Blog Income Life

Posts Tagged ‘Affiliate Marketing’

Are you on pace for your 2010 internet marketing goal?

In three weeks and a day the first quarter of the year will have come and gone.  If you are serious about your blog income business this is the time to take a quick overview of where you’re going, where you are and where you’ve been so far this year.

Reviewing your progress in anything that you do is critical to success.  Goals drive success.  So you need to review the progress of your goal for the year.  I review by day, week, month and quarter.  I don’t spend a lot of time on all the details, but come the end of a quarter,my blog income business undergoes a microscopic review. Year to date results are tallied  and adjustments where necessary are made.

This is a good time to take a quick overview of the current situation vis a vis your blog income goal.  With three weeks to go there is still time to save the bacon.

Am I on track?

NO!

Do I know how far off track I am?

YES!

Here is a quick way to review your progress and maximize your internet marketing performance:

1.  Goal.
You can do this for any part of your life, but for the purpose of this blog and post let’s stay with your blog income business.  What was your goal for the year?  .

A common annual goal is to achieve a certain income.  Assume that your goal is $100K  for all your internet marketing streams.  A very simple plan might look like this

1Q = $10,000
2Q = $20,000
3Q = $30,000
4Q = $40,000

Total = $100,000

2.  Progress to date:
What is your year to date income?  With three weeks to go, if you do not make some quick adjustments will you achieve $10,000?  If not how far off the mark are you?  If the shortfall is just a projected thousand or two, what can you do to turn up the heat.

3.  High Gain Activities
A quick review will tell you what in your marketing mix has worked the best and brought you the money to date.  You will notice that every time you took action there was an upward  spike in the results.  Very quickly identify the action that brought you the most income.  Take that model and ramp it up for the rest of the month.  If it is affiliate marketing that is the major contributor, see which affiliate product contributed the most to your bottom line.

4. How Many Sales Needed?
If your current track projection shows that you will be $2000 short of your 1Q goal, what are the steps that will lead you to reaching $10K?  Ask yourself these questions:

a)  What is the commission for each sale?
b)  How many clicks to reach one conversion?
c)  How much traffic  per click?

For ease of calculation:
commission per sale:  $100
clicks to make one sale: 10
traffic to generate 1 click: 10

Armed with this information you come up with this formula
2000 visits = 200 clicks
200 clicks = 20 sales
20 sales @ $100 commission = $2000

5. Which Piston Is Firing  The Traffic Engine?
Look through your statistics to identify which marketing action drives the most traffic.  Isolate it and increase that marketing action in direct proportion to meet and deliver the additional numbers.

This is also a good time to look at your second quarter.  Based on your 1Q results what are the action steps for the coming quarter.  What adjustments do you need to make?

Look at your business as sailing.  When you sail you know what your destination is.  You have a mapped out route.  Depending on how the wind is blowing, how the currents are running and daily weather changes, you need to continuously tack your sailboat to reach your destination.  A review of your  results is just tacking your internet marketing business to success.

In short:  review, correct, continue.

Olympic fever has swept the city – never mind that we are having a record warm winter and snow had to be trucked in to one of the local city mountains where the snowboarding competitions were held.    Downtown Vancouver has turned into one big party hosting visitors from all over the world.  The hundred plus pavilions have lineups  from here to there, cordoned off streets are jammed with revelers and everyone is having a rip roaring good time especially as Canada  has brought home 4 golds so far making this the first Olympics that we have copped the elusive metal for the first time on home turf.  Another week – I’ll definitely be spending more time enjoying.

Did get some blogging done.  Here is the Review of the Week that Was , a summary of the the new posts published here since February 14.

Sunday Morn Musings:  Valentine’s, Gung Hay Fat Choy!  The Smell of Gold – 14/02/10
A potpourri of topics:  St. Valentine and valentines and China and Valentina (yes, me!) and the welcomeing of the year of the tiger, an animal that is lucky, vivid and incredibly brave.  Talked about Chris Farstad a former Olympian and what he told us about athletes and how he figured that this year the Canadian athletes would fare far better and why … they have.  Hop on over to Sunday Morn Musings and read the full article.

Affiliate Marketing:  Write the Ad 15/02/10
This post takes you through a five step process of writing an attention grabbing ad that will have your visitors clicking and buying your affiliate products.  Nothing like the sweet  sound of a click to enrich your blog income bank account.

Affiliate Marketing:  Plan Your Campaigns 18/02/10
The nine steps to a successful campaign – from inception to fulfillment including time lines and a little known marketing ploy that will take you from obscurity to success with direct financial benefits to you.  The starting point for your passive income.

Yes, I did work on my own campaign to start March 01.  This is the first time I will actually be promoting one of my affiliate products not just on an ad hoc basis, but according to a plan.  I will establish my first “control”

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life.

Valentina

Growing your blog income through affiliate marketing is an ongoing process.  Seasoned affiliate marketers plan their campaigns months and sometimes even years ahead and often have several running simultaneously for each of their niches or affiliates. It takes time to get to this level of expertise and efficiency – and money to automate and outsource.  Take a deep breath.  You do not need to start at that level but if you want to earn a healthy online income then start you must.

One of the easiest ways to plan affiliate marketing campaigns is to center them around events, seasons, celebrations etc. The obvious are Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s, Mother’/Fathers’s Day … and so on.  No matter what your niche is one you can definitely work one or two of these special days into your marketing campaigns.

But why not separate yourself from the pack?  Everyone is selling at Christmas and it’s not to say that you shouldn’t, but did you know that there are dedicated “days” or months to just about anything  and everything under the sky?  The narrower your niche, the more bizarre the relevant topic day, the more attention you can draw with your advertising.

An example might look something like this:

Niche:  Left handed people
Domain:  LeftHandedPeople.com

Is there a Left Hander’s Day? Yes.  August 13.

Now is the time to start preparing for an all out campaign that should launch sometime in July.  But you need to start to have all your tools in place and there is no better time to start than now.

1.  Do you have a mechanism to capture leads?
If not think about what it might be that would entice your blog reader to register and leave their name and email.  Here are some possible options:

- weekly or monthly newsletter
-  e.report on being left handed: 17 – 20 pages on what it means to be left handed
-  e.book on famous left handed people – write one yourself, or check around to see if there is one that is available for PLR(Private Label Rights): 50 – 70 pages.

2. Decide what your offer is going to be.
What about left handed mugs – message on the mug appears to the right of the handle.  Or left handed scissors?  Left handed golf clubs.  The list is endless.

3.  Dedicated domain name.
You do not need to buy new domain name, you can have a sub-domain that would look like this:

LeftHandedPeople.com/August-golf
LeftHandedPeople.com/August-mugs
LeftHandedPeople.com/August-scissors

4.  Contact your affiliate vendor.
See if you can work out a one time offer for their top selling product.  Now you have a special price  for your unique market: the lefties.  It is estimated that 7% – 10% of adults are left handed.  That is a narrow niche yet a significant market.

5.  Write your ad:
Write your copy for the sales letter – this is the long sales letter telling your prospects why they need a new set of left handed golf clubs. Check and see if your affiliate vendor already has one.  If you are going for more than one item have a separate sales letter for each one, as in example  #3 above, it should be a different sales letter and domain for  golf clubs, the mugs and the scissors.  Not everything has to be different, just a few words and phrases to reflect the offer.   Have these ready to go for first week of August.

6.  Marketing blueprint:
Decide how you are going to market this.  Start warming up your prospects.  Pre-write a set of autoresponder messages that will start going out mid-July.  Space the messages by several days, decrease the spacing as August 1st approaches.

7.  D-Day
August 01:   the mass promo goes out to everyone on your list. Put up banners on all your relevant sites.  Put out a press release :  “Lefties Rule August 13″ and submit to all press release directories.  If you have the budget by all means submit to those that are fee based, but if dollars are scarce use the free directories service.

