Marketing Techniques Compendium Part 2

Affiliate programming

You can offer your products’ through an affiliate program. Generally, you allow anyone to become an affiliate, as long as they follow your rules. Affiliates get a commission on each sale. It can be paid immediately after the sale, or accumulated and paid out periodically.

Subscriber list

You should provide your visitors an opportunity to sign up for your list on every page of your site. To get them to sign up, you must offer them value for their email addresses. A free gift immediately and the promise of a quality newsletter or free gifts regularly is a good value. Regular communication with them is crucial to maintaining their interest. Asking for their input and opinion about the site is also a very good idea.

Tell-a-Friend

You should place a “Tell-a-friend” script on strategic pages of your website. If visitors recommend your website to other people, you will get more quality traffic. A recommendation from a friend is about the best advertising you can get.

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What Value Your Product?

It is one thing to put a selling price on a product, it is another altogether to put a value on it. What value your product really has is only apparent after someone has made a purchase. You need to create a high perceived value in your potential purchasers minds so that they will buy your product.

What is Perceived Value

Perceived value is the difference between the prospective customer's evaluation of all the benefits of your product compared to the total price. Viewers are turned into buyers based on the perceived value of your product. By making , sure that your product has a high perceived value, and then delivering on it, is an excellent way to get new customers and keep them, and eventually building a strong relationship with them.

Creating high perceived value products or services is very straightforward. You can do that by putting yourself in their shoes, figuring out what is their most pressing problem, and creating a product or service that will provide great benefits to your customers. Next check out what your competitors are offering. Make sure that your clients feel that they will receive greater benefits and value from your product(s) compared to your competitors' products.

How To Create Perceived Value

1. Find out what your customers value. What do they are really want? It could be anything from saving time or money, clear instructions on how to do something, to a complete resale package including graphics and website.

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The Importance of an Affiliate Program to Membership Sites

Join Affiliate Programs

An affiliate program isn't really a program. It's a business arrangement.

Affiliate programs are also known as associate programs, associates programs, referral programs and even bounty programs. Most affiliate programs are free to join. Affiliate programs are important to membership sites for a number of good reasons. Mainly, because they are a way to earn money without producing your own product.

Affiliate programs allow your membership website to generate additional (other than the membership subscription) income by advertising products that are relevant to your site’s theme. For example, let’s say the theme of your membership website is golf. You would recommend products that you like yourself such as golf books, golf magazines, golf videos and golfing gear.

When you have an affiliate agreement with the merchants selling those products, they provide you with affiliate links which you paste into your site. Then when members click on those links and buy those products, you earn a commission. Affiliates programs can earn you commissions in three ways: per click, per sale and per lead.

The members of your membership website are helped by the affiliate programs as well. They are given easy access to products that they would otherwise have to search the Internet to find.

Run an Affiliate Program

On the other side of the aisle, you can let other companies post your ad on their sites and pay commissions for sales of your product or memberships. Sure, you may give away 50 percent of your profit to an affiliate; but 50 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing. If you have several affiliates, you’ll undoubtedly make up the lost percentage in sales quantity. One hundred percent of $1,000 is a lot less than 50% of $5,000. It’s quite worthwhile in the long run.

Beware of Affiliate Spamming!

Since your affiliate marketer earns compensation based on a percentage of each sale, you can see where an affiliate marketer would be sorely tempted to send out email advertising the products he makes money for promoting. At one time, this resulted in so much SPAM being generated that anti-spam laws were enacted. Spammers are severely fined and the newest twist in the anti-spam laws are that the merchants, like you, whose affiliates spam are being held responsible for the spamming as well. So you are well advised to exercise caution when you choose affiliates, and then to supervise them closely.

If you are considering adding an affiliate strategy to your online sales channel you should research the different technological solutions available to you. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming. Some types of affiliate management solutions that help to deal with this problem include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

Spamdexing

Search engine spamming or Spamdexing is the practice of deliberately creating web pages which will be indexed by search engines in order to increase the chance of a website or page being placed close to the beginning of search engine results, or to influence the category to which the page is assigned.

Right now there is a lot of debate about the affiliate practice of Spamdexing. Many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of automatically generated web pages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of optimizing their sites for the search engines. This type of Spam is the biggest threat to organic search engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users.

Internet Marketing For You

Just like there are no magic weight loss cures or ways to earn money from home without a great deal of effort, there is no one simple solution to guarantee Internet marketing success. However, Internet marketing is not overly complicated to understand. Many business owners can enjoy at least some degree of Internet marketing success with only limited knowledge of marketing skills. This article will discuss some of the simplest Internet marketing strategies, both paid and free, that you can implement to promote your business online.

Message Boards

Participation in industry related message boards is one of the easiest ways that you can use the Internet as a promotional tool. Message boards are websites which provide a forum for Internet users who share a common interest to share information related to this subject or just socialize. You may opt to join message boards which closely relate to your industry or the products or services youi offer. This is important because doing this gives you access to a group of Internet users who fall into the target audience for your products or services. It also gives you the opportunity to promote your own website. Many message boards allow users to place a link to their own website in their signature. You should do this and make sure that you contribute useful commentary on the message boards to attract potential customers via the this link.

Additionally, some message boards may even allow you to post links in the body of the message. This gives you the opportunity to offer your link in response to questions and comments when doing so is relevant and offers something of value to the online conversation. However, care should be taken to carefully review the terms of service and all guidelines on the message board before posting links to ensure this is not a violation of the policies of the message board. Failure to adhere to message board policies may result in your removal from the message board or your posts being viewed as spam by other users.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is certainly one of the most cost effective Internet marketing strategies available. This marketing strategy involves having other website owners known as affiliates post an advertisement on their websites to direct Internet traffic to your website. This marketing strategy is cost effective because in most cases the affiliate is only paid when he produces a desired result such as enticing an Internet user to click through your advertisement or to purchase a product or service once they click through the ad. You only pay for the advertisement when it produces a desired effect, but it is still very worthwhile to evaluate the effectiveness of these ads to determine whether or not they are working well.

Banner Ads

You may want to take advantage of banner ads. Although their effectiveness is very much reduced, banner ads can still pay off. If you are on a limited budget you may find banner exchanges to be quite useful. The ideal use of banner ads would include placing your banner ad on a website which receives a great deal of traffic and attracts an audience who will likely be interested in your products or services. Additionally, this website should not directly compete for your business. This scenario may be difficult to find and even if you are able to find this type of situation, purchasing advertisement space may be expensive especially if it is a highly competitive niche. For these reasons you may find banner exchanges to be an affordable alternative.

Ezines

Another very popular Internet marketing strategy is to publish and distribute an e-newsletter or ezine on a regular basis. Ezines are essentially emails which may contain content, graphics, links and subtle forms of advertising. In general ezines should be informative in nature and useful to the recipient but should also serve some type of marketing purpose as well.

Search Engine Optimization

Another simple, but effective, Internet marketing strategy is to hire a consulting firm with search engine optimization (SEO) experience to assist you in achieving high search engine rankings. The concept of SEO can be rather complex and understanding the most effective strategies and how to properly implement them may take years of experience as well as continual education. If you are interested in trying SEO on your own, you may be interested in a tutorial on the subject such as “Basic SEO Explained”.

The ability to hire a qualified SEO firm is as simple as knowing how to interview candidates and select the most qualified one. Handling your own SEO efforts can be rather difficult if you don’t have any SEO experience. Hiring a skilled firm to take care of this for you is not only easy but it can have a significant impact on your website traffic. High search engine rankings typically translate to improved web traffic. This is because Internet users trust search engines to serve the most relevant websites first and typically only visit the best ranking websites when they search for a particular term.

Consulting Firm

Similarly another simple way to enjoy Internet marketing success is to hire a consulting firm to plan and execute your Internet marketing strategy. Just like SEO, Internet marketing is essentially a full time job. Business owners may have a great deal of difficulty trying to run their business and organize their Internet marketing. Outsourcing this work eases the burden on the business manager and will likely produce more favourable results.

I have just briefly touched on a number of Internet Marketing ideas that may be of interest to you. From time to time, vver the next few months I will try to expand on specific methods of Internet Marketing..

Good luck and great profits.