Category: Grow a Home Business

Ten Reasons to Start an Affiliate Program

Starting an affiliate program is the best way to increase your income and build a bigger business fast. You have a whole army of fans promoting your product, pushing your website up on search engine results, and talking about your product. There are so many reasons to have an affiliate program that you should just almost stop reading now and get to work on starting one. But, if you’re not convinced yet, keep reading.

1. Low Startup Costs – There is hardly any business that you can start that has a lower startup cost. Depending upon what type of software you want to use and the functionality you want, you can start your affiliate program for just five bucks through E-junkie.com, or for about 50 bucks via ClickBank.com, or a little more by using software like aMember.com.

2. Low Cost Marketing – Face it; marketing isn’t cheap. But, when you have an affiliate program you get other people to foot the bill for a lot of it. You will need to create marketing materials for your affiliates, but they will often pay for ads and PPC campaigns if your payout is high enough for them to do so.

3. Winning Business Model – When you consider the business model, it really is just hiring sales people who work on commission only. This means your labor force is very cheap and essentially free unless they make a sale. Sales people have always been around and will always be around. Just because you’re good at making your product doesn’t make you a good sales person, but hopefully you can attract good sales people via your affiliate program.

4. Easily Scale Your Business – When you have a practically free sales force, that means you can scale your business easily. Once you have enough affiliates you can close or open the program as you wish. You can start focusing on building products instead of selling, and still keep growing your business.

5. Increases Your Streams of Income – If you already sell products of your own as well as other people’s, then you know what it means to have multiple streams of income. Having many ways to bring money into your household keeps you from having financial problems, because you’re not reliant on just one source of income.

6. A Key to Higher Profit Margins – Getting other people to do work for you is a huge key to making more profits in your business. Once you get your affiliate program going, and your affiliates are promoting and selling your products, your main job will be to create new products and marketing materials and then let them go for it.

7. Word-of-Mouth Marketing at Its Best – In many cases affiliates are also users of the product or service. In fact, you can make that a criterion for promoting it if you want. Then you can take advantage of the idea of word-of-mouth marketing with a boost. Affiliate marketing is like word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.

8. Improves Traffic to Your Website – When you have multiple people sending traffic to your sales page, this is automatically going to create links outside of your website. Many of these will be considered authoritative in nature, which Google Search likes.

9. It’s Team Building That Gets Results – When you have an army of affiliates working for you, you can get them together and work on team building, even offer them training to help them sell your products better.

10. Helps Expand Your Entire Business – When you start and run a successful affiliate program, it will shift the emphasis of your business drastically. You’ll be able to hire customer support, outsource more (maybe even product creation) and focus on running your business instead of working in your business.

An affiliate program is not hard to start, and it’s something that you should definitely consider doing if you sell products and even services (especially if you outsource). Give your affiliates a lot of incentives, awesome products to promote, great promotional materials and you will be successful.

Categories: work with others Tags: Tags:

Writing to Sell versus Writing to Communicate

If you need to hire a writer, first you have to determine what type of writing you want. There are several types of writing that you will need to promote your business.

Often it can be difficult to know what type of writing you need, though. It’s easy to think that all writing is the same, but it’s not. There is writing to communicate and writing to sell.

Writing to Communicate

This type of writing is what you need to communicate information to potential and future customers. It might be blog posts, white papers, advertorials, eBooks, eReports, and other informational type content. This is what you need a content writer for. This type of writing is intended to teach, inform, engage and inspire.

Writing to Sell

This type of writing is usually called copywriting. It is a special type of writing using specialized skills. Writing to sell is all about your sales pages, sales emails, direct mail, websites and brochures. This is a completely different type of writing and is exclusively focused on making sales. It uses tools of the trade like emotional trigger words that help a reader choose to make a purchase.

Content Marketing

Writing to communicate is used in content marketing. When you place your content on other websites as with guest blog posts, or articles in online and offline magazines, it’s important to know how to write for information, entertainment and engagement in such a way that isn’t overtly selling – like a sales page, for instance. This isn’t to say that good content marketing doesn’t include some light forms of copywriting.

Sales Page Writing

On a sales page you will need to inform, but more importantly you’ll need to compel the reader to take action. This is probably some of the strongest types of copywriting that you will do outside of display advertising, banner ads, and email that is designed to push sales. This type of writing is completely different from content writing, even when content writing is spruced up with some good copywriting.

They’re Different But Can Be Combined

It’s important to understand the difference between writing to sell and writing to communicate. Just for reference’s sake, what you are reading right now is an example of writing to communicate. You are given a lot of information, being taught something, and there are no emotional trigger words being used to get you to make a purchase. However, it can change. If, at the end of this information the point is for you to purchase or sign up for something, it will soon become clear by the types of words used.

Copywriting helps with every type of writing for business. It’s in the headlines of a blog post. It’s in the headline of the next email marketing message you send your audience. Copywriting is what makes you want to read the next word written and drives you to want to learn more. Copywriting brings life to the words on the page or the screen.

Without copywriting, no one will read what you have to say. If you want results from the content that you put out to the world, learn as much as you can about copywriting or hire an expert.

Categories: blogging, Run a Home Business Tags: Tags:

Common Mistakes Made in JV Partnerships

A JV partnership is a joint venture where two different businesses join up to work on a particular project together. They do not become one business entity; rather they stay separate through the JV experience and after.

There are many advantages in having a JV partnership. At the same time, here are some common mistakes that you’ll definitely want to avoid.

* Not Having a Contract – So many people get involved with JVs without a contract and this is a huge mistake. If you have no control over the purse, the domain, or the intellectual property, you could end up being left out from the profit too.

* Not Having a Clear Delineation of Duties – Each partner in the relationship should have some type of duty or responsibility. There are cases of silent partnerships where one gives their name, their list, or some funding in exchange for a split of the profits, but everything should be spelled out specifically. If you want one person to deliver a specific amount of work each month, say so.

* Giving Up Too Much Control of Your Brand – In a joint venture, sometimes one person is in control and in charge. However, you want to keep an eye on your brand so that you don’t give up too much control over it.

* Unrealistic Expectations – It’s easy to get excited about a joint venture, but don’t place all your hopes and dreams into a single venture. You never know what can happen, but you need to have contingency plans.

* Entering into Partnership with a Competitor – It’s a bad idea to enter into a JV partnership with someone who is a direct competitor. Instead, try to find people to work with who market complementary goods and services to your audience.

* Not Planning an Exit Strategy – Most JV partnerships don’t last forever. Therefore, you should write into the contract how long the relationship will last and how it will end. Planning everything in advance usually works better than just letting it dissolve on its own due to potentially having different expectations.

* Not Offering Something Valuable to the Partnership – If everyone is to be satisfied in the partnership then each person needs to contribute value to the partnership. Everyone will feel better and it will cut down on resentment.

* Trying to Hook Up With Someone in the Wrong Niche – It’s hard sometimes to differentiate between working with someone who offers complementary products in your niche and someone who is in an entirely different niche. But you need to stick to what you know and only enter JV partnerships within your niche.

When you enter into a partnership, it’s more important than ever to cross all your T’s and dot all your I’s. Don’t be afraid to ask for a better contract or better terms when working out the initial phases of the JV relationship. If you’re setting it up, don’t have a “me first” attitude about the situation. Instead, find a way to make the JV a win-win association for everyone involved so that everybody can contribute talents and benefit as equally as possible.

Categories: Joint Ventures Tags: Tags:

Eight Ways to Get Help Inexpensively

When you first start a business it can be on a very small budget. Perhaps you do not have the funds to outsource and pay as much or almost anything to get the help. Don’t worry, because there are ways to get help inexpensively.

1. Fiverr.com – This is a website where people offer their services for just five bucks. There are providers who have moved up the ranks who charge more, but those starting out still are only five bucks. Take a look at their ratings and ask around who is the best one for the services you need.

2. Your Children – Even young children can help you with your business; whether it’s data entry, filing, or cleaning the house to free you up to do other things. Older kids can do a lot of amazing things, so don’t discount hiring your own children.

3. Your Spouse – It might be a hard sell to get your spouse to help you, but they are usually wonderful sources of work and they can be free, or you can legally hire them as a deduction in your business.

4. Your Network – If you have joined any networks, whether they are colleagues or not, you can go to them to find people to help you inexpensively. Perhaps you can barter with each other to get things done.