8. Daily Activity:
Have something happening on the net every day until the 13^th – newsletters, blog posts, forums, see if you can get guest blog space on some of the more popular blogs.

9.  August 14:
Tally up your sales.  You may still have some straggle in after the date but the majority of your sales should be in by the 14th.  Review everything:  what sold, what promo delivered most traffic, what venue converted most, which gave the biggest return on your time/investment.  Make immediate notes and make the tweaks to next year’s promotion while they are still fresh in your mind.

File away till January or February of the following year.  Dust it off then, make changes, add new things you may have learned in the interval.

For a list of holidays/bizarre dedicated days etc. go to:

http://www.brownielocks.com/month2.html

For example, did you know that February is National Start a Business Month?  I didn’t either.  This morning I was pleasantly surprised when while  doing  my blog rounds I read this post on Pat’s  Smart Passive Income blog.  The article is on whether you should form an LLC for your business.    You will notice that this is part I.  Now Pat is a real savvy blogger who pulls in significantly more than just coffee change from his blogging.  Dollars to donuts he has shingled several posts and put a small campaign together that will garner him some extra sheckels, I mean, who isn’t interested in starting a business these days?

Chances are that the first year you do this, the results may be less than sterling. Here is what you will have achieved:

-  an affiliate marketing model centered around specific holidays
-  established control(s) campaign for your left handed market niche

For a list of holidays/dedicated days etc. go to:

http://holidayinsights.com/moreholidays/index.htm

Don’t go hogwild now.  You probably want to mix them up – you know, the odd ball days with the more mainstream ones, don’t forget Christmas or Mother’s & Father’s Day!

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

Growing

-

Today’s blog income post will be a follow up to last weeks Affiliate Marketing: Establishing A Control .  I will examine the process to step 1 in establishing a control: advertising.

But first Today’s Olympic Moment! Brought to you by Blog Income!(another benefit to owning a blog – being your own sponsor!) – Smell of Gold Turns to Taste of Gold!

Canadians across the nation are doing the rain dance, whooping, hollering and stomping it up as they celebrate  “Alexandre the Great” in winning the first gold for the host nation at Vancouver’s Olympics thus ending the country’s drought of winning gold on home turf.  I mean Canadians are known to be nice and hospitable but we have to draw the line somewhere!   Sweet!  Congratulations Alexandre!

Now to the topic at hand: 5 steps to a successful ad.

1.  CREATE OFFER
What is the offer?  Speak Spanish in two weeks!  Travel in luxury on a pauper’s budget!  Whatever your offer is you need to capture the interest and curiosity of  the viewer so that the ad is clicked on.

2. WRITE THE AD
Obvious as it seems I have seen in the offline world where people just throw something up without giving much thought to what they are saying.  I suspect the same happens here in the online world. The shorter the ad, the more important it is to fine tune it as much as possible.  Good ads come in three parts:

The Headline.  Lets see what we can do with traveling in luxury on a pauper’s budget.  Here are some options:

- Broke Student Travels in Style:
OK.  Nothing terribly compelling but the general idea is intact

- Luxe Travel on Student’s BudgetGetting stronger. But what about

- Luxe Travel on Pauper’s Budget
I like the word  pauper more than student, I think it is stronger and more likely to arouse the curiosity.

The Body. This is where you write about the offer in two to three sentences at most.  Make it interesting and compelling.  Punch it up.

Call to Action: Download your free report now.

3. PLACE THE AD
Another obvious.  Look at your options.  Do you have a budget?  If so look at Google Adwords, Ezines and Newsletters that take advertising.  If you are new to affiliate marketing chances are that the budget is slim to none.  The first place is to put it up on your own site or blog.  A banner is more likely to attract attention than just text.  You can design a cool ad for free at http://www.addesigner.com/

4. TRACK RESULTS
There are lots of ad tracker services on the internet, many for free.  Just do a Google search for “free ad trackers”.  One that looks good to me is http://www.clickaudit.com/ .  Wordpress also has some free plugins that can help you track your ads.  I use Pretty Link which is proprietary to WordPress Direct.

Track your results. Congratulations, you have now established your first control.

5. REPEAT
Repeat the process.  Make a few small adjustments.  Don’t revamp the whole ad and its process unless it gave you zero results.  Success comes in fine tuning and fine tuning is not a re-haul.

To Your Success in Affiliate Marketing!

Valentina

What a week!   The city positively crackled with excitement as sidewalks spilled over with visitors from all over the world here to attend the Olympics .  Energy is high.  Hopes and aspirations  at levitation level.  Whether you live in the city or the burbs its hard not to catch Olympic fever.  Even though I crow with glee at the sight of blooming crocus, a slight drop in the temperature wouldn’t be all that bad – would do wonders for the mountains where the shushing events are taking place.  Ironic that last year at this time we had record cold temperatures and gobs of snow on the peaks – well we do have gobs of snow on the peaks, just not the ones where the events are scheduled!

This was the last week of my Internet Marketing Bootcamp.  Learned a bit more about Wordpress which I will be putting to use within the admin area of my Wordpress Direct program.  Polished up a few things on this site and I just might start a site on Wordpress.org, just to put into practice the whole meal deal.

Participated in some Olympic revelry – planning on more over the next two weeks.

The week in review:

Musings On a Sunday Morn:  Done? Never! 07/02/01
Carlos Velez posted a comment which prompted a rebuttal and I had a bit of fun on how dishes never get done!    This was strictly off the cuff but apparently I hit on something somewhat accidentally: linking to comments!  Full Musings on a Sunday Morn reading

Affiliate Marketing:  Establishing a Control 11/02/10
What is a control?  In its simplest form a control is that system, process or campaign that produces the desired result; in affiliate marketing that result is sales.  The campaign that delivers the best sales results becomes the control. In this article I write on how to set up your first control.

The Mitts That Were Seen Around the World: 11/02/10
Went off topic – had a good time!  Actually, what was not off topic was how “co-incidences” happen.  I believe that  “coincidences” are not accidental at all and had alluded to that in a previous article when I wrote about my friend and author Wendy Atkinson. Back to the mitts … read how the lowly mitten has become the fashion item of the season & more.

Coming up:  This week nose to the grindstone – err… fingers to the keyboard. Setting up my affiliate marketing campaign so that I can establish a control for it.  Target date is to have it up and running March 01.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

What is a control?

In its simplest form a control is that system, process or campaign that produces the desired result; in affiliate marketing that result is sales.  The campaign that delivers the best sales results becomes the control.

The dilemma that an affiliate marketer faces is do I first set up a system or do I first make the sales and build a system around that result?

Answer:  yes and yes.

Sales is the backbone of any successful business – you can have the best product in the world but without sales you have no business.  By now you have selected your affiliate product.  Here is what a typical marketing funnel looks like:

You now have the bare bone structure for a system. That is where you start.  Lets examine the flow of such a funnel:

1. Advertising:
   First you have to create the offer.  With affiliate marketing, especially with information products, this is often already done for you. But remember if you send your prospects directly to the affiliate’s sales page, you do not capture the lead.
2. Capture:
   The way to get around this is to create your own offer.  It can be a free newsletter, an e.book, an introductory 7-day course, a CD or some other ethical bribe.   The idea is that you give it away for free.  It should be something that is in alignment with what your affiliate product is.  Let’s take my affiliate Atomic Blogging which is advertised on this site as an example.

   My options are:

a)  Just put up the banner which when clicked goes directly to the vendor’s sales page.  If the visitor buys, I make a commission.  That is good.  That is the job of the banner to the right.

or

b) Develop my own ad.  I have done this with the ABC’s of Blogging banner which you see on this site.  This is a free PDF on blogging for money.  When a visitor clicks that banner, they are directed to a capture page which asks for their name and email.  This is needed so that the visitor can receive the link to the download.

When the visitor submits the information it is directed to my autoresponder which “captures” the visitor’s name and email and immediately sends out the link to the PDF download.

I now have a qualified lead.  I know that this person is interested in blogging. The name is loaded into my blogger prospects list. My loaded autoresponder follows up with an email within 24 hours inviting the prospect to purchase Atomic Blogging

3.  Follow Up:
I am currently working on another option. After clicking on the download link, a popup sales page will appear with the Atomic Blogging offer.  Why?  Because the visitor is in action mode and may be ready to make a purchase right then and there.

Because this involves some tech type stuff my goal is to have it all up and running by the end of the month with tracking implemented for each option.  The method that delivers the best results will become my control.

4.  Relationship Building
Not everyone that downloads the free PDF will buy the Atomic Blogging product.  These people will receive my pre-loaded, time spaced  emails with helpful information on blogging.  Some of the pre-loaded messages may include some information on Atomic Blogging which hopefully convert into a sale.

5. REPEAT.
Each option is a separate campaign.  Each will be tracked to the minutest detail.
The campaign that becomes the control will be the one that all other campaigns will be measured against.

It is best to run your control several times, tweaking where necessary.  Run the identical campaign but with two small differences and test to see which one pulls in the better results. It can be something as simple as the placement of a word.  This is called split testing or put another way it’s fine tuning the art of internet marketing and the way to building an enviable blog income.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

Now that you have selected an affiliate to promote and bought a unique domain name it is time to fill your box with some basic tools.

1. YOUR OWN SITE –  LANDING PAGE

The good thing about affiliate marketing is that the better affiliates already have collateral material ready for you including the “long sales letter” if you want to use it.  You could just redirect your new domain name to your affiliate URL – that way the traffic goes directly to the vendor’s site and buys the product.  You get the commission.  Easy as pie.

But you really want more.  You want to capture that buyer’s name and email address so that you can send your newsletters, emails, updates and valuable information to your customer.  That is where your own landing page …  alternately referred to as a squeeze, portal or capture page comes in. Now each of these have shades of difference, but basically their main job is to entice the visitor to give you their name and email address.

This is merely a mini site that is a page long – in this instance a “page” is not a designated size, it can be a short 5 x 8, a typical 8-1/2  x 11, or, go on and on like a roll of paper.  On this page you offer an ethical bribe so that the visitor gladly fills out her name and email address.  That ethical bribe can be in the form of a free ebook, a video or cd, a subscription to a free newsletter or if you can afford it a discounted price to the affiliate product (limited number, limited time), but in order to receive these they need to register through your landing page.

2. HOSTING

If your blog is already self hosted then that is where you host your new affiliate domain name.  I use Hostgator . This was the host that was recommend when I was going through the 30 Day Challenge last summer. I find their customer service to be excellent and their pricing is competitive with other hosting companies.  Another company I see cropping up more and more often is Blue Host.

3. AUTORESPONDER

An autoresponder manages your list.  It is a way to stay in touch with your prospects, to build rapport, establish credibility and promote new products and services.  You can program a thank you page to show up after a product has been purchased.  You can keep your prospects and customers updated on new developments in your business.  An autoresponder can have sub lists so that your customers are separated from your prospects, or perhaps they responded to different promotional material that way you can customize your messages to sync with their interests.

One of the most important features of an autoresponder is that about 90% of it is on autopilot – periodically you will want to interrupt pre-loaded messages with something new and fresh with a broadcast.  Use and abuse your autoresponder, it is there to serve you, your business and your subscribers – the more you know about how to use it, the stronger your business will be. A good autoresponder starts at about $10 per month and increases as your prospect list grows.  I use iContact . It was recommended to me by my mentor as a user friendly service and indeed I found that the learning curve was minimal.

4.  LINK TRACKING

Test, test & test again and make sure that everything you do to market your affiliate is tracked precisely.  What link tracking does is that it gives you information on every URL that you have published, whether it is by email, advertisement, articles, pay-per-click, even offline. A link tracking software is way over and above the statistics that your platform system or hosting company provide – those are just an overview of traffic and the source of that traffic. 

As you become more comfortable with your affiliate marketing efforts, you will want to mine deeper into which ad or words or  title drew the most traffic and converted in sales.  You can subscribe to a monthly link tracking software such as Website Gear from $10 a month or buy from about $300 upwards.

5.  LINK CLOAKING SOFTWARE

You don’t always need link cloaking but it is a good practice to get into.  What does link cloaking do?  It changes the original URL to a different one, while still leading the visitor to the same destination – in other words, the original URL is cloaked, or hidden. One of the reasons you may want to cloak the original URL is for sheer appearance.  Have you seen URLs that take up a whole line, something like (not a real URL)

http://www.valentinasaffiliates.com/linktracking=img&affID12345

I have seen URLs that are twice the length of the above.  Not only does it look cumbersome but it is much easier for the link to break, or it can be so long that your prospect needs to cut and paste it into the browser bar – some just won’t bother and another sale is gone.

Another reason to cloak your affiliate URL is, well people can be funny.  Onliners are becoming insreasingly savvy and recognize an affiliate URL when they see one.    Sometimes, for whatever their reason might be they don’t want to have someone make a commission on their purchase so they eliminate that part of the URL that is affiliate sensitive and buy directly from the vendor… I know, the price is the same, go figure!

There are URL shortening services such a Tiny URL which are free.  The problem is that you have no control over how long the redirect will last.  Affiliate Cloner Software will do the job for a one time fee.

There will be other tools that you will want to add to your toolbox.  The five mentioned here are a good start and signal  your professionalism.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

A week flies by so fast I often feel that I got nothing done, especially when I look at all the items I had on my “to do” list!  Do you ever feel that way?  I find that a  good antidote is to go review the week and highlight all the things that did get done.  Guaranteed you’ll feel better about your time – I know I do.   I also recommend that you not only highlight but double underline that which took you closer to your goal, focus on it and capitalize on it.  On that note I have got some good highlights to share with you about this week that was:

-  Highlight of the week for me was “guesting” at Dave Doolin’s Website In A Weekend blog.  Dave invited me to submit an article or two on MasterMinds.  I submitted a mini-series – what Dave terms as “shingling” your articles, yes, new term for me too!  This is my first “guest” gig and I am so honored to be on Dave’s blog.  You can read the articles:

How 5 Boys Achieved Unparalleled Success
A story is told of a handful of pals who achieved extraordinary success in their lives.  With the telling and retelling, the origin is somewhat hazy, but it is supposedly based on true life and while the details may be a bit scant, the concept is powerful. … read full story

Napoleon Hill Father of MasterMind
In his book, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill outlines 13 principles that his 29 years of research defined as common to every successful person.  One of those principles was the Power of the Master Mind which he defined as: “Coordination of knowledge and effort in a spirit of harmony between two or more people for the attainment of a definite purpose.”  … read full article

Two more articles are scheduled for Jan 25 and 27.  Be sure to hop on over to Dave’s and read them, or better yet, subscribe to Website In A Weekend’s RSS feed.

Articles published at Blog Income Life:

Golden Nuggets for Your Blog Income – 18/01/10
A very special THANK YOU to Mike Paetzold for guesting here at Blog Income Life for the past week.  The series gave me some golden nuggets and exposed areas where I can certainly do some tweaking.  Below are some things that I took away … read full article.

Blog Income Org Chart – 19/01/10
Expand your thinking and your blog income.  It’s time to think beyond just a blog.  If you have not already incorporated yourself as a business, you will definitely want to do so as your online earnings grow.  I like to see things and thought it would be fun to put up an org chart of what my internet marketing business looks like….read full article and see the chart

Five Basic Steps to Start Your Affiliate Marketing: 21/01/10
What is so powerful about affiliate marketing is that you do not need to have a product of your own.  You profit by someone else’s research, development, production and fulfillment.  All you need to do is promote and convert your promotion into sales. In other words you get to make money without the worry, stress and up front costs of developing a product. … read full article

As to those items that were left undone … I think that I tend to put too many on my list.  I read somewhere that it is best to scale down the number and complete them, that way the  mind is being programmed for completion rather than partial completion.  Habits are being formed.  Done is better than almost done ……..hmmm… article brewing there.

And now for something a little bit different – starting tomorrow there will be a new feature to this blog “Musings on a Sunday Morn”  … Once upon a time I started a blog which I titled  Four O’Clock Thursdays.  The blog had no purpose other than to write on whatever it was that captured the mind at, well four o’clock on Thursdays.   After a few posts the time allotted was given a different job and the postings disappeared.  I miss writing that blog and thought that Sunday morning would a good time for those musings.  Now, I don’t promise a “musing” every Sunday … but do drop by on Sunday morns – or any morn for that matter,  the door is always open at Blog Income Life!

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

Last week I had the honor of Mike Paetzold guesting here at Blog Income Life.  Mike’s posts were mostly directed to blogging yet the very same principles apply to affiliate marketing.  That’s how we get better and stronger  – reps at the gym build your body muscles, reps on the internet build your marketing muscles

Ewen Chia of Secret Affiliate Weapon says that when you master affiliate marketing you can your write own paycheck any time you want.  This self made mulit-millionaire made his first million focusing on affiliate marketing. In his book How I made My First Million on the Internet, Ewen sets out the step by step process that he employed to bring in the big bucks.

What is so powerful about affiliate marketing is that you do not need to have a product of your own.  You profit by someone else’s research, development, production and fulfillment.  All you need to do is promote and convert your promotion into sales. In other words you get to make money without the worry, stress and up front costs of developing a product.  You can even be choosy and take on products that are proven to convert well, its like betting on a sure horse.

Here are some basic tools that you will need to have:

#1.  HANG OUT YOUR SHINGLE

Tell the world you are open for business.  How are you going to promote your affiliate product?  Of course you can put up banner ads on the sidebar of your blog, as I have done here, but that of and on its own will not bring you many sales.  Have you ever noticed that in the offline world  big brand names appear in so many different media venues?  Coke ads  for example  appear in magazines, on billboards,  TV, as sponsors for major events, co-op with movie theaters, restaurants, and the list goes on and on.  That is marketing at its most.  As an affiliate marketer you need to do the same with your chosen product.

#2 – DIRECT MARKETING

One of the strongest methods of getting a message to your market is through direct opt-in marketing.  Strictly speaking direct marketing is the flyers and leaflets and “junk” mail that finds its way onto your porch or mailbox.  Internet marketing pioneers learned much from this method and with a few adjustments here and there developed a system that works.  So when I say “direct opt-in marketing” I am really referring to getting your message to your market’s inbox.  How do you do that without spamming?  You build an opt-in list.

#3 – OPT-IN LIST

This is a list of people in your market who have opted in to receive information from you.  It is permission based marketing by email that goes directly from your autoresponder to their inbox.  This is how you send them information about your product, about any specials that you may have, or an introduction to another similar type of product that may be a good add on to what they already have.  This works for both informational product as well as physical.

An example of this is the ABC’s of Blogging banner ad at the top of this page.  When you click that on you are taken to a long sales letter at the end of which you are invited to submit your name and email address and for that you will receive the link to a free PDF download of my e.book ABC’s of Blogging for Money.  Many marketers publish a newsletter and offer a free subscription – you may have seen such invites on other blogs.

#4 – VIRTUAL BILLBOARDS

Everything in the virtual world has a twin in the “real” world.  Virtual billboards  are mini sites and they are a full blown ad for the product that you are marketing.  Typically a good affiliate program will already have this type of collateral material ready for you,  and you can just go ahead and drive traffic to that mini-site, but it would be better if you could somehow manage to collect an opt-in before your prospect goes off to buy the product.  Don’t get me wrong, a sale is good but it’s better if in the process you can also add the name of the customer to your own list.  A future post will deal with how you can do this.

In future postings I’ll cover additional ways of growing your list.  As a point of clarification RSS feeds and email via Google does not contribute to your list.  Those are people who just want to know when you have fresh content on your blog or site – the contact information belongs to Google and you do not have access to it.

#5 – EZINE ADS

Look for online publications on your topic, be it a newsletter or an online magazine and place an ad.  This is going to cost money but you are advertising to a qualified target market.  Be sure to get the circulation numbers and other logistics such as the readership percentage and typical click through rate for each ezine broadcast.

These are some of the ways that you can promote your affiliate products.  As with anything it is starting, testing and tweaking.  It is best to start with one method, massage it till it starts to make money, then expand on the same method, when you get real good at it introduce another.  Indeed,  master affiliate marketing and you will be well on your way to living the big awesome on your blog income.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

Expand your thinking and your blog income.  It’s time to think beyond just a blog.  If you have not already incorporated yourself as a business, you will definitely want to do so as your online earnings grow.  I like to see things and thought it would be fun to put up an org chart of what my internet marketing business looks like.  It also gives me a structure, one I can add on to – or make adjustments as needed.  Here is what my org chart looks like:

I’ve put INTERNET MARKETING as the holding company.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT  and BLOGGING  are each an “Internet Marketing” company.

BLOGGING is  the owner of each blog.  Each blog has its own set of affiliates.  Under Blog Income I have listed my affiliates for that blog.  This list will continue to grow as I add other affiliates.  I have a white board in my office and have drawn this chart on it – I see it every day and it gives me a better sense of business – it’s easy to lose sight of that fact when the commute is a scant minute and the dress code doesn’t stop at pajamas.

Just for the fun of it, put up your own org chart.  The good thing is that you can draw one any way you want.  Just imagine what you want your internet marketing business to look like in five years.  The parts that you can flesh out right now are the affiliates.

Select just one affiliate to start with and treat it much the same way that you did your blog.  Experts recommend that you have a domain name for each of your affiliates, or, at the very least, have each of your affiliates as a sub domain.

An example would be:

-  www.AllanasFavoriteAffiliates.com or
-  www.BestAffiliates.com

Both are fictitious.

Then for each affiliate you can have a sub domain without paying for a new one.  Here are some examples:

- www.AllanasFavoriteAffiliates.com/dogtraining
- www.AllanasFavoriteAffiliates.com/rawdogfood
- www.AllanasFovoriteAffiliates.com/puppytreats

Next stop for me is getting unique domain names for my affiliates.  I haven’t decided on how to organize them yet.  For the moment they are just being marketed directly to the vendor’s sales pages.

I’ve mentioned this before but it begs repeating – choose an affiliate that you are familiar with, whose service or product you are personally pleased with.  This is particularly important in the early stages of your affiliate marketing.  Later as you get to know your vendors well and trust them you can forego the third degree before promoting a new product of theirs.

Last week Mike Paetzold talked about  getting quality affiliates and pointed to some that are so obvious that they slipped right under my nose.   He said that the services you are currently using make for a good start – most online services have affiliate programs.  The only “service” I promote is Hostgator by just putting up a banner ad.  I just checked Go Daddy where I buy all my domains, and yes, they have a revenue sharing program as well but I think you really need to be a substantial internet marketer before going that route.

What are your thoughts about where your online business is going?  Do you see yourself  incorporating it into some sort of a legal entity?  How do you envision your chart?  What does it look like today?  In five years?

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Best……………valentina