Why you must presell

The most important thing you can do to increase your affiliate commissions is to presell properly.

Before we start, let’s talk about what preselling actually is. Well, it is an art. And it’s also a science. And it’s function is to prepare your reader to buy something. Then you send them to the site that sells what you’ve prepared them for. And if it’s done properly, the process is completely sub-conscious.

The gist is that you give your reader some useful information. And then refer them to the product website. In a second we’ll talk about how to do actually it. But before we do, you need to know why it’s so important. Here are a few benefits of preselling:

• It builds trust – And gaining the trust of your readers helps them want to click your links. Which obviously means you’ll make more sales.
• It disarms your reader – Nobody likes to be sold something. By not doing that to them, your reader is less defensive. Unguarded reading means they’re not filtering what you say. And your intention is conveyed more easily.
• It preps them to buy – Your readers are now receiving your message. So they become more receptive to other messages. This includes the sales website you send them to! Being open to a sales message is what it means being in a buying mood.
• You make more money -
• It boosts customer loyalty -
• Your profits go up – Happy customers ask for refunds much less often. Which means you keep more of your affiliate commissions.

Obviously, it’s important to presell. You increase your profits. Your customers are happier. That’s a clear win-win.

Now, here’s how preselling works:

You’ve learned the importance of preselling. And I hope you’re resolved to being preselling, too. So, it’s time to break down how it works. Like we talked about before, it’s an art. And it’s 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. That is, they have to be wanting more when you refer them to the product sales page for the product you’re trying to sell. Plus they’re not guarded, so they’re more open and likely to purchase the product.

It’s also a science

There’s also a specific formula you need to follow.

The first is how you present the information. You have to have your end in mind. Your goal is to sell the product you’re promoting. 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. Or you can give them so much information that it feels overwhelming to do what you’re talking about. Whichever method, you send them to a product website that solves the problem you just created.

You also have to link to the product you’re promoting discretely. You have directly to the home page of the product. That’s because nobody likes to click on affiliate links. But, without your affiliate link, how do you get credit? This is all part of the science of preselling. You use the “covert cookie” strategy.

You also want to link to the sales page from inside your article’s content. It’s habitual to click on words and phrases that are hyperlinked. Plus, if you link on relevant words, it only makes sense to click on there.

Using this system, you’re virtually guaranteed to increase your affiliate business success.

Now for the bad news…

This process is not easy – at all! Let’s talk about everything required to put this plan into action: Good content. First of all, you actually have to write great articles and give value to your readers. This means you have to be able to write well, and have enough knowledge to be useful.

First, you have to give good information. But, you also need to know how to present the information in a way that give value to the reader. And somehow also make them want to learn more. Or provide so much information that they see how hard it will be to implement.

Picking products. Next, you’ve got to pick the right product to presell. Even if you can pull off writing and great article. You’ve wasted all your effort if the product doesn’t sell well.

The technical know-how

Summary:

A good presell can boost your affiliate profits up to 500%!  The important thing is to use these techniques for everything you promote as an affiliate. Please don’t be lazy. Make the extra effort required to propel your affiliate business to the next level.

Everyone knows the number one thing you need to be successful online is traffic to your website. Of course you also need to have a valuable offer for your visitors – a reason for them to transact with you. What you do with the traffic when it gets to your site could be any number of things. The most crucial aspect of this process is getting the visitors to your site.

How, then do you get traffic to your site?

These are the best and fastest ways to get free visitors coming to your site:

• Web 2.0 Sites
• Articles Directories
• Video Sites

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. The other interesting thing about these sites is that all the search engines (including Google) treat them as “authority sites”. The benefit of this to you is that your content is now considered as part of these sites. 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. That’s the real benefit of adding content to this sites – search engine ranking means ongoing free traffic. How to generate web 2.0 traffic

Article Websites

Article marketing really builds on the Web 2.0 concept. This is because article websites are really web 2.0 site. In typical web 2.0 fashion, article sites rely on user-generated content (i.e. your articles). And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you – so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. If you want to generate traffic from articles follow these steps:

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free traffic in no time.

This article explains how to select a profitable niche for your membership business.

