If you decide to become an affiliate marketer, you will definitely be successful if you work with the company closely, in terms of looking at all their guidelines, hints and tips. In many cases they are giving you advice on how to promote their most successful products, what keywords to use, professionally presented ad copy, and more.

You might even go so far as to write review of the products, your personal experiences, and more. (Handy hint here—NEVER try to sell products you or your friends and family would not be interested in ever using yourselves. And also, just think of the discounts you can get if you buy through your own site! It is a super way of making the most of your budget at Christmas!)

Gear whatever marketing message you are being give by the affiliate manager  to the visitors at your site.

Other affiliate opportunties on the internet.

One of the biggest opportunities on the internet is to sell information products as instant PDF digital downloads.

It is fast, easy, and provides instant gratification. It is great at monetizing the impulse buy, and non-fiction in particular sells well, and can sell a fair bit if it is a hot topic everyone it interested in.

While everyone will tell you that you can make the most money with your own product, it takes time and energy.   So why not promote products already for sale?

You can get started selling other people’s ebooks on topics related to your site at Clickbank or at Paydotcom.  PDC is relatively new, but is trying to give affiliates a better deal.

Once you become a member of either of these sites, you can see all of the products available on topics related to your site, and get a special code with an in-built link. Every time a sale occurs at that site, you get credit for it. The Clickbank checks come every two weeks like clockwork, and you can also buy the books yourself and get a commission.

So again, while it is easy to just rely on the sales message given to you, you should study your product in order to be able to market it effectively.

Email Marketing 101

Email Marketing is a great tool, but the money is NOT in the list, it is in people’s wallets, and will stay there unless you can persuade them to buy.

So let’s start with the basics, so you can check to see if you are converting visitors into ‘customers’, or if there is some tension or friction in the ‘sales process’.

Am I a marketer?

First of all, you need to be clear about the goals of your site. Is it to persuade, inform, entertain?

The reason I ask is, let’s face it, there is a certain amount of work involved all the time, and cost too, in doing a website, even if it is just something you have put up for family and friends.

You may love to blog, but unless you are being hosted at a free site, there is cost involved. So why not turn your hobby site into a money-maker?

You may not get a huge flood of cash pouring in, but if it is enough to cover the cost of domain registration and hosting every year, great.

You can monetize your blog or site it very easily by putting ads on your site, by becoming an affiliate with a company like Commission Junction, and then putting up the banners and special offers. Money will come to you every single time you make a sale.

Some pay on the basis of commission, that is, you get a percentage of whatever the customer spends, thanks to links which track the sales back to you.

Others pay on the basis of lead generation. That is, they sign up for something, like a free newsletter, and you get paid.

So, if you have an email list you have permission to contact on a regular basis, you can send them news and regular updates about your site, and also provide links to the special offers from the companies you are working for as an affiliate.

In which case, yes, you ARE a marketer.

Commission Junction is one of the best known affiliate services, with a wide variety of companies to work with. Once you sign up with them for your site or sites, you will get a code and then you can begin to search all of the offers. You will be able to get links with your code embedded, so that you will be given credit for any sales  which take place at your site.

Start small, with relevant ads related to your site’s topic/s, and watch the money come in (we will be talking about how to do this in a new series of articles soon).

Another group is called Performics. They were working with Yahoo Search Marketing and were recently bought by Google, so they are also worth keeping an eye on.

Now that you have looked at what your visitors are doing on your selected landing pages, it is time to look at your email marketing.

First of all, there is no excuse for NOT having an email marketing program these days. Even the tiniest website can have one through a robust service like Aweber. It is great value at only $19.95 a month and you can have virtually unlimited campaigns and lists.

You can use it straight out of the box, so to speak (it is actually all internet based, so once you register, you can pretty much get started right away.

But you will probably get the best results if you customize each step in the process, with clear instructions, your color scheme, logo and more.  Best of all, the service has excellent tracking of email open rates and click through rates.

There is also a split testing tool that will help you hone your sales messages such as your sign up boxes to check which is performing best, to make sure you are getting the best conversions possible.

Sound interesting? Or are you confused?  Okay, let’s back up for a minute, and discuss WHY you really need an email marketing campaign if you don’t already have one, even if you think your site is small. Or indeed, even if you are not actually selling anything online. YET!

Creating Relevant Marketing Messages 4

The importance of tracking

As I said, tracking is following through on the sales funnel from start to finish, to actually see what is going on, and what people are doing, and buying, if anything.

Based on what I was able to observe, a few very strategic and careful changes to my sales letters added up to big results.

There is no such thing as “They almost bought from us.” They either did, or they didn’t. Your profits each month either go up, down, or stay the same. Which way are you trending. If it is 0 or downwards, you need to track, and test to see if you can lift your results.

Through honing my sales messages based on what I could see my visitors were clicking on, and at what depth of click in the letter, I was able to raise my customer conversion from 5% to 25% on one sales letter alone.  And from 1% to 6% on several others.

Just think what those numbers really mean! That means for every 100 visitors, I went from 1 customer buying, to 6 buying.  So it is NOT just all about the traffic, but how well you get your traffic to obey your call to action.

For my other letter, for every 100 people, I went from having 5 people buying to 25 people buying! With response rates at one-half to one-quarter of one percent as an average, I was already doing well at 1%, and phenomenally well at 5%. 25% conversion is astronomical—but by no means impossible. Not if you are creating relevant marketing messages that are resonating with your readers.

Now think what THAT can kind of increase do for your bottom line. It’s all a question of observing, looking at your reporting, and applying what you learn from it to do even better.

What do we mean by tracking?

Tracking is finding out what is ACTUALLY going on on the page. Not what you THINK is happening, but what you can visually SEE from their click action on the actual page.

More to the point, it will show you what they are NOT clicking on.

If you sign up for a free account and track your page in the tool Crazy Egg that we recommend for about 100-1000 visits depending on volume, and then weed out anything causing meaningless clicks, you should have a well-honed sales message at the end of your analysis.

You can then use this finely-tuned message for other purposes, such as your email marketing campaign (and if you don’t have one yet, you should! –More about that in another article) and even print ads.

Using tools to track your landing pages and sales pages will boost your sales, and this tracking study can be a firm basis for split testing your sales letters to do even better.

Don’t just take it for granted that the letter is working well, and NEVER assume that you KNOW what is working best unless you actually LOOK.

I tested several calls to action for our PDF download versions of our books, and found “Order Now, Download in Minutes” worked best.

Everyone else on the team had assumed that Order Now, or worse still, SUBMIT, was actually best!

It was only by looking at where they were clicking on the page, and weeding out the ‘happy clickers’ who will literally click on any hyperlink or picture, I was able to refine my underperforming sales letter, and then move its success over into my email marketing campaign.

(And here is another NEWSFLASH: just because our sales letters were written by copywriters who command about $20k per letter for direct mail does NOT mean they work online).

How Do We Find Out What Our Visitors Are Doing?

If you know what they are doing, or NOT doing, you can hone your marketing messages to make them more relevant.

One tool I have found really useful for showing on-page clicks at your site is Crazy Egg.

It is a nifty little tool, very easy to apply to the site pages that you want to track and test with a view to improving your marketing message.

You can sign up for a free account which will let you track three pages, and it will soon end up making you want more!

(You can track up to 50 pages for $49 a month in the paid service, 100 pages for $99 a month.)

All you need to get started with the free account, however, is the ability to copy and paste a single line of Javascript at the bottom of the pages you want to track.

That will actually be plenty to start with, because you are going to focus on only one or perhaps two campaigns at a time with a view to improving them and your ROI.

You will start small, tracking what is actually happening, and then you will start testing, and tracking the tests again, in order to improve each sales letter or landing page, for maximum conversion.

Tracking what your site visitors are doing is the first step toward a better return on investment

There are two key questions you need to ask in order to create more relevant marketing communications on your  website, and in your emails:

* What are my vistors doing?
* What do their actions mean?

Many businesses’ marketing messages miss the mark because the people creating them do not have any idea what their visitors wants, needs and interests really are.

Of those who have an idea, most don’t know how those wants, needs and interests DIFFER from visitor to visitor.

In order to market to our site visitors successfully, we need to ask these questions, and pay attention to the answers.

The articles in this series will give you some practical hands-on advice as to how to make your marketing messages more relevant.