www.BBAffiliateMarketing.com affiliate marketing Getting Started With Affiliate Programs And How To make money Online In this lesson, I talk about choosing an affiliate marketing niche. Your affiliate marketing niche should meet two important criteria: 1. It should be a large niche on a popular subject large enough that it has enough affiliate program buyers and traffic potential. 2. It should have plenty of products that are available through an affiliate program. Choosing a niche is a …
For thousands of years humans have been telling stories. From the sketchings on cave walls, from The Epic of Gilgamesh around 2000 BC to different religious texts that circle the Earth. The story is so central to the human experience that one can not separate the story from what it means to be human.
In marketing, one of the huge benefits of telling a story is that people can remember stories better than any other form of marketing. Marketers call this “sticky”: it sticks in peoples minds long after they read or hear it. If you are a Christian, then you already know that Jesus knew the power of storytelling with his parables. Perhaps the greatest marketer to ever live, Claude Hopkins, in 1919, was hired by Schlitz beer to create an ad that would save the company. Indeed, Schlitz was ranked fifteenth in beer sales and was on the verge of closing its doors. Hopkins made a trip to Wisconsin to visit the brewery. He knew that he needed to know more about how their beer was actually made. Hopkins knew that in order to make a profitable ad, he would have to learn as much as possible about the product.The managers at Schlitz gave Hopkins a tour of the brewery and showed him every step of the brewing process. They showed him how deep they had drilled their wells to find the purest water. They explained how the glass sealed rooms kept the water pure, the yeast they used and from where they got it. They explained to Claude Hopkins where the bottles were cleaned, re-cleaned, and sanitized a dozen times.“My God,” Hopkins said, “Why don’t you tell people in your advertising about all these steps you are taking to brew your beer?”But, answered the Schlitz people, “all companies brew their beer about the same way.”“Yes,” Hopkins replied, “but the first one to tell the public about this process will gain a big advantage.”Hopkins then launched an ad campaign for Schlitz that described in detail the company’s step-by-step brewing process for making the beer. Six months later, Schlitz sales exploded and they became the #1 selling beer. Hopkins proved with his ad campaign the power of storytelling marketing If Claude Hopkins was alive today, he would literally dominate Internet marketing.
This is a good example of how marketing that you would think would fail, actually works. Most people would think that someone doesn’t have the time to read a long story and so it is better to not use story telling in your marketing and instead go for the short sales pitch. Who really has the time to read all this?–is what most new marketers think.This is just not true and we can prove that it is not true because of the marketing giants that have gone before us. Hopkins did marketing research on this very topic, he writes: Mail order advertising tells a complete story if the purpose is to make an immediate sale. You see no limitations there on amount of copy. The motto there is, “The more you tell the more you sell.” And it has never failed to prove out so in any test we know. One of the greatest marketers to have ever lived, Ben Hart, has done his own research on this subject. His findings show that his two page sales copy does better than his one page sales copy, and his four page sales copy does better than his two page sales copy. He has even written sales letters that are more than 12 pages long!
I am reminded of a client I had who felt that the sales letter I created for him was just too long to post on his landing page. He took out huge portions of my sales copy and posted the final version on his website. After a few months, I called him to find out how his web sales were doing. He said his sales increased about 10% but was really hoping for more. I recommended that he put the longer sales copy that I wrote for him up. This time he listened to me and did as I instructed. His sales increased 40%. He is a big believer now in using longer sales copy to tell a story.
Perhaps the greatest example of storytelling marketing is the sales letter that literally made the Wall Street Journal. This letter alone brought fame and fortune to the Wall Street Journal. You can take this letter and tweak it to fit your business.
Dear Reader:
On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both -– as young college graduates are — were filled with ambitious dreams for the future. Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.They were still very much alike. Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company after graduation, and were still there. But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president.
What Made the Difference?
Have you ever wondered, as I have, what makes this kind of difference in people’s lives? It isn’t always a native intelligence or talent or dedication. It isn’t that one person wants success and the other doesn’t.The difference lies in what each person knows and how he or she makes use of that knowledge. And that is why I am writing to you and to people like you about The Wall Street Journal. For that is the whole purpose of The Journal:
To give its readers knowledge – knowledge that they can use in business.
A Publication Unlike Any OtherYou see..
The Wall Street Journal is a unique publication. It’s the country’s only national business daily. Each business day, it is put together by the world’s largest staff for business-news experts. Each business day, The Journal’s pages include a broad range of information of interest and significance to business-minded people, no matter where it comes from. Not just stocks and finance, but anything and everything in the whole, fast-moving world of business … The Wall Street Journal gives you all the business news you need— when you need it.
Knowledge Is PowerRight now..
I am reading page one of The Journal. It combines all the important news of the day with in-depth feature reporting. Every phase of business news is covered, from articles on inflation, wholesale prices, car prices, tax incentives for industries to major developments in Washington, and elsewhere. And there is page after page inside The Journal filled with fascinating and significant information that’s useful to you. A daily column on personal money management helps you become a smarter saver, better investor, wiser spender. There are weekly columns on small business, marketing, real estate, technology, regional developments. If you have never read The Wall Street Journal, you cannot imagine how useful it can be to you. Much of the information that appears in The Journal appears nowhere else. The Journal is printed in numerous plants across the United States, so that you get it early each business day.
A $28 Subscription
Put our statements to the proof by subscribing for the next 13 weeks for just $28. This is the shortest subscription term we offer – and a perfect way to get acquainted with The Journal. Or you may prefer to take advantage of a longer-term subscription for greater savings: an annual subscription at $107 saves you $20 off The Journal’s cover price. Our best buy -—two years for $185 – saves you a full $69! Simply fill out the endorsed order card and mail it in the postage-paid envelope provided.
And here’s The Journal guarantee:
Should The Journal not measure up to your expectations, you may cancel this trial arrangement at any point and receive a refund for the undelivered portion of your subscription.If you feel as we do that this is a fair and reasonable proposition, then you will want to find out without delay if The Wall Street Journal can do for you what it is doing for millions of readers. So please mail the enclosed order card now, and we will start serving you immediately.
About those two college classmates, I mention at the beginning of this letter. They graduated from college together and together got started in the business world. So what made their lives in business different? Knowledge. Useful knowledge. And its application.
An Investment In Success..
I cannot promise you that success will be instantly yours if you start reading The Wall Street Journal. But I can guarantee that you will find The Journal always interesting, always reliable, and always useful.
I’m sitting here at my computer, sipping my first cup of coffee, and wondering what I’m gonna write about that would be of interest to readers of my blog. I’m thinking about all the facets of Internet Marketing: product creation, list-building, copywrighting, follow-up message writing, affiliate marketing, search engine optimization, traffic generation techniques, niche marketing, keyword research, ppc,joint-venturing, give-aways, and seemingly the list could ramble on ad-infinitum! How can a person possibly get one’s head wrapped around all this stuff sufficiently enough to take the first step into this alluring, yet crazy world of Internet Marketing?? It’s no wonder 95% is the failure rate!
After a year of buying up everything I could afford to buy, lurking in dozens of forums and reading so many blog posts I’ve lost count, I’m just beginning to see the “Battle Fog” begin to lift!
What’s interesting is where all that ‘Fog’ came from. Innocently, I subscribed to a couple of Give-Away events about one year ago. I perused the ‘free’ offers of promises of ‘internet marketing greatness and massive wealth with my product’. Each time I succumbed to a good sale page, I freely gave my name and email address in exchange for the purported “Golden Nugget”. But as an uninitiated ‘Newbie’ I didn’t really understand what I was actually doing. I was commiting myself to the first stages of a massive avalance of endless ‘ the-greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread’ offers one could imagine! The feeding frenzy had begun. In the days and months to follow, dozens of hyped emails filled my inbox with offers for products that were making each sender a friggin’ fortune! That’s the ‘Fog’ to which I previously referred! The dust stirred up by the relentless pounding of incoming rounds of awesome offers had my vision and focus so clouded I strayed aimlessly, with wallet open, for several months! I spent lots, read a ton, realizing I was often reading rehased, out-dated garbage. After 6 months I was officially ” Information Overloaded”!
At that point, with gigabytes of product, some valuable, most trash, I realized I was doing exactly what scores of marketing ‘Gurus’ hoped I would do….buy everything that promised success. I then decided to take control of my destiny. I began to catalog all of the ‘product’ I had accumulated. Then, with a vengence, I began assessing each product. With a plan in hand, I gleefully began deleting. A tremendous feeling of euphoria began to envelope my very existence! Somehow, once I decided a product to be a ‘waste of my time and money’, the act of pressing the DELETE key made me feel more in control of my life again! A clarity of purpose arose and for the first time I believed, no…I KNEW I could do this business.
Presently, with more patience and a clear mission, the ‘Fog’ has completely cleared! Soon I will be productive! The real purpose of documenting my experience here is to ask you, the reader, to share your beginning experience in hopes other readers can benefit. So, I simply ask that you leave your comments on this post and let’s begin a meaningful dialog that might help others avoid these traps.
affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online, and even if you don’t have a list of customers who buy every time you email them, you can still make money with affiliate marketing with this cool tactic that I use. I actually have taught my mom to do this in several niches and she uses it to bring in a couple thousand dollars a month. She’s wanting to retire and works a full time job, so I knew I had to come up with something she could do fairly easy.
First, you’ll need to pick a pretty broad niche. Like health, hobbies, etc. Yes, you can even use Internet marketing. That’s actually the niche I use this tactic for.
So, once you have your niche, you need to make sure their are plenty of digital products for your niche. ClickBank and PayDotCom are the two biggest affiliate sites where you can find tons of digital products you can sell as an affiliate.
Pick 1 digital products to start out with. You’re either going to have to buy it or ask the owner for a review copy because you’ll need to write a review for the product. Now this is really important. You’re not writing an ad for the product, you’re writing a review. My suggestion is to go to a place like http://www.EzineArticles.com and read articles about how to write a review before writing your first one.It’s really not that hard, so don’t let that discourage you. Once you get your first one done, all other ones you write will be super easy.
Once you have your product reviewed, and the review written for it, it’s time to create a blog, and post the review to your blog. Make sure you create links so that once the person reads your review, they can buy the product. These will be your affiliate links. I highly recommend getting your own domain name and installing a blog on it.
Okay, so you’ve got a blog with your product review. There’s only one problem. No one is coming to your blog, right? Well here’s where the secrets come in. Just kidding. The secret is there are no secrets. Just tactics you have to learn.
So the first thing I do is use an RSS submitter tool, and submit my blog rss feed to the directories. This will give you some instant traffic.
The second thing I do is pay an article writer to write an article for me on the topic of the product I have reviewed. Once you have your article, there’s one more step you have to take before we use the articles, and that’s keyword research.
You need to find easy to rank for keywords that are related to your product. An easy to rank for keyword is simply a keyword that gets good searches but doesn’t have a lot of competition. There are a lot of software programs online that will help you determine easy to rank for keywords. You’ll need 2-3 easy to rank for keywords per product.
Once you have those, make sure to take one of them and use it to link back to your site in your resource box. This will give you backlinks for that keyword because we’re going to be submitting the article to article directories. Backlinks are important and submitting articles is a great way to get them.
Take your other keywords you have, and use other ways to get backlinks for them. Either have more articles written or learn more ways to get backlinks. Believe me, there are tons of ways to get backlinks and many of them are free.
Once you’ve done this, rinse and repeat with a new product….
What does all of this accomplish?
If you keep writing reviews for your products and putting your affiliate links in the reviews, you’ll make sales on those products by driving traffic the ways I’ve told you. There are tons of ways to drive traffic, but this is the easy method. You’ll get some instant traffic, but by using the backlink tactic, you’ll also get long term traffic as your reviews start ranking for their keywords.
I just finished reading a new report by Walter M. Prorok Jr. and Chris Vendilli. Inside this report Walt & Chris talk about the in’s & out’s of configuring your Twitter account along with some free third party services to maximize your traffic & exposure.
I was skeptical at first, but after reading through the whole report and watching a couple of the videos available at their website I must say, I’m beyond impressed.
These two guys have been silently attracting visitor after visitor to their sites using Twitter, and they’ve created a step by step guide so that anyone can replicate their ideas & systems.
Yes, that’s right, it’s another “system.” Most of us, as marketers, have pretty much come to recognize the word “system” as overused and often incorrectly placed. But, with “The Twitter Report” and the videos that follow, this stuff really is formatted into what you could correctly label a “system” at it’s finest.
Walt & Chris have uncovered every known tip & trick for setting up your Twitter account to give you maximum return per tweet, while keeping everything on auto-pilot as much as possible. They leave nothing to question and go pretty in depth.
Most of the stuff they cover includes many things you could likely figure out on your own, however, this report can save you the time & aggravation of having to go through trial and error while you make the same mistakes they’ve already made for you, & neatly documented along the way.
Why waste time, energy, and money trying to figure it all out on your own when you could just see how it all worked out for them and simply follow their suggestions, which are already proven to work successfully?
After reading the report and watching some of the videos I give TwitterHints.com two enthusiastic thumbs up, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to stay on the cutting edge of this new wave of communications & hyper-connectedness.
You’ll learn how to configure your settings, which 3rd party sites to join & how to set them up to run campaigns automatically, and much more.
I’m sure you’ll enjoy “The Twitter Report” as much as I did and you can go check it out here:
