Posts Tagged ‘affiliate’

Affiliate  marketing programs (some call them referral programs) is a norm these days. Most of the major web sites offer such affiliate programs, on which site and blog owners can register in order to start making money. You can easily have a look at the 2010 Affiliate Marketing Statistics Report to have a look at the real number of Affiliate usages.

According to these  programs  a site or blog owner will add to his site a link/banner that forwards his visitors to the Brands/Sellers web site. For every successful sale the sellers does, it usually provides a percentage to the affiliate site .

Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

Wikipedia.com

But making money of these affiliate programs is not as easy at it seems. In this rather “small” articles we discuss the 10 commonest mistakes that site and blog owners do.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #1

NOT Dedicating Yourself to One Before Starting Another

In affiliate marketing you can often be drawn in by the promise of operating as an affiliate for several different sites while making money from each one of them. This is a difficult thing for anyone to do successfully when they are first beginning. Not only is it hard to learn the basics of affiliate marketing but you also need to have time to grow your business. So if you don’t dedicate yourself to one program before starting another, you will not be able to fully experience the potential that affiliate marketing can offer you.

Learning is Essential

Once you have decided on an affiliate program that you would like to work with, it is essential that you take the time to learn about that specific program as well as affiliate marketing in general. Dedicate yourself to understanding the in’s and out’s of your program.

Learn how others have been successful with this affiliate program in the past and find out their tips for your success. Most affiliate program owners will offer a forum or other way for people to exchange marketing ideas and information to help make that affiliate program the best it can be. Don’t be shy. Jump in and start reading all the posts in the forum or blog regarding the affiliate program you are interested in. Post your questions and don’t feel like you can’t ask something. Most likely many other people have the same question as you and will appreciate you asking it. Learning more about the company and product you will be promoting is essential. In the real world you would not take a job to sell a product if you did not fully understand it, so you should not do so in the marketing world either. Do your research and your knowledge of the product will help you become a successful affiliate marketer.

Many people are in such a hurry to make money with affiliate marketing that they don’t take the necessary time to really understand their first program before becoming an affiliate with another program. But if you feel you have fully researched your program and have the time to dedicate to a second line of promotions then go for it.

Managing two affiliate programs is not impossible. But you have to do the same amount of research for each program. You also want to make sure you are dedicating yourself fully to each affiliate. If you cannot offer your full attention to two programs, you may actually find that fully dedicating yourself to one program will offer you more financial return in the end.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #2

NOT Concentrating on the Pre-Sell

Affiliates that try to sell the product to the client and tote all the product’s positive and negative qualities does not truly understand the concept of an affiliate marketer. When you spend your time trying to describe every last detail of the product or answering all the questions of the client, then you are wasting your time. As an affiliate for a marketing program your job is to pre-sell the client. You should not be offering ambiguous information that is confusing to the prospective client nor should you be offering all the little details that you think are necessary. Your job is simply to get the client interested in the product. You want them intrigued by what this product or service might be able to offer them. You want them to want to know more so they will go to your clients site and read more about it. Your client will have all the details of the product covered so it is not your job to repeat those details. Instead concentrate on pre-selling the product to your clients.

Making them want to buy it so when they get to the final purchase site they are ready to continue.

Too Little

Not offering enough information will prevent clients from continuing on to the sales page. If you cannot provide enough basic information about the product, then why would a prospective client want to click on another link that you give them?

Too little information makes you look like an amateur who does not really know about the product they are selling. You are not an amateur since you have done research about your product and understand fully what you are offering, so show your prospective clients that they can trust your research and buy the products you recommend.

Too Much

This is not often a problem with affiliates. But too much information can be just as deadly to a prospective client as too little information. You are pre-selling your prospects on a product by introducing it to them and offering up the positive aspects of that product.

Your job is not to identify all the products flaws or offer technical advice to downloading, installing, or generally using a product or service. Leave that job to the owner whose products or services you are promoting. They are much better versed in their product or service and will be better equipped to offer that information to the client.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #3

NOT Using the Product

How many times have you talked to an electronics sales person and asked questions about a product and felt like they really had no idea what they were talking about? When you are purchasing something from a salesperson you have more confidence in the person if they have tried the product or are currently using the product.

The same goes for affiliate marketing. You cannot possible be successful in selling a product if you have not at least tried the product. Maybe it is something that you know other people will like but you just don’t need it? Or perhaps your affiliate program is geared towards computer gamers and you don’t play computer games.

It doesn’t matter what the product is. You should spend the time and money to try the product and use it the best you can. Find out what you truly think of the product and ask questions of others who use it already. The more questions you get answered the easier it will be for you to write your promotional material.

Knowledge is easiest to acquire if you are doing it from a hands on approach. Your potential clients will be able to see you are a genuine person who knows what they are talking about and is selling them from a point of knowledge and not a point of greed.

Anyone can just sign up to be an affiliate marketer and throw up a standard webpage and hope to get sales. But that is not how you will make money. Instead, you will become more and more frustrated and wonder why you are not bringing in the big sales like you thought you would.

Trying the product or service is an easy step that is often overlooked when people are getting started in affiliate marketing. Instead of making this mistake, take the time to become a customer of the product.

To increase your sales even more you should find a product that you truly find useful and can rave to others about. Affiliate marketing is not just about randomly selling other people’s products. Instead, it is about you finding a product that you can put your time and energy behind to help market and sell. And this is much easier to do if you have a product that you understand and feel a passion to sell.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #4

NOT Understanding Pay Per Click

Understanding the advertising model known as Pay Per Click is essential to becoming a successful affiliate marketer. With pay per click, advertisers use search engines and other web pages to place their ads. But the advertiser only pays when a user actually finds their ad compelling and clicks on the ad to visit the advertiser’s webpage.

By bidding on the keywords they would like to use for their market, each advertiser can customize their pay per click advertising to a specific market of potential clients. As users then type keywords in the search engine, they will be given a list of relevant content and the advertiser’s ad will show up in the sponsored link section.

Search Engines

No matter which search engine you use it is nearly impossible to conduct a search without seeing some sort of results in the sponsored link section. Take a moment and search for anything you would like and you will see the idea behind pay per click advertising. Each one of those advertisers decided that they wanted ads for the keyword or keyword combination that you searched for.

The two top companies that provide pay per click advertising are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Minimum prices start as low as $0.01 and go up to several dollars per click depending on the keyword chosen and its popularity.

Web Pages

Google and Yahoo offer another service besides just pay per click advertising in the sponsored link section of a search inquiry, they also offer a content based pay per click service.

In the content-based ad program, an advertisers’ ad show on websites and blogs that have similar content to what the keyword indicates. The idea behind this pay per click advertising concept is that potential clients that are already interested in a similar content page will be more likely to click a related advertising link.

Understanding the differences between the two major types of pay per click advertising will help you optimize your marketing techniques as an affiliate marketer. It is essential to your success that you comprehend the importance of pay per click advertising. Pay Per Click is a much more in-depth topic than can be covered here, so you should check a few different resources to better arm yourself to take advantage of this part of affiliate marketing.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #5

NOT Having Clutter-Free Web Pages

Filling one website with a variety of affiliate program ads may seem like a great way to save money when you first look at it. But it could actually cost you thousands of dollars in sales. Potential customers automatically get turned off when they see a webpage cluttered full of different sales products. It is too confusing for them and they move on to another website fairly quickly. If you are working with more than one affiliate program it is important to dedicate one page at least to your program. Even better would be to dedicate a domain name and site to each affiliate program.

Dedicated Web Page

By dedicating a whole page to one affiliate product you are showing your commitment to that program. Your page should be uncluttered and not full of Google Adsense ads, or ads for other programs or services. A small area on either the top or side of the page could be used for these type of ads, but don’t clutter your page with them. I would recommend not using them at all on these pages. You don’t want to give your visitor too many options on your page.

A good affiliate marketing sales page will be informative and positive. It will offer potential customers the chance to become intrigued about a program or product enough that they decide to click on the link and go to the main affiliate sales page of your program.

Dedicated Domain

Having a whole website dedicated to a specific product will provide instant credibility for you. Domain names are not very expensive and relatively inexpensive programs are available for maintaining the page. You do not need to be a computer whiz to get a basic website developed to act as your informative site for an affiliate program you are working with.

By dedicating a whole site to one product you have the expanded option of offering informative articles and other information on your site that will continue to entice your potential consumers to click on the main affiliate website you are working with. A dedicated domain name is by far the best way to inform your potential customers of the benefits that your product or service can offer them.

No matter if you decide to go with a dedicated web page or a dedicated domain, the main idea is simplicity. Don’t clutter your pages with too much information, instead offer your potential clients a clean, easy to read, informative website. An aesthetically pleasing website will win customers over a cluttered, hard to understand site every time!

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #6

NOT Writing Your Own Copy

Does your affiliate program offer you pre-made web pages or email ads that you can simply copy and paste to make your own promotional campaign? Many programs offer this convenience to their affiliates as a way to make it easy to get started with their program. Unfortunately, these ready to post web pages will be of little help to you when you are trying to get your website seen and clicked on, or your emails opened by potential customers. Instead you should take the time to write your own copy or hire a professional writer to do it for you.

Original Copy

It is essential to have new and original copy for your website to even be seen by the search engines. If the search engines detect that your website is filled with information that is a duplicate of current information on the web then they will penalize you by pushing your website further and further down the search results.

Although it may seem like a good idea to copy and paste some existing information and make your own webpage, it will only frustrate your goal of making money through affiliate marketing. Take the time to put the existing copy into your own words or add your own twist to it. And if you absolutely cannot write the copy, you can hire a freelance writer fairly inexpensively if you only have a few pages of information that you would like written. Only with new and original information do you even stand a chance at getting your webpage seen, and getting the results you are looking for.

Fresh Perspective

Your writing, or the person you hire, will offer a great new perspective to the product. This could be a way for you to gain new clients that the original marketing plan did not even expect, or perhaps just capture more potential clients than you had originally expected. Since you will have tried the product, you will be offering the best possible perspective on it from both a sales end and the consumer end of the product or service.

Use this information to your benefit to develop your own customized web page or website that will gain your customers confidence and sales. Writing original copy for your site or email ad is not an option – it is absolutely necessary. You are not saving time or money by copying and pasting the information into a pre-made web page. Instead you are actually costing yourself the opportunity to gain as many customers as possible.

Think back to all of those mega-launches where you get 10-20 different people sending you emails about the launch. How many did you get with the same subject line, and the

same copy when you open it up? I’ll bet that the ones who took the time to write their own subject line, and their own emails got much better results than those who used the ‘canned’ copy that was provided by the product owner.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #7

NOT Choosing the Right Products for You

Every affiliate program may not be right for you. Although it is nice to find the highest paying program or the program that offers a product you have used for years. Those things may not actually make the program right for you. When choosing your program you should keep three things in mind: Time, payout, and usability.

Time

Before choosing an affiliate program, it is important to find out how much time you will need to dedicate to it in order to make yourself successful. Some affiliate programs just lend themselves to needing more of your time than others. Be honest when looking at the amount of time you are going to be able to offer the program. If you truly can only offer a few hours a week, then find a program that you think you can comfortably work within that time frame. Being honest and upfront with yourself in the beginning will help make you successful in the end.

Payout

We have all heard the saying that money isn’t everything, but when you are looking at affiliate programs it is hard to say that. We all tend to look at the money part of things first, but just because a program offers the largest payout does not mean you are going to be able to sell people on the program.

When choosing the right affiliate program for you, make sure you are balancing the payout per sale with the amount of work that will be required to get the customer in the door. Usually these two items go hand and hand, so it is important to understand that before choosing your affiliate marketing program to begin with.

Usability

Make sure the affiliate program you choose is something that you believe is truly usable and a great service or product for people. Your enthusiasm about the product will come through in the people you talk to and even in the web page copy you write. Being passionate about the product or service will make it a usable affiliate program for you and the perfect fit for your first time around.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #8

NOT Capturing Incoming Email Addresses

Your job is simply to get potential customers to the sales page for the product you are promoting…right? WRONG! Don’t waste the chance to get your customers email addresses. These will be invaluable to you in the future as you begin working with other affiliate programs. By gathering their email addresses up front, you set it up so you continually will be adding to your own marketing list, which will help you in all your marketing endeavors in the future.

Why Should You Do This?

Because email is the quickest and easiest way to communicate with new and existing customers. If you continue on with affiliate marketing and begin working with other programs you could easily send out a mailing to people who previously showed an interest in a product or service you were working with. Once you have established yourself as someone who knows about all the top products, your customer list will look to you to provide them with the inside scoop on the up and coming products that will work for them. Gathering email addresses and maintaining a database is your opportunity to continue to grow your business – no matter what the product or service is that you are working with.

How Do You Do This?

The absolute best way to do this is to give them a free gift, via a squeeze page, and then after they sign up to get the gift send them directly to the sales page using your affiliate link. You can easily set it up to do this from your autoresponder account.

The key to making this work is the free gift MUST be of high quality, and it must be related to the product you are promoting. Use your own knowledge about the subject area to put together a short article or ebook that you can offer to your potential customers. This will make it a win win situation for both you and the customer.

Capturing incoming email addresses can help you make sales from customers that were not ready to make a decision initially. Those same email addresses can also benefit you as your company grows and you begin working with other affiliate programs. Being a successful affiliate marketer requires you to maintain your own database of customers; So starting with your very first affiliate webpage you should be capturing those email addresses.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #9

NOT Believing in Yourself!

If you don’t think you are going to be successful as an affiliate marketer, then you probably will not be. It is normal to feel a bit of apprehension as you begin a new program and try to navigate all the new information involved in affiliate marketing, but it is essential that you believe in yourself and your ability to make a success at this business.

Your excitement needs to translate into confidence in yourself. Once you are confidant and belief you can be a success, it will be a burden off your shoulders. You no longer will have to waste time wondering if you are going to be able to make this work and instead can use that time to concentrate on the other steps necessary to becoming a successful affiliate marketer.

Although success is not fully based on your believe that you can be successful, it is a necessary quality that all people who are making money in affiliate marketing posses. So take the time to understand the programs and understand the mistakes you should avoid; then believe in yourself and your ability to have fun while making a living with your affiliate marketing business.

Common Affiliate Marketing Mistake #10

NOT Committing Yourself to Your Affiliate Marketing Program

There are thousands and thousands of different affiliate programs out there. Some are widely known and some are not known at all. Once you have taken the time to research the various affiliate programs and you have found the ones that are right for you, make sure and give it time to work. Most programs will not be able to make you an instant millionaire. They require time to build up a customer base. Be patient and be committed to growing your affiliate program.

Schedule Your Time Commitment

Take the time you have allotted to your program and spend that much time no matter what is going on with your affiliates. Even if your business is growing and you do not feel you should be adding more or marketing more it will help your business continue to grow. Don’t let good sales camouflage your commitment to your affiliate program.

Because just around the corner is a lull in business that you will need to be prepared for. Set up a schedule of time that you would like to commit to your affiliate program and find something to do with that time every week. You could write additional copy for your site or manage your email database or even just spend time on blogs and message boards, just commit yourself to your affiliate program every week and you will make it a success.

Your commitment will shine through in the web pages you develop and the content that you provide to your customers. It will also show through to your customers as they continue to come back to you over and over to see what new program or service you have the inside scoop on.

In this ‘small‘ post we thought  to recap some of the techniques that can be used to market your new site. Most of these are already known, but it is always   nice to have all of them collected in one place :

• Yahoo Answers.

Answering questions at http://answers.yahoo.com can be proven an extremely efficient marketing strategy. People there leave thousands of questions and many of them remain unanswered. Answering questions, and solving problems in a category similar to your line of business (i.e. Computer Engineer, SEO, marketing, work from home, business models) can easily make you an ‘expert’ of the specific field. Being the expert means that people will want to actually visit your site and learn more. Further to this answering questions on yahoo answers can produce a number of backlinks for your site.

MySpace

MySpace has more than 110 million monthly active users and over 300.000 new signups every daily. Getting this for a fact, you could considered that the returns from a successful MySpace campaign could be huge. So the more ‘friends’ you have on MySpace the better the changes you have to transform some of them into customers. First of all create a Profile using CSS to style your MySpace profile as close as possible to the site that you want to market (including any logos). Secondly start adding targetted friends by using the MySpace searching facility (i.e. by using keywords like freelancer,marketing). Some general advices on how you will go on are :

• Never spam
• Avoid the use of bot friends adders because you could easily get banned.
• Join as many relevant groups as possible and participate within the groups.
• Post interesting bulletins that provide useful information
• Send friend requests to users within the groups you’ve joined.
• Use graphics in your posts to catch the attention of the reader.
• Use catchy titles, anything boring will be ignored

Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups ( http://groups.yahoo.com/) is a great place for people to talk and exchange ideas. You can search and join yahoo groups , which are immediate related with your site (i.e. Freelancers, Wholesale,stocked products) and start spreading the word for you new web site. Note  that if a group has 2,000 members, and you post a message, you will  have  potential 2,000 users reading your message and maybe visiting your site. Members of the groups are always interested to learn information on new sites and ideas.

If you want to make group users even more interested on your site, you can offer some free content and tools on them. This will make your site even more appealing to them.

You can even create you own group and start posting. People which are interested in the subjects you post will became members of your group.

Stumbleupon.com

StubmleUpon is a great site, which allows people to share stories, information and links. Download the stumbleupon toolbar and ensure you click “I like this” to all of your websites, and have your friends and family do the same and click the “I like this” to all your sites. Also create pages specifically for stumbleupon that either is funny and odd, which can range from funny pictures to funny videos. This works well since Stumbleupon users love to browse sites that have odd and funny stuff, or even free stuff would work good as well.

Forum linking

Try to find ‘Do-follow‘ forums that are relevant with your site(s) subject and register. In all forums that you are becoming a member of, include your web sites url in signature of your profile. Having created your signature, start posting!! Create new subjects or reply to existing threats and use your preferred keywords within the links or perhaps catchy titles to entice clicks. Be sure not to SPAM otherwise you can get banned.

Blog commenting

Blog commenting is a great way to advertise your site and also gain some backlinks. It is usually in the center of many link building strategies followed today. You can easily promote your site, by identifying related blogs and comment on their posts. In most blogs you can include the URL of your site during the commenting procedure. Two things that you must note here is that in order to get backlinks, the blogs must be do-follow, and that you must make sure that your comments provide some value to the users of the blog (i.e. just don’t leave a post if you have nothing to add). You can easily find such blogs by simple searching the Google :

http://followlist.com/
http://www.stephanmiller.com/the-ultimate-dofollow-blog-list/

Craigslist.org

Craigslist is a great place to promote your web site and service. It allows you to submit your free ads Frelance jobs, freelance resources, freelancers, freelancing,consultants, consulting, contractors;but be sure not to spam it. Just one or two ads per week in a few select cities will do the trick. Don’t submit too many adds because you could be flagged or labeled as spam. As afinal note ensure to use catchy titles to ensure your ad is read.

Site maps

Sitemaps is the best way to help search engine crawl your site. If you want to have high rankings you must definitely include a site map in your sites and submit it to google. You can create a free site map using the following site.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

When finished, then upload it to your site, then submit it to

Google using the link below: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview?hl=en

Submit your sitemaps using Yahoo Site Explorer, similar format to

Google Webmaster Tools http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Directories Submission

Directories is one of the oldest way to get backlinks. Most Web admins already do this, but just in case you haven’t, you should submit to directories. A good list of directories can be found in:

http://strongestlinks.com/directories.php

Try to submit your site to high PR Do Follow directories. You can easily check if the directory is a Do Follow by clicking on a link inside the directory and checking on its properties. If it says ‘No follow’ then this is not a Do follow directory and you can skip it.

A site with many do follow directories is: http://squidooeventlog.com/dofollow-directories/

When you submitting to directories, ensure that the title and description of you submission is carefully selected. The words to be used there is what the Search Engines use to index your site. You can use the Web Masters Keyword analysis tools ( http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml ) to test the words that you must include your submission.

Tell a Friend

A Tell-a-Friend script must be installed on your site. These scripts enable you users to access the email/facebook/twitter/myspace accounts and massively send invitations for your site to their friends. If you have a joomla / Drupa / WordPress based site, it is very easy to download an install a module or widget/plugin for this. For all other sites you can download a PHP script for this. For any case OpenInviter is a nice and free option (http://openinviter.com/)

Search Engine Optimization

The way you site is structure and build is very important. There are a number of programming good and bad practices that can help you gain good search result positions. Meta tags, page names, breadcrumbs, alt text on images, are just few examples. SEO is an important aspect of any new web site and must be taken seriously. Some sites that contain really useful advice on this are :

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=3
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=12
http://forums.seochat.com/
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/

Squidoo.com

Squidoo.com is a free popular platform that allows you to create overview pages. These pages, called lenses, usually simulate small one page blogs and include articles, photographs, videos and links. Such lenses could be a great marketing tool for you site. You can create a lense in an subject similar to your new site. There you could post articles and links to your site.

Social bookmarking sites

Social bookmarking sites are really important for your new marketing strategy. People use them to share the Hyperlinks and Interesting sites they discovered on the Net. Posting your web site to these can create a stream of new visitors and also new back-links.

• http://del.icio.us/ PageRank: 8/10
• http://www.furl.net/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://www.simpy.com/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://del.icio.us/ PageRank: 8/10
• http://www.backflip.com/ PageRank: 6/10
• http://www.blinklist.com/ PageRank: 6/10
• http://bluedot.us/ PageRank: 6/10
• http://de.lirio.us/bookmarks/ PageRank: 6/10
• http://www.diigo.com/user/ PageRank: 6/10
• http://www.shadows.com/ PageRank: 6/10
• http://www.markaboo.com/ PageRank: 5/10
• http://ma.gnolia.com/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://linkagogo.com/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://netvouz.com/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://www.mister-wong.de/ PageRank: 6/10
• http://www.spurl.net/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://www.rawsugar.com/ PageRank: 6/10
• http://www.stumbleupon.com/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://www.digg.com/ PageRank: 8/10
• http://www.blogmarks.net/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://www.netvouz.com/ PageRank: 7/10
• http://www.taggly.com/ PageRank: 5/10
• http://www.lookmarks.com/ PageRank: 5/10

Article Promotion

Creating articles related to the subject area of your site and submitting them to the numerous free article directories can give you a number of backlinks. Make sure to use keyword analysis tools, in order to select the keywords that you will use in these articles. Some examples of such article directories are:

• http://www.thearticlesarchive.com
• http://www.ezinearticles.com
• http://www.goarticles.com
• http://www.articlecity.com .

Listen to your Users.

As a new site you are only going to have few users/visitors. One of things that will make them return back to you is to ensure that they can communicate their opinions /ideas/thoughts regarding your site with you (aka that their voice is heard). This will make them feel more comfortably with your site and feel that they participate in the process of making it better.

The information collected from such processes greatly helps in improving your site, because they can be used as bug reports and/or features requirements, and also assist in increasing the number of returning visitors.

To do this you can either include a feedback form on your site, or even better use one of the Feedback Management services that exist today (i.e. http://www.uservoice.com/ )

Alexa.com

Alexa is a popular place to allow users and provide reviews for other sites . You can register and regularly review popular websites on Alexa.com, making sure that at the end of your review you will add the URL of your site. It may not hyperlink automatically but may still bring some traffic to your site.

Newsletter

A newsletter box on your website that will allow all visitors to subscribe and receive updates. You must build a regular newsletter and inform your users, o new offers, changes and products. This will ensure that your users will never forget the site and increase the number of returning visitors. You can also have your users register their Date Of Birth and automatically send them an electronic birthday card.

You can use an email marketing service in order to automated some parts of this process. Some examples are: aweber.com, getresponse.com, constantcontact.com for the newsletter subscriptions.

Pay per Click search engines

I’ve listed this due to the fact most of you probably already know this , but I can’t have a list of marketing techniques without mentioning PPC. Google Adwords, Microsoft Ad Center and Yahoo Search Marketing are the big three. Other options are SearchFeed.com, Goclick.com.

For a analytical list of pay per click search engines see link below:

http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com/

Twitter

One of the latest trends in Marketing is Twitter.com, the microblogging platform. You can create a twitter account for your site, register you site address and description (i.e. The free online library) in your new Twitter account profile and start twitting. Start posting things (i.e. articles,photographs,videos,news) that are of interest to you and related to your site. If you have a blog you can automated this process by using special WordPress pluings and Joomla components.

People that are interested in your postings are going to soon become your followers. Everything you post can be seen by all of your followers, which in their turn can retwitt it in order to share it with their followers (i.e. imagine that you have 1000 followers and each one of them has another 1000 followers, Can you see the big picture ?) Having a big number of followers can greatly help you in promoting your products and services.

Facebook Fan Page

Facebook currently offers a great place to promote your products and service. Just consider the case that Facebook has more than 60 million active users. The returns from using facebook as a marketing platform can be high. There are tons of different ways that you can advertise over Facebook.

Fan Pages

It is very easy to create a Facebook Page (http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages) and invite your friends (and their friends) to became fans of your page. In a while you will see that your fans pages can easily grow into having thousands of fans. This will greatly help you with branding your new site and products.

Facebook Application

You can create, or have a freelancer do it for you,or even buy, a silly small Facebook application. Such applications could include, games, puzzles , quizzes ,jokes of the day or anything that a user will want have and share with his friend. These application could be distributed around your friends and their friends( following the pattern of viral process) for free (yes free!!! if its free people will definitely want to try it). But in this application you could include a banner, the colors, and the logos of your Web Site. This is what Branding is all about.

Facebook Adverts

Final but not least, you could use the Facebook Advertising System (similar to Google’s ) to create a facebook banner for your new site. The huge difference with other systems is that facebook allows you to control the target audience of your advert (e.g. age,country,job,title)

Blog

It’s a proven fact that search engines love blogs. The question we should ask ourselves is why do they love blogs? It’s pretty simple, search engines love to search and find new quality content. Search Engines target to index high quality novel information . But ensure that the content that you post on your blog is original. Search engines do not like to see articles or content that already exists on thousands of other sites. You must update your content regularly in order to ensure better Search Engine Ranking.

But blogs are not only for search engines. Having a blog that includes good quality content will increase you user returning rates. Users may not come to your site to buy, but they will come to read. Even so, your site still will get targeted traffic, and thus higher rankings and publicity.

There are many free sites on the Internet that will allow you to create your own blog and they will host it for you. Some examples are :

• http://www.blogger.com
• http://www.ebloggy.com/
• http://www.aeonity.com/

If you are like me, you will prefer to host your own blog, so you will nee to find your own hosting solution and domain and then download and install a blog engine like WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com).

Having completed your blog, now it the time to start advertising. There are a number of directories out there which are targeted to blog owners. It will be quite a strong marketing policy to submit your blog to these Directories. Some examples are:

• Blogarama Link: http://www.blogarama.com
• Blogdigger Link: http://www.blogdigger.com
• Blog Catalog Link: http://www.blogcatalog.com
• Blog Hub Link: http://www.bloghub.com
• Blog Rankings Link: http://www.blogrankings.com
• Blog Search Engine Link: http://www.blogsearchengine.com
• Blog Wise Link: http://www.blogwise.com
• Blog Lines Link: http://www.bloogz.com
• Blog Pulse Link: http://www.blogpulse.com
• Blog Universe Link: http://www.bloguniverse.com
• Blog TreeBlogarama Link: http://www.blogarama.com
• Blogdigger Link: http://www.blogdigger.com
• Blog Catalog Link: http://www.blogcatalog.com
• Blog Hub Link: http://www.bloghub.com
• Blog Rankings Link: http://www.blogrankings.com
• Blog Street Link: http://www.blogstreet.com
• Blog Wise Link: http://www.blogwise.com
• Globe Of Blogs: Link: http://www.globeofblogs.com

To turn an idea, product or service into an online money-making venture, every entrepreneur must utilize effective and proven Internet marketing strategies. The evolving world of online marketing presents different strategies for people to test for their products or services. To devise a plan or marketing campaign that will work, you must first identify company goals and the timeline for achieving those goals. Once you have laid out the foundation, you can start implementing strategies to promote the products or services. Below are some Internet marketing strategies to consider.

Blog Commenting
Link building is an important part of promoting your products or services to the public. People like clicking on links that lead them to a web page that offers them something they can benefit from. One way to build links is commenting on blogs but it is important to go on blogs that are relevant to your niche. When you find a blog post, there is a text field that you can place a link when commenting. This link will point to your website and people who read the comments can find your products.

Forum Posting
Another way to promote your site is to post on forums. When you find forums that are relevant to your business, you can ask questions to members or answer other questions. You can leave your link as a signature so that people can click on and land on your page. Placing this link is another method of building links and the more links you build, the chances of you getting discovered by search engines increases.

Blogs
Whether your business is an e-commerce site or you offer some sort of service, you can start a blog to promote your business. When starting a blog, it is important to keep up with blog posts so that you always have fresh content. Your customers and visitors will be more interested and inclined to return when you have a reputation of updating your blog. In your blog you can write posts on new products, new services, descriptions of your products, news, opinions and so on. You will also get feedback from your customers and readers which can help you understand where your business stands.

Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is not necessarily a strategy but rather a must for any Internet company that wants to grow. Search engine optimization involves a number of tactics, tools and strategies but the underlying purpose is to get on the search engine map. That means that you use various strategies, such as link building, to improve your rankings on major search engines. The higher your rankings, the more people will come across your site. Search engines will also place more value on your site as your rankings improve. This helps promote your products or services and will help you gain more visitors.

Social Bookmarking
The Internet is all about networking and communicating with your audience. To promote your business, it is very important to use social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and other social bookmarking tools including Digg, Delicious and even StumbleUpon. When you use these platforms, you are placing links to your website for people to click on. In other words, you adding a virtual bookmark for people to come back to. Social bookmarking sites and other networking sites are great ways of understanding your audience and promoting your products or services.

Directory Submission

The Internet holds a number of directories that are willing to hold a link to your site for free or for a small fee. Posting your site into good quality directories and in the appropriate link categories can help potential customers to became more aware of your brand or products. This can also help your site get better rankings by search engines.

Affiliate Marketing
Many online businesses and internet marketers use affiliate marketing to help promote businesses. Affiliate marketing involves revenue sharing between a website owner and an online merchant. If you are selling products or services, it is a good idea to try to get advertisements on another website. When this website receives traffic, visitors will find your ads and click on them to land on your online store. Although there is an exchange of profits between the merchant and the site owner, this is a highly effective way of promoting.  Both parties can benefit from affiliate marketing but it is important to choose a merchant or affiliate website carefully. This Internet marketing strategy is not only effective in promoting a business but also getting leads.

• Pay Per Click (PPC)

This campaign allows the affiliate site to earn a certain amount of money when someone clicks on the ad on his site. The merchant will also make a certain amount of money.

• Pay Per Sale (PPS)

This affiliate marketing campaign involves actual sales. When a merchant advertises on an affiliates site and a sale is made, the affiliate site will earn a certain percentage of the sales.
Pay Per Lead (PPL): When merchants place ads on an affiliates site and a customer registers at the merchants site as a result, the affiliate site will earn a certain amount of money.

Banners

Traditional Banners are still an effective way to advertise you rsite and services. By placing banners into high quality and highly ranked sites you can earn new customers and users. Along with placing banners in highly ranked sites can also help you raise your site’s rank as well.  If you do not want to pay to get your banner published, you can enter into a banner exchange program (there are a few out there).

More and more people are opening up to the idea of having their own home-based business. Having your own home based business has its own benefits, you can spend some quality time with your children, help household chores, keep yourself fit by dedicating some time towards the right exercise regime and most important make the right use of the money you have earned.

“I like thinking big. If you’re going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big” Donald Trump

Benefits of Home Based Business.

There are many more benefits that will look here, and you need to work in your day-to-day life. All these benefits are impossible to achieve with a full time job and meeting deadlines. You bank balance certainly gets multiplied but your quality of life hampers in the long run. With your home based business you can create a perfect balance with work and family without compromising on your lifestyle. You will be able to pay complete attention to your family and children. Also, you will get lots of free time in your hand, which you use for some other activities.

The best part about starting your own home-based business is that you don’t need much of investment in the initial stages. You just need little knowledge and properly organizing the whole thing. As it would be run from home, there is no need to worry about the rents or utility bills at the end of the month. If it were going to be based on the Internet you would require only a personal computer with a dedicated Internet connection to start with. Just see to it, you have a high-speed connection so that it becomes easy for you to work properly. If you intend to offer a niche product or services through your home based business then you need to also workout where you could find your niche customers. You can do these by thinking about the product and services in the real world and the people who would like to take it up. This is very important for any beginner who is starting their business; you must know what your clients need. You shall get to know which section of people you need to target and work accordingly.

Are You Ready to Start?

If you have made up your mind to have your very own home based business then, the next thing you need to look for a product or services that you offer your clients. You need to know what you can give to your costumers, and it is very important that whatever product you choose, you need to have complete knowledge about that product. If you have a formal training in any particular field you can offer a consultancy services for the same, or you can look out for an option in home based business on the internet. You shall come across a number of home-based business ideas and options that could appeal to you. On the other hand, else you can opt for a niche product or services that are likely to catch up the market soon. Any business ideas you come up with make sure you do some thorough research on it before you start implementing it. Doing research is very important, and you need to completely what the market exactly needs that you can offer. Especially if you are a beginner, I am highly advisable for you to do an extensive research on the business you would like to start and the business plan.  It is very important that you do the right kind of research on the internet before you commit to any business model and find all related information regarding the competitors, your target –group of customers and also draw your marketing strategy.

Depending on the type of products /services that you will offer there are may be many other types of information that you will need to collect and analyze. Some examples are Import/export taxes and local laws. A good way to start your planning and analysis is to use the S.W.O.T analysis tool. (S)trengths  (W)eaknesses (O)pportunities (T)hreats is a strategic planning tool which in reality helps you to identify if a business project is viable or not.  In reality the SWOT analysis will help you to answer important questions like:

•    Do you have any advantages over competitors (i.e patents, capital)?

•    Are there any things that can be improved?

•    Are there any steps that can be avoided?

•    Are there any favorable circumstances that can be used?

•    Is changing technology threatening your position?

•    Is your company entering new markets?

Of course when start your home based business you may don’t have all the information to answer a complete set of SWOT questions. But having this tool on your mind will greatly help in doing you research right.  Some example questions that can be answered are provided in the drawing below:

A lot of people however know nothing about what is available, and therefore, it is imperative to go through the foundations. Successful business people generally start small & grow their business. They don’t have a lot of irons in fire at one time so their efforts are not at all diffused. Also, they give everything that they have and think that the hard work counts and, try very hard until they get the success that they are searching for. Furthermore, most of them have the positive attitude. Some general advices that can be provided to anyone starting a home business are given below.

Build a Corporate Image

The Internet is a powerful marketing and sales tool ensuring that you have the power to reach millions of people. Confidently & concisely describing your whole business in some sentences is very powerful. Work on making a short description that will easily get remembered by the others and publish this over the Internet so that they will read it and  discuss it with their friends and family. Keep in mind that word of mouth is extremely powerful. This is a very powerful way to make profit even without having a product of your own and there are lots of people who have made a fortune with this.

It is a pretty recognizable brand name. Originally it was “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” but we settled on “Yahoo”. Jerry Yang

Know the Product Well

Know your service or product “like the back of your hand” prior to start market it and sell it. By knowing a product one must make sure that knows all the products advantages/disadvantages, customer target group as well as the competition. Customers are always interested in buying a quality product or service, and for sure they will always ask “why your product and not the competitors”. Be sure to always display the quality related information of your product/service and its advantages. Keep in mind the product and service, which you are marketing and selling might not be something that you use yourself, but it must be something that you believe in & know intimately. As an example, consider some women which might choose to sell  men’s related products but still know all the products benefits & features in order to satisfy their customers.  If you know your product well then there are better chances that you can explain its benefits well and this will help you “earn” one more customer. As a rule of thumb that you must have is that if you do not trust your products, the customer’s will always know it and they will simply do not buy. Don’t try to rip off your customers. A happy customer means that he will return for more products and he will also share his happiness about your products with his friends and family.

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better”  Jeff Bezos

Start small

It is always advisable to handle a single product or services in the beginning to get in to the skin of the home based business. Whether your client will approve your products and services that you are offering. Eventually, you can diversify your products and services and also your client base. You can change the theme if you feel that your costumers are not approving for the earlier one. Now that you know which section of people to target, you need to market your product or services for people to know. One of the best methods to market your product is through the Internet having your very own website with an impressive home page. Creating a good web design and having proper content is very important for your website. Make sure the website is informative and impressive for the prospective buyer to spend more time browsing through it. If the traffic of your website increases it is a sign of business and prosperity. Now you need to be extremely quick in getting back to your clients in case of any queries or questions and clear their doubts. Make sure you make a note of every client writing or calling you regarding the product. Do not forget to take their email ids and contact numbers, as you would be building your very own database for future use.

Take Help

A business is not a ” one man show”. Finding someone with experience, especially if you are new is a very. What should basically happen, is striving to find a company that has relevant experience to the products/services that you are selling. One of the most rewarding things in starting a simple home business is that other people also reap the rewards beside you. There are many other small companies and freelancers out there that can really helped you build a successful Brand while at the same time keeping the cost into low levels .

Patient is a Virtue

Success will not come overnight & it is good that you enter in the business area with this in your mind. Most of these successful entrepreneurs on Internet, the majority of them have persisted for some time & surmounted many of obstacles to get where they are now. If you think yourself as  a professional who understands things well then it will help you a great deal in understanding and overcoming the problems which you might come across. Always don’t forget, that we are just humans, and humans make mistakes. Don’t be afraid of the mistakes that you will make in your  first business activities. Avoiding them is difficult if possible at all. Try to learn from them. Try to turn every mistake into an advantage.

“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes”. Oscar Wilde

Initially, the response for your product can be cold but do not lose hope you need to keep trying and aggressively market your product through every which way possible. Later you will definitely get the market in your hand and will be able to get good profit. As you develop awareness for your product so will you get more enquires and enquiries shall bring in business shortly.

Hard Work

Hard work is always involved when starting your own business and time must be set aside every day to work non-stop on the current project. The “non-stop” means avoidance of a lot of time that is spent on the useless activities such as constantly checking commission statistics and email accounts for the new sales. Focus on the business and connect in one positive thing every day to add little value to the business. It is very important that you work hard as if you do not then you will be out.

“ I’ve always worked very, very hard, and the harder I worked, the luckier I got”  Alan Bond

Be Positive and Confident

Look at these beliefs that are holding you back, as an example; do you harbor a belief that a lot of money may bring more of responsibility than what you can handle? You have to drop such thoughts immediately, or it can sabotage your success efforts. Finally, one must devote some time to working on “inner” beliefs, which propel or else hinder business success as to planning & hard work, which it takes for reach our aims.

“Confidence can get you where you want to go, and getting there is a daily process. It’s so much easier when you feel good about yourself, your abilities and talents.”  Donald Trump

Starting a Home based business can be extremely easy tasks but running it successfully requires a lot of patience, focus and perseverance. Stick on and work hard, and you shall soon see the results with some great profit margins. The earning options with home-based business are excellent as there is no much investment you would be making initially. The impact of good customer service and timely delivery shall help you in getting many customers thus making your business a very successful venture.

Looking at your success there would be many to follow your footsteps, so be prepared and work doubly hard henceforth. Do not forget, networking is the key for any home based business.