Step 1 – Find a Fanatical Market

• 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. If they can make money in a print version, you can probably make money with a membership website.
• You’ve got lots of opportunities every day to see what people are interested in. Just pay attention to what people talk about on the radio, at social gatherings, at the store or restaurants and anywhere in public. If people are talking about it, they are interested in it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
• Don’t forget about clubs and organizations. If there are enough people to to build a club, there are certainly enough people to start a membership site on the same topic. 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. Making money is fun and it’s even more fun if you can do it in a niche you’re excited about.
• Another fantastic way to discover what people are interest in is Google Trends. This service shows you the current most popular 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. Hot topics that people are excited about make great niches for your membership website.

Second – Analyze the “commerciality”

Once you found to center a potential niche or topic around, you need to figure out if you can actually make any money in it. An easy way to determine this is to figure out if anyone else is making money in this niche.

Here’s a punch list for figuring out if anyone’s making money in your niche:

• Are there blogs or forums in this niche? Take the name of your niche and search for “niche name blog” “niche name forum” in Google to see if there is an active group of people talking about and interested in the niche. 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. What you’re trying to figure out is if anyone is making money in this niche, and if people are selling products it means they are making money.
• Watch Google Adwords for a period of time and look for ads the run again and again. Adwords ads are expensive, so people only run them repeatedly if they are profitable. And to be profitable, they have to be selling products and making money.

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

• Product types. What kind of products are being sold in the niche? You’re looking for a niche that sells info products. That’s because it’s much easier to build a around information vs. any other kind of product.
• The last thing you want is a marketing filled with tons of competitors. A few means it’s a profitable niche, but too many means you won’t be able to take a piece of it.
• Size vs. Competition. Some competition is good. It means that this is a profitable market. And as long as the size of the market is large enough to support the competition, you’re fine.
• Market readiness. Are people ready to buy? Are the receptive to marketing messages? Depending on the market it can be anywhere from a couple minutes to a many months between when someone starts the investigation process to when they actually make a purchase.

In Summary

At this point you’ve figured out what niche you’re going into. You found your fanatics, you know they spend money and you’re confident there’s room in the market for you. Now that you’ve prepared properly, you’re success is 99% guaranteed. and is the only thing left to talk about…

Visitors to your site are critical – getting them there automatically is even better. Here’s how…

Before we begin

Keyword research is really the first step in getting traffic to your website. Why? Because you have to target these keywords if you are to have any hope of actually generating traffic for them. This means it’s critical to select your keywords properly.

Here are the important considerations for your research:

• Are the keywords you’re interested in attainable? Take a look at the “strength” of others websites (and how many) are already targeting these keywords.
• Are these “buying” keywords? If you don’t do your research you’ll end up with a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy from you. This is not what you’re looking for.
• Another thing to think about is affiliates. Nothing brings more buyers like an army of affiliates. 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. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. The upside is that these two factors keep most everyone from even doing their keyword research. What I recommend is using website traffic software to save the time of doing it yourself and the money of hiring someone else. This way you get this critical step done fast and done well.

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Only after doing your keyword research correctly can you start targeting these keywords to get you traffic.

• Here are a couple of clever ways to do this…
• Most people overlook the power of Surveys!
• “Help” Websites
• Video Sharing Sites

Surveys

The truth is that people really enjoy taking surveys and finding out what other people think. And if you make it interesting, other people will post your survey on their website. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. The beauty of this is that it generates  website visitors for you with no work on your part. Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. Just make the question interesting enough that people will want to share it with their own visitors.

“Traffic Traps”

These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. Once again, the main reason for this site is not the reason you’re interested. What you want to do is use these sites to generate traffic and leads for your business. Now, you can do this all by hand – visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. The good news is that it’s easy to find website traffic software that can do this automatically. This allows you to do the things in your business that can’t be automated and let the software just give you the leads.

Video Sharing Sites

Another great resource is video sharing sites like YouTube. 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.

And don’t worry if you don’t have any idea of how to make a video. It’s really easy to just start with an article or something you’ve already written. Then just do a screen capture of yourself going through it. You can even get software that will automatically do this for you.

Summary

Figuring out how to get some visitors to your site is not hard at all. It just takes a little time and some ingenuity. And today there are tons of options for software tools that can help with every part of this process.

Don’t waste any more time:

• Step 1 is researching your keywords
• Set up some viral surveys
• Make sure to use the “answer” sites
• And definitely include video sharing sites

 Affiliate Marketing Secrets

One of the easiest and fastest way to generate income online is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing means that all you do is sendtraffic to someone else’s website, they make the sale and deliver the product, and you get paid 50% or more

These are a some of the benefits

1.  You’re able to start almost instantly without having to make a product, set up a website and sales page, design the website, develop marketing materials, or get a merchant account and CRM.
2. There’s no time investment from you because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.
3. Your efforts are risk-free, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So if you send visitors you will get paid.

Obviously affiliate marketing makes sense – these benefits make it a clear winner!

OK, but it’s not all rosy…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.

How can you avoid this pitfall?

What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you’re really on top of your game, you’ll then send to a content mini-site in between.

Here are the benefits of doing affiliate marketing like this:

• Owning a list of potential buyers gives you the ability to market additional products at the push of a button.
• You’re generating good will by giving them high-quality content. This way, they are much more likely to make a purchase when you send them to the sales page.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following

• A lead capture page, preferably with video
• At least a few pages of great content
• At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

Instead of sending visitors directly to the product sales page, you’ll send them to your lead capture page first. It captures the name and email of your visitors and puts them into your autoresponder, which then begins sending out the 5-part email series. Then it redirects them to your content pages after they subscribe to your email series.

The content pages provide valuable information for your visitors and make them more receptive to the sales message that you’ll link to from inside the content. While they’re reading the content you’ve provided, your email system is already following up with them to send them back to the product website again and again.

All of this together increases your chances of making the sale by up to 500% so it’s well worth the effort of setting it up. After setting it up, you simply send visitors to your squeeze page instead of the sales page. And the rest runs on auto-pilot.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to set it all up yourself, you can use something like a Services like this to design the entire system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. One negative is that there will be other people using this same affiliate marketing system  However, the odds of you and them both finding the same visitor are so small, that it doesn’t really matter.

Another way to accomplish this is to hire “outsourcers” through a website like Elance to build and put your system together for you. The important thing is that you start using affiliate tools like the ones described here right now! Otherwise, you’re wasting your time and money.

Internet Marketing isn’t hard. A lot of people have a hard time getting started though. One reason is that they buy a couple of IM products that teach you to set yourself up as an expert in a niche, and try to sell products in that niche.

The problem is most people just starting are interested in the Internet marketing niche, which was why that bought the product in the first place.

With so many people trying to become an authority in internet marketing especially those that are just getting started it easy to see why it’s a crowded market place.

It makes it even more confusing for someone trying to learn more about it, because how do you know you are getting real information from someone that has actually used it and been successful with it, or are you just getting re-hashed information that someone heard about maybe working, from a friend of a friend?

Unfortunately many people are not able to tell until after a purchase is made.

There is a better way to do it though. Find a different niche. Or even a sub-niche within the IM industry.

Look for something that is not over saturated, that is profitable, and market to that niche.

Once you get your feet wet and you have had some success marketing to your other niches, take what you have learned, put your own twist on it and then try entering the IM arena.

The only problem with the above plan is finding those profitable other niches. It takes a lot of research; you have to find good keywords. A topic that is heavily searched but not very marketed.

This in itself could be a fulltime job for someone.

Luckily though, Cindy Battye, just released DailyNicheIdeas. This is a free membership site that not only gives you a new niche idea everyday but lets you know what the top performing product for the niche is. Marketing materials and everything else you may possibly need to market that niche.

You don’t have to go out and buy product after product trying how to learn the latest and greatest ways of marketing online, the member’s area is full of information.

If you want to learn how to use PPC, blogs, articles or anything else it is covered in the members area for you.

These tools along with a new proven niche idea each day makes this the only ite you will ever need.

Be sure to check out DailyNicheIdeas for the last site you will need to join.

I mentioned above that the site is free to join and you do get access to everything as a free member but be sure to pay close attention to the upgrade offer at DailyNicheIdea, for more ways that you can fill your mailbox with affiliate checks with no extra work by you.