products you are going to promote. Investigate which products your visitors need or are interested in within your niche. You can test to discover which products that most visitors want, and which convert more. You can change products that don’t give you good results and try others.
Using Email Marketing
The best way to get good sales results is to build a relationship of trust with readers, and the most effective way to do this is through Email Marketing. With Email Marketing you can achieve incredible results, its success lies in the fact that when you use it you can get a person to buy your products more than once.
Landing Page
You can create a high converting landing Page to collect data from your visitors. This landing page should be super-focused, without a navigation bar, with a catchy title, an explanatory subtitle and a super clear call to action that clearly reflects your goal.
Reward
In the landing page you can offer a free reward (like a free Ebook or a free video) with valuable content in exchange for the visitor’s data (mainly name and email) through a subscription form to create a subscribers list.
Subscribers List
The data entered by visitors in exchange for the free reward through the landing page will be stored in a subscribers list handled from email marketing software. This list is really important because all the people there are potential buyers, so it is also important to make it grow.
Email Marketing Software
Using software such as AWeber, GetResponse and Mailchimp you can manage the list of subscribers and send them automated and periodic emails with valuable content and offers.
With these platforms you can divide the lists into smaller lists according to the interests of the subscribers and that way you can send them more targeted offers that can lead to a purchase.
Creating this kind of relationship, the readers will become familiar with you and feel confident to buy what you offer them through your affiliate link.
Purchase-Oriented Content
When people go shopping online, they do more specific searches because they are looking to buy something, not only information about the product, that’s why you should use purchase-oriented keywords. For example, if you sell costumes you can use the phrase “cheap costumes” instead of “costumes” and thus attract quality traffic i.e. people looking to buy and not just people who are looking for general information on costumes.
International Commissions
Amazon allows you to receive commissions only if the buying public is located in the country where you created the affiliate account, for this reason, if you only have an Amazon US account you are losing sales commissions from people in other countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada.
But today there is software that help us solve this problem, such as EasyAzon 4 and Genius Link. These platforms include automatic link location, which means that your affiliate link changes depending on the country where the visitor is located.
In this way, if you have a visitor from Spain make a purchase, you earn that commission.
To achieve this, you must create an account for the Amazon Affiliate program in each country, or at least the countries where the most traffic is provided.
The Amazon Affiliate Program exists in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, India, Japan, China, France and Italy.
But the software we mentioned above helps you to redirect traffic from other countries to one of the countries where the Amazon Affiliate Program exists.
Make sure you don’t lose any commission.
Best Seller Lists
It is a good idea to include Amazon Best Seller Lists in your website posts. These lists focus on the best-selling products within the category of products you are promoting, so people may be interested in more than one product to buy and in this way you can increase your profits.
Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that will help you track visits to your website and the behavior of your visitors.
It allows you to see where your visitors are coming from, what are the most visited pages, how long users remain on each page, what are the hours of the heaviest traffic, used devices, used traffic channels, user retention, age and gender of the users and much more detailed information that will help you analyze your website to know what is working and what is not, to help you make decisions on what should be changed to improve.
If you follow these tips the right way you will find that you can boost your sales. You just have to be constant and patient. Dedication is an important part of growing any project, and if you do it right you will get the best results.
Remember to create a plan that includes your goals and the steps to follow to reach them. After doing all the steps in your plan, analyze the results obtained to decide what to change for better results.
Starting An Online Business At Home (The Two Things You Must Have Before You Do Anything)
Starting An Online Business At Home (The Two Things You Must Have Before You Do Anything)
Did you know you can outsource pretty much everything you need to start an online business? If you don’t like doing it, don’t fret; just pay someone else to do it for you and this frees you up to work on your business and not in your business.
But there are a couple of things that can’t be outsourced and need to come from you and they are crucial to your success or failure. So, what are those 2 things you may be asking?
Well the first one are your ideas.
Your BIG Idea
Your big idea has got to be yours and it should underpin your entire business and should be incorporated throughout your sales processes.
So let’s say you come to me, wanting to start an online business. You’re a blank slate, in that you don’t have a clue where to start or what to do.
You may think that you are at a disadvantage but in fact this is not the case, because someone who is a blank slate actually holds a tremendous advantage over someone who already thinks they know it all, when in fact they don’t really have a clue. A little knowledge can be dangerous!
So you come to me and ask what you should do. And I stuff a pad of paper and a pen in your hand, and I tell you to go somewhere quiet and think because you’re going to brainstorm like you’ve never brainstormed before. You’re going to write down every idea you get. Good ones, bad ones, stupid ones – even the ones you KNOW for a FACT you cannot possibly pull off.
You’re going to write them all down.
“I want to teach a cooking course to people who currently can’t boil water.”
“I want to build an app that tells people where the vacant parking spots are in New York City.”
“I want to build a community gardening site for people who live in southern Florida.”
And so forth. Be vague or get specific. The key is to just brainstorm your heart out and get all these ideas out of your head. Speaking of which, watch for those items that feel especially near and dear to you, and put a little star by those. And then keep writing.
You’re going to start your business on YOUR idea – not on what’s necessarily gone before or what other people are doing. Lose all preconception of what will and what won’t work for now. That comes later.
By generating your own business model without worrying about what anyone else is doing, you’re freeing yourself up from comparisons, crappy advice and self-doubts. Let your imagination run wild and remember that your business model can be anything you can imagine.
Naturally once you’ve narrowed your choices down to a handful, you’re going to do some research to make sure there is indeed a market for what you’re proposing. But I’m going to discourage you from spending a lot of time looking at any potential competitors. Ignore what they’re marketing, how they’re marketing it, how they’re advertising and so forth.
And this leads us into the second thing that you must have and that is overcoming fear. Only you can do that.
Fearlessness
Because what tends to happen when people over analyse is that they learn to fear their own idea.
“This is already being done, so I’m too late!”
“This company is already doing a good job of covering this market, there’s no room for me.”
“Their idea is different from mine, so theirs must be the right one and mine must be wrong.”
And so forth. So, by not over analysing things you’re eliminating one type of fear that plagues all new marketers. But you’re not done yet as there is a second fear you’ll need to overcome – the one that creeps up on you when your friends say, “What, YOU’RE going to start a business? HAHAHA!”
Or maybe your friends are supportive, but you lack confidence. “What if people hate my product?”
Yup. There’s a real heart stopper. And you cannot outsource overcoming those fears. So how do you deal with them?
For me, I just acknowledge them rather than fight them. Yes, I’m afraid. No, I’m not going to let it stop me. So Mr. Fear, you go sit in that chair over there while I work. And if you get bored, feel free to fly out the window.
Believe it or not, this attitude works. When you stop letting fear take a hold of you, when you stop feeling like you’re trapped in its icy grip, when you just acknowledge it and do the work anyway, then fear tends to get real quiet. It takes a seat and watches for an opening. And if you don’t give it one, eventually it just leaves the way it came.
Ignore what’s going on around you. Put blinders on, manage your fear and above all else, stick to your idea.
And remember these acronyms for F.E.A.R.
False Evidence Appearing Real and Face Everything And Rise
And in the immortal words of Susan Jeffers Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway. This is a great book by the way and you really should check it out here for US readers or here for UK readers.
If you are ready to get started on your online business you may feel a little confused with all the technical jargon around setting up domains, hosting etc. Well, I have a report which can help with that so don’t let this stop you.
