Eight Ways to Use PPC Campaigns to Market Your Business

    Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns is a great way to break into online advertising without spending a fortune. You can start with a small budget and over time see huge returns on your investment. But before even starting, it’s important to understand all the different goals you can have in mind for your PPC campaign.

    1. Build Your List – Email lists are a lucrative way to market your services and products. You get people to agree to receive marketing message from you via permission-based marketing. That is, they sign up on their own free will to get the messages. Usually, they get a free gift of some sort for signing up.

    2. Promote an Event – Short-term goals are really great to fill with PPC campaigns. Events usually have a set date that they are going to happen, and this bodes well for pay per click because people do not like to miss out. With a deadline approaching, people are more likely to sign up if they hear about it via PPC.

    3. Sell Your Book – Do you have a published book that you want people to know about? Starting a PPC campaign to promote the book is a great way to get more people to buy it. You can let your ad send them to a video trailer of your book and to an order page.

    4. Get More Followers – If you are trying to build up a community on Facebook, running a promoted post advertisement or another type of PPC campaign to get awareness for your group can do wonders for getting more followers.

    5. Get More Engagement – You can run promoted posts on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to get more engagement on a particular post that you want to see people respond to. When you get the engagement though, be sure to respond back to increase the effect.

    6. Promote a Contest – If you have a contest without PPC, you may end up very disappointed in the results. Contests are wonderful ways to build your list and get more awareness about your brand.

    7. Close More Sales – PPC can also be used to promote a direct product for direct sales instead of promoting a list or a post. Sometimes people just want what you have to offer and they want it now, not later. Create an awesome sales page and the PPC ad can link directly to the sales page for best results.

    8. Retarget Consumers – A great use of PPC is to retarget people who have seen your website and offerings but did not buy. Bringing them back is an excellent use of PPC campaigns because sometimes people just left because they got busy and the reminder to go back will help.

    Using PPC campaigns is a great way to improve your business, get the word out and brand yourself. You can also build an email list, make direct sales and more to market your business – whether it’s online or offline. It’s up to you.

    Categories: work with others Tags: Tags:

    Different Ways to Find Affiliates

    Finding affiliates is the next thing you need to do after you create an affiliate program. You aren’t going to get affiliates without telling people about your affiliate program. There are numerous ways that you can do that, but here are a few ways that you might try to find affiliates for your products and services.

    Link to Your Affiliate Program Right on the Product Website

    Don’t hide your affiliate program. Even if you want only buyers to be part of it, use it as another sales page. Link to the affiliate program and then require a purchase to be able to earn commissions.

    Host a Webinar to Recruit Affiliates

    Webinars  are awesome to promote products, but they can also be used to promote your affiliate program. You can attract people who want to earn money within your niche to the hangout, and offer attendees an extra incentive to join and make their first sale.

    Create Awesome Products

    Nothing can beat an awesome product. It’s true – if you create products that people love and talk about, you’ll naturally attract super affiliates as long as you have a good program. The product can speak for itself on many levels.

    Deliver Excellent Customer Service

    Another added incentive to get people to join your affiliate program is your customer service program. Affiliates don’t want to have to worry about returns and problems associated with promoting your product. Be sure that you have implemented an effective customer service program.

    Develop Effective Sales Collateral

    Don’t make an affiliate work too hard, or they won’t want to be part of your program. Offer graphics, text content, images, samples and more for your affiliates to use. Offer to have a webinar for super affiliates or any affiliate who sells more than a certain number of items. The more you can help your affiliates, the more sales they’ll make.

    Give Bonuses/Gifts after Their First Sale

    If you really want to attract serious affiliates, offer them a bonus for their first sale and then progressively better bonuses for their 10th, 50th and 100th sales and so forth. These bonuses or gifts will not only attract more affiliates, but it will also make the ones you have work harder to earn the benefits.

    Run a Make Money PPC Campaign

    You can also use pay-per-click campaigns to attract affiliates. Make the ads directed at people who want to earn a living from home as an affiliate, and also run them directed at experienced affiliates.

    Go To and Participate in Live Affiliate Events

    There are several affiliate events each year that you can attend when you run your own affiliate program. Find them, volunteer to help, offer to host a course, or speak, and get involved so that you will be seen as an authority.

    Offer Lucrative Commission Rates

    Good affiliates aren’t going to waste their time with poor products or low commission rates. Keep in mind that you can afford to give higher commissions when you are promoting digital products. Even if you only make 10 percent yourself, that’s still a lot of money for no extra work.

    Offer Buyers the Opportunity

    A really great way to get affiliates is to offer the opportunity to promote and refer your products to the people who have purchased the product. They’re the ones who will know the most about the product since they are really using it. They likely know people who will want to buy it, too.

    If you want to have a successful affiliate program, these tips will help you accomplish that. Every aspect of your affiliate program, from the product to the execution of the program, matters when it comes to attracting affiliates to your program.

    Categories: work with others 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:

    Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

    It’s easy to make a lot of mistakes when you first start affiliate marketing. But, if you take the time to educate yourself you can avoid a lot of the problems that might arise. Affiliate marketing is a good way to produce an extra income, add an additional income stream, and even to earn a full-time living, but only if you are prepared and go about it the right way. Here are some mistakes you’ll definitely want to avoid.

    * Choosing the Wrong Products – Any product you choose should offer a solution to a problem that your audience has. First choose who your audience is, then find solutions for them. Doing it the other way around can include the risk that there is not an audience for that product in the first place.

    * Joining Too Many Networks – You cannot make good income from affiliate products if you spread yourself too thin. Choose just a couple networks and work directly with some good products and their managers to ensure the best mix of products for your audience’s needs.

    * Not Investing in Helpful Resources – There are a lot of very helpful products, services and solutions today that can help make your life easier as an affiliate marketer. Set a budget and invest in your business. You can’t make money without spending, but you want to spend it wisely.

    * Not Using Technology to Its Fullest – Email lists, autoresponders, social media, blogs etc… all involve using technology. Seek to learn fully each new piece of tech that you add to your business before adding the next one.

    * Avoiding A/B Testing – A/B testing means to test two different versions of something like an email subject line, a sales page headline, or something else. But the trick is to change only one small aspect of it during the test. The one that works best can then be used throughout your marketing efforts.

    * Not Looking at Your Competitors – Many times your competitors are doing a lot of things right that you can learn from. If they are successful, you want to look at them. Buy some of their products and sign up for the lists. Make a note of what they’re doing right and wrong and make a plan to do even better.

    * Thinking You Don’t Need SEO – Search engine optimization is super important, no matter what you’re doing. You can use it when you are completing a social media profile, a guest blogging bio, and more. It just means that you are considering the search engines (and your audience) in whatever you do, both on and off your website.

    * Not Finding Multiple Streams of Income – You do not want too many products, but on the other hand you don’t want to deal with only one. You need to diversify your income stream by adding more than one product. The trick is ensuring that all products fit with your ideal audience.

    * Spending Too Much Time Creating Marketing Collateral – With most products, choose programs that create all the marketing material for you. The reason is that you should not be driving marketing strategy; the company should. If they can’t take the time to create marketing materials for you, it’s probably not the product you want to promote.

    Ensuring that you put in the needed time and effort to study your market, knowing what your competition is doing, and promoting the right products to the right people will go far in making sure that you are successful at affiliate marketing.

    Categories: Affiliate program Tags: Tags:

    Building Your Affiliate Marketing Program

    Affiliate marketing isn’t a fast results type of program. A well-planned affiliate marketing program built today can pay off in spades tomorrow. But, remember – it’s a long-term plan, not a short-term overnight success type of situation. So, get started on the right foot so that you can do it right.

    Set Up Your Website Right

    You don’t want to have a terrible website with ineffective sales pages if you want affiliates to take an interest in your offerings. Ensure that your about us, privacy policy, return and shipping policy (if dealing with physical products) and contact information are clear for all to see.

    Don’t Link Away from Your Site

    When it comes to promoting a product, the page should promote that product and nothing else. You don’t want to lead people away from your website when they’re coming there to learn about a specific product or service. Take away anything that links them away. Your affiliates will appreciate it.

    Clear Contact Information

    If someone has a question that they need answered, you want clear contact information so that they can contact you easily. You can also use a service that provides a chat with people to help them make purchasing decisions. Whatever you decide, make it easy for people to ask questions and get answers.

    Product Pages That Convert

    It’s imperative that you have a clear call to action, great images, good descriptions and benefits of the product on the page. If your product pages don’t convert, then affiliates won’t want to touch the product.

    Converting Marketing Collateral

    Affiliates need copy, images, text and more to promote your products and services. They’re not going to create it for you. If you want them to send out emails to their list, create an email that they can edit and make their own. Do the same with all the marketing materials you offer them to ensure that they promote your offerings.

    A Fair Commission

    Affiliates are like sales people who get paid only when they make a sale. If you want them to do a lot to make that sale, then they’ll need a fair percentage of sales to make it worth their time. If you don’t offer at least 50 percent, you are unlikely to attract high-level affiliate marketers to your program.

    Offer Incentives to Affiliates

    In addition to a fair commission, you can also offer prizes to top sellers so that they work harder to promote your offerings. People like competition and if you give it to them and let them win prizes such as additional money or a physical prize, they’ll want to win.

    A Fabulous Product

    Of course, if you want to attract affiliates, you need a product that is everything you say it is and more. You want your affiliates to be excited to promote the product because it does what the sales page says it will do.

    Having affiliates to promote your products and services is like having a legion of fans screaming your name. They’ll blog about you, promote you, and be excited about it – because if you are offering a great product or service, they know that it makes them look good. After all, their job is to promote things to their audience that solves their problems. Your product could be the answer.

    Categories: Affiliate program Tags: Tags:

    Promoting Memberships with Small Reports

    If you want to promote your own membership or someone else’s membership that you’re an affiliate of, you can do it in a lot of ways. You can write blog posts, reviews, eBooks, and share on social media, and so forth. But, you can also promote memberships using small reports. There are a lot of different ways to create small reports that are good to use in this way.

    * Use PLR – Small reports are wonderful uses for PLR. PLR means private label rights. These are articles or other content that you can rewrite and reuse as if it’s your own. You can purchase PLR from a reputable company like AllPrivateLabelContent.com. You change them a bit, add your affiliate links, and you’re done.

    * Combine New and PLR – Combine several types of PLR plus something new and relevant to your audience to create a report in which you place an affiliate link to the membership you’re trying to promote.

    * Write Something New – Take one problem that people who may join the membership have, and either define it or solve it with the small report. Offer up the group as additional support to help them maintain their solution or solve more problems that they may have.

    * Make Brandable Reports – Create a report that is designed for your affiliates to edit, make their own and brand with their affiliate links. Affiliates like promoting products that are easy to promote, and nothing makes it simpler than providing them with the raw materials to create their own report.

    * Use Pictures, Facts and Stats – A good use for pictures, facts and statistics is to compile them into a small report that has pictures, graphics, and images. The more you can spell out the benefits of a solution, the more likely someone is to want to join a group. What better way than a small report with pie charts?

    * Hