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Is Your Website User-Friendly For List Building?
Is Your Website User-Friendly For List Building?
When growing your list, remember that gaining more traffic is not the only goal. Attracting highly targeted traffic, full of people who want and need what you’re offering, is the goal. Therefore, you need to develop a list-growing strategy that uses tactics that focus on your goal: Building and Growing a Responsive List, because when you have that responsive list, using email for marketing becomes much easier.
The following tactics will ensure that when someone joins your list they really do want the information you’re providing and will likely turning into a paying customer if you’ve matched your freebie opt-in offers to the right audience and with the idea of promoting specific products and or services to them.
So, let’s build that traffic and ensure that you have a great list that will respond to every email marketing campaign you send them.
First and foremost, everything begins and ends with your website. If your website doesn’t look great, work fast, and doesn’t work on all devices you are likely missing out on numerous opportunities to connect with potential customers.
- Develop a Responsive Website – Using a responsive template is simple today but if you add images, always double check to make sure they resize and are positioned correctly on the screen. You can check by using Browserling.com, as well as your own mobile device, and other tools.
- Brand Your Website – You don’t want your audience to be confused when they visit your website. Keep your branding the same throughout your online real estate, from social media to your website, and everything in between. You can do this by using logos, fonts, colors, etc., to develop your branding so everything matches.
- Make it Easy to Contact You – You don’t want someone to have to dig around your website to find a way to contact you. Make it very easy by placing the contact info at the top and bottom of your site, as well as in the sidebar (if you have one). Visitors should be able to contact you easily, when needed.
- Create Simple Navigation – The rule of thumb with navigation is that less is more. Plan your navigation in advance to help create the right setup. Use labels on the navigation links that adequately identify what they’ll find there. Make sure your primary navigation stands out. This menu is usually at the top of every page of your website. Always link the logo to the home page so no one gets lost.
- Ensure it Loads Fast – A slow loading site is a traffic killer. In most cases, if your site takes longer than .8 seconds to load people will leave. Consider using a content delivery network (CDN). Use the right image formats and sizes, browser caching, fewer plugins, enable compression, the right web host, and more.
When you create the website, it’s important to consider your audience because that’s who is going to use it most. Are they tech challenged? What colors do they like? What do they expect when they come to your site?
Making their wants and needs top priority helps to ensure you build a user-friendly website that people want to visit.
Know Your Audience & Your Competition
Before you start building or changing your site, get to know your target audience and your competition. You can only make informed decisions if you are well informed. It’s hard to create products, services, or content for your target market, if you don’t know what they want and need.
The same is true about your competition. It’s hard to compete if you don’t know who your competition is, as well as what they’re doing right and wrong.
- Conduct Research – There are many ways to do research. You can look at the analytics you already have, but you can also do research using government databases such as the United States Census Bureau to compile information about your audience. Not only should you study your audience, study your competitors too.
- Develop Customer Personas – This involves creating a profile of your ideal customer. Find an image of how your imagined customer looks. In the profile, include personality traits, education, family life, career, income, and other details needed to develop content, products, and services.
- Monitor Social Comments – Whether a comment is on a blog or on social media networks, finding comments from your audience can help you learn more about them. Engagement on social media within groups is usually more trustworthy because they tend to ask honest, straight forward, questions.
- Conduct a Survey – When you know your competition well, you can develop a survey, which targets that audience. This helps you discover what they want and need. You can use Facebook Ads to market the survey, which lives on your website. Learning about your competitor’s audience can help you, if you have the same or a similar target market.
- Engage Often – The more you engage with your audience the better. Keep your email open to replies, invite questions, and answer questions, as they come. The more open you are the more open they will be. This is especially true if they feel you truly listen and appreciate their input.
Your audience can teach you a lot about your business. You may think you know something, but even if you are part of your audience’s demographics, what you experience is subjective.
That’s why you need to look at the data, pay attention to what your competition is doing, and keep your ear to the ground, regarding your entire industry to stay on top of what’s coming next.
Participate On Social Media
Social media can be very beneficial, as you build your opt-in traffic and mailing list. Since you need to be “social” and build relationships anyway, you may as well get the most out of your efforts. Let’s look at how you can use social media to drive traffic and grow your mailing list.
- Build a Facebook Group – Social media is the perfect place to build a community. Create a niche group, where you can promote your freebies, content, and products. Link your business page and your related group. In your profiles, include a link to your website and/or your main opt-in page. In your group, get the group’s thoughts on your “new” website content and discuss the nuances. You’ll also want to do live events. Weekly live events can really boost traffic to your business page, the group, your website, and your mailing list.
- Monitor Comments – Don’t allow comments to go unnoticed. Sometimes you only need to acknowledge that you read it. Other times, you should respond in more depth. Try to keep everything positive and be yourself. Being authentic on social media is important to building trust. Answering questions and linking to your “helpful resource” allows you to establish your expertise and build trust.
- Share Your Freebies – Share your freebies directly or indirectly in your group. Indirect sharing might be done via sharing blog posts, where the opt-in is. Members only items may be added directly to the group area. Every page of your website should offer a way to share the content blurb and link.
- Engage Your Audience – Post questions and information that makes your audience think. On Facebook or YouTube, use Live Q & A events to engage with your audience. Post polls, quizzes, and other interactive information help to encourage engagement.
- Use Amazing Visuals – Social media posts with visuals get more response than social media posts without images. Use the right type of visual to get your audience’s attention and make the post more interesting to your target market.
- Make Content Shareable – Everything you post needs to be easy to share. Don’t restrict sharing. In fact, ask people to share your content and thank them when they do. Sometimes a little reminder is all that’s needed to get people involved.
The more active you are on social media the more you’ll see the traffic to your website, but the action needs to be purposeful. That means you need to plan the content you put on social media just as you plan the content that goes into your blog, email messages, and newsletters.
I hope these list building and email marketing tips have been useful. If you want to know more about email marketing, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about simple list building to expand your knowledge further. If you do download it, please read it and take action and good luck 😊
Never Stop Learning Marketing
Never Stop Learning – Expanding Your Marketing Knowledge Is Crucial
Growing up, you may have heard the phrase “never stop learning,” which is such a powerful statement. The phrase goes for everyone in the world. Without knowledge, it may be hard to go through life and you certainly won’t achieve all that you would like!
Everyone everywhere has to learn something so they can survive. It is important to survive in the business world as well, so here are some tips and advice to expand your marketing knowledge.
First of all, if you are an Internet marketer, you have the power to learn new things by doing a simple search. There are sources out there which are not the most reliable, but still, you can learn something from it.
If you read a blog or an article online, think about it objectively. See if there is anything on that blog or in the article that you may never have used in with your own marketing. How can you start to implement it in your own business?
If the blog or article mentions something unfamiliar to you, keep that new idea in mind and do further research on it. New information should always prompt you to do more research about something, thus expanding your knowledge.
If the information is good, you will find out more about it and if it is bad, then the article you are reading may not be worth it.
Marketing tips are all over the place. Sometimes you have to think outside of the box. For instance, you will walk around and notice that advertising is all around you.
From the time you wake up, get your morning coffee and eat your breakfast, to the time you go to sleep for the night, there are hundreds upon hundreds of types of advertising you saw in one day.
You know that billboards are common, radio commercials, and even newspaper ads, but you may not think of the shirts people wear, or signs on the street as ways to advertise too.
Did you ever go to the city and see a sign for something like a museum or theatre and wonder what it will be like to go there? Well, thinking about that, is that not a way to market your brand?
Of course if you go to a big city and you are only an Internet marker, you may not be able to get a big sign placed on the street that says something like “this way to such and such brand,” but you get the idea.
So if you are an Internet marketer, there are tons of other things you can do to market your brand online instead.
Word of mouth is a common and cost-effective way. This is where you need to be creative. You may think that just asking your customers to tell people they know about you is enough.
There is more than meets the eye here though. Just telling people alone may not work. What you can do is make the time you spend with your client fun and engaging.
Most of the time if they are laughing or really enjoy themselves when they are doing business with you, they will tell their friends. They do this because people love to share things that are funny or memorable. If it is not done in a way that people will enjoy, they may forget about it themselves.
Simply making a video for YouTube talking about your brand is not the most effective way to go about it. Actually the most creative ways I have seen effective advertising is when you don’t even realize they are advertisements.
You can put a funny video of your or someone using a product that you sell. Talk a little about the product then use it in the video. What you don’t realize is people will see it and may go out and purchase the product. Don’t forget to let them know that you have a link to the product so if they buy through your link, you’ll make some money!
They want to use the product the same way that made them laugh in the video. One other way you can be creative with this is by going to an event of some sort and demonstrate your product. The more ways people can see how to use the product, the better chance you have at making some great sales.
There are many people in this world that are full of ideas and you will never know if they will work or not if you don’t try it yourself or expand your knowledge about it. Talk amongst your friends or engage with your audience online and see if they have any ideas.
With your friends, you can pretty much ask them directly if they have any ideas for you. With clients you won’t be able to be so direct.
After you have some idea of what you want to do for a funny or entertaining ad, talk a little about it online to your customers. Have people vote on two different ideas by asking “would you want to see this product used this way, or that way.”
Of course replace the “this” and “that” with the actual thing you will be doing. That way, you asked for their idea without really asking at all.
When you have an answer from your clients, the next thing to do is to make the video. Of course if you are camera shy, get someone who isn’t to do it.
Instead of a video, however, you may be able to write a song. Don’t sing the song yourself if you aren’t the best at singing unless you can be funny about it.
So I hope this article helped to expand your marketing knowledge just a little bit 😊. It is crucial to do this as you need to survive out there in the business world.
People will remember funny or entertaining methods of advertising instead of simply telling them about it. Do your research too and don’t just take the advice as you read it; make sure it is legit and that more than one person says it works.
And if you want to learn more about how businesses use branding then check out this great course called B.R.A.N.D. here. Or check the featured resource below for a free Brilliant Branding report.
Have You Heard Of The SMART System Of Goal Setting?
Have You Heard Of The SMART System Of Goal Setting?
People struggle with setting goals. It seems like a daunting task. This is largely because they lack the proper knowledge to do so. After all, not everyone goes to management school. Even those that do are not always as prepared as they should be.
This may be the reason why management consultant, Peter Drucker, came up with a system as part of his Management By Objectives (MBO). This system is essentially the SMART Goal setting system. If you are not familiar with SMART, it is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-related. Each component deals with a part of goal setting.
Some have interpreted the letters in different ways. That’s okay as long as there is agreement. If you are using the acronym for your own purposes, use what makes the most sense to you and what works best.
To have a specific goal, imagine creating a video with you telling the viewers what your goal is about. They should be able to comprehend your goal without any questions. The more specific you can get, the better the overall goal setting process will be. For example, suppose you specify that you want more money as a goal. Would this draw questions if you presented this goal as it is? If the answer is yes, then you need further refinement.
When you figure out your goals, the next step is to understand how to measure them. General goals will be difficult to measure, whereas specific goals will be easier. This is the part that can help you be accountable for meeting your goals.
For a goal to be assignable, you need to be able to describe it in a way that you can pass it off to someone else. They should be able to run with it, and not get too stuck on the details.
Your goals should be realistic. People often get overzealous when setting their goals. They believe they should push themselves. Non-realistic goals will frustrate you and make you fail when trying to accomplish them. Of course, you don’t want to set goals that are too easy that you don’t see any growth.
You need to set time frames for your goals. Otherwise, you will come up with excuses to push them off, and you will never get them completed. The best way to do this is to break up your goals into tasks, and then come up with milestones for each of those tasks.
How To Overcome The Flaws With SMART Goals
SMART is an acronym. Those five letters mean different things to different people or groups. While many of the replacements are similar, if everyone who relies on them is not on board, this can cause problems with a project or plan.
For instance, some reference the “A” in the acronym, as achievable. That’s a great aspect of any project to have. If it is not achievable, there is no way a goal or task will get accomplished. However, there are others who consider the “A” as standing for agreement. That is not similar to achievable. And it’s one thing to have achievable goals, but if not everyone on the team is in agreement, that will cause problems down the line.
Another example is the “M” which many believe stands for measurable. That is a worthy aspect of any goal. If you can’t measure your goals, you won’t know when you are successful with them. The “M” can also mean motivational. If you use motivational instead of measurable, somehow you won’t be as inclined to measure how you are doing. It may happen, but there is nothing to guarantee that. This is why people use guidelines such as SMART in the first place.
Some will use rewarding as the “R” component. When you accomplish your goals, that will be the reward. So, it’s difficult to imagine what people come up with when they use this as part of the acronym.
You can come up with many replacements for all the letters. When you search online, you will see several variations on what it means. This makes it tougher to use it as a concrete guideline. This confusion can cause the acronym to suffer in its effectiveness.
The key when using a system such as this is to come up with the meaning for each that makes sense. This will depend on who is involved in the process. If you are the only one affected by the outcome, then you have some flexibilities in what the definition should be. If you are using it as part of a team, however, you will need to define it in a more concrete manner. If you allow for any ambiguity, this can delay or even derail your project.
Even within a team, you have some flexibility. However, all changes should be communicated to the team. It is going to affect them which means they have the right to know.
Are You Specific Enough With Your Goals?
You may recall the goal acronym Called SMART. The “S” stands for specific. The others are measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based. If you don’t get the specific component right from the start, it will set you off in the wrong direction. This is the beacon of your goal navigation if you will. If your beacon is going south when you meant to go north, you can guess things will not turn out as planned.
For a goal to be specific, there should be no ambiguity. For instance, if someone states they want to run a business as their goal, would this be enough for them to hit the ground running? It’s highly doubtful.
What kind of business do they want to run? If you are good at advertising and you buy an accounting business, you probably are going to struggle getting this concept to fly. Of course, you could hire talented people who know the accounting side of the business.
On the other hand, if you decided you were going to start a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising agency that helps clients increase their return on investments with Adwords, this is much closer to having a solid goal that is specific. You may be able to refine it even further. Perhaps, the businesses that you target are only B2B, etc. This is much more specific than the higher level PPC advertising to anyone you can find.
Is there room to get more specific with your goals? There usually is, but you don’t want to get so specific that you are only targeting a few clients based on your criteria. This is dangerous as those clients can pull the plug at a moment’s notice. However, you may decide that you want to target businesses who have large advertising budgets, etc. You will have more businesses to work from when you do this.
You are certainly welcome to expand your goals for your business as you see fit. After you become established, you may find smaller businesses and individuals approaching you about running their PPC campaigns. This is great, and as long as you have the resources to handle this new business, you should welcome it.
If you want to know how specific you should be, you should be able to explain your goal to a friend in a way where they don’t need much explanation of your concept. If you find they have a ton of questions or need clarification, this is an indication that further refinement of your goals is needed.
Of course, you will certainly be aware that setting and achieving goals requires a lot of self-discipline, so if you want to learn about growing your own self-discipline then download the featured resource below which is a free report all about the power of self-discipline; download it, read it and take action 😊
Simple Email Marketing Tips
Simple Email Marketing Tips
Email marketing is an effective form of online marketing, but there are ways to get the most out of it. Creating an email message to use in an email marketing campaign is not very hard, but convincing people to open email marketing messages is, because online scammers also use email to spread their junk mail around the internet.
By using these tips for good email marketing, you can let people know that you are a legitimate company at just a glance, and they will therefore feel safer about opening your messages.
Giving your autoresponder service provider a heads up on your intention to use their platform for any type of affiliate marketing campaign is the first of the marketing secrets that you should think of and remember to do before sending out that first message.
Many autoresponder services frown upon affiliate marketing as it can come across as spammy but if the main purpose of the message is to educate or entertain and then offer them something related to help them it should be fine. If in doubt, ask them before you start sending anything.
Be respectful enough of those who will be receiving your email messages to use their names to greet them in your message. This secret to email marketing does add some work to creating a marketing campaign, but it will get you further than an impersonal and unprofessional, “hey you.”
Send your email messages in HTML and PLAIN formats so that those receiving them can choose to view your marketing message in the format they prefer. Yet another of the secrets to email marketing that is very effective in getting more people to at least open and look at your message.
Never use dollar signs anywhere in your messages. Not the subject line, and not in the message body. People have come to associate the presence of dollar signs in the subject or message body with SCAM emails and will delete them instead of opening and reading them. Many ISPs also have filters that will block emails containing dollar signs in the subject line of the message.
Even if your email marketing message containing dollars signs were to make it past an ISP filter and someone were to open it up, this is insulting and not necessary to provoke interest in your website. People understand what money is without pictures or symbols of it.
As another strategy, it is best to avoid sending your marketing messages during the holidays. This secret is in sharp contrast to the suggested techniques of other styles of internet marketing, but during the holidays people are more apt to be online for shorter amounts of time and many stay away from their inboxes because they feel an obligation towards messages from family and friends, and we all know that at this time of year people just don’t have the extra time to invest financially or even just investing their time, in other people’s ventures.
Use double opt in for cold traffic. Many people will give a fake email address jut to get a freebie, but if you force them to confirm their email address before they get the freebie, you can avoid this and remove any email addresses that don’t confirm their address.
This also helps those who may have simply typed in their email address incorrectly; they can try again and confirm their details to get their gift.
Another secret to is to provide a concise path for those receiving and interested in your offer to follow in order to complete desired purchases or receipt of offered materials.
Your email marketing message should have a link to where these purchases, downloads, subscriptions, or whatever it is that you are offering can be completed or a way for these to be completed directly from your email.
Most of these secrets to email marketing are simple yes, but they are very effective when used in email marketing.
How To Market Effectively Without Becoming Spam
The best way to effectively carry out marketing without becoming a spammer is through Email-marketing. Email marketing is a very popular practice and technique that can be used to advertise your business to prospective customers.
Apart from using email for marketing, you can also use it to engage customers by making your emails as personal as you can. If you use this strategy correctly, you will develop a good relationship with your customers and get their interests.
In this section we have outlined the various ways on how to market effectively without ending up in spam.
Send Emails to people who know you and your products.
Sending emails to people who know you and your products is the first effective way on how to market effectively without becoming spam.
Anyone who is aware of the reason he or she decided to join your email list will not receive your email as spam.
Therefore it is vital to only mail people who are familiar with your products because those who are not familiar with your product will receive it as spam and delete it and this will be a waste of your time and resources.
Avoid overwhelming your customers with Marketing Emails.
Sending out hordes of marketing emails to your customers can be boring, therefore focus more on one topic per email.
The topics should be followed by a short copy which can entice your customers to click on it and read through and this way your customers will be happy because they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by too much information.
And don’t be all marketing; don’t be afraid to reveal stuff about you as this will help to create a bond between you and your readers.
Do not bug your customers with ‘Buy now!’ Emails.
Your email subscribers are already aware that you want to make sales therefore do not annoy them with abhorrent ‘Buy Now’ messages but instead try building a steady relationship with them and present yourself in a professional manner.
This has proved to be one of the best ways one can use to market effectively without becoming a spammer.
Always focus on what your reader wants, and if you have something that can help them, then feel free to mention it as a soft offer, rather than ramming it down their throats so you can make a quick buck.
Do not use too many images in your emails.
Most people who use emails usually block the graphics thus sending them emails with many images will only hinder them from getting the information you are trying to pass to them.
Apart from missing out on the major information, too many images activate junk mail filter which becomes present in email programs, preventing your messages from ever been seen.
They can also slow down email loading, just as they do with a website, and we all know that attention spans are at an all-time low!
Give your customers the choice of accepting a certain number of mails per day.
This is another effective way one can use to market effectively without becoming spam because giving your customers more choices will improve your marketing and make it more rewarding.
Allow your subscribers to choose the number of emails they will be receiving together with the intervals at which the emails are sent.
For anyone who is looking for suitable ways on how to market effectively without becoming known as a spammer, the above-mentioned methods will be ideal for their marketing strategy.
However, when using this email marketing strategy, do not forget to include an Unsubscribe link in your emails because your goal is for customers to choose whether they want to keep receiving your mails or not.
And, if you want to know more about email marketing, check out the featured resource below where you can get a free report about simple list building to expand your knowledge further. If you do download it, please read it and take action and good luck 😊
Affiliate Marketing Research, Kindle And Automation
Affiliate Marketing Research, Kindle And Automation
Sometimes when you’re launching a new business, especially online when you’re doing it all alone, it can feel overwhelming not knowing how to find the best path to profits. You have to know how to research niches and products and people and keywords to decide where you want to grab your affiliate links. It’s enough to make anyone throw up their hands in frustration.
There are some easy tips that can help you conduct your research online. Researching niches is a piece of cake. What you’re looking for is competition. Some people will look at competition and feel like there’s no way they could go up against the other sites.
But competition actually means it’s a healthy niche – with room for everyone. If you find a niche that no one’s selling in, then it probably means there’s no interest in – and that should set off warning bells for you.
Look on bookshelves in your local Barnes and Noble and see what non-fiction topics have plenty of resources. Glance at the covers of the women’s magazines at the checkout stand the next time you buy groceries.
You’ll see everything from insomnia to nutrition and more. They’re good about showcasing trendy topics, too – niches that are just now growing big enough for major publications to pick up on them.
News sites give lots of good insight into trends within a niche, too. Most major news sites like FoxNews and CNN have categories for science, technology, health and more. Look at those to stay abreast of what’s happening in your niche.
Also, set up a Google Alert so that you get news and information delivered straight to your inbox whenever something happens – or in a digest version if you want to check it sparingly.
Product research is sometimes a bit more in depth. You first want to go to sites like Ubersuggest and see what kinds of things your audience wants to know about the product. Type in the product name or niche topic and get hundreds of results that help steer you in the right direction.
Then, go to the manufacturer’s website and see what the specs are on the product. You can even download instruction manuals to read more details about it and share that with your visitors.
If it’s something you can find locally, don’t be afraid to go into your store and look at the product and jot down some notes. You can even take some pictures or a video to put on your blog.
Researching people is easy if you trace their social media accounts. Look at their blog and the interaction they have with people (if you’re promoting an info product). Look at their Twitter account, their Google Plus and Facebook, too.
Keyword research is a cinch with free and paid tools that are available to you. Ubersuggest again is a great tool, but you can also invest in paid tools like Market Samurai that show you the competition and profit potential of a niche.
How To Use Kindle For Affiliate Marketing Purposes
Kindle is a fantastic resource for affiliate marketers – and the strategy you’re about to learn is one that few affiliates have applied, so the field is wide open. It’s going to require a small amount of product creation on your part, but there are double benefits involved.
Kindle is a platform on Amazon that’s 100% free for you to use where you can self-publish your eBooks and reports to a large global audience. But as an affiliate, your goal is to promote other people’s things.
Affiliates are like all other marketers – they have to produce a variety of content – for their blogs, websites, email autoresponders, opt in giveaways, and more. So creating a short report shouldn’t be too difficult.
Your goal is to create these short reports, load them onto Kindle for sale at a low price point of $0.99, and let the book sell to the masses – with your link in it! The link will go back to your affiliate site, or even to your squeeze page where you promise them another book (only free this time) if they sign up to your list.
So let’s say you had a site that promoted household organization products. You could write an entire series of Kindle creations about how to organize various rooms in your house (and outdoors, too).
Start with a broad “How to Get Organized” book and then branch off into more specific areas. Kindle has a Select program that you can enroll in, too – and this lets you give the book away for five days out of the 90-day period.
During this time, you’ll want to sign up to promote it at all of the major Kindle promotion sites that like to feature free books for the day. This greatly expands your exposure because you’ll get free downloads from all of the people who signed up for notification.
Plus, Amazon Prime members can borrow your book from the lending library if you enable that feature. But you still get paid for the borrow – sometimes even more than what you’d make for selling it at your cheap price point.
If you choose not to use KDP Select, which restricts your eBook from being sold elsewhere, then you’ll have the opportunity to sell it on your website, too. But you might want to try it out first for at least 90 days to see how it works for you.
Make sure you avoid linking to products inside your Kindle eBook. That’s against the rules. You want to link them to your site so that you can capture their name and email address and then promote items in your niche for a long period of time.
Is Affiliate Marketing Automation A Good Idea?
There are many automation tools on the ‘net that supposedly help you free up some time and effort in running your business as an affiliate marketer. There are definite pros and cons that you need to be aware of before you begin using them.
Automation helps you avoid tasks that you dread. This can be beneficial because there are so many little tasks that we don’t look forward to, so putting a few on autopilot helps us continue enjoying the affiliate marketing journey.
Automation helps you do things better than you do manually. Sometimes there are tasks that we’re just not good at. An automated tool might be able to do things faster, easier or more thoroughly than we do them ourselves.
Automation tools mean you get to work on something else. Freeing up time is one of the biggest reasons affiliates utilize automated tools in the first place. It’s certainly a benefit to have less work on your to do list.
But automation isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, either. There are problems that can arise, so it’s important that you recognize where they can hurt your business.
Automation can prevent you from seeing errors that arise. Tools like software and plugins can have bugs in the system. If you have a completely “hand off” system for running your business, then you could go months without noticing that things aren’t working right.
It’s usually only when sales begin grinding to a halt that an affiliate heavily invested in automated tools goes to check things out – and discovers that there’s an issue with the tool, or perhaps a necessary upgrade they didn’t see that keeps it running properly.
Automation removes that human element that makes a connection with your target audience. Most automation tools simply remove a small task from your to do list. But there are those that remove you from your site entirely.
For example, any automated tool that whips up content or automates comment approval means that your site won’t carry your natural voice in it. It will be difficult for visitors to engage with you or trust you enough to click through on your links and act on them.
Automation tools can sometimes get you in trouble with the search engines, too. If they’re black hat tools that do anything illegal, or unethical, then you could find your site plummeting in the search engine ranks. It’s better to approach affiliate marketing from a morally sound perspective so that your profits increase over time and there are many affiliate marketing strategies that are above board.
If you want to know more affiliate marketing, then check out the featured resource below for a free Affiliate Marketing Machine report which complements this post perfectly; download, read it and take action 😊
