Every affiliate marketer is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. Sometimes they think it is a magic formula that is readily available for them. Actually, it is more complicated than that. It is just good marketing practices that have been proven over years of hard work and dedication.  You need to find a top affiliate training program.

There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing and is continuing to work in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing online.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buys them.  You need to find a top affiliate training program.  Also include testimonials from users who have already tried the product. Be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.  Top Affiliate Training Program

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Try to create autoresponder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.  You need to find a top affiliate training program.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Just think, if the person who visited your website has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering, they will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports.  You need to find a top affiliate training program.  This way you can locate publications that is focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.  Top Affiliate Training Program

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.

Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or get your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, that means you can made 10 sales based on the average statistic.  You need to find a top affiliate training program.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

Try to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You can end maintaining a good source of income and surviving in this business that not all marketers can do.  You need to find a top affiliate training program.

Besides, think of the huge paychecks you will be receiving…

Top Affiliate Training Program

Source: Marketing

I hate to exercise. I really do. I feel good afterward, and I'm definitely getting in better shape because of it, but I hate it. It's a real chore for me. What do my exercise habits have to do with finding motivation in your business? Hang with me for a bit and it will all make sense. It may even be enlightening.

My son is going to be born in late July, and I knew I'd have to be in better shape to chase him around and prevent him from hurting himself. I know this is going to happen because he's my son, and I was a hand full. That's strong motivation to get in shape, right? Sure it is, but that didn't make it easy.

I'd get on the treadmill bound and determined to walk for 30 minutes, and I'd find myself getting bored out of my mind and irritated with the soreness in my muscles 15 minutes into it. Half the time I would just give up, and the other half was so aggravating that I vowed never to do it again. Of course, my motivation was strong, and so I'd try again the next day.

Then my family and I went to the movies to see The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. I had read the Narnia series of books in the past, and the movie rekindled my interest in the series. So I got the full series of unabridged books for my iPod. But I'm a busy guy, and so I didn't have time to listen to them.

Lightbulb! I had 30 minutes a day of mind-numbing boredom to fill, so I started listening to the series while walking on the treadmill. I love the Narnia stories, and I get so wrapped up in listening to them while walking that I stop staring at the timer wishing it would move faster. In fact, now I often find myself not wanting to get off the treadmill because I'm in the middle of a good part! By coupling something I love to do with something I abhor, it made the task much easier to deal with. I'm very happy with the results in my energy level, as well as being able to listen to the stories I enjoy so much.

Let's face it: a successful business is rarely made up of only tasks that we love to do. There's always some real chores that are absolutely necessary. Why not apply the above lesson to your business-related tasks as well?

If you're working on something that you really don't like to do, break it up so you don't have to do it all at once. Put something in between that you love to do as a reward for your doing the dreaded task. That way you'll have something to look forward to. You'll have the needed motivation.

For instance, let's say you love to write articles, but hate to go through the drudgery of submitting them to the article sites. If that's the case, try writing an article and then immediately submitting it to the article sites, knowing that when you're done you can go write another article. If you wait until you have 20 articles written and then have to submit them all at once, the sheer magnitude of the chore will make it unbearable. But one at a time isn't so bad, is it?

Here's a personal example: I love to write code, but I get a lot less joy out of answering support requests. I have a fantastic support person now (Amin Motin), but there are usually some support requests each day that I need to handle personally. I make it a point to answer those tickets first, knowing that when it's done I can reward myself with what I love to do: write code. That gives me the needed incentive.

You probably do this kind of thing all the time in your daily life. It's just a matter of applying that same "reward yourself" principle to your business.

Here's a personal example of how I do this in day-to-day life: I'm not a fan of vegetables. I'm a meat and potatoes kind of guy. But I also want to be healthy. So I always eat my veggies first. When they're out of the way and I can move on to the slab of steak or fried shrimp that I really love and still feel good about having eaten the healthy stuff.

I'd be much less inclined to eat those awful veggies after having already downed all of those delicious, golden brown stuffed shrimp from PappaDeaux's. There's a reason we teach our children to eat their food before dessert! Not only is the food more nutritious, but who wants to eat veggies after a wonderful slice of apple pie?

The same applies to your business. Get the tasks you consider chores out of the way first, that way you can concentrate on the aspects of your business that you love to do. If the dreaded tasks are very time consuming, then break them up into chunks. For instance, if you find writing a chore, but you love the challenge of link building, then create some content when you first start working and then focus on your link building for a while. After you feel great about your link building efforts, go back to writing for a bit.

Failure to get through the drudgery and then reward yourself with the "fun stuff" can result in deadlock. If you do the fun stuff first, then you've already "had your dessert (or fried shrimp!)" so the mere thought of tackling the other tasks is loathsome and you'll find every excuse possible to put it off until later. Take it a little bit at a time, followed by an enjoyable activity, and you'll be amazed at what you've accomplished at the end of the day.

Please post your thoughts in a comment below.

Source: motivation

Most people who get into business online start off either building web sites for AdSense revenue or being an affiliate of other people’s products. That’s a reasonable way to begin, since there’s less work, less responsibility, and probably most important for people starting out, less risk involved.

But the truth is that there’s simply less earning potential in AdSense sites or being an affiliate when compared to creating and selling your own product online.

There are three major benefits of being a product owner over being the a site publisher or affiliate.

1. More earning ability than affiliate commissions, both initially and after the sale.

As an AdSense publisher, you get paid once when a visitor clicks an ad. As an affiliate, you get paid once when the visitor buys the product you link to. That’s usually where it ends.

As a product owner, you have a lot more opportunities to profit. When a visitor becomes a customer, then you have the most valuable asset any business can have: a customer! It’s ten times easier to sell to a happy customer a second, third and fourth time than to convert a visitor into a customer.

I’ve got customers who’ve told me that they buy my products without even reading the sales page! They buy first and then read over the benefits. “My credit card loves you” was the exact words of a loyal long-time customer of mine.

The obvious financial rewards aside, as a product owner you also have the ability to tweak things about your site to make it convert better – modify headlines, wording in the sales page, incentives, price. As an affiliate you can’t change any of those things about the product you’re trying to sell, even if you have a good idea of what would make the product sell better.

2. Greater growth potential as you recruit affiliates.

As an affiliate or AdSense publisher, you’re limited to your own ability to create growth in your business. It’s usually not cost-effective to have other people do the work for you. For example, you can setup a Pay-Per-Click campaign to sell the products, but you have to pay for every click, which cuts into your profit margin. You can't go out and recruit others to sell the product for you, either.

As an affiliate or publisher you’re usually just a one-man show. As fast as your fingers can type is as fast as you can put up articles or web sites that drive traffic to your affiliate links. There's no way to leverage other people's work.

As a product owner, however, you don’t have these limitations. Beyond sending an email to my list, I do no outside advertising of my products. I know that if I have a good product that it will be found in the PayDotCom or ClickBank marketplace by affiliates eager to sell the product. I know a portion of my my initial customer base will also look into becoming affiliates for the product.

After I create a product I just sit back and let the affiliates do all the work! They run all of the Pay-Per-Click campaigns, they write blog posts and do search engine optimization for their web sites and Squidoo pages, they write articles and reviews and submit them to directories. I don’t have to do any real promotional work at all. In my mind that makes it a lot easier to be a product owner than an affiliate.

Let me give you an example of how much traffic affiliates can drive to your site. For just one of my products, Instant Article Wizard, I had more than 42,000 unique visitors in June of 2008. Of that 42,000, only about 2,500 came from search engines. The rest came from the work done by my affiliates. Searching for the phrase “instant article wizard” in Google returns about 118,000 results – of which only half a dozen or so belong to me.

Do you have any idea what it would cost to drive that kind of traffic with AdWords? Even at only 50 cents a click that’s $21,000 for one month’s worth of traffic! The reality is that you probably couldn't find enough keywords to get that kind of traffic out of PPC, not without paying huge per-click prices.

Even at 50% commission, affiliates are by far the cheapest form of advertising for the volume of traffic you can get from them.

3. The money is in the list.

The third major benefit of being a product owner is that even if the visitor does not buy immediately, you have the chance to get them onto you mailing list with the offer of a free gift or some specialized information. Afterward you can follow up with more teaching and coaching until they reach the point of trust where they’re ready to buy.

As an affiliate, it’s usually a now-or-never deal. Either they convert and make you a few dollars right now, or they’re lost forever. You don’t suffer from this shortcoming as a product owner. You can grow your list and teach them and win their trust over weeks or months, and in time they will help build your bottom line by becoming a customer.

As an example: I have a core set of about 5,000 people on my 50,000+ email list that are my real buyers. They’re the folks who read every email I send, leave comments on my blog posts, and have bought at least some of my products. Every so often a “lurker” on my list – a person who, up until now, has only been feeding off of the information I give out – has enough trust in me to become a member of my core list.

It takes time to build someone up to that point of trust, and affiliates don’t have the luxury of that time. Only product owners do.

So why isn't every one a vendor?

If being a product owner is so great, why isn't everybody a product owner? Because there's more risk in putting time, money and effort into creating a product. If it doesn't take off, you're left holding the bill. As an affiliate, if your efforts don't pay off, you're still holding the bill, it's just usually a lot smaller bill.

Being an affiliate also means less responsibility: no customer support, no follow-ups. You make a few dollars and you go on your merry way.

I think it's a good idea to start off as an affiliate, but you'll hit a ceiling where you won't be able to go any further. When you hit that ceiling, it's time to move on to becoming a product owner.

Please leave your thoughts and questions in a comment below.

Source: info product creation

Adwords or Overture which is better? The result may surprise you.

Overture is Yahoo’s equivalent AD display and back end management system.
In truth, Overture was a search engine in of itself at one time. Some users may still remember it as go.com

Amongst online marketers ad agencies and others, there is this oft repeated question, “which is better ?…”
Google’s Adword or Yahoo’s Overture ad management system.

Well there is no doubt that at the moment, Google’s management system is significantly better despite Yahoo having had just as much time to get their system up and sparkling.

Significantly better… but what does this mean and if i said, significantly better, I would expect a few of you out there to say, significantly better for what and for whom.

Ahh, now we are getting down to the crux of the matter.

For straight up analysis and backend reporting, I doubt that i will get flamed ( much…) for repeating what many technical adcopy and ad agencies already know. The Google backend system is tops. In the sincerest form of flattery, it is the de facto standard and everyone and their brother who runs a search engine and is selling traffic is either attempting to emulate, reverse engineer it or using it as their benchmark in terms of the feature set and analytical tools.

So, does this mean its very, very good - this backend management system?

Well that’s an opinion and not easy to answer definitively. Google’s adwords management has benefited from an incredible amount of usage and finetuning. Google’s internal usability testing also appears to be significantly better than that of most other fortune 50 web companies. So the ad management backend has become the system to beat as a benchmark and has stayed that way for quite some time.

Many long time users who are pay per click specialists could give you a quarter dozen very valid ways of improving the Google Adword system, so it’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is well thought out and quite the formidable 600 pound gorilla in this arena

I digress here, but if your company sells an instant gratification product and you knew for a fact, that you rarely if ever received sales between 3pm and 7:30pm on the third Wednesday of every month, perhaps you might turn off your advertising during that time or at the least tune it down significantly. Why, then is it that Google only recently allowed you to see this, and why is it that you still need to do a highly customized report to even easily see this type of trend.

Ahhh, well, some might say, its because the search engines really did not want you to know this level of detail …

All this “shadow confusion” did, was to give room to 3rd party groups like Atlas to build a better mousetrap, ha ha.

But, does the fact, that the google adword system in general have the upper hand over Yahoo’s overture system mean that Acme’s widgets should use this in preference to Yahoo?

Most Pay per click specialists would wisely tell you as a customer.

Test them both, because experience has shown us that its a different set of customers ( demographically ) who use google vs. yahoo.

I have visited this topic once before in this blog and my results then showed that some decision makers appear to inhabit the Overture spectrum and thus several of my customers who were B2B ( Business to business ) had conversion rates on Yahoo that were more than 250% better than Google.

In contrast, a particular customer who ran limousine services seem to do so well from google that there was no persuading this guy to spend one single penny on Yahoo.

In truth, unbeknown to this customer, I tried just to see what might happen and it flopped. Overture would not convert well for this type of business.

So, the answer to this question, is still not black and white.

So, today, you’re about to say, hey buddy since you haven’t given us any really new information why bother waste our time.

Well, I am here to tell you that from November 2007 thru to June 2008, many of my Overture Results have outgunned, outrun, outmanned, outmaneuvered my google adwords by a factor of 1-300%.

After scratching my head for a while and digging around in my campaigns to find out what had gone ( wrong ) or right, i came to the conclusion that a significant number of advertisers bidding on the overture terms had simply gone away, leaving bidding at an all-time low for many of these terms.

So, where had my bidding buddies gone? Well, over to Google of course - i think, hey well i didnt go over there and really check… but what i know is that they are simply NOT in overture!

Check out the Google vs. Yahoo financials over the last quarter and see if that doesn’t bear out my theory.

Google has done such a fine job of branding that every Tom, Dick & Harry ( Apologies to Tom and Dick and Harry ) thinks that they absolutely have to be on Google.

Well, my boss says we have to be on those google ad thingies to get the first position so that’s why i am gonna do…

Well, it could also be that too many of us are tired of using the rather anemic yahoo ad management interface… and it could also be that if any of you were running ads last year this time, you would know that ads promoting retail products did extremely well while b2b business offers going into the XMas season did quite pathetically for many of us.

It could be all of these reasons, a combination or perhaps none at all, but if you are currently running overture ads and google ads, go and check your own results. Depending on the industry that you are in, you may be in for a pleasant surprise.

As of February 2008, I would certainly review moving a significant portion of my B2B advertising back to Overture simply because it appears as if the sheep have done the opposite.

And for the uninitiated, you never want to get into a bidding war with the sheep. So, the less bidders ( sheep or otherwise ) the better the chance of getting a reasonable or outright low bid for your very valuable keywords.

Btw, sheep always think that they need to be in the number position. Or sometimes its the sheep’s BOSS who thinks so, but in any case, you never want to get into a bidding war with the sheep, it just too rarely ever pays.

So, Overture/Yahoo has finally put a better management system into place and things are hopefully… looking a little better for both Yahoo and their ad customers.

As an update it appears that after Yahoo and Microsoft fell out of love, Yahoo has made a deal with Google that will give Yahoo another 450Million annually in advertising Revenue and hands Google 80% of the ad market online.

Since the users of both systems will not necessarily migrate from one system to the other, what I wrote above still holds true.

Adios.

Comments on Google vs Yahoo on Flash and seo.

I saw the following in my email, and thought that the writer below had some good thoughts on pay per click advertising. But on reading further it was obvious that some parts of what was being discussed was misleading and fairly opinionated ( read non-factual ) . The author was saying that Google’s search bot has no ability to read or decipher a site made entirely in flash. Thus concluding that one should never build sites with flash. While there was some truth in that statement before, it is not true at all, and one needs to be careful about saying never, especially when it comes to Google and technology.

Using flash judiciously along with rich text formatting is in truth the methodology best suited to building sites that will be appealing to both search engines and users.

The part of the post that i take great exception to is where our friend attempts to categorize Google and Yahoo. He says that Google is business to business while Yahoo is mostly for consumers. My own adwords and Overture campaigns campaigns say that this **fact** depends on the sector being discussed.

In general, I have said before that Google’s popularity can work against it.

People use Google to research everything. Those researchers who have very little intention to buy or subscribe to products will click on the paid ads at the top and the right side of the screen. This click action is particularly prevalent for the number 1 thru 3 pay for click listings.

So, Click, click, Click - Kaching in the Google bank account. Even competitors will occasionally click, click, click to research what their market sector is doing and to intentionally run up the bill, particularly when the click is a 3-10 dollar click as the first position in a highly competitive area can be.

So, lets look at Yahoo. How does the googling help your Yahoo ad results.
Well, it stands to reason that if more research is done on google, that less research is done on Yahoo, right? Perhaps, but that statement neither defines nor truly aids in the resolution of the problem.

Studies ( yep with real stats ) using real money on the same ads in both google and yahoo have shown that people interested in the same market segments, when using both engines, appeared to respond differently when searching for the same item. For B2B ( Business to business ) we frequently saw less research and more action occurring in our yahoo ads resulting in consistent $35 conversions in Yahoo vs $54 in Google after all the tuning could be done - 2007. Note this was before Yahoo’s latest set of changes which allow even more tuning.

So, our opinions, on this, differ strongly from that of the author who wrote the text below ( More pointers for a good search engine listing ).

While none of us may be entirely correct, ad campaigns run on both search engines do seem to consistently show that the sectors that do well on Yahoo or Google consistently outperform on the particular search engine platform that they do well on. Demographics of the searching audience, increased competition on Google driving the adword pricing up? Perhaps a combination of these and more.

So for limousines and taxi services my Google ads outgun Overture consistently while many of my business to business ad-campaigns on Overture outperformed my similar Google ads by a margin which has to be seen to be believed.

Below is the email that i received a little while back.

More pointers for a good search engine listing

Worse, website designers are still building sites with Flash. Flash is great. Flash is startling. It looks terrific as all those images come cascading in a blizzard of light, shade and colour. The only problem is - guess what? - the robots can’t figure it out. They are puzzled, bemused, unable to grasp what is going on. The result is that they go somewhere else, probably to a site where the designer has laid everything out on a simple plate for them.

Until the search engine programmers figure out a way to write algorithms that understand Flash presentations, the simple, no-nonsense, text-based sites will continue to win hands down. And by that I mean they will continue to win good listings. Which is the object of the exercise.

To be fair, however, the great majority of web designers have no abiding interest in search engine optimization. They figure that their job is to build a site that is both attractive and interesting. It is therefore up to the site owner to lay down a few rules when commissioning a build - no Frames, no animated gifs and, above all no Flash.

Is Google really the greatest?

And finally, folks, a word about the search engines themselves.

Everybody wants to get a good listing on Google. To them, Google is the be all and end all and that there really is nowhere else to be. What they tend to overlook is that the so-called lesser engines are equally good at pulling business if they are fed properly.

I have a client who receives 80% of his Internet business (which is substantial) via Yahoo, on which he is No 1 for all four of his search terms. Google does very little for him. Why should that be? It’s because, when you get down to it, Yahoo is a consumer-oriented engine and Google is predominantly a commercial or business-to-business engine. And his business is geared to the consumer market.

I know that many seo elitists will take issue with me about the efficacy of this statement. So be it. But I will get my retaliation in first by saying that (a) their argument will have to be damn good to convince me and (b), I don’t really care what they say.

My own comment on this is that, its very difficult for the average user to discern what is real and not real when there are so many passionate half correct seo consultants publishing information that appears correct.

For the longest time a desperate customer could get an unethical seo person to literally spam (via blackhat techniques ) yahoo and get away with it. Though yahoo might disagree with me, at this time 2008, I think its still possible to spam yahoo and msn and to a large degree, get away with it. Doing the same with Google requires more work. Enough work that, one might as well just do it the right way.