Take from this what you will. I’m not recommending you do what I’m about to describe, nor am I saying you shouldn’t do it, either.
Okay, here we go:
From time to time I get emails from someone (Not in the IM niche) with subject lines that look like this:
Re: Ticket # 73652430
Then in the email he goes on to explain that this ‘ticket’ is my discount on a certain product of his. Sometimes the discount is half price, sometimes it’s like 95% off.
Obviously, he’s making the email look like the reply to a support ticket. And yes, it gets my attention. In fact, Google sometimes even flags these emails as being important in my inbox, which is kind of rare for me.
He only uses this headline now and then, because if he did it all the time it wouldn’t work. Or at least, I don’t think it would, since I haven’t tested it.
As I always say, don’t take my word for it and test everything.
It might be worth noting that this guy seldom promotes anything that isn’t his own products.
Anyway, I wouldn’t even be telling you about this subject line except for one thing: I buy stuff from this guy’s emails. So yes, his emails are working, including these quasi-bogus ‘ticket’ emails.
Like I said, take from this what you will. While I don’t necessarily support it, I will bet you that his open rates and conversions on these ‘ticket’ emails are high, or he wouldn’t keep doing it.
If you want people to read your work, then never forget these 7 words:
Your blog is not your personal journal.
If you want to journal online, go for it. Just don’t expect that your journal is going to resonate with your audience.
When you make the mistake of making your writing all about you, nobody but you will care.
Yes, stories are great. They’re awesome and if told well, they rock. Yes, you need to share your personality with your reader.
But never forget – you are in competition with every other website on the internet. That includes apps, movies and porn.
Write for your audience. Write TO your audience. Be authentic, unique and sincere.
And always, ALWAYS do at least one of the following:
1: Entertain your audience.
People love to be entertained and they hate to be bored. Make them laugh and make them cry. If you were a stranger reading your writing, would YOU be entertained?
2: Educate your audience.
There’s a reason why “how to” posts are popular. If you can show someone how to get the result they seek, they’ll pay attention. Share what you’ve learned through personal experience and help people to better understand themselves and how to navigate their path.
3: Inspire your audience.
People want hope and change. They want to be inspired, to be lifted up and to see what they can become. Inspiration can be the spark that causes people to do the work to make the change they seek in their lives.
Can you do all three of these at once?
Then your writing will be amazing – and people will read it, share it and come back for more.
First, view your sales page, your opt-in box or anything where you are trying to get a conversion.
What is the dominant color on that page?
Whatever it is, choose a CONTRASTING color for your button to increase conversions.
For example, if your sales page is predominately white and green, choose red for your “Add to Cart” button.
If your opt in box is predominately white and blue, choose orange for your “Send My Free Report” button.
The more you can contrast your call to action buttons with the rest of the page, the higher your conversions will tend to be.
Make your buttons stand out as much as a pink elephant in your kitchen.
Test after test shows this is the way to higher conversions, but then again only one test counts: The test you perform on your own site.
The Power of a Great YouTube Channel Name
Make of this what you will:
While watching a John Oliver “Last Week Tonight” video, I noticed a comment from a user named, “1,000,000 subscribers without any videos challenge.”
Intrigued, I clicked on the name and found an empty channel without a single video. But they do have 3.9K subscribers as of this writing.
Here’s his progress thus far:
50 – 9/5/2019
100 – 9/8/2019
150 – 9/12/2019
250 – 9/18/2019
500 – 10/19/2019
750 – 10/21/2019
1,000 – 10/29/2019
2,500 – 12/06/2019
5,000 –
Two things to note about this achievement:
1: I’m guessing he’s gotten nearly all of his subscribers from comments he’s left on other people’s videos
2: The reason he’s gotten those subscribers is 100% because of his name.
How can you use this information to increase your YouTube subscriber base?
If Your First Language Isn’t English…
…but your target market’s language is English, be sure to get a native English speaker to check your content prior to posting.
Of course, this is true for all languages, not just English.
A recent reminder of the importance of having a native speaker check your work comes from a site I recently visited. The newsletter sign-up box had the following copy:
Unlimited geek help
Leave us handle all the hard work when it comes to set your online business and marketing stack
Give us some more extra info about you by signing-up with Facebook and we re compensate you back.
English is hard.
But losing potential customers because of silly little errors like these is even worse.
Put Yourself in a Unique Position
“When you solve problems and satisfy needs, you put yourself in a unique position. You’re doing something for the customer that he isn’t used to getting from others. The others are simply going along, taking orders, doing what they’re asked to do. They aren’t looking for ways to be of greater value, so they don’t enjoy greater income and opportunities.”
— Harry Browne, How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World
Forget the Passion Mindset
“If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (‘what can the world offer me?’) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (‘what can I offer the world?’)”
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Don’t Spend a Second on These
“No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won’t care. Stick with the people who love you and don’t spend a single second on the rest. Life will be better that way.”
― James Altucher, Choose Yourself
Don’t Wait Until You Feel Motivated
“Who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like’ doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn’t that you don’t feel motivated; it’s that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you’re procrastinating on as passing weather, you’ll realize that your reluctance about working isn’t something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.” -Oliver Burkeman
Do Silly Names Sell Products?
Way back in the day (which is another way to say I don’t know when this happened, but it was at least 10 years ago) an online marketer recorded a bunch of videos to sell as a product.
The product had something to do with online marketing, but I don’t remember the topic. I also don’t remember who the marketer was, although at the time I think he was pretty well-known.
What I do remember is that while he was recording, a dog in the background kept barking.
And thus, rather than go with a standard name for his product like the, “Get More Traffic!” product or the “Make Tons of $$ with Social Media” product, he called his video set…
“The Barking Dog Videos.”
My point here is simple: After all this time, I STILL remember that name because it was different from everything else out there at the time (or perhaps since, too.)
He could have rerecorded the videos to make them more “professional,” but if he had, I suspect his sales wouldn’t have been as good.
Not only did he have a catchy, memorable name – he also had a STORY that his affiliates could tell in just a few words.
In a nutshell: “Great product, silly name because of a crazy barking dog, check it out.”
I remember a tourist type of place with a huge gift shop and restaurant on a main road on the outskirts of town. I drove by it all the time, and regardless of what time of day it was, the place was PACKED with people.
The name of the place? “The World’s Worst Restaurant.” People stopped just to be able to say they ate at the world’s worst restaurant and shopped at the world’s worst gift shop. You know that when they got home from their vacation, they told their friends about the place.
Would they have told others if it was called the Magnolia Café? I don’t think so. In fact, they probably would have forgotten all about it after a week or two.
We might want to be “professionals,” but the fact is that being different, strange, weird and even fallible will sometimes win out over everything else.
Create great products with just a little bit of built-in gimmicks or craziness and see what happens.
Within the Flow – They say you can get your business name in just 3 seconds. (You might want to take a little longer than that, but hey, who knows? Your first attempt might also be the best. https://www.withintheflow.com/business-name-generator/
Namelix – Generate a short, brandable business name using artificial intelligence. https://namelix.com/
Panabee – Search for domain names, app names and company names. Red broken hearts mean the name is not available and full blue hearts can be yours. https://www.panabee.com/
Embrace Insecurity
“True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity – in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.” – Oliver Burkeman
Dwell time is the metric that runs through various search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s the time people spend reading those results pages before they go back to Google to take a look at other results. And it might be more important than we thought.
Thanks to apps like TikTok and Snapchat, Instagram’s growth rate has dropped and Pinterest has taken its place as the third largest social media app in the U.S.
Debate flares up over the ownership of ‘.org’ domains
Do you own a .org domain name?
Ethos Capital, a private equity firm, announced that it plans to buy the rights to the cyber neighborhood that is home to big nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations like the United Nations (un.org) and NPR (npr.org), and to little ones like neighborhood clubs.
The deal has been met with a fierce backlash, with good reason.
What Google’s plan for a cookie-free Chrome means for marketers
Google’s Justin Schuh, director of Chrome engineering, recently released a blog post stating that Google Chrome intends to kill off third-party cookies by 2020.
This proposed change introduces friction for advertisers and marketers who continue to rely (for better or worse) on third-party cookie tracking to display relevant ads to users.
Google Updates adds Favicon to Desktop Search Results
Google has been displaying favicons in mobile search results for several months, and now these website icons have been added to desktop and laptop displays as well. Here Google lays out exactly how you can choose what favicon will appear next to your search result.
CCPA, or the California Consumer Privacy Act, is the latest legislation focused on improving how online users can control the data businesses obtain from them, and how those businesses are able to utilize it.
The new law requires updates to your business disclosures, including letting consumers know about the existence of the law, their specific rights in regards to their data, as well as enabling users to obtain copies of, or order the deletion of, their personal information from any business.
Email is still a force to be reckoned with in 2020. Although there are new kids on the block like social media and PPC, email is still as relevant and powerful as ever.
Here is what you are looking at in terms of ROI across the digital landscape:
Email – 59%
Social Media – 21%
Display Ads – 14%
Video – 5%
As you can see, email provides the highest ROI.
The next time someone tells you that email marketing is dead, show them these 141 email marketing stats:
What should marketers be doing about Google’s BERT update?
BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is Google’s most recent algorithmic update to how it processes queries and curates page results. Instead of just using keyword matching, BERT will seek to understand the meaning behind sentences, paragraphs, and the entire article on a page.
Spotify introduces game-changing ad technology for podcasts
Spotify announced a new approach to its podcast marketing technology. The proprietary “streaming ad insertion” (SAI) allows Spotify’s sponsors to deliver targeted ads to podcast listeners through the use of real-time data analysis.
Resources for Collecting and Sending Emails for Free
Are you on a budget? Begin growing your email list with one of these:
Contact form 7: WordPress plugin to collect email addresses
Hello Bar: Displays a bar across the top of the page to get more email subscribers
Mailchimp: You can send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free
ManyContactsBar: Free contact form sits on top of your website
Moosend: You can send unlimited Emails to 1,000 subscribers for free
Scroll Triggered Box: This WordPress plugin has consistently increased conversion rates by several times. Be sure to test this one prior to use, as it may not be compatible with all WP sites.
Sumome List Builder: Create professional-looking pop-ups that appear on clicks, timers and before people leave
Sumome Scroll Box: A polite way to ask your visitors for their email address as they finish reading your latest blog post or product page
Click To Tweet: This plugin allows you to easily create tweetable content for your readers right from WordPress. Make it easy to share your content on Twitter, and grow your traffic. https://clicktotweet.com/
Later: Visually plan, schedule and analyze posts for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. https://later.com/
Crowdfire: Follow / unfollow people on Twitter & Instagram. Automatically discover articles and images your audience will love, so you can share them to all your social profiles and keep your timelines buzzing. https://crowdfireapp.com
SocialRank: Identify, organize, and manage your audience on social media. https://socialrank.com/
Ritetag App: When you share a URL in a social post, forum or email, etc., you get a way to retain your connection with your audience. You can display a text, image or video ad on top of the page that opens when people click that URL. You can entice people to follow you here or there, get newsletter signups, launch a startup or even sell something. https://ritetag.com/
Buffer Free Plan: Craft the perfect post for each social network, all in one place. Plan and publish your content for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, all from one simple dashboard. https://buffer.com/pricing/publish
Addthis: Simple share buttons and a full suite of website tools like list builder, link promotion, and recommended posts, all for free. Get more shares, follows and conversions. https://www.addthis.com/
Sumo Share: Makes it super easy for your visitors to share your content to their friends, family and others with built-in social media buttons on your site. https://sumo.com/app/share
Disqus: The internet’s favorite comment plug-in makes it easy for publishers to bring their content to life, fuel colorful discussions, efficiently moderate comments, and build engaged communities. https://disqus.com/
Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to a selection of introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University.
Browse free online courses in a variety of subjects. Harvard University courses found below can be audited free or students can choose to receive a verified certificate for a small fee.
You’ve probably been hearing the name “PerkZilla” floating around a lot lately. And if you haven’t, just wait – it will make it into your circles and social media networks soon. Everyone’s talking about it, because it’s the most exciting viral rewards platform to come down the pike in a long time.
Simply put: people are loving their traffic, they’re loving their new subscribers and they’re loving all their new sales.
But is PerkZilla right for you? That’s what you’ll find out inside this review. Take a look…
What is PerkZilla?
First things first – just what is PerkZilla?
In a nutshell, it’s a viral rewards platform that lets you give gifts such as products, coupons, contest entries and other rewards to your visitors in exchange for them referring their friends to your website.
That means that one visitor might tell three friends, who tells three more friends, who tells three more friends… and so on. That means that one visitor can turn into dozens of visitors. It’s an incredibly powerful way to get more traffic to your web pages, content and offers!
I’ve been on the inside of PerkZilla, have put it through its paces, and have set up multiple campaigns. So, let me tell you the pros and cons of this platform…
What Are PerkZilla’s Best Features?
There are a lot of really good reasons to fall in love with PerkZilla. Here are the highlights…
PerkZilla is a Hands-Free Way to Drive Traffic
The biggest benefit is that this is a traffic generation method that works completely on autopilot. You set it up once, and your traffic grows on its own! You don’t need to spend hours monitoring your campaigns, and you don’t need to spend any money placing ads. Just tell your existing network and visitors about your content, and they’ll tell all their friends!
It’s Easy to Use
Simon Hodgkinson and Jeremy Gislason built this platform for their own use, to make it easy for them to get more viral traffic without having to do things manually. They built this platform so that anyone can use it on ANY device.
Here’s why it’s so easy to use:
• No downloading or installation required. This is a web-based app, so all you have to do is log into your dashboard to get started.
• No tech experience required. Setting up a viral campaign is as easy as clicking your mouse. The app gives you a bit of code, which you need to paste into your website. It’s easy!
• The dashboard is very user-friendly. The links and features are all intuitively labeled, so you can get your campaigns up and running fast. But if you get stuck, there’s also step-by-step documentation and videos available in the very thorough help section.
• It works on any platform. Whether your users are using phones, tablets or desktops, the links and forms are tested and proven to work across devices and browsers.
Next strength…
PerkZilla is Very Flexible
You’re in complete control when it comes to PerkZilla. Here are some of the factors where you have control:
• You choose how many reward levels to offer. You can offer one reward level, or you can set up multiple levels to encourage even more sharing. Ideally, each level up would offer better rewards.
• You choose the rewards. These could be products (such as ebooks, videos, apps, or memberships), contest entries, discount coupons, or anything else that you can easily deliver by email.
• You can customize most everything. This includes your opt-in forms, emails and more. However, PerkZilla also comes pre-loaded with default settings and pre-written emails, which makes it quick and easy to set up your campaign.
• You can use PerkZilla to promote a wide variety of content and pages. This includes lead pages, sales pages, contests, blog posts, videos, webinar registration pages and more!
Sounds good, right? This platform is easy to use and is proven to drive viral traffic to your contests, lead pages, sales pages, blog content and more. The better rewards you offer, the more traffic you’ll get!
What Are PerkZilla’s Downsides?
No product is perfect, but PerkZilla comes pretty darn close. That’s because it comes with only the features you want and none of the ones you don’t, which keeps it clean, lean and very powerful.
However, there is one downside to PerkZilla…
At the time of writing, you can’t use this platform to promote other peoples’ content (such as your affiliate links), UNLESS you work directly with the person who owns the website. That’s because you need to paste a little snippet of code into the page to make it work.
This isn’t a failing of PerkZilla itself so much as a practical limitation. While certain technologies such as iFrames may work, they’re not very practical for this particular application.
Of course, there is a way around this. If you want to promote an affiliate link, then set up a pre-sell page, and have your visitors refer their friends to THAT page. That way, you still get the viral traffic. You still get to build your list. And you still get to promote your affiliate offer. Only difference is that you don’t need to bother the vendor and have them creating special pages for you and pasting code into it.
Our Verdict?
If you can’t tell by now, we’re REALLY excited about PerkZilla. And that’s why we highly recommend it.
Listen, there are a few competing platforms out there. But there are multiple problems with them. Namely:
1. The competing platforms aren’t flexible enough to handle multiple campaigns. For example, some of these platforms ONLY handle contests. Others only handle giveaways. PerkZilla is different because you can promote any of your web pages, products, contests or content!
2. Some of these platforms force users to utilize their templates. You have nowhere near the power and customizability with these other platforms as you do with PerkZilla. Some of them even force you to use certain social media sites. PerkZilla gives you full control to let your users promote their links however they want.
3. Some of the competing platforms are bloated and confusing. There is a big learning curve, which often results in users simply giving up and abandoning the platform.
PerkZilla overcomes all these problems, as it’s user-friendly, flexible, fully customizable and very powerful.
From now on, it’s my #1 choice in viral rewards platforms. I know it will be yours too once you see what all PerkZilla can do. So, check it out right now at click here – and do it now, because a load of viral traffic awaits you!
You Need to Start With The Right Tools to Be Successful with PLR
If you want to be successful with PLR, then it can be a good idea to invest a little in your business. One of the best ways you can do that is by investing in your hardware and software. By upgrading your capabilities, you will improve your ability to make your own edits to improve upon the original products or just to make them a little better suited to your specific branding (whatever that may be!).
So, what kind of tools can you make use of as a PLR reseller? Here are some of the most useful…
Image Editing and Word Processing
Perhaps the most basic place to start is with word processing software. If you are going to make edits to the actual content rather than just the cover, then you will need a piece of software that allows you to open and edit the documents that your content is made up of.
Most of your PLR products will come in .doc or .docx format. This is of course the Microsoft Word format and thus downloading MS Office could be a good place to start. With that said though, you could find you are able to use other products, such as Open Office or Google Docs.
While MS Office is particularly feature-rich and very much an industry standard tool, it unfortunately also costs a recurring monthly fee. Open Office does essentially the same things but is free. You might find a couple of compatibility issues but overall, it should be smooth sailing.
Another free option is Google Docs. Google Docs is a cloud service that began life as Google Drive – a cloud storage solution – but grew to include its own tools such as a spreadsheet tool (Google Sheets), Word Processor (Google Docs) and more. This is excellent for collaboration, as it allows you to make changes that will instantly be available to anyone else with access to the Google Drive folder. Moreover, you can make comments and annotations for others to see.
This is less convenient for editing PLR content, however, as you’ll probably have the document on your computer, and you’ll likely find this brings up even more compatibility issues than something like Open Office. This is not a bad solution but if you plan on doing this a lot, then MS Word is a worthwhile investment. MS Word will allow you to create headings and titles and to auto generate a table of contents from this.
It will also let you do other impressive things, such as adding watermarks or page numbers. While other tools might do the same, they will possibly go about it in an alternate way to the original creator, thereby creating more work for you! As for redesigning your covers or creating images for inside the book, this will probably benefit from Photoshop.
Most of the covers that you get with your PLR content will also be available in editable Photoshop file format. This will allow you to do things like editing individual layers: for instance, you can alter text that is hovering on top of a background image, or you can alter just the background image and leave the text as it is. The only problem with this, is that Photoshop is a rather expensive product.
In order to gain access to it, you will need to sign up for the Adobe Creative Cloud and you can choose to give yourself access to the full suite of apps that come with that, or just the few tools that you actually need (though this will limit you to two). There is a free one-month trial that you can use. This will allow you to edit the cover of one PLR cover, but of course that’s not going to be especially convenient if you want to do this on a regular basis and you have lots of books you need to edit!
An alternative is once again to use free software. A good example of this is GIMP, which can do nearly everything that Photoshop can do and is completely free of charge. Again, the issue here is compatibility and there is no guarantee that GIMP will be able to work with all the files you get – this will depend on how the creator decided to work! That said, if you only have access to a PNG or a JPG, you can still do a lot with GIMP or Photoshop.
You’ll still be able to airbrush, or to apply effects and filters. And if the book designer has been smart, then they will have placed the title against a plain colored background which you can edit without needing to work with layers.
Again, this is all at the discretion of the creator and something you need to consider when choosing which PLR product is right for you. This is where I get my PLR products.
However, if you want to make logos or images, then there might be a little more reason to invest in the Creative Cloud and that is so that you can get Illustrator. Illustrator is the software that is considered the industry standard for making logos and other professional designs. The reason for this is that it creates ‘vector files’. Vector files are files that allow you to move, bend and delete the individual lines that make up your image – as well as to resize them.
That means they can be resized endlessly with no loss of quality which means that once more, they can be edited in a way that appears seamless. It is down to you to decide how much editing you want to do and what kinds of books you’ll be reselling!
Web Services
There is no requirement for you to make any edits and if you prefer, you can sell your product just as it is!
But what you will need to do, no matter what business model you choose to pursue, is to set up a website/page from which you can start selling your product. You might already have this, in which case some of these suggestions won’t be relevant. I use this site to create all my online sites.
But for everyone else, the following will be absolutely required…
Web Hosting
Web hosting means somewhere for you to store the files that make up your website online. We recommend HostGator or CoolHandle (www.coolhandle.com), both of which will provide a lot of extra features and benefits on top of basic hosting – including a range of tools to help you manage emails, upload and download files, edit files on the fly, improve your security or even install WordPress with a single click.
You can purchase one of the more basic packages, as this will give you enough space to store the files you need as well as enough bandwidth to handle the volume of traffic (unless your product turns out to be the next Pokemon Go, in which case you can always go ahead and upgrade your account.
As well as the space to store your files, you’ll also need a domain name, which of course is the address that people will type into their URL bar when they want to find you. You can get this through your hosting provider, or through NameCheap (www.namecheap.com) or GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com).
Finally, to help with transferring files, an FTP software like FileZilla (https://filezilla-project.org) can be a very useful tool indeed. This will allow you to upload files to your hosting account without having to do so through your browser. It’s also handy for making backups or fixing issues when things go wrong with your WordPress files.
Building Your Sales Page
You’ll also want a payment processor, which will allow you to create your own ‘buy now’ button. This is important – if you don’t replace the buy now button, then you may just be making money for the person that sold you the product! This will be tied to your own account and that way, you can withdraw the cash into your own bank. PayPal (www.paypal.com) or Stripe (www.stripe.com) are good choices.
Depending on the type of package you have purchased, you might find that your product comes with ready-made files to run the website. In this case, you can simply swap out the ‘Buy Now’ button and any of the text that you want to change and then just upload all the files to your domain. On the other hand, you might just have been given the text and in that case, you will need to create the actual HTML page that this text is going to go on.
To do this, you might want to install WordPress, which you can do through your hosting provider or through WordPress.com (www.wordpress.com). From here, you may wish to install a theme like Optimize Press (www.optimizepress.com), which will automatically transform your site into the perfect size and shape to be a sales page! You can also use something like Infusion soft, (www.infusionsoft.com), which combines an autoresponder with a sales page and a ‘buy now’ button all in one!
You can also sell through a Project Management System such as JVZoo (www.jvzoo.com) or ClickBank (www.clickbank.com). By the way, these also happen to be affiliate marketing networks, meaning that you can use them in order to sell products via affiliates. An affiliate is of course a marketer that will get commission whenever they sell your product. This means you can have more people helping to drive traffic to your PLR product so that you don’t even need to do the marketing legwork!
Autoresponder
Finally, you might want an autoresponder. This is a piece of software that you use to build mailing lists. This allows you to collect the emails of people who think they might be interested in buying your products and then to send them messages to encourage them to come back and buy. It lets you build trust and it lets you establish yourself as an authority.
The purpose of the autoresponder is to allow you to keep all your contacts managed in one place and to handle things such as new subscribers or people choosing to leave the list without you having to do everything manually. Good options include GetResponse , AWeber (www.aweber.com) and MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com) I personally use GetResponse as it’s a very reliable service and is inexpensive. It also allows unlimited subscribers and campaigns for a low monthly price.
YouTube: The Forgotten Marketing Powerhouse
When you start learning about internet marketing, you’ll find that there are a lot of different subjects for you to tackle. These include the likes of SEO, of social media marketing, of writing press releases and more. You’ll have to learn about autoresponders and email marketing, about how affiliate marketing and about link building.
But something that often gets overlooked is video creation. This is strange, bearing in mind that video can have an incredibly profound impact on your brand’s visibility as well as your sales and is one of the most effective ways to stand out.
So why do people tend to ignore it? One possible answer is simply that it is too complicated and difficult for many people to understand – so they’d rather just overlook it!
Why Video is SO Important for Your Internet Marketing
But it’s this ‘difficulty’ that makes video production such a powerful marketing tool. Simply put, anyone can create a blog and anyone can create a sales page. When you build either of these things, you could still just be someone working from their Mom’s basement.
Video creation on the other hand requires expertise and expensive equipment. To make high quality videos, you will need a good camera, a great lighting set-up, a good microphone, editing software and know-how. All of this communicates that you are a serious business with serious money to invest and that professional sheen is what will inspire trust in your visitors.
What’s more, is that video allows you to talk directly to your audience and to use both your own voice and music to persuade them to make a purchase. Video is naturally more engaging and it makes people feel as though they know you, all of which is incredibly useful from a marketing perspective.
When creating video there are several ways you can use it as part of a marketing campaign. One is to add a video to your homepage or your sales page. Either of these things will help you to immediately grab attention and increase conversions. Another option is to create a YouTube channel. This makes it very easy to reach a big audience and can even be highly profitable on its own. A video getting 100,000 views a month can easily earn you in the region of $200!
How to Get Started
To get started, you will need to invest in a small amount of equipment. You need a camera with good auto focus and the ability to record in at least 1080p at 30fps (ideally better on both fronts). Even more important is good lighting, so invest in a soft box or another professional lighting solution.
Sound is also very important. A H1 pocket recorder paired with a mic will make a big difference at a low price point. You’ll then need to edit all this together in a piece of editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro.
It all sounds a lot but trust me, it is more than worth the investment in terms of what you’ll get back out of it!
There are countless excellent reasons to be interested in earning money online and it is no exaggeration to say that this is a decision that can change your entire life. Earning money online is appealing first and foremost to many people for the freedom that it affords them. If you can earn money online, then it essentially means that you can work from anywhere in the world.
For some people this then means working from home which is a great way to have a much more relaxed lifestyle. Imagine if you had no commute, if you could pick and choose your working hours, or if you could work in bed when the mood took you? Others will be more ambitious with their ability to work from home and will instead use it as a way to travel the world as a ‘digital nomad’.
If you have an online business model that works, then you can earn a living anywhere in the world as long as you have a laptop and an internet connection. Why not see the world and have some amazing experiences along the way?
This opens up a whole new concept called ‘lifestyle design’. Lifestyle design means deciding what kind of life you would like to live and then coming up with a career plan to fit that lifestyle – rather than falling into a job and then being forced to change your life around that.
It’s not just the lack of commute that makes working online ‘more free’ though either. Many online business models have the distinct advantage of being forms of ‘passive’ income. What this means is that you can earn money even while you’re sleeping or relaxing with friends. Ultimately, if you are very smart with your online business model, you can end up generating massive income while spending very little time actually working!
But there are other massive benefits to earning money online too. For example, earning money through an online business model essentially means that you’re running your own business and that is a highly rewarding and satisfying experience. You can to do something you really care about and be your own boss with your own company name, your own logo and your own mission statement.
Then there’s the fact that you can potentially earn much more online. Most of the best online business models are highly scalable and have very little overheads. With you being the sole earner and possibly even the sole employee to begin with, you can generate a massive amount of money and progress much more quickly than you would do by climbing the corporate ladder in a traditional manner.
But perhaps that all sounds a bit like a pipe dream? Maybe you don’t think you have what it takes to be a successful internet marketer, website owner or app developer? Actually, it turns out that this type of business is more common than you think. And it’s becoming much more common too. In all likelihood, these online business models are a glimpse into the future.
One day, we may find that very few of us end up working in stuffy, corporate environments. To demonstrate just how possible this is today, read on to see some rather impressive statistics regarding online business.
Statistics About Online Earning
8% of affiliate marketers earn $50K-$100K
12% of affiliate marketers earn over $100K
Many affiliate products offer up to 75% commission!
Over one third of businesses are introducing a ‘digital transformation program’ buying into the promise of earning money online
Another third have already put such a program in place!
In 2015, content marketing generating 3 times as many leads for businesses as traditional marketing
73% of B2B organizations use video marketing
78% of companies have dedicated social media departments
91% of all consumers check their e-mail daily
66% of US customers over 15 have purchased a product via an email ad campaign
Email advertising has a ROI of 4,300%!
One in five Americans now work from home (thanks to the internet)
That totals 53 million freelance Americans
54% of marketers believe SEO will be more in demand
96% of marketers rely on search engine optimization
Ironically, search engine optimization is the most popular search term on Google relating to marketing
Search ads accounted for $9.1 billion of advertising spend during the first half of 2014
I could go on and on!
So the point is, earning money online is indeed something that is going up and that more and more people and businesses are becoming interested in. It’s not rare or unusual to earn money online now – it’s something that
over 50 million Americans are doing and even big businesses are now doing most of their business online.
What’s more, is that this eBook is going to show you just how easy it is to start marking money online.
As you’ll see there are countless different methods you can use to earn money online and many of them are
incredibly simple and don’t require any upfront investments. That is to say, that if you’re so inclined, you can go start making money online this evening. And that’s another exciting thing to consider. Earning money online is something that you can do on top of your current job.
This doesn’t have to mean taking the frightening step of giving up your current job and putting all of your eggs in one basket. You can start earning money online today and only ever have to leave your job once you’re making a stable income and you decide it is safe and sensible to do so. Or you can carry on running a ‘side business’ on top of your current career indefinitely and potentially double, triple or quadruple your income!
What You Will Learn
All this will be possible thanks to the eBook you now hold in your metaphorical hands. In this book, you’ll learn of multiple different online business models that you can start making money from right now. These are tried and tested methods that are currently being used by countless people and that you can start benefiting from right away. Take a look through this article and see how they work.
That way, you can then decide which method is right for you – or whether you would rather take a different approach to your online money making!
Here is just a small preview of what you will learn:
How to sell affiliate products
How to create and sell a piece of software
How to make money from a ‘software as a service’ business model
How to make money from a website or blog
What CPA is and how you can use it to make money
How to run a business through eBay
How to promote a website, blog or eCommerce store
How to create a drop shipping business
How to create a membership site
And much more!
Things to Keep in Mind In Promoting Affiliate Products
Once you have identified the product that you want to market, there is still a little bit of work that needs to be done and they are set out below.
Profit
This is obviously the first thing that you should look for in any product that you want to market. Affiliate marketing is a business, and just as in any other business, it is profits that matter. All decisions therefore have to come down to this baseline, and if you, after all the research in the world find that the product is not profitable, there is no point in going any further.
This is the reason why there are a number of people who would have started out with affiliate marketing, but would have had to give up half way, because there is no money to be made. This is also the main reason why newcomers are advised to go for those products that are already selling well. That way there is not much decision making regarding the product to go with.
You will therefore have to concentrate only on improving your ranking in Google and while the competition is also much stiffer, you will at least know that if you are not able to sell, it has nothing to do with the product. It is important to make a distinction between profit and profitability. Most people go with high profitability, which means that you get high margins on sales.
While this may be a good income stream, it may be a good idea to take a look at the low margin, high volume segment. Many times the quantity of sales will be such that your total profits will be more in the low margin products than in the high margin ones. For example, trying to sell an eBook for $60 a book may give you a commission of $5 per sale but if you are netting only 20 sales a month, you are earning only $100.
Instead, if you go for the ones that sell at $10, your commission may well be only $1, but if you are able to make 200 sales, you earn $200. This is only an example but it serves to illustrate the point.
Marketability
The first point dovetails into this. You need to find products that are marketable. Unless there are people to buy what you have to sell, there is really no point in you even trying to sell it. You need to make sure that there is a market for your product before you try to sell it.There may be geniuses who were able to create a market, but this rarely happens. For the vast majority of us, selling products that already have an existing market is the only way out.
Stick to consumables
This is good advice because only consumables are sure to give you repeated sales. For example, dog food may not sound appealing, but there are more than 1,500,000 people searching monthly for it, and they will have to buy dog food the next month and the month after that. This way, even if the size of the market is low, you are guaranteed recurring sales because as long as you give a good deal, buyers will return to you.
Of course there is always the fear that repeat customers will go straight to the home site, but your advantage as an affiliate is that you are not stuck to just one product. You can have as many brands as you wish and as long as you make sure that there is something different about your site, like a new brand that you feel is better, or something else, people may very well try out different products from you.
It is easier to remember just one site and bookmark it, rather than 10 different ones for 10 different products, and so you are ensuring that they will keep coming back to you first before going elsewhere. As long as they do that, you will be credited with the sale.
Quality
This is important because although the net gives you a lot of anonymity, purchasing is still governed by old fashioned values like quality of the product. You are putting your reputation at stake by saying that a product is good quality, so either make sure that the product really is as good as it says it is, or give an honest review. Either way you will have to try the product to build up consumer confidence in your site.
It is not necessary that you sell only top quality products. High quality generally means high price but more people are satisfied with fairly high quality, but lower price product. Just don’t say that something is really good when it is not. For example, if you are selling cameras, there are a number of low cost, good enough cameras that will probably make up the bread and butter of your sale.
You cannot afford to not sell them as the high priced ones are not as often sold. Yet, you need to make sure that the purchaser gets good value, so inflating specifications, and giving opinions like something is really great when it isn’t, should be avoided. Honestly saying that something is good only for a certain use, and that if you want more functionality you should go with another model, is more appreciated than if you say that it is the best that money can buy.
Many sites offer customer reviews as their marketing ploy thinking that a customer who finds a review by another customer will be more inclined to believe it. Unfortunately, not all customers leave a review, which means that many of these sites resort to putting in reviews under different names just to bolster their site. This also means that you will have reviews that are not entirely accurate, meaning that you yourself are bringing down the value of your site.
A much simpler and as effective way is to just give an honest review and as long as you have taken the time to review the product properly, you will find people respect your opinions. This may take longer, but in the long run, is easier.
Popularity
Look into the popularity of the product first. Affiliate marketing is not as easy as just creating a site and becoming an affiliate. A lot of legwork is needed and just because you find a product that is searched for does not make it a good niche to be in. For example, there are a large number of people who search for anything “Labrador”. Yet, this is of no use to you because most of these people are looking for information.
Few people buy puppies online, and although you have the option of marketing various dog products, it is still not a very profitable niche to be in. Even people who like their dogs very much generally get what they need at the supermarket, and unless you can offer a really good deal on your products, they will not buy it.
This is just an example of something that is really popular, but does not net you anything in the form of money. Of course, if this is a niche you really want to be in, you could do further analysis on finding out why exactly people do not buy, and then create a site that takes into account all these problems. This is not only time consuming and expensive, there is also no guarantee of success.
How Do you Identify Products to Promote
After you have gone through some or all of the above-mentioned ways to identify products to market, your work is still not over. You are still left with choosing which product you want to go with. Using Amazon or Google’s affiliate network may be very easy, but all that it will help you with is with giving you options to choose from. You still have to choose, and if you make the wrong choice you will not only be not earning any money, you will be wasting your time and effort on something that is well spent elsewhere.
Choosing these products is an art, you need to have a gut instinct for it. There are a number of tools that will help you with making the choice, and we will discuss them in detail later, but making the final choice is still something that is as arbitrary as you picking one because you like it. If picking products were totally scientific there would be no place for you to enter in at all because everyone else would use the same tools that you want to make use of and choose products to market.
It is because it is not so easy, and it requires a lot of hard work that there is potential for the person who is willing to work hard at it. There are a few basics to selling both online and offline that are applicable and the primary among this is that selling is very easy if you are catering to a need. For example, selling clothes is never difficult. What is difficult is to sell them at a 300% profit, because buyers know when they are being ripped off.
Most of the advice you get will be different variations of the same thing. Find something that people need and start to sell it. A slight tweak on the same thing would be to find things that people need, that other people do not sell, and then sell it. This is just to make your job of selling it much easier than it would be if there were a horde of others selling the same thing.
The problem is that most of the needs of people are already met. Not only that, there are a large number of sellers already in the market and finding a spot where you will be alone is going to be a difficult thing to do. Taking advantage of changing trends will give you huge returns in a short time, but there is nothing permanent about it. You will have to keep finding new things to market and will always have to be on your toes.
It is simply because of all these difficulties that choosing the product to sell becomes an art. You make use of the tools available to you to gather as much information as you can about the product and then take a call on whether it is a good idea to promote it or not.
Below we will take a look at both what you can do as well as the tools available to you to help you choose the product to promote on your site.
Become an Expert
This takes a lot of time, and even more hard work. The Internet is amazing in that it basically creates a level playing field for everyone. It takes very little money to start a website of your own, and if you are not particular, you can even host your site for free at certain places. This means that you have just as much of a chance as anyone else out there to make good. The bad thing is that this increases the competition tremendously.
While in real life, it takes a lifetime of hard work to not only become an expert in a certain field, but to be accepted as such, it takes considerably less time online. Yet, this same factor means that there is no dearth of experts in any field on the net. You will therefore have to put in a lot of hard work to show people that you truly are an expert and that what you say is reliable.
This is because most of these so-called experts are really not, and all they do is scrape information off other sites and put it on their own. It does not take long before people find out that such people rarely have an opinion of their own, and discard them. The true expert though will not only catch the fancy of the net going public, but will stay there for a length of time, and even build up a fan following.
Let us take a simple example to explain the point. If you are going to set yourself up as an expert on cameras, you will find that there are a number of affiliate sites that push products by saying the exact same thing, that they are experts on cameras. However, you invest in some time to build your site up as a place where people can come to for reliable reviews of cameras, you will find that pretty quickly there will be a number of people who do.
As long as you make sure that your reviews are honest and accurate you are sure to become popular sooner than later. If you start to sell cameras from your site, you are poised to take advantage of a lot of traffic that comes to your site looking for reviews. Even if most of them are only looking for the reviews but are not interested in making a purchase online, you will still profit from the few who do.
The reason why the reviews need to be accurate and honest is because if not, the same people who came to you thinking you were an expert will go out of their way to tell everyone else that you are a fraud. You will find bad reviews about your site cropping up all over the net, and all of a sudden you have lost everything you had.
This also means that you do not need to go searching for products to promote. Any new camera in the market that you do not have on your site is a potential candidate for promotion.
There is little in the way of research or analysis that needs to be done, and all you have to do is to put in a review of the model and sit back. The advantage of this model is that you have a regular income stream. Even if you have to do a little maintenance work like always making sure that your content is current, or ensuring that you have a new model up on your site within a few days of launch, everything else runs along pretty smoothly.
The flip side though is that you will not be able to take advantage of anything new on the market other than cameras. If Apple brings out its new phone, you won’t be able to do anything about it. Having a site that is too general is not good because you will not be able to focus on any one product or niche, bringing down the value of your whole site. You will also not be able to target your market properly because you really do not have any target market.
Online stores
Most affiliate sites go with the large online stores because not only is it easy to become an affiliate, it is also easier to sell the products. For example, if you have a site that promotes cameras, it is much easier to sell these cameras through Amazon or eBay than through some other site. With the number of scams only increasing, people are wary of making any sort of payment unless they know that the site is bona fide.
The second good thing is that most of these online stores really do not even give a good description of the product, far less a comparison with similar ones from other brands. This means that they are just a place where people can buy, but it also means that people who want to buy will look elsewhere for expert opinions. If you are the person with the expert opinion, they will visit you, and if you have been convincing enough, will purchase the product online thus crediting you with the sale.
For example, you have pitched on washing machines as your niche; you will find that Amazon stocks pretty much everything that you can find in your local store, in terms of brands and models, and then some more. You have two choices here, you can go with washing machines as a niche for your site, or you can target specific manufacturers or even brands to sell.
The advantage of doing this is just that you can focus more narrowly on a particular brand or model allowing you to go even higher in the search rankings.Just looking through the most popular list on Amazon will tell you which model people are buying. Generally speaking, this alone is enough because if people are buying something, it means that there is a demand for the product. There are a few things that you have to do to confirm whether that particular model is what you want to go with.
Google it
is the simplest way to check if the product you selected is already being marketed by other affiliates, and what king of competition there is. If you see a number of paid advertisements as well as a number of affiliate sites coming up high in the display page, you know that this niche has already been covered and continue your search for your product.
The reason for this is obvious. You will be investing a lot of time, effort and money in building a site dedicated to a particular model and if you are going to have to fight it out, it will take you that much longer to start seeing any returns. Going in for something where the competition is lesser is a better idea.
Probe your competition
This is the stage where most of us find ourselves. Most new niches are already taken and finding one where there is little to no competition is not as easy as it seems to when you read about it. This means that you have to probe your competition to find out exactly how good your competition is. For example, let us take it that you are interested in selling washing machines. You are pretty confident about selling them because you know that there is a need for them.
Everyone needs a washing machine. It only remains to be seen what the competition is like. Searching on Google shows you that that particular niche is taken. There are a number of affiliate sites that deal with washing machines and some of them are actually quite popular and not only give you a good review of different washing machines, but also have a rating system that lets you compare different models.
If you search on Amazon for the bestselling washing machine, you will find that it is the Haier HLP23E. Yet, when you search with this “Haier HLP23E” as the search string, the results are completely different. You get six results in the display page and we will restrict ourselves to the first page alone.
In this first page, you will find that apart from Haier’s official company site, there are six affiliate sites. Yet, out of these six there is only one that offers anything approaching a reasonable review of the product. Most of the other sites either give you a general description of the functioning of a washing machine, that you really don’t want, or give you the features of the machine that you can get from the company site directly.
All the sites offer customer reviews, but barring one all the others have between two and five reviews, which is really not good. Even the one site that has what looks like a promising review by a customer looks like it has been written by a professional article writer rather than an actual user. This fact immediately shows you how you can improve on your competition.
When you come down to this level, you will be able to identify products that have lesser competition than others. Yes it is not a totally empty niche, but there are possibilities that are worth exploring further.
Use tools
You will also find tools that will supposedly help you find weaknesses in your competitor’s websites. These tools are generally paid and will do everything from checking the keyword density to checking if your competitor has the ideal address in his URL. The effectiveness of these tools is debatable, but then it is something additional that you can try if you want to.
If you can do all the research yourself, it is probably the best, but where you cannot, you’ll have to rely on tools, even if they are not as good. The one thing that you need to remember is that all the pages that have made it to the first page on Google are those that have Haier HLP23E in the URL itself, which shows you how important it is to target specific products.
Identifying products is all about legwork and although we have taken Amazon as the basis of our search, this can be done in many other ways.
Affiliate networks
ClickBank and Google’s affiliate network gives you a list of all the products you can promote on your own site. All you have to do is to sign up with them, and this information is made available to you. The sign up procedure is free, and if you go through the procedure of finding products and marketing it, you find that it is one of the simplest there is.
You can search by product categories or you can go with specific keywords.
If you want to go with the categories, you will get a list of all the products including the “vendor’s pitch” which gives you relevant information about the product. This information may often not be enough, but it will at least help you shortlist likely products. You will have to do further research before you choose individual products.
The stats button shows you how much your commission is for each sale and the promote button generates a HopLink that will link your site to the vendor’s. This is the link that you will have to use in your site, as if you copy the URL of the vendor, you will not be credited with any traffic you drive to the vendor. Such a simple process has seen them grow tremendously and they are one of the more preferred affiliate vendors in the market.
When compared to online stores, they also offer much higher commission rates, meaning you earn more. The difficulty though is in you making the sale. Everybody knows Amazon and is comfortable with purchasing from them. When they have to give out their credit card details in other places though, many people will refrain from doing so meaning that you will find selling that much more difficult.
Going with the products that have a number of affiliates is a good place to start off. The more the number of affiliates, the more the chances are that that particular product is a large selling one. This is a different take on aping your competition, and your whole strategy is based on the simple fact that if everyone else is selling something, and making a profit out of it, then you can as well.
Yet, this logic is not without its pitfalls. Just because a particular product has a number of affiliates, it is no guarantee that you will be able to sell the same product. It also means that the competition is already stiff, and breaking into the market is not going to be easy. Moreover, all the juicy sounding URL addresses would have already been taken which will make it more difficult for you to get the product name into your address.
This is especially true of you are going in for a totally unrelated product from what you are selling now, or are starting out new. The other way is to look at the products with the maximum commission and then figure out a way of driving sales. Unfortunately this is easier said than done, and in many cases the commissions are high and the competition low because making a sale is so difficult.
The second thing that you will have to think about is that you can drive any amount of traffic to a particular site, but unless the home site is written well, no one is going to buy the product. For example, if you become an affiliate to sell eBooks for someone else, however much you do your part, unless the home site itself has something that will make the people you send, buy the product, you are not going to get any sales, and all your effort will be to waste.
Generally speaking going for the sure shot ones, like the ones that have a lot of competition is better, because if you work hard enough and get the ranking on your site up, you are at least guaranteed success. If you go for the hard to sell products, you cannot be sure that even after all this effort you will make any sale.
Promotional tools
Many times the affiliate site will offer all the promotional tools that you will need, like page banners, informative articles, and even email promotions. Of course, the articles cannot be used as is but you at least have all the basic information about the product to help you create a wonderful sales pitch.
If you find a seller that does not do this, it is better to stay away from them. This is because it shows that they are not serious about marketing online. It also means that you will have to put in that much more effort at marketing their product and their commission may not justify this added effort.
Use keyword tools
Most search engines offer free keyword tools that you can use to find related keywords. There are also other paid software programs that will help you do the same thing, but with increased functionality. This is the one I use. While usually these tools are used mainly to find related keywords, they are also useful to find the most often searched strings. This process is time consuming and takes a long time, but will give you solid information to move forward on.
For example, if you feel that washing machines are a good option, just typing washing machines into the tool will give you all the related search strings that are being searched for, their local and global numbers for the month.
This gives you an approximate idea of the number of people searching for a particular product. For example, if you type in Yorkshire Terriers, you will get a number of results that range from more than 80, 000 to less than 2,000.
You therefore know that there are at least 80,000 searches for the Yorkie on average every month. On the other hand, if you put in Labrador retrievers, you will find that this number triples. It is pretty obvious that there are more people searching for them than for the Yorkie. This gives you a good baseline to start off on. While looking in online stores like Amazon may give you similar data there are two advantages of using the keyword tools that search engines offer.
First, you get actual numbers of the number of people searching for a certain product while all Amazon can do is tell you which products sell the most. While you may be more interested in promoting products that sell more, you may be losing out on a good opportunity to convert sales. Amazon gives you data for sales converted, while Google gives you data about potential for sale. There may be innumerable reasons why there may be more people searching for a product than there are buying it, and one of them could be that the sellers are not doing a good job.
This gives you the opportunity of entering into a market where even if there are other competitors, the competition is really nothing much to talk about. The second advantage is that Google offers you the ability to find niches that are as yet untouched. While this may be difficult and may take a lot of time, the possibility at least exists with Google, while with any other way this possibility is not an option at all. Of course, doing random searches will mostly be a waste of time. You will have to approach it in an organized manner.
The way to do this is to brainstorm and note down as many niches as you can come up with. Then go through Google with all these niches one by one. If you hit something, good, if not you continue the same process. It is simply because this process is so time consuming that many people prefer to go with the affiliate network or check on online stores. Yet, doing this is still not useless as if you do get lucky and chance upon a niche where there are a number of people searching, but very few people selling, you are on to a sure thing.
Where do you Look for Products to Start Promoting?
Once you have the first question out of the way, the next one is to start looking around for products to promote. This is really not as easy as many people say it is and requires a lot of effort. There are not too many places where you can look for products and most of them are known. Below we will take each of these and individually discuss their pros and cons.
Google AdSense
This is one of the easiest ways to spot products to sell. Whenever you type out any search string, you will get sponsored ads on the right hand side of the page. Usually these ads would have been put up by affiliates wanting to increase traffic to their websites.
For example, if you type in “Herbal beauty creams” in the search bar, you will get five ads on the right hand side of the results page. Barring one, all the others are affiliate sites that sell different kinds of herbal beauty products, and just looking at the different products they sell will start you off on your search for products to market.
Generally, if you follow the link to the home page, you will find details of how to become an affiliate member. It is not necessary to sign up to the affiliate network immediately as there is many analyses that needs to be done before you pick a product, but it makes finding them easier.
The negative of this method is that you will be entering a crowded market. If there are four ads by affiliates themselves, think of the total number of affiliates who will be marketing these products. Standing out from this crowd to make your site unique is not going to be easy. Yet, if many affiliates are promoting a particular product usually means that it is a good selling one, so the chances of you making a sale are also better.
Check out your competition
This is one of the easiest ways to find products. If you are in a niche, you will be aware of whom your competitors are, and all you have to do is to follow their lead. This way is easy because you let someone else do all the legwork for you, while all you have to do is copy them. There is a lot of analysis required before you decide on whether you want to go with a product or not, and allowing another person to do this frees you up to do other work.
The drawback to this model is that you are always following the leader. Depending on how long it takes you to set up your site, get content posted with everything else you have to do to get its ranking up, you may very well miss the boat. However, some people follow this policy because their costs are low. All they have to worry about is marketing a product, not finding it.
Use affiliate programs
There are a number of affiliate programs like Google’s affiliate network and ClickBank that allows you to browse through sites that have registered with them and who are open to using affiliates. It is similar to what you do with the Google results page ads, but the difference is that you get a much bigger number of sites from which to choose. You can search according to product or niche and identify the product you want to go with.
Not only this, you will be able to compare the commission given to affiliates. Different sites will offer different percentages of commission, and while going with the one that offers the highest commission may seem like a good idea, it may also mean that the high commission is because of the difficulty in selling the product. A more easily salable one may have a lower commission per sale, but total sales volume may be greater, giving you more total income.
The biggest advantage is not even this. Most of these affiliate programs will give you a track record of the company that you want to start marketing for. This is very important because if you are pulled in by a scam artist, sell his products and he doesn’t pay you, there is very little you can do about it. Checking the track record of various sites gives you the knowledge that you require to weed out the strong candidates from the not so strong.
You can check their payment history to see if they make their payments properly, and even check how long they have been online. Generally speaking, going with someone who has had a web presence for at least 6 months to a year is good because if not you have no idea if they are real or not. By going with sites that already have an affiliate program running you may be entering an already tight market, but you at least know you will not be cheated.
Look up online stores
This is becoming very popular nowadays. Amazon actively encourages affiliates and with their sales volume increasing by leaps and bounds, it is relatively easy to make a sale on Amazon. Not only that, their whole affiliate marketing system is mostly automated and there are no payment issues at all concerning commission. There are a few negatives here, with Amazon offering the lowest commissions anywhere on the net.
They start off at a low 4% and many times you will have to work really hard to start seeing any money from your site at all. Many affiliates just drop out because they will be putting in more than they are getting out of it. Yet, if you are willing to be patient it is also one of the best methods. Not only does Amazon give you all the details of what the most searched for products are on their site, they give you the option of tracking a number of other details.
There are a number of people who earn just out of promoting products on Amazon. Their per product earning may not be much, averaging around $1000 per month for a really good affiliate program, but if you have 10 such sites you’re earning quite a tidy sum of money. Amazon has been taken simply as an example, and the same is true of any online store that you want to start marketing for. All of them know the value of affiliates.
Many of them take a day to check into the antecedents of those who want to start on their affiliate program to find out of you are serious or not before accepting you into their program. Although there is no minimum qualification that you need to become an affiliate, it is better if you have an existing website with a bare minimum amount of traffic monthly. It shows that you are in it with your eyes open and for the long term.
Approach potential partners
This is something that you can do only after you are really set up with a really good site and are doing business. You can approach both online partners and offline ones to check with them if they would be interested in having you market their products. This will work only if you are able to offer an already existing marketing network, with both a large amount of traffic as well as sales going on in your site.
Most companies are interested in increasing sales and are open to commissions if you can give actual increase in sales. A few of the top bloggers and review sites have done this with success, even approaching companies that have never done any online marketing before and partnering them. Although this means that you already have an existing set up, if you can do this you are effectively putting yourself in a place where there is absolutely no competition.
Because these companies themselves have never worked with affiliates in the past there is no competition that you have to worry about. You would still have to do a basic analysis to find out if you have a good chance of making a sale or not. For example, if you are able to convince Ferrari or Lamborghini that you are a good person to start an affiliate program with, it still does not mean that you will be able to sell even one car. You need to research into the market to find such products that have a reasonably good chance of being sold online.
Google search
This is the simplest way for you to find anything that you are looking for. If you want to enter the health and fitness niche, just Googling “health and fitness” will give you a number of products. This is very time consuming, but there is nothing better to give you an impression of how the market is. In fact, if you rely only on affiliate programs and other directories, you will be mission out on a number of products whose manufacturers are not a part of these directories.
They may not necessarily be against affiliates as such, just against being part of a third party program. Even with all the amount of online activity that is going on, not every niche is crowded, and sometimes there may be a new product that has been launched in the market, and you will not find more than one or two sites promoting it. This is the opportunity for you to jump into that particular niche and take advantage of this lesser competition.
A simple example would be when it comes to record labels that come out. When a particular artist brings out an album, it does not take you more than 24 hrs to find out how much of a hit it has become in the market. Checking online the next day will tell you what the competition is like and very often it will be nil. If you work fast, you can have your site up in just a couple of days at the most, to take advantage of the interest in the public for that album.
Getting affiliated and starting your marketing is going to be very easy simply because there is little competition. Getting to be the number 1 ranked site is very easy as long as you take some basic precautions like including it in your site’s URL and putting in at least a couple of good quality content that is optimized towards that artist’s name and other related keywords. Interest may taper off within just a matter of weeks, but you would have taken advantage of the wave of public interest, and have ridden high on it because you got an early start.
Finding the Best Affiliate Products to Promote
The Internet has become a virtual world. There is nothing that you can do in the real world that you cannot do in the virtual world including buying and selling products. This has been a known fact for some time, and when you promote products on the net it is called Internet marketing. There are a number of websites that sell products and a few large organizations that dominate the market.
Companies like Amazon and eBay are some of the most commonly known names although there are a few others as well. While Amazon and eBay sell products, they do not actively advertise for them. Considering their sales volume and growth – Amazon grew 16% last year when compared to 2.4% for retail sales, it is possible that they feel that they do not need to advertise. Yet everyone knows the value of advertising.
This gave birth to what is called the affiliate websites. When you are selling a product, and someone comes to you and tells you that they are willing to promote your product, they are vendors. When they do this online, they are called affiliates. Affiliate marketing works because it is a win-win situation for both parties. The affiliate takes it upon themselves to promote his website.
He toils hard and puts in a lot of effort to increase his ranking on Google. The result is that any product that he is promoting for you will also get the increased exposure, and you have not spent one dime, or one minute of your time to do this. The affiliate is paid a commission that can range anywhere from 4% to 30% on profits depending on the product that they are marketing.
He is paid only if any person who he directs to your site makes a purchase. You may miss your profitability per product here, but your overall profits will increase because of the increase in sales volume. You keep track of who comes to you through whom by giving each of your affiliates a different cookie. This cookie has a definite expiration date and is installed in the system of any person who visits the affiliate site.
When said person comes to you, the cookie in his system will tell you who has sent him allowing you to keep track of both the number of people he directs to your site and the number of sales made. Most of this is automated and it is a system that works for everyone. If instead of being the person who sells the product you are the affiliate, the process is the same, but in reverse. You contact the seller, get his cookie, and you are set.
All you need to do is to put in the legwork to increase your web traffic because it is the basis of all conversions and ultimately the amount of money you make. Because you go to such lengths, investing your hard-earned money and time into promoting a product, you need to make sure that the product that you choose is the right one. There are millions of products being sold online, but not all of them will give you what you are looking for. Then there are the scam artists who are out to cheat you.
This being the case you need to be careful how you choose the product that you want to market. There are a few ways to do this and we will discuss them in detail below.
Where do you stand?
This is the first thing that you have to think of. Either you will be creating a completely new website or blog to market a said product, or you will be integrating it into your already existing site. There are pros and cons to both of these.
Promoting products on an already existing site
If you already have a site or a blog up and running, you are lucky in that you would already have a certain ranking with Google. You can focus your attention on your one site and over time you can get quite a high ranking with all search engines.
The advantage of this model is that you already have a certain amount of traffic that you are getting on a daily or weekly basis, which means that the chance of you getting a sale quickly is higher. In addition, if you have more than one product in your site, even if you put in activity promoting one product, all the other products will reap the benefit. You just have to concentrate on improving the ranking of your one site so that you increase traffic.
Once you do this, if you have made a good choice on the products and if you have designed your web page well, the sales will come. The other side to this is that you will have to pick and choose the kind of products that you can promote. For example, if you have a website that reviews dishwashers, you cannot start selling air conditioners there. You can take your pick of any dishwasher to promote, but you are pretty much limited to only one product category.
Of course, you can try to work around this by creating a generalized website where you can promote anything you like. The problem with that is that such sites have no focus at all. If you want to sell home appliances, beauty products, herbal medicines and books all in the same place, you will have to choose a name that is very general, like “Amazon.com” for example.
Unfortunately, it also takes that much more work to bring it to the notice of search engines first and then to the notice of the public. When a person is looking to purchase anything online, he or she is apt to click on the link that carries the name of the product that they wish to buy. For example, if you name your site www.xyzreview.com people will realize that your site is providing reviews about the product xyz.
If on the other hand you name your site www.purchaseproductsonline.com nobody knows if you are connected in any way to the product xyz and will not click on it. Furthermore, even the search engines will lower your ranking because they tend to give the highest ranking to those sites that carry the search string in the site name itself.
Building separate sites for different products
This is the second option open to affiliates. They can choose to create different niche websites and then actively push their product online so that over time they get a good ranking with search engines, consequently resulting in increased sales. This tactic is a good option in that everything about it is a positive. You can choose a site name that carries the keyword in the name of the site itself.
As mentioned previously, sites that carry the keyword in their address not only have a good chance of getting high up in the rankings, but are also the ones that are clicked on more frequently. You will be targeting a certain product and can focus your attention on that single product, helping you build a good site, one of the prerequisites to getting traffic. Consumers online will only remain and read what you have written if the site looks nice and if the content is worth reading.
By focusing on a single product, you are able to provide targeted content, what people are looking for. This increases your conversion ratio. On the other hand, you will have to create a different site for every product that you promote. This will increase your work a hundred fold because instead of having one site where you can sell five different products, you will have one site selling one product.
This means that if you want to sell a total of five products, you will have to create five different websites, and work on all of them so that they all start becoming income streams for you. It is a little difficult to decide what to do, and many people prefer to go the latter way, creating different sites for different products, because even if it is more work, it gives you more returns. This is the most common advice that you get with regards to affiliate marketing.
Focus is everything and if you do not target one thing, a niche or a product, you cannot hit anything. Yet, this is not always the case because if you create a generalized site but are willing to work on it for some time, you are creating a brand, and over time people will start to recognize the brand. Once this happens, the sky is the limit on what you can promote.
Amazon.com is a simple case in point. The company was started in 1995, but did not show any profit until the fourth quarter of 2001. At that time profits were a modest $5 million on a turnover of nearly $1 billion. Now, just nine years later, it is growing at a rapid 14% while retail sales are struggling to post 2.5% growth. Their profits have grown to more than $2.4 billion, and are still growing. Yet, it is important to note that it took six years for them to become profitable.
Affiliate marketing is very interesting as it’s actually similar to the last business model we looked at but with one key difference: you don’t need a product. So if you thought that creating a digital product was low risk, this is even lower risk.
How is this possible? Simple: you are selling someone else’s product. Your profits then will come instead from the commission made on that product which is much higher on the web than it is for door-to-door salesmen. To put things in perspective, you can sometimes make as much as 100% commission on a digital product. That means you actually earn more than the product creator!
So how does this work? Why would they be interested in offering you more money than themselves? As we discussed, a digital product has no COGS which means it offers 100% profit. A product creator can sell as many copies of their product as they like then and then get affiliates to sell more of their product on top of that. They might not get 100% of your sales, but those are still additional sales generating additional profits on top of what they already earned.
And the more commission they offer to you, the more people will take on their product and start promoting it. This means they can end up with a legion of people selling their products while they reap the benefits! From your perspective though it makes perfect sense too. Not only are you getting to sell a product without having to invest any time or money on creation – but you’re also able to choose a tried and tested seller.
In other words, you can pick something that you can already see is selling really well! And there’s no limit to your earnings here either: if you want more money, you simply find a more expensive product. Or maybe you end up taking on 2 or 10 affiliate products and earning from all of them!
How to Get Started In Affiliate Marketing
So how does this actually work? To begin with, you need to find your product that you want to sell. The easiest way to do this is through an affiliate network such as JVZoo (www.jvzoo.com), Commission Junction (www.cj.com), ClicBank (www.clickbank.com), WSOPro (www.warriorforum.com/warrior-specialoffers/) or others. Here, you’ll then be able to find a massive list of affiliate products along with the amount they’ve sold, the commission they’re offering and their price.
You then find something that appeals to you and that fits your niche and you apply for an ‘affiliate link’. That link is basically a special URL that directs people to the page where they can buy the product while also storing a cookie on their computer to show that you sent them. If they click your link and then buy the product within a certain time frame, it is logged as your sale and you get the money. Very straightforward!
Your job then is to simply promote that affiliate link, which you can do in a number of ways. You might for instance decide to simply set up an advertising campaign using Facebook Ads or AdWords. As long as you’re paying less for the advertising than you’re earning from the sales, then this will be an effective method.
Another option is to use your own channels. If you are able create a large email list then you can send your affiliate link to those subscribers after you’ve built their trust. Or if you have a blog, you can promote the link that way. You can even promote the links via social media, or using ‘real world’ posters and flyers. Or how about a YouTube channel? Either way, this is a very simple and straightforward business model that lets you earn big cash without having to invest anything or take any risks yourself.
There are some very well-known figures in the affiliate marketing industry which include the likes of John Chow (www.johnchow.com) who is now somewhat famous online and regularly attends talks and interviews. Other big names include Mark Link and Rae Hoffman. All these people now live incredible lifestyles enjoying passive income while they travel the world or spend more time with their families.
Affiliate Marketing Best Practices And Tips
Now you know what affiliate marketing is and how to get started with an affiliate marketing network, the next thing to consider is how best to succeed in this space and to really start generating the kind of income you’re looking for.
One of the most important points here is to pick the right product. Of course this means that you should choose a product that is selling well and that offers large commission at an attractive price point.
But on top of that, you also need to think about how you’re going to sell that product and succeed in that niche. This is the most important part and it’s something that will help you in a ton of different online business models actually. When selling anything, you need to look for what is known as the ‘route to market’. This essentially means the route you’re going to take to present your product to the largest number of people who may be interested in it.
If you are able have an eBook on flow arranging, then a route to market might be something like a blog on flowers, or maybe a magazine for brides-to-be. Most of us have a few contacts and resources we can already use. Maybe you happen to be in touch with a big blogger in the fitness niche? Maybe you happen to know the editor of a magazine? Instead of choosing a random product and then trying to build that audience from scratch, choose the subject that you already have a head start in and then exploit those contacts and opportunities.
When you choose your product remember that you aren’t just choosing your product – you’re choosing your market, your marketing strategy and your audience! Oh and often this means going for slightly smaller niches. It’s sometimes
easier to find and connect with a group of truckers than it is to get noticed among all the different marketers going after the dating crowd. Once again, starting small and building up is often the best strategy.
Physical Products?
One last point to consider is that there are also a number of affiliate programs aimed at people who want to sell physical products. The best known of these is Amazon’s Associate Program (https://affiliateprogram. Amazon.com/) This lets you promote any product on Amazon for commission, potentially opening you up to a much wider audience. Bear in mind though that these sales offer much smaller commissions – typically about 3-10% of the retail price.
How to Create Your First Information Product
So there are lots of options when it comes to selling a digital product. Simply put, this is one of the simplest and easiest ways to get a product that you can then start promoting and marketing. But how do you go about making one? There are plenty of options here but in many cases you’ll be able to simply handle the creation of your digital product yourself. If you are able are selling an eBook for instance then you only need to create a large MSWord document, include some images and good formatting and then save the final file as a PDF. Consider a low price for your product, say $7, and put on Warrior Forum to get you started.
Alternatively, if you’re creating a video series, you can just film yourself on camera and then edit the video neatly using editing software such as Adobe Photo Shop. Creating an email course is even easier. For this, all you’ll need is to write out some emails and then sign up to an autoresponder which you can use to automatically send your emails. A good choice is AWeber (www.aweber.com). I personally use Trafficwave, as it allows unlimited use and subscribers for the low price of less than $18 per month, They also have an affiliate program. If you are able can recruit 3 referrals, your autoresponder if free. Check this out here.
The main tip when doing this is to make sure you come up with a digital product that will play to your strengths and that you can be proud of. It’s very important to come up with a digital product you’re proud of because that way you’ll be able to promote it much more easily. When you talk about a product you truly believe in, your passion will come across and people will be far more likely to believe in what you’re offering too.
If you are able’re kind of shy of the quality of what you’ve created, then your marketing will lack conviction and you won’t attract repeat customers. In terms of creating something that plays to your strengths, that means picking a topic that you know a lot about and that is relevant to the topic or niche of your website and it means creating something you can create well. If you are able’re a great writer, then write an eBook!
If you are able aren’t so good at writing though but have an excellent manner on camera, then film a video series! If you are able can’t do either of those things, then consider using screenshots of your computer/creating slideshows and then narrating them. Alternatively, another popular option is to simply outsource the creation of your digital information product. There are thousands of writers, video editors and other skilled individuals on the web and any one of them will likely be happy to help.
The best places to find these people are generally freelancing sites which include the likes of ‘Elance’ (www.elance.com) or ‘UpWork’ (www.upwork.com). On either of these you should be able to find someone with the skills you need and from there it will cost you between $100 and $1,000 depending on the nature of the job you need done and the quality you are looking for (good writers will generally charge upwards of $3 per 100 words).
What To Price Your eBook?
Once you have your digital product, the next question is how much you want to charge for it. This of course is entirely up to you, though you don’t want to charge too much and alienate your audience. As I previously mentioned I recommend around $7 for a short report, or $17-27 for a full length eBook (10,000 words plus). What you’ll find when you look around the web is that there are plenty of examples of eBooks being sold for ridiculous prices – sometimes as much as $50, $100 or more.
While this does happen, the books very rarely manage to provide value for money and in the long run this can lead to damaged reputations and angry customers. Likewise, you’ll find it much easier to sell a cheaper book to begin with until you have built up a reputation for yourself as someone who can be trusted and who delivers premium content.
A good tip is to start with something small to test the market. Don’t aim to create the eBook to end all eBooks.
Instead, start out with something smaller like a report and sell that for $7. This allows you to very quickly and easily start honing your business model and generating income without investing too much or creating too much risk. Only once you’ve seen that this method is working and you’re earning money, do you then go and invest further into the business model with a bigger product at a higher price point. Remember too – there’s nothing to stop you from experimenting with price points and running ‘split tests’ to see which is the most profitable!
Creating Your Landing/Sales Page
One of the most important tools when it comes to affiliate marketing is to create a landing page. This is essentially a single page, also known as a ‘sales page’, that is entirely dedicated to selling your one product. A sales page will look different from the other pages on a website because it has no links to other parts of the site, no adverts and no distracting images.
In other words, everything on the page is there to serve the one objective of selling copies of your information product or whatever else it is that you’re selling. Often these pages are long and narrow and they contain a lot of text and a lot of ‘buy now’ buttons. Those buy now buttons are your ‘call to action’ buttons and of course they contain the affiliate link you just acquired.
The real magic of the landing page is the text. All the copy here is going to be aimed at persuading people to buy the product and this is where you’re really going to earn your wage. Your objective is to be as persuasive as possible while not misrepresenting what you have to sell. The way to do this is to remember that ‘value proposition’. That means focusing on what the product does for people.
How will their lives be better after they’ve used it? Maybe they’ll be a success with the opposite sex, or maybe they’ll be much richer and happier. Your job is to get them to imagine that possibility and to really desire it. At the same time, you point out their current failings in their situation and why their previous attempts to improve their lot in life may have failed.
In other words, you present a problem and then provide the solution – that solution being the eBook you’re selling or the online course. An easy and fast way to create a sales page is by using your Trafficwave account. Once you have this landing page, you’ll then be well equipped to market your product very easily.
For instance, if you pay for advertising then all you need to do is ensure those ads are sending the right kind of traffic to your sales page! Likewise, you can hand out flyers with the URL of your sales page, or you can mention it in social media posts. If you have written your sales script well then you can expect numerous people who stumble on that page to end up converting – becoming paying customers!
Alright, the first thing you need to do is choose a niche to focus on. This method is so much easier than the micro niche method, because it doesn’t involve hours upon hours of researching products, affiliate networks, and keyword tools. You just pick a niche and go.
Okay, so it does involve SOME research, but the research is faster and easier using this method and using a few free tools you can complete this in an hour or less in most cases. The first thing to do is figure out a niche that has voracious buyers but NOT a ton of competition. This is the toughest part, because most markets with voracious buyers are insanely competitive. (Some competition is good, but too much competition makes your job much harder.) I use a program called Jaaxy for this.
Golf, for example, is a popular niche for internet marketers to get into. This is especially true for beginners. Yes, golfers do tend to have excess income to spend. Yes, they do tend to spend a good chunk of that excess income on their hobby. But because pretty much everyone knows this, competition is ridiculous. There are just too many established golf websites for the average marketer to compete.
I use this tool for my keyword research, and I find it second to none. Try THIS.
Is it possible to compete? Absolutely. But unless you are extremely good at marketing and/or have a huge budget for advertising and content creation, you’re not likely to make a whole lot of headway in this niche. It’s just far too over-saturated. A great idea is focusing on a broad interest group rather than a more competitive niche. Look at DIYReady.com (http://www.diyready.com), for example.
They have a niche—DIY—but it’s broad enough that they have a huge number of topics they can focus on within the DIY spectrum, which also gives them a broader range of products they can promote. Because there are so many individual topics under the DIY umbrella, virtually anyone can compete in this niche.
People who enjoy this type of content typically frequent multiple DIY websites, and those users are easy to access because they are prevalent on Pinterest and other social websites. This is the type of niche you should try to locate. You want something broad—but not too broad—with voracious buyers and fans that are easy to locate.
The great thing about this method is that if you discover one aspect of a niche isn’t working for you, it’s easy to switch to another one as long as you get a domain that covers the whole, broad niche. For example, if you decided to market to model builders and want to focus on model cars, you might want to register a domain like model builders.com instead of modelcarbuilders.com so you can branch out into planes and ships later. (I’m sure those domains are taken; I’m just using them as a basic example.)
Worst case scenario, if you create a large amount of custom content in a niche and it doesn’t pan out the way you hope, you could sell the website or articles to someone else in the niche to recoup some costs you incurred, and probably make a good profit. Once you’ve chosen a niche and bought a broad domain, it’s time to move on.
An Introduction to Amazon Affiliate
Amazon has been a great income earner for affiliates for many years, but changes to a variety of factors such as SEO and the habits of your typical web surfer have made it a much different environment than it was a few years ago.
It was once possible to create micro niche sites that focused on a very specific niche subject, or even one single product, and make very good money.
Google seemed to love those micro niche sites, and it was very easy to rank them and make a lot of money quickly.
But times change. Google apparently decided they wanted that most micro niche sites were spam, which was mostly true, and decided it wanted to rank sites that had huge amounts of quality content instead.
It destroyed a lot of businesses, and domains began expiring left and right because they lost their rankings and were no longer profitable. With all these changes making old methods difficult, if not nearly impossible, is it still possible to make money as an Amazon affiliate?
The answer is a resounding, “YES!”
The methods may be different, but it certainly is possible to earn very good money as an Amazon affiliate, and you’re going to learn how in this guide.
So let’s begin.
Getting Started
The first thing you need to do is toss out your old notions of micro-niche sites. These sites are a lot harder to make profitable, and it requires a lot more marketing and promotion. It’s simply not feasible. Google doesn’t like tiny websites, because tiny websites are generally nothing but spam.
For this reason, it’s incredibly difficult to rank a “thin” website, meaning the original purpose of micro niche sites (to bring in a large amount of traffic to promote just one or two affiliate products) is pretty much dead unless you’re willing to put in a ton of time and effort into other marketing methods.
Instead, it’s important to focus on wider niches, because if you’re going to put so much effort into promotion, you might as well have a lot more products that you can potentially sell. Another thing that is practically dead is the review site. Review sites just aren’t going to rank in Google, and most people just go to Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, or some other major retailer to find reviews.
People online are more savvy than ever, and they have learned that the average “review site” is nothing more than a thinly-veiled affiliate site. While review sites can work, it’s just so much harder than it once was. You can no longer easily rank these sites, and they require a lot more promotion, and since people no longer trust them like they once did, they really aren’t as profitable.
Creating “thin” affiliate sites with little to no original content
Focusing on single products or narrow niches
Spamming Google and other search engines
Registering dozens of domains (or more)
Intense keyword research
Paid advertising
This method is actually easier and more fun than the old method, and requires less financial investment than the old micro niche method, because you only need one domain, or maybe a handful, instead of dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
You can focus on a broader niche, while still attracting Google traffic and getting traffic from other sources. In fact, this is actually the type of method Google prefers, because you’re creating REAL website with REAL content and REAL benefits to your visitors!
LinkedIn’s Ad Specs & Advertising Guidelines
You launched your first Company Page, and we’re sure that your fingers are itching to start making some cool ads to start promoting your content. That is great news, and we have made room to give something special to you before you start.
In this article, we will teach you how to apply some ideal ad specifications in advertising with LinkedIn, as well as how to follow and comply with the LinkedIn guidelines.
LinkedIn’s Ad Specs
For LinkedIn Advertising Specifications, my advice for you is to go straight to www.linkedin.com/help/lms/topics/8154/8155 and right here you will be able to see all the advertising specifications for each one of the Ad Types LinkedIn is actually offering you.
First, take a look at the Sponsored Content and the Text Ads Ones.
Sponsored Content Ads are updates that promote your content to an audience beyond people that are following your profile or your company. You can use them to target a specific audience, and help you reach LinkedIn members wherever and whenever they are engaging on the LinkedIn platform across desktop, mobile, and tablet.
For Sponsored Company Content and Direct Sponsored Content Specifications, we find: Link sharing, Embedded Rich Media, Ad policy notes, tracking capabilities, and Click flow. Text Ads are a tailor made for reaching any type of potential audience on desktop devices on any type of budget.
For Advertising Specifications for Text Ads, we find: Links, Text, Image and Placement.
You can also take a look at the other Ad Specs, depending on your plans for advertising with LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Advertising Guidelines
The following advertising guidelines have been created by LinkedIn to protect their users and the integrity of its platform. Failure to comply with these guidelines will get your ads removed from the platform.
LinkedIn can also restrict you from further advertising on it, so take note:
Your in-ad content must be accurate and true to the actual content being promoted. Do not ever deceive or lie to LinkedIn members through advertising.
Keep your in-ad text concise and well formatted. Do not use non-standard grammar, spelling or capitalization.
In-ad contact information must be kept to a minimum. Add only one link, one email address or one phone number per ad.
Do not ever use inappropriate, suggestive or outright offensive language in your ads.
In-ad links must lead to clean and non-deceiving sites.
Do not use trademarked material that you are not legally allowed to promote.
Do not promote sensitive content such as adult and dating websites, gambling related material or websites, hate related or violent content or religiously inflammatory content.
Do not promote prohibited products and services such as multi-level marketing schemes, affiliate advertising, alcoholic products, animal products, counterfeit goods, copyrighted content, private data, drug related content and paraphernalia, fake documentation, cracked or pirated software, tobacco related content or products and weapons or firearms.
IM Business Models:Blogging
Of course the first thing that comes to mind for many people when discussing ways to make money online is blogging. A successful blog is an incredibly valuable tool because it essentially provides you with a platform through which you can promote any other type of business model. For instance, if you chose to become an affiliate marketer, then building up a popular blog with a large, regular readership is one of the very best ways to sell those products.
Likewise, if you want to be a drop seller, then you can really benefit from a blog by simply creating an e commerce store and using the blog to promote that. We’ve already seen that you actually need to have a good website or blog in place if you plan on CPA marketing. The same goes double for subscription sites. There are more options with blogging too. One is to use PPC advertising such as AdSense. AdSense are ads from Google that pay out each time someone clicks on them.
You simply add some ‘ad script’ to your website and then it will show different adverts at different times. Or perhaps you just want to use display ads? Get big enough and many brands will pay you monthly to feature their adverts on your site. Likewise, you can use a blog to launch all kinds of other business ventures or you can get paid by sponsors to recommend products.
A website can even be used to sell a service – if you provide web design or writing services then your website can be a great place to demonstrate your talent and your knowledge. There are countless examples of people who have become very wealthy through running a blog. Pat Flynn who owns (www.smartpassiveincome.com) is one such example. Pat is a guy who talks about making money online and who actually owns several blogs and websites including one aimed at food trucks which he publishes his earnings from.
Pat’s blog is very easy to read and provides a ton of great information and as a result, he has achieved almost superstar status and is invited to big events. This is just an ordinary family guy! Pat makes his money mainly through adverts on the sites and via sales of information products. Another great example is The Art of Manliness (www.artofmanliness.com). This blog was founded by Brett McKay in 2008 and focuses on a range of topics relating to what it means to be a man in the 21st century.
It’s a unique niche that allows him to cover diverse topics ranging from beard trimming, to weightlifting, to how to smoke a cigar and drink whiskey. The site is now highly successful and provides far more than a full time income to Brett and his family. He makes his income through various types of advertising, possibly commission on physical products and through sales of his own products through an e commerce store.
How to Get Started, And Succeed!
The problem with running a blog is that it’s not easy. In order for a blog to become profitable, it’s often necessary for you to be getting hundreds of thousands of views a day and to have a smart form of monetization in place.
The question is, how do you get to this point?
Setting Up a Blog
Thankfully, actually setting up a blog is a relatively easy process. To do this, you’ll need to find a hosting account and a domain name and you’ll probably want to use a CMS such as WordPress. A hosting account is basically what gives you the ‘space’ to store your files on the web. You’ll be paying a monthly or yearly fee in order to rent space on a ‘server’ which is a giant computer that remains constantly connected to the web at all times.
You place your website files on that and it ensures they’re able to be served up when someone wants to find them. In order to find those files though, your visitors will need to use your domain name or URL. This is the address that people will type in order to find your website and this address is going to point at the specific directory within the
server so that people are shown your website when they navigate there.
Fortunately, finding hosting and a domain name are both relatively easy tasks and shouldn’t set you back too much more than $200 a year to begin with (tops). This is where creating a SaaS business would be much more complicated as you’d need a lot more space and speed from the server in order to let thousands of users upload and edit files as they needed to. A great example of a hosting site that also offers domain name registration and web hosting is Blue Host (www.bluehost.com).
A quick search on Google though will yield many, many more. Next comes the CMS. CMS stands for ‘Content Management System’ and essentially what this is, is a tool that will allow you to easily change the look of your website and to add and delete pages of content. The best known CMS is WordPress and it’s highly recommended that you go this route. WordPress will allow you to create a website in minutes rather than months, it will manage your files and it will look highly professional.
WordPress is not a ‘beginners’ tool by any means but rather is a professional piece of CMS software that is actually used by many of the biggest brands on the planet. Huge websites like Forbes, the BBC and Mashable use WordPress, as do the aforementioned successful blogs we mentioned. Using WordPress also ensures your site will be compatible with a ton of useful tools and features including the aforementioned WooCommerce and Amember.
It also means you’ll have a community of people out there who can help with any technical troubles you may be having and that your site will be easy for most web developers to understand and edit. In short, WordPress makes
life much easier for you and also makes your site far more professional. It is tried and tested and known to succeed… so why go with anything else?
If you choose a prominent hosting service like BlueHost, then the option to install WordPress will even be right there in the control panel meaning it takes literally just one click. All that said, there are other CMS options if you would prefer. One is Joomla! (www.joomla.org) which is similar to WordPress and offers a lot of flexibility. It’s a lot more fiddly though and there’s less support available mostly it is used in house for companies creating backend software.
Another popular choice is Drupal, which is again much more complicated.
Of course, you could always create your own CMS or forego having one at all, but either of these choices will drastically increase your workload while actually putting your business at more risk. Be very limited in terms of space, bandwidth and the other elements of your website. Blogger is also highly limited in terms of the features it offers for building your own web design.
In other words, if you want to create a proper website with the potential to grow and scale into something that will
earn a lot of money, you can’t use something like Blogger.
CPA Marketing
CPA marketing stands for ‘Cost Per Action’. This is an interesting alternative to affiliate marketing that is similar in many ways. Basically, what ‘cost per action’ means is that you get paid every time someone carries out a certain action. Now, in many cases this might mean that you get paid when someone buys something – in which case it is
working similarly to affiliate marketing (except that you’re getting paid a flat rate most likely). In other cases though, the ‘action’ might mean subscribing to a mailing list or joining a membership site.
Another difference is that CPA is often managed more similarly to PPC or display advertising. In other words, rather than promoting a product you might simply place adverts on your website. Instead of being paid for every click though, you get paid when someone clicks on the advert and then takes the required action.
Getting Started
Similar again to affiliate marketing, the first thing you need to do to get started with CPA marketing is to find yourself a platform where you’ll be able to track down the different offers and start promoting the adverts/links.
Currently, CPA marketing isn’t quite as big as affiliate marketing which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it means less competition for you but it’s a bad thing because it’s a little harder to find good options.
Likewise, there aren’t as many networks that have quite risen to the top of the heap like JVZoo or Clickbank. Some CPA networks are actually a bit poorly made and in some cases even disreputable. Make sure you do your research then before choosing one to go with! That said, some good CPA networks to choose from include Max Bounty (www.maxbounty.com), PeerFly (www.peerfly.com) or Clickbooth (www.clickbooth.com).
Make sure to read the reviews and browse through what’s available in order to find the right products and deals that you want to promote. What you’ll find when looking at these is that the whole process is a little simpler and more automated versus affiliate marketing. You simply sign up as a publisher and then post the ads/promotions on your site without having to deal directly with the brand that is offering the CPA promotion.
In other words, this system is a lot closer to using AdSense or other ‘Pay Per Click’ adverts.
How to Get Accepted Into a CPA Network
One of the tougher parts of CPA marketing is that you need to be ‘accepted’ into the network and into the specific deal. In order to make sure that they are offering their clients the very best service, CPA networks make sure to vet the publishers they work with closely. They want to make sure that you are representing the offers you’re
promoting well and that the brands they work with will be proud to be associated with your business.
All this means that if you have a website that looks like it was made by a 13-year old, you’re going to struggle. Likewise, if you have no prior experience or examples of your work then you may also struggle. So the solution is to make sure that you have a good website that you can demonstrate to those networks that you’re delivering good value and you’re reaching a larger audience.
This does mean that CPA might not be the best choice for those who are starting out with their first online business model – as they’ll need to build up some traction first. Another tip for getting accepted into CPA networks is to pick up the phone and give them a call. Ask to speak with an affiliate manager and this way you can put forward your strong case for why you think you should be accepted. This essentially fast tracks you and it’s certainly much quicker
and easier than waiting for lots of emails to come through.
