Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Affiliate Marketing 101: Converting Your Prospects

Going from squeeze page to sale can be a difficult part of affiliate marketing. There's a massive difference between free information and information that costs even $1, and making your prospective customers convert from passively reading to pulling out their credit cards can be a difficult jump. There are really three things to check off your list before you should try to sell to your customers. First, you need to build the trust and immersion in your ideas that cause people to buy. Secondly, you need to introduce a deal so valuable and worthwhile that your prospective customers become interested. Finally, using a combination of psychological selling and informative copy, you should hook your customers into a purchase. These three steps are explained in greater detail below. Building Trust: This is the fundamental and primary goal of any marketing campaign. With so many competitors out there, truly innovative and powerful marketers need to build trust to ensure that their prospective customers keep coming back to them, and not falling to the competition. Building trust starts with creating value for your customers, which can take the form of free information or sample products, an informative guide, or merely brief video or text content explaining how you can help them. Without being able to offer anything for them, you can't expect your prospective customers to convert immediately. This is where so many wannabe affiliate marketers make mistakes. Instead of building trust and creating the environment that results in sales, they sell their products short and introduce a sale from the get-go. While this may result in one-off sales and some low conversion rates, it immediately puts the buyer on the defensive, and destroys any potential trust that could have lead to greater sales. It's ultimately your decision, but the smart money (and massive payoffs) rest with building trust and introducing sales later on in the process. This means that the most lucrative and profitable campaigns are almost never those that focus exclusively on direct ad -» sale advertising. While Google AdWords might bring in a sale now and then, it's never building relationships with your customers, never creating a permission asset, and ultimately never creating the trust that's so essential for a profitable business. Focus on trust first and foremost, and then worry about monetisation and sales targets once you've built the trusting customer. From here, it's a matter of introducing offers that interest and entrance your prospective customers. Simply mentioning your product isn't enough -- it's about building the benefits that the product can create for your customers, and highlighting why they're so important. This part of closing a sale is introduced in greater detail in part two of this quick guide to affiliate marketing, along with the best methods to make your customers pull out their credit cards and convert from passive readers into active buyers. To learn more about affiliate marketing, check out the free Affiliate Marketing 101 report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.

How Can Surveys Help Your Online Business?

There's a massive amount of conversation covering the consumer end of consumer surveys, mostly the ability to make money, gifts and bonuses through taking surveys for Fortune 500 companies. This area of surveys is well covered, with many highly useful eBooks and online reports covering the lucrative online niche that is paid survey work. The side that doesn't get much exposure is the use of customer feedback, either through surveys or direct responses, to help build, optimise, and grow your online business. It's difficult being an online entrepreneur. In addition to the massive amount of competition that's out there, there are endless pyramid schemes and online scams that seem to threaten everyone's reputation. Instead of promoting ourselves, we often end up defending ourselves against the allegations of others and the bad atmosphere created by these websites. It's something that no internet marketer or entrepreneur wants to deal with, and it's something that you shouldn't have to. Online surveys are widely known as a good way for consumers to make money online, and it's well documented how successful many people can be with them. However, they have a second massively powerful function; their ability to create highly targeted consumer feedback for online companies and marketers. Whether you're on eBay, your own online shop, or busy promoting other people's products, an online survey can be highly helpful to your business. Now, understanding this side of surveys is very useful for understanding the other. When you know the dynamics of a survey for their company or corporation, you can understand how valuable the role of the customer giving feedback is. When you're involved in a business, you often lose perspective of your product due to proximity, exposure, and other psychological factors. You begin to take on a view of the product that's different from a typical consumer. While this can make you less able to place feedback on your own business, it can also allow you to create unique perspective and information for companies that require feedback. Mastering feedback from both sides will give you an understanding of the issue and system that few other online workers possess. Whether you're looking for feedback for your own online business, or simply looking to provide your services to other companies that require survey takers, you're in a position to market yourself as someone special. Use your abilities to create massive demand for you, and build your online income through feedback and information. Surveys are one of those interesting forms of feedback that can provide either massive value or simply waste time. The real value in surveys comes when you have a highly targeted audience, that's actually able to provide critical feedback to you. Pick your questions right and you'll gain useful insight, pick them wrong and you'll just waste time and money marketing something that isn't properly optimised. To learn more about paid surveys, check out the free Checks For Surveys report. Feel free to distribute this article in any form as long as you include this resource box. You can also include your affiliate link if you sign up at Clickbank Pirate.