Master affiliate Marketer Part 1
Introduction
If you currently own a business or are thinking of starting one up, chances are, you are going to need some information about how to get the word out about your product or service. That is when you need to think about marketing and building a marketing strategy. With the World Wide Web being the major source of information sharing and communications in the world, it is natural that you would want to use this as a major focus for building your marketing strategy. That is what this e-book is for; to teach you how to become a major player in the field of business that you choose by taking advantage of the internet and using affiliation as your marketing strategy’s foundation. Of course, before I can show you how to become a master affiliate, I think it would be best to begin with a basic introduction to marketing in general. So in this introduction to becoming a master affiliate, I will give you a basic explanation into marketing because this will help you to better understand how an affiliation can be done with expert precision. Most people are aware of what marketing is, but most do not realize everything that is involved in marketing. Marketing is not a temporary thing. Marketing is more than sales. Marketing is actually an entire process of activities that is used to: 1. Get your potential customer's attention 2. Motivate them to buy 3. Get them to actually buy 4. Get them to keep buying Marketing is how you define your product, promote your product, distribute your product, and to maintain a relationship with your customers. All of this is important
if you want to run a successful business. When you become an affiliate, you are just gaining access to a world of customers instead of just being available for a local customer base. It simply allows you to reach millions of potential customers instead of hundreds. With this kind of potential, is it a wonder that so many people are relying on the web as their marketing hub. In order to get the consumer’s attention, you will need to know who they are and where they are. When you use affiliation, you can cut some of that work in half. When you are an affiliate, a lot of your customers will find you. This is a business feat that is just too good to be true, and if you know what you are doing, the benefits are simply awesome! About Online Marketing Your first interest in any type of marketing campaign is to start developing a marketing strategy that is going to be focused on who you will need to determine your target market is. This is exactly who you think will be your consumers. For starters, you need to know how to break down your consumers. Target market is the group of potential customers that will be selected for the reception of your marketing strategy. It certainly makes it easier to develop your strategy if you know exactly who/how old/where people live when trying to sell things to them. If you are looking to segment the market, you need to determine the different target markets for each segment. For example, if you are selling tires, (which everyone needs) you will need to divide your market by knowing how people shop for tires, and who they are. If you are selling high cost/quality tires, you have to market to a market that is likely to buy them such as middle aged and established consumers as opposed to teens and twenty-something’s who may not be able to afford them. There are different means that are used by professional marketers that help you to find your target audience. You can use both of them that are within your means. Some of these methods include: 1. Researching the market through surveys, interviews, and setting up shop in a mall to see who questions you the most etc. to see who would benefit the most from your product and be most likely to buy. 2. Host experimental sessions for people to try out your product and give their opinions for improvements etc. so that you can ensure that you giving the people what they want or need. 3. Host trial websites that are geared toward finding the market by letting the market come to you. You can best do this by utilizing keyword centered articles that will let you know who is coming toy our website. It really doesn’t matter if you stand on your front porch and just ask people what they want in a product or service like yours or not, as long as you get a good handle on who your market audience is. If you are selling T-shirts, you will likely want to appeal to younger people who are more likely to wear them; which means that you should market your wares to those people. To do this, you will have to begin your strategy where you know you will find them….on the internet. When you are using the internet to market any product or service, you must understand the basics of what internet marketing is. When you are marketing on the internet, you are looking to reach a larger audience and therefore, you need something that will catch their attention and bring them to you. In order to do this, you will have to bring these people to your website. Once you have your website built, you have to work on getting people to visit not just once, but over and over again. You can start this by using your website to do more than just sell stuff. You should always try to host a website that is also informational. It is generally the website’s that offer up to date information as well as sell wares. It is through the information that you establish yourself as a trustworthy authority to your consumers. Doing this establishes trust with your consumers and brings them back again all of the time. Nobody wants to visit a website that is profiling outdated information in a month. It is the up to date website’s that get and keep clients. These are also the website that the search engines find relevant during a query. A nice tip for keeping your information up to date; especially if you are selling a product or service that is rarely updated is to keep a weather program or stock ticker program running on your website because the search engine spiders and robots will view this as new content and still return to your site on a regular basis. If you are running a website that can sell things directly or order services and make payments there etc. you will want to generate as much sales as possible. What this means is that you need to make search engines come to your site for a particular product or service before others. It is because of this need that search engines have to become your best friend, which I will explain what these are below. Search Engine Basics Search engines are computer programs that are used to explore the internet in search of web pages. They do this by using "spiders," "crawlers," or "robots" which are used to search for the most up to date information on any given search request. This may seem like an odd place to introduce you to the search engines, but I can assure that this section is well placed. Giving you the basics here will help you to understand what I am saying in the later sections. Anyways….back to the basics and explanation of search engine spiders. These spiders (like those that are used by Google) are able to follow the links present on web pages that are located by specific keywords. When spiders are searching for a new webpage, they copy all or parts of the text present on the page into their search engine database. Other spiders revisit these pages on a regular basis so that they can register changes or dead links. The wait time varies greatly from search engine to search engine. It is for this reason that your website should stay current. The search engine will have hundreds of millions of web pages in its database. In order to deliver relevant results, the search engine companies have developed special ranking algorithms that calculate the order of search requirement results. The keyword or keyword phrase the visitor enters into the search form of the search engine will determine which web sites get picked up by the query. The pages the search engine find most relevant will be listed first. This will determine where you will be listed upon search requests. For instance, if you are searching for "Beethoven," and the search engine finds a main headline on that page containing the phrase "Ludwig von Beethoven," it will assume that this page is fairly relevant to your needs. If, on the other hand, it finds the phrase only once, and it is buried in a long text, it will ignore it because it will assume that this is not important. That is why so many websites use special keywords more than once in a particular article or webpage, because that is how the spiders pick them up and place them higher in the results of a search. What does this mean to you as a business person? Well…..this means that in order for you to even consider affiliation; you must first have a website. If you want your website to get attention, you have to appeal to search engines first. Many potential affiliates will not want to associate with just anyone prefer a site that gets traffic. Knowing about search engines and how to appeal to them will get you this traffic. I will offer more on traffic in another section later. Right now I would like to get you started with website affiliation because that is what this book is about and I have already given the basics about marketing in general. The Fundamentals of Website Affiliation As you can imagine from the above section that spends a great of time focusing on the basics of internet marketing, you must realize that it was all just an informed lead in to the affiliation, which is the whole reason that we are here. The first thing that you have to think about when getting into the affiliation game is how to go about it. In order to understand this, you will need to know exactly what it is and get basic knowledge about it. Affiliate programs are an excellent way to generate income for your site or someone else’s, and it is a pretty good introduction into ecommerce, however but it's a numbers game. Basically, the more people who visit your site, the greater your chances become for creating a good income, especially if the programs you participate in are related to your site topic. Chances are you have probably come across many commercial sites that claim to offer the best affiliate program. What you will often learn is that this is simply not true. So what exactly is an affiliate program, you might ask? An affiliate program is where a company offers to pay you a certain amount of money for either a click through from your site, or a fixed amount for a lead (where the visitor signs up for a newsletter, etc.) or a percentage of a purchase made by a visitor as a result of a click through. Even if the visitor does not make a purchase on the advertiser’s site right away, most programs will offer “cookie duration” of usually around 30-90 days. What this really means is that as long as the visitor has the cookie in their cache; even if they return to the advertisers site one month later, you will still receive the commission from the sale however, as in all things that are business related, cookie duration is not a guarantee when you sign up for an affiliation program and is something that you need to check for before signing on. Looking for the best affiliate programs The best way to try to explain this to you is to give you some of my personal experiences when looking for an affiliation program. “When I first started searching for and implementing affiliations with various companies; it was one of the largest parts of time wasted during my day when it came to managing my website. I spent a disgusting amount of hours searching for suitable affiliate programs, implementing the links and then keeping track of what they did”. If you are hoping that marketing a website affiliation is going to get you rich quickly, forget about it. You will have to spend a lot of time in your project if you want to make it work for you. Then again, all money making ventures do, just ask Donald Trump.
“Of course, the income that was generated from each program was actually pretty low at that time because at that time the number of visitors to my site was not high either. With this in mind, it was not particularly uncommon for companies to disappear on me without warning me about it and since most affiliate programs only pay out at around the $25 mark, I would lose a lot of revenue in the end. The other part of affiliation that I was not happy with was the idea of another companies banner’s being plastered all over my site, if you place too many of them on any given page it only serves to confuse and irritate your visitors. think about it; how do you like it when you visit a site. Any more than one animated element on a web page can be very distracting which leaves you with nothing gained at all, and many affiliate programs insist upon this type of bargain when signing on. By now, you must realize that I learned a lot just by trial and error. Affiliate tracking can also a problem. After you have successfully applied to become an affiliate for a company, they will usually supply you with some personalized code or link. It is very important that this code is implemented correctly into your page; because otherwise you may be sending the company visitors without being reimbursed. Most snippets of code contain a unique user id; which is used by the company to distinguish which site sent traffic. Even if you do implement this code in the right way, it has been my experience on occasion for it not to function correctly”. Having heard of my experiences, you can see why I would not really recommend that you hunt around and sign up without much research and thought first when finding a good affiliate program. Your time is too valuable and could be better spent creating content and updating your site. But there are some excellent individual companies offering affiliate programs out there. What I have discovered to be very successful is to take advantage of companies like Offers Quest or Google for text link advertising. Text links are a great resource as they are bandwidth friendly, and when they are implemented properly add valuable content to your site which can also assist in search engine rankings. When it comes to website affiliation, you will also need to know how to conduct a market study because this is how you will find your target audience. Without a targeted audience, your marketing campaign will not be effective. Below I have begun to give you an outline of what you should include in your market study. It is best to write it down; especially if you are hoping to entice someone else into investing in your marketing venture. That and it is a good way to keep track of your objective and provides a good guideline of what needs to be done.
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