5. High School Students – You cannot legally use high school students who aren’t family members free, but you can pay them a bit less than you would an expert. Even if they just help you with housework and childcare, that is something that gives you more time to work your business.

6. College Interns – Local universities and community colleges are great places to find interns to use in your business. This is a highly talented pool of people, especially when it comes to technology. It’s important to know that you do need to pay them something and offer them a lot of education.

7. Elance.com – You can find inexpensive outsourcers on Elance. The price will vary depending on where the outsourcer lives and also what their expertise is. Make sure you put up a good proposal and set your budget.

8. oDesk.com – This is another place like Elance which has people to hire that can help you inexpensively. Be careful and don’t take the lowest bid, as the lowest is not always going to be better.

These eight ways to get help with your business are tried and true methods that work. You can get help without spending tons of money. You also have to remember that anything that you can get someone else to do is worth it if it costs less than you can earn per hour doing your main service or selling your main product.

Categories: Expert, Run a Home Business Tags: Tags:

Common Mistakes When Starting an Affiliate Program

Starting an affiliate program can help you develop an entirely new income stream. Affiliate programs for digital products provide smart business owners with an additional stream of income for selling the same product they sell directly. The ROI might be lower for each product now that you have to split the profits with a sales person, but the rewards can be enormous too.

Realize that when a product is digital, your cost per item goes down each time you sell a new one. Therefore you can absolutely afford to contract with affiliate marketers to promote your products. It might be a little harder to stomach if you are selling services, but if you sell for a high enough price, and are able to outsource the work, it can work great too.

It’s common to make mistakes when you first start an affiliate program. When you know the mistakes that others have made who went before you, you can learn from them and avoid those mistakes for yourself. Here are ones you’ll definitely want to avoid:

* Not Getting the Right Software – Don’t be cheap, but don’t think you have to get software that has all the bells and whistles either if you’re not going to use them. Test out different software to see what works for your program with the features you want it to you have.

* Not Creating Marketing Graphics – Affiliates don’t want to have to create their own graphics to sell your product, so you should create it for them. Plus, you do want to maintain some control over your brand by creating your own marketing graphics.

* Not Creating Marketing Content – The other thing that is important for a good affiliate program is to offer your affiliates plenty of marketing content that they can repurpose on their blogs, email newsletters and more.

* Not Developing Excellent Sales Pages – Nothing can be more maddening than trying to promote an excellent product with a horrible sales page, or worse, no sales page. If you don’t create sales pages for your product, no one else is going to do it for you. You’re going to lose out on a lot of sales and super affiliates.

* Not Recruiting Superstar Affiliates – Many times super affiliates won’t just land on your doorstep. You need to do something to recruit and attract them. Get some sales behind you, and then send a couple super affiliates a sample of your product if it fits in with their niche, offering them a special commission rate for promoting your products.

* Not Paying High Enough Commissions – Most people aren’t going to sell something for a 10 percent commission, or just a buck or less. Most people are hoping to get 20 dollars or more per sale. While some products are really great at lower prices with a 50 percent commission, the higher priced and higher commissioned products will naturally attract better affiliates.

* Not Treating Your Affiliates Like Business Partners – A huge mistake that some business owners make is treating affiliates as if they’re employees instead of business partners. They are sole proprietors just like you are, and they love working how they want when they want. Avoid making too many rules or requiring too many hoops, or you’ll lose good affiliates.

* Not Asking for Input from Your Affiliates – When you have some great affiliates who earn a full-time living being affiliates, it will work well for you to ask them for help designing and running the program. They will also give you input on products that they think the audience wants and needs. Just ask them.

Fixing these problems with your affiliate program will improve your income almost immediately. Plus, it will help you develop a long-term affiliate program that gets results – no matter how many products you create.

Categories: Affiliate program Tags: Tags:

How Often Should You Review Your Marketing Strategy?

Like most plans you make for your business, nothing is like the reality. Once you have started implementing your marketing strategy and see how close your assumptions match the reality, you can start tweaking the plan to keep it fresh and reality based. There are many ways to test whether or not you need to review your strategy.

Ask Your Customers

You’ll want to automatically survey new customers to find out how they found out about you so that you can evaluate whether or not they found you via current marketing plans or via some other way. If they give you a reason they found you that is contrary to how you thought they might find you, then it might be time to review your marketing strategy.

At the End of the Marketing Cycle

Some marketing strategies have a definite beginning and ending. For example, if you are running an email marketing campaign that runs for 30 days straight, then you need to review the strategy at various points throughout the plan and also at the end to ensure that you got the results that you thought you might.

By the Numbers

Many business owners make it a habit to review their marketing strategy on a quarterly basis to match up the financials with the effort. How did that PPC campaign you ran last quarter stack up compared to the email marketing push that you started at the same time? Can you quantify your efforts?

To Ensure That Your Strategy Is Unified

If your overall strategy is to service six-figure business owners and above, then every single element of your marketing plan should match that goal. It is easy, without review, to get lost and off track. A good time to check up on the unification of your strategy compared to the steps you are taking to implement the plan is at least quarterly.

To Know Your Return on Investment

How much is it costing you to acquire a customer and what is the lifetime revenue potential from each customer? Are your plans reflecting the financial truth? Is your marketing strategy directly influencing your ROI? If not, then you may need an entire overhaul of your marketing strategy.

Your Educated Guess

Sometimes, you just have to go with what you feel. If you feel as if your current strategy isn’t matching up to what you want for your business, then it’s time to review everything so that you can figure out where to make changes and where to implement new strategy.

When You Develop a New Product or Service

Each time that you develop a new product or service is a great time to revisit your marketing strategy so that you can incorporate plans for pushing out the new product and/or service. How you did things before might not work.

Check the Numbers Weekly

When checking in on the numbers on a regular basis such as weekly (or you could do it quarterly instead), at the same time you can understand how all your actions are affecting your marketing strategy and ultimately the bottom line.

The entire point of marketing is to tell your target market that you exist so they can choose your products or services. If you want to be good at getting the message out to the right people, you’ll need to evaluate on a regular basis how it is that you spread the word about your products and services.

Categories: Marketing, Run a Home Business Tags: Tags:

How to Find Your Niche as a Virtual Assistant

It’s very important to choose a niche as a virtual assistant. By choosing a niche you will have an easier time choosing the service you’ll offer, and marketing those services. It will also be easier for you to set your rates if you know who your audience is. But to experience all those benefits, you’ll need to figure out what your niche is going to be.

Choose an Audience to Become Your Clients

Many people who start a business do it wrong. They create or find a product to sell, then they search for their audience. In truth, a successful business owner will first choose the audience they want to serve, and then develop their services and/or products based on the audience. What type of people do you want to work with? Be very specific about what you want.

Get to Know This Audience

Who are these people? What do they do for fun? What kind of business do they run? How do they get clients? How do they accept payments? How do they go through their day? Knowing how they run their business will help you know how you fit into their business. For example, do they have a newsletter? Do they speak in public? What is entailed in each of these things that you can do?

List the Skills You Have That You Enjoy Doing

When listing your skills, do not list every skill you have if you hate doing them. List the things you know how to do, or are willing to learn how to do, and want to do, and like to do. After you make the list, decide how they fit in with your ideal audience or client. Those will be your services that you offer your audience.

Who in This Audience Needs Your Services?

As you make the list and match them with your audience, narrow down the services you’ll provide to the ones they want to buy and where they need what you have to offer. There will be a specific narrow portion of the entire audience that needs and can afford to pay for your services.

Get Training to Fill Gaps in Your Knowledge

If you have gaps in your training that you should fill to better offer your ideal client the services you want to offer, find that training. There are so many places today online and offline where you can take a course and learn what you need to learn. As you learn new things, you increase your value to your clients – as long as what you’re learning fits in with their needs.

Set up Your Packages and Watch Scope Creep

One issue that can pop up when you set up your packages is that clients may start asking for services that you do not offer, nor want to offer. Do not start offering these services just to get the client, unless it’s something you really want to do.
You have a few choices: you can outsource, or you can refer the client to someone else. Working with the niche you chose in the beginning, offering the services you have the skill to do and want to do is where you should stay to be happy with your business.

Network Where Your Clients Are

Once you have worked out who your audience is, find your clients by going to where they hang out. Networking with other VAs is fine, but you also need to network with your audience often to be able to market well to your niche.

Finally, keep up to date on your niche so that as things change you will keep up. Today, your audience may be using AWeber.com for example; tomorrow they might be using another program to do the same thing and you’ll need to learn it – either by hiring someone to train you or taking a course.

Be ready to build and grow with your niche. As you learn more, you’ll be able to find your niche instead of casting too wide of a net and not knowing what you’re going to do each day. Or worse – ending up doing things you dislike.

Categories: Outsourcing, Run a Home Business Tags: Tags:

Ten Tips to Successful Affiliate Marketing

Being a successful affiliate marketer can be very lucrative. You will make a percentage of sales for each item that you convince someone to buy. This means that you don’t have to create a product, or even make a web page. You can use many methods to promote the products, such as pay per click and social media.

Here are ten tips to help you succeed.

1. Promote Only Products You Believe In – It’s so much easier telling people about products or services that you truly love and believe in. You’ll have much more to say about them if you like them. You’ll be able to explain the benefits so much better if you are passionate about the products.

2. Learn Traffic-Building Strategies – It’s important to learn as much as you can about search engine optimization and other traffic-building strategies. You want to push and pull as much traffic to your products as possible. It doesn’t matter if it’s to a sales page, or to a website with more information; you will need to build traffic using every means available to you.

3. Know Your Audience – In order to best provide good products, you’ll need to ensure that you know who your audience is. If you know them well, you will know what they want in a product or service. You’ll know what their problems are and find a way to offer them products that solve them.

4. Provide Value to Your Audience – Anything you offer your audience, whether free or paid, should provide value above all else. If the things you offer don’t make the audience feel like they’re getting more than they paid for, they’re going to be unhappy.

5. Follow the Rules and Laws – Disclose that you have an affiliate relationship with the items that you promote and that you’ll earn a small percentage of sales. It’s the law first of all, and secondly, it’s just a nice thing to do. People will not be upset about it if you let them know up front.

6. Test Different Designs and Copy – When you come up with copy, sales pages or ad designs for your promotions, make sure to test them out to find out which kind works better for your audience. Change one small thing at a time to find out which version does better.

7. Work with the Affiliate Manager – If you are promoting products that have an affiliate program and they have an affiliate manager, this is a great sign of a wonderful product. The great thing is you can work with the affiliate manager to ensure you have the marketing collateral you want to use to promote.

8. Not a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme – One thing to keep in mind as you move forward with your new affiliate marketing career is that it’s not going to happen overnight that you go from zero dollars to six figures. You can make unlimited profit, but it will take some time.

9. Get Good at Review Writing – One way to promote affiliate products is to write great product reviews. Write them for your own content purposes, but also write them on other platforms where the product lives.

10. Be Yourself – The best thing you can give your audience is a glimpse into who you are. That’s what makes you unique and special. Your audience will appreciate getting to know you, and that will make them trust you more.

You can be very successful at affiliate marketing and make a lot of money. The amount of money you can make is truly unlimited. All you have to do is make a plan to promote the products to the right people at the right time.

Categories: work with others Tags: Tags:

How to Generate On-Site Experiences That Will Have Attendees Coming Back for More

Having face-to-face meetings and events is invaluable. They help foster relationships, build trust, encourage openness and offer a way to have immediate and clear communication with others. In this day and age, it seems that online events are the only way to do events, but nothing could be further from the truth.

However, an in-person event needs to be much more exciting than sitting hour after hour for presentations that one could have watched online. In person, on-site events require something that will make the attendees want to do it again. There are many ways to make your event amazing. Let’s go over a few.

* Use the Best Technology You Can Afford – There is so much technology you can use today for on-site meetings and events that will help such as an app that will help like-minded attendees find and locate each other, and technology that will match up businesses that need each other. There is also technology that enables audience participation and questions to be asked and answered more easily. Get what you can afford that is above a traditional “presentation” type meeting.

* Choose the Best Location You Can Afford – If you really want people to attend your event, then the location does matter. Not only does location matter, timing the event right to coincide with something important in that location can also help so that attendees (given the time) can do both. For example, have an event in Washington DC during the time that the cherry blossoms bloom, or in the Ozarks during the fall colors.

* Make Sure the Food Is Awesome – You want to give people plenty of food choices. Today people care a lot more about their health than they used to. You may consider polling those who sign up for the event and pay about their food choices so that you can do a better job with food provisions.

* Someone Should Greet Everyone – If you have to hire greeters, do so. Nothing is worse than going to an in-person event and feeling like a nobody, with no one greeting you or helping you know what to do or how to get involved.

* Have a Meet the Speakers Special Event – Offer an upgrade to VIPs where they can have a dinner with the speakers at their table. Kind of like a “captain’s table” event on a cruise ship. People will pay good money to be able to hobnob with the speakers.

* Offer Breakout Sessions – If your event is large, having smaller breakout sessions with 10 to 20 participants with a speaker will be an amazing way to help people get closer. You can arrange them together based on answers they give in the questionnaire you give them at the time they register.

* Ramp Up the Content – The content that you and the speakers have at a live event should be even better and tighter than for a webinar or teleseminar. The speakers need spot-on slides, or visuals, and a good story to engage the audience.

* Attract Well-Known Speakers – Even if you can’t get a lot of well-known speakers, pay at least one well-known person to speak at your event. Do ensure that they’re relevant to the event and can speak to the target audience.

* Design for Relationship Building – Ensure that there are plenty of breaks, and even planned tours of the area around the event location. These are all networking opportunities for the individuals that come to the event.

* Be Specific about Priorities – Know what your point is for having the event before you even start, so that you can stick to your priorities. You don’t want to have an event that no one understands the point of.

* Build in Networking Opportunities – Set up after-hours drinks, dances, and other activities that can help people with networking. Do some in the morning, some at lunch, and some after dinner and some in the evening so that you can have a little something for everyone.

* Inspire and Motivate Action – Don’t just talk at your guests; talk with them. Invite them to comment, invite someone or a few on stage to tell their story in a spontaneous way. The more you can inspire them and motivate them, the better they’ll feel when they leave, and the more they’ll want to come back.

Making people want to come back involves a well-oiled and planned event. If you can afford to, hire an event planner to help you get everything organized well so that you don’t have to focus on much more than the content.

Categories: events Tags: Tags:

How to Find JV Partners

Finding JV partners can seem difficult at first, but it’s not hard once you realize how to do it. Not only that – you need to know what your goals are, who the direct competition is, and someone who can help. You want someone who can complement your business and help you reach your goals.

* Search Keywords – Use various keyword search tools on social media like Google Alerts, AdWords and others to search for and find authoritative articles, eBooks and other information about your niche. These will be created by people who may make lucrative JV partners.

* Find People with Complementary Skills – Get to know yourself well enough so that you know when you meet someone who has skills that complement yours. If you’re great at organization, but someone else is a wonderful speaker, you could do webinars together.

* Your Best Affiliates – If you already have a thriving business that includes affiliates, do some research into your most prolific affiliate partner. This may very well be just the person to help you create a wonderful JV partnership for the next great thing.

* Your Best Contractors (Virtual Assistants, Graphic Designers, etc…) – If you outsource to others and someone you’ve connected with is super talented in an area that you are deficient, and you know of a product or service that could be a lucrative JV situation, bring it up to them.

* Your Indirect Competition – Take a look at people who promote complementary products to the same audience you do. How well known are they? How successful are they at what they do? Can you see a way for you two to merge for a project?

* Be in the Right Place at the Right Time – Some people say that being in the right place at the right time is an accident but the truth is, you can ensure it by design. Join groups, forums, and attend events that the type of people you’d like to work with attends. Making yourself available is important.

* Learn How to Write a Killer Proposal – When you meet the right people, get to know them and come up with a potential idea, learn how to write a proposal that will get their attention and make them want to work with you. Don’t be afraid of getting a no. If you don’t ever ask, you won’t ever achieve what you want to.

* Take Applications – Another way to find JV partners is to put an application on your website where others can submit their proposals and ideas for JV partnerships. If you are well-known and popular, you may receive many to choose from.

Finding the right JV Partners can help expand your reach and put more money in your pocket. Joint venture partners share the responsibility of a short-term project in order to leverage the skills and connections of each person in the partnership. You too can take advantage of the wonderful benefits of JV partners if you find the right partner.

Categories: Joint Ventures, Run a Home Business Tags: Tags: