Software Review
How would you like an army of salespeople promoting your products?
Even better, you only pay them when they make a sale.
Who are they?...
They are known as Affiliates or Associates.
These are people who will promote your products on their web site. In return you pay them a commission for each sale they make. This can vary from say 15% up to 50% or more for
electronically delivered products like books or software. Be as generous as you possibly can and it will reflect in your affiliate sales. You also stand the chance of attracting a Super Affiliate who can really make your sales
take off.
There are a number of web sites who specialize in bring together businesses with products to sell and affiliates to sell them.... and the service is usually free.
The best I’ve found to date are:
www.affiliatesdirectory.com
www.associateprograms.com
www.cashpile.com
www.refer-it.com
There are many others
which you can find out by checking on the search engines like www.google.com which I think is one of the best search engines and www.yahoo.com who are the best known of the web directories.
My best advice is don’t even think about registering with these affiliate directories until you have got your
affiliate program in place. This means a dedicated place on your web site where you can explain to the affiliates the benefits of your products. You will also need banners, pictures and copy for them to download.
TOP TIP - The best sales come from affiliates who give your product their personal recommendation. So it makes sense to encourage this as much as possible.
Once you register it is quite easy to have several hundred
affiliates signed up in quite a short space of time. The major challenge is how to track which sales have come from which affiliate. All they are doing is sending people to your web site.
You will need to assign a unique
number for each affiliate. One way to track sales is to have a separate web site page for each affiliate. It can be done but it is a nightmare.
You might not be surprised to learn that there is an answer:
Associate Tracking Software
Once again I’ve done the legwork for you to find the very best.
There are a number of producers of this type of software. In my opinion the very best of
these is a very powerful program called AssocTrac. Even better, it costs a fraction of what you will pay for similar programs without the features of AssocTrac.
One of the delights of an online business is that, if set
up properly, it runs itself. With very little input from you. Generating profits around the clock - 365 days a year. In order to make this work effectively you must totally automate it.
AssocTrac helps you achieve this.
Here are the barebones of the benefits you will enjoy:
Automatically sign up your affiliates
Automatically manage all of your affiliates.
Automatically track all the visitors and sales to your web site
Automatically prints out commission checks to your affiliates
It can even help you test which advertising is the most effective.
You must be serious about making your web site profitable (otherwise you
wouldn’t be reading this). Setting up your own affiliate program is one of the best ways of doing this. But without effective Associate Tracking Software you will find this very difficult to achieve.
I’ve checked out
most of those on the market and AssocTrac wins hands down.
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Get Your Site A High Ranking On The Search Engines |
The search engines are still a great way of generating a lot of traffic to your site. To be effective you will need to appear on the first page of listings.
With literally thousands of other sites competing for this high ranking, this is not easy.
Once again, I will issue a word of caution. Don’t be tempted into submitting your site using one of the free submission services.
By doing so you will be opting in to their mailing list and you will be inundated with junk mail. Its not spam because you effectively gave them permission to mail you when you signed up.
Furthermore, you will be
disappointed to find that it has had little or no effect on your ranking.
There are only two options open to you.
Option 1 - Submit your site by hand.
Every search engine and directory has individual forms to be completed. They will want you to supply a
title for the page - a set of keywords and a description for your site with differing amounts of words allowed.
Your title is a one line description of your site. Make it punchy and eye catching but stay away from trying
to be cute or clever. This one line is what is going to attract a visitor to your site.
Key Words are the same as the meta tags on your web page.
Keep them specific to what you are selling. You only want people to
visit your site who are interested in what you have to offer. Think which words they would type into the search engine to find you and use those words as your key words. Keep it tightly targeted and specific and avoid
generalities.
These can also be two and three word phrases separated by commas.
Option 2 - Submit your site automatically
There are about 150 effective search engines and to maximize your marketing you should be
registered with all of them. Now to hand submit each of your web pages to all of these search engines a couple of times a week would be more work than I care to imagine.
There is one piece of software that I am aware of
that can do this for you and optimize your submission for each individual search engine. An incredible piece of software at a very low price. And the price includes regular updates to keep constantly abreast with the changing
requirements of each submission.
The software is called SitePromoter. We use it and it’s is very effective.
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Collect The Email Addresses Of Customers & Prospects |
Email is without doubt the most powerful marketing tool on the internet. You can send thousands upon thousands of tightly targeted messages to your customers
and prospective customers for next to nothing.
At this point I must issue a word of warning. Never ever SPAM!
SPAM is an email sent unsolicited to a random list of addresses. I know you can buy a million
addresses on CD for $25. Some even say that they are “opt in” addresses. Please don’t do it. At best you will receive hundreds even thousands of very abusive replies... at worst your ISP will disconnect you.
So how do you collect addresses?
The most basic information you require is the contacts first name and email address.
1)
The most important list is your database of past and present customers. If you don’t have their email address make a point of collecting them from this point on. Even set someone the task of calling them and asking for it.
2)
Offer something free on your website. A free newsletter (see the blue box on the left), a free information booklet... even a free sample of your product. These people have opted into your email list and registered an interest in what you do.
They would be happy to receive future, relevant mailings from you. But never, ever abuse this trust by selling your list to anyone else.
It is quite common to build up a list of many thousands of interested
people in this way.
What Do I Do With My List Now I’ve Got It?
Use it to keep in touch with your customers and prospects.
Send out personalised emails. I’ll tell you how a little later. Use the persons name. This
means starting your message with something like:
Hi John,
I just wanted to tell you about a special offer that I’m very excited about.......
I hope you already know that it’s much easier to sell something to someone whose bought from you before. Send your customers an email offering a similar product to
the one they bought.
Many of them will place an order there and then!
Send your list of prospective customers more information about your products, details of special offers, upcoming exhibitions etc. etc.
Be careful not to be too blatant with your selling, include some useful information or news and don’t bombard them several times a week or you’ll lose them forever.
This Seems Like An Awful Lot Of Work To Keep On Top Of
It is. But thankfully there is an easy way to put the whole thing onto autopilot.
I checked out everything I could find to automate these tasks and the
best software I found to do this (and a whole lot more) is called Mailloop.
Email can quickly take over your life. Mailloop is so easy to use (it even comes with a set of videos to get you started), I literally couldn’t
run my business without it.
There isn’t enough space here to go into too much detail, but just to give you an idea of what it can do for you:
Sends out personalized e-mails to unlimited sizes of databases.
Automatically sends out your newsletter on the date you specify.
Replies to incoming e-mails
with exactly the right message using intelligent autoresponders.
Sorts and filters all of your incoming mail.
Extracts e-mail addresses automatically from any list.
And much more. Sorry if I go on a bit but I am so enthusiastic about it I wanted to share it with you.