Affiliate marketing can be very difficult to break into. This is because there are already a lot of people doing it. The challenge is to try and outdo other affiliates and think of ways to do a better job promoting. And the sea of information about this doesn’t make it any easier. Here’s one trick that almost no one else is using.

Marketing with video

You can’t deny that video is powerful. Video online is everywhere because people love it. About the only thing that keeps people’s attention anymore is video. So why wouldn’t you use it in your affiliate business?

Here’s how to use videos for affiliate promotions:

• Do a testimonial video
• Record a walk-through
• Record the order process
• Sneak peak

Do a testimonial video

It doesn’t get any easier than this. Just click record on your web cam and start talking. It doesn’t have to be professional or polished. Listening to your honest endorsement makes your viewers feel comfortable buying. And honestly, if you mess up it just makes it seem more authentic. So serious, just turn on the camera and talk. And if you don’t want to show your face, use one of the next ideas.

Walk-throughs

This is a great way to promote something without selling it. You’re taking the role of teacher and showing how to use the product. And while they watch you use it, they think, “I should buy that.” If it’s useful, then what you’re teaching just makes people want it. So, obviously, pick a good product to demo.

Ordering

This technique is super powerful. Do a screen capture of the ordering process. Watching you make a live purchase will inspire your viewer like nothing else. First of all it’s what’s called “social proof”. Once they see you doing it, they feel more secure. It also build your viewers trust. Your advice is easier to trust if they can see you’re doing what you tell them to do. And let’s not forget about good old fashioned envy. People want what they see you getting. To really cap this one off, end your video with: In order to get to see the inside, you gotta buy the product.

Record a preview of the members area

This one is perfect for building up the value of what you’re promoting. You do a tour of the members area. They get to see everything they’ll receive when they order. It also reduces the reservations of skeptics. It’s much easier to trust they’re getting something if they actually seen it.

You can do this!

No special skills are required. Anyone can create stunning videos with some easy-to-use software. All the work is done by the program. So there’s no need to even think about the technical side. Just focus on the benefits:

• Increase sales You will increase your affiliate sales when you start using videos. People like video, so start using it.
• Reduce refunds You’ll lose less of the commission your earn. Your customers will know what they’re getting into ahead of time. So, very few of them will cancel their order.
• Rise above the competition! This is a really easy thing to do. But only a very small percentage do it. So, you’ll be way ahead of the crowd.

Get started right now and take your affiliate marketing to the next level. Not using video is detrimental to you business. So do it!

Honestly, everyone making money online has an email list. This is the most important factor in your long-term success. Once you have a list built, you can market to it again and again. It’s a resource you can tap at any time and generate income.

So, how do you build a list?

Here’s what you need to build your list:

• The Squeeze Page
• The Incentive
• Your Confirmation Page

Your Opt-in Page – Your opt-in page is the page you send visitors to to build your list. This page is the one that asks them for their email. So, obviously it has to be well designed. It’s also got to be free from distractions. And have a clear call to action.

The biggest mistake you can make is not having a clear call to action. This “close” tells your visitors what you want them to do. Without this your opt-in rate will plummet. The funny thing is that people just don’t know what to do unless you tell them.

If you want to add some extra juice to your opt-in page add a compelling video to the page. You only have a few second to get your visitors attention – video helps! It also allows you to tell them what to do several times. And after the video, you can make it just say “fill in the form now”.

If you don’t know how to make video, don’t worry. Hiring out-sourced help to do it for you only costs $150 – $250. There are also list building systems that give you squeeze page templates.

The Bribe – Next, you’ve got to figure out what your bribe is. People won’t give you their email for nothing. Most people are very protective of their email address. So you have to give them a good reason to do it.

The only way to make this work is to provide real value. It has to be something that people actually want. And will be able to actually benefit from it. A few ideas:

• A report
• Some useful software
• Videos
• A multi-part email series

It all boils down to content. And make it both helpful and informative. It goes without saying it must be free. If you make it good enough, they will give you their email in exchange.

If you’re worried about creating this content, don’t be. Here again, you can hire freelancers to create this for you. Simply tell them what the topic is and they can write the content. A 5-part email series is a good freebie. You can have ghost writers create emails for under $25 an email. So, a great premium will cost you around $100 – $150.

There are also list building products that include the follow up email series. Two things to keep in mind when writing (or buying) and email training series. First, it must provide value to your subscribers. And second, it needs to make you money. The easiest way to do this is to market affiliate products in the emails. This is such a simple solution because you don’t have to create the product. And it enables you to generate cash right away from your new list.

The Thank You Page – The “thank you” page is the final piece of the puzzle. After subscribing to your list, your visitor is redirected to this page. It’s a great idea to give them some valuable information right on the thank you page. This helps them feel they’ve made the right decision giving you their email. And it helps you establish the relationship. It also makes them more likely to open your emails.

This is another case where you can get a complete marketing package. Or you can go the DIY route. And do your own writing for this content. Or pay a freelancer to write the content for you.

Summing it up

It doesn’t matter if you do all of this yourself. Or pay a freelancer to write produce it all for you. Or if sign up for a “complete package” solution. The key is to start building your list. Once you’ve got it built. You’ve got a license to print money!

Presell like a pro

If you want to make more money as an affiliate, you must presell.

First, what is preselling? There are two components to it – art & science. It’s a process of taking your reader and getting them ready to buy. Then you send them to the site that sells what you’ve prepared them for. And when it’s done correctly, they don’t know it’s happening.

Basically, you give them some content. And give them a link to the product you’re preselling. In just a minute, I’ll explain exactly how to presell. Before we get into that, you should understand what’s in it for you. Some major benefits of this process:

• It builds trust – Readers who trust you are more likely to click your links. And the more clicks you get the more sales you’ll make.
• It disarms your reader – Nobody likes to be sold something. By not doing that to them, your reader is less defensive. This means they are more open to what you’re saying. So your content get absorbed.
• It preps them to buy – Now they trust you and feel open to your message. Being open means, they are open to everything you give them. This includes the sales website you send them to! And being open to the information there means they are much more likely to buy.
• You make more money – Now your reader arrives at the sales page in a buying mood. With the guard down and trusting your recommendation. The only thing that can result is increased sales!
• It increases customer satisfaction – Plus, they feel they’ve made the buying decision on their own. Instead of being manipulated into buying. And this leads to greater satisfaction with the product.
• It boosts your profits – Happy customers ask for refunds much less often. And that translates to more commission staying in your affiliate business.

Clearly preselling makes sense. You increase your profits. And produce happier customers. That’s a clear win-win.

Now, here’s how preselling works:

OK, now you understand why it’s so important. And I hope you’re resolved to being preselling, too. So, it’s time to break down how it works. As I mentioned earlier, it’s both an art and a science.

Part 1 – The art of it

Effective preselling requires gaining your readers trust in order for them to let down their guard. And the only method of doing this is to give exceptional value to your readers. But you can’t give them so much that they think they have everything they could need, and that’s what makes it an art. So you send them to the product website with a hunger for more of what the product provides. Plus they’re not guarded, so they’re more open and likely to purchase the product.

Part 2 – the Science

You also have to include some very specific things.

One of these key elements is the presentation of the information. You’ve got to map out your strategy before you start writing. In the end, you want to sell a specific product. You use the information to do this in one of two ways. The first method is to provide enough info to get them started, but not enough to finish. The second way is to provide all the information and let your reader discover how hard it is to actually implement it. Either way, the product sales page solves the problem.

You also have to link to the product you’re promoting discretely. Instead you link directly to the product sales page. This increases your clicks. But how will you earn affiliate commissions if you don’t use your affiliate link? There’s a trick to make this work… You use an image tag to cookie your reader before they leave your site.

The next trick is to hyperlink specific words and phrases inside the content of the article you’re providing. Hyperlinked words are clicked more than anything else. Plus, if you link on relevant words, it only makes sense to click on there.

What you have now is a super powerful system for affiliate marketing success.

Now for the bad news…

This process is not easy – at all! Let’s look at the skills required to pull it off: Good content. First and foremost, you have to be able to write a great article that provides valuable information. To do that you have to have enough information to be valuable and be able to present it in a useful way. Writing to presell. Yes, you must providing useful content. And you have to make the content accessible in order to provide value. And somehow also make them want to learn more. The other approach is to reveal a self-evident problem through the information.

Picking products. You also need to determine what products you’ll be preselling. Even if you get the article written. You’ve wasted all your effort if the product doesn’t sell well.

Technical skills. One of the keys to this system is using “covert cookies” for the tracking. This is pretty easy – you just make a 1 pixel X 1 pixel image with no border and make the “source” of the image your affiliate link. (But if you mess it up, your referrals won’t be tracked.)

Summary:

Now you’re armed with the information needed to effectively presell. Preselling properly will boost your affiliate profits up to 500%! So, start now and develop preselling content for all your affiliate promotions. Please don’t be lazy. Put in the effort to reap the greater rewards.

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Everyone knows the number one thing you need to be successful online is traffic to your website. Obviously, this assumes you actually have a reason for wanting this traffic. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. The important thing is getting the traffic and sustaining it.

Let’s talk about how to generate traffic…

Here are a few of the most popular way to get traffic to your site – for free:

• Web 2.0
• Article Websites
• Video Marketing

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Sites

By web 2.0 we mean any site where the users actually create the content. The exciting thing about Web 2.0 sites is that you get to add your own content and it becomes part of these sites. Because these sites get so much traffic, Google and the other search engines treat these sites with greater importance in their algorithms. Which means the content on them gets “indexed” faster and with more weight. And any links in your content that point to your own sites count as a strong “vote” in favor of your sites – lending you credibility in the search engines. The direct traffic from the Web 2.0 sites themselves is only part of the benefit. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don’t have time to get into here, but this will get you started.

Article Marketing

Article marketing really builds on the Web 2.0 concept. Article sites are in essence web 2.0 websites. Article directories are sites where users (including you) can upload articles they have written. And because they are also considered authority sites by the search engines you get all the benefits of other web 2.0 sites just by putting your articles on them. And in addition to this, other users can take your article and place it on their own website. And because the terms of the directory say they have to include your “resource box” you get links back from all these other sites, too. Here are a couple article marketing traffic tips:

• Figure out what keywords you want to go after
• Tailor the content of your article for the keywords
• Be sure to link to your site on the keywords you’ve chosen. Do this inside the article itself and in your author’s bio.

Video Marketing

The last of this group is video marketing. Here to we’re really looking at a web 2.0 sub-category. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. The extra top secret benefit of video marketing is that it’s much easier to rank for competitive keywords than in any other medium.

Here’s how to get free traffic using video…

• Set up your YouTube account
• When people view your videos, you want them to visit your site, so turn all the other modules in your profile off
• Put relevant “tags” in your profile
• Add a link to your website
• Add at least one video to your profile
• Include your keywords in the title, description and tags

Summary:

If you want to get traffic to your site, then follow the advice in this article.

In order to make sure your membership business is profitable, you have to select the right market. Here’s how.

Number 1 – Discover Niches with Fanatics

The number 1 thing you have to do is find fanatics if you want a profitable membership website. What’s a fanatic? It’s someone who is so excited about a certain topic that they will spend their time and money on information about it. Here’s how to find fanatics:

• Look at magazine racks. This is an often overlooked, yet extremely simple way to find niches that people are interested in. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to run a print magazine. So if you see one on the shelves you know they are making money, which means that there are enough people interested in what they’re saying to make it profitable. This is a very good indication that it’s a good niche for you to go into.
• Pay attention throughout the day in your regular activities. See what people are talking about on the radio, TV, at parties, in public, etc. If people are talking about it, they are interested in it. And that may also mean they’re willing to pay money to learn more about it.
• Conventions, clubs, and organizations. Once again, if there are enough people interested in a topic to create a club or organization, then there are enough people to build a membership business around it. By the same token, if enough people are interested to hold a convention on a certain topic, you can definitely find enough people to build a membership business around that same topic.
• What about your interests and hobbies? Chances are that if you like a certain topic or hobby, other people do, too. The icing on the cake here is that you get to build a business doing something you love.
• Another fantastic way to discover what people are interest in is Google Trends. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. The reason people are searching Google for info on these topics is because they are interested. And the fact that it’s made it into Google Trends tells you LOTS of people are interested. These are the niches you want to be in – lots of people actively searching means lots of opportunity.

Second – Analyze the “commerciality”

OK, so you’ve got a great idea for your niche membership business with lots of fanatics. But will they actually spend money? One way to figure this out is to see if other are making money in it.

Here’s how to determine if you can make money in your chosen niche

• Find out if there are blogs or forums related to it. Just search Google for “YourNiche blog” & “YourNiche forum” and see what comes up. This means there is a large group of people already assembled for you to market to.
• See if other people are creating and selling product in this niche by searching in Google Shopping, ebay and Amazon. It’s a good sign if there are because it tells you people are making money here.
• Look at Google Adwords for the same ads are running over time. If people are running the same ad over time it means they are making money in the niche. They would not continue to spend money on the ads if there were not making a return from them.

Last, but not least… How hard will it be to break into this niche?

OK, so you found a hot topic and you know other people are making money on it. Will you be able to get involved and do the same? How do you gauge the ease of entry?

• Figure out what kinds of products people are interested in. If it’s mostly physical products, coaching and live seminars, then it will be harder to break into this niche. Membership websites based on information are the easiest to start and maintain.
• Competition. How many other people are trying to sell to this market? You want to start in a market that’s not completely saturated with competitors.
• Compare the size of the market versus the number of competitors. Some competition is a good sign – just make sure the market is big enough for you to join in.
• How quickly do people in this market make buying decisions and are the ready to buy? Some niches are made up of people who require lots information and have a very long lead time, and some markets are filled with people who will spend lots of money right now.

Summing it all up

OK, now that you’ve figured out what niche you’re going to go into. Determined there is money to be made and that the competition is not too strong to break into it. You’re ready to start your membership business. Now that you’ve prepared properly, you’re success is 99% guaranteed. How to actually run your membership website is the only thing left to talk about…

My Take on Why People Fail to Succeed

Fellow Entrepreneur, this is quite interesting…

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Most people out there who are looking
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Makes sense huh? This isn’t you is it?

Look, most people (even those who have been
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They just don’t have a functioning, full blown
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YOU SEE, when it comes down to it, at the
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OR,

you could quickly get your own full-blown
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It would seem obvious to me, those who
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Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

Before we begin

Keyword research is really the first step in getting traffic to your website. This is because you will building your traffic funnels around specific keywords. So you need to make sure the keywords you’re targeting are worth targeting.

A couple things to keep in mind when doing keyword research:

• Will you be able to rank for these keywords? Take a look at the “strength” of others websites (and how many) are already targeting these keywords.
• What kinds of visitors do these keywords bring? Some keywords will bring lots of traffic, but none of them will buy. What you want is buyers!
• Will these keywords bring affiliates? Generating your own customers is great – having other people do it for you is even better. So make sure you are also targeting keywords to attract affiliates.

Although this is an essential step, doing it all by hand can take a very long time. Hiring someone else to do it costs a lot of money. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. This will not only speed it up. It will give you better results, as well.

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Once you’ve done your properly keyword research, you’re now ready to start targeting these keywords to draw in visitors.

Powerful Traffic Tactics:

• Surveys
• “Answer” Sites
• Video Sharing Sites

Surveys

Here’s the thing – people love surveys. It’s human nature. And smart website owners know this, so they will include your survey on their site if you make a good one. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. Think about that – you get website traffic for free just for making a survey! Using just this one extra idea will put you ahead of your competition . . . who think surveys are for gathering information! Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Answer” Sites

These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. But, like the surveys, that’s not why you’re going to pay attention to these sites. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. Of course, the process of digging through these sites and pulling out the content info of leads for your business is very time consuming. The good news is that it’s easy to find website traffic software that can do this automatically. These tools put the whole thing on auto-pilot and just deliver the leads to you each day.

Video Websites

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! So don’t miss out of this incredible source of free website traffic.

You don’t have to be able to make awesome videos for this to work. One super easy thing to do is take an article or website you’ve written. And use free screen capture software to record yourself reading it. I’ve even seen software that will automatically convert an article to a video!

In Closing

Getting traffic is not that difficult. Use your noodle and come up with things other people aren’t doing. Plus, there’s lots of great software out there to help you.

So, start right now and:

• Step 1 is researching your keywords
• Next, set up a survey or two with viral appeal
• Take advantage of the “help” sites
• Capitalize on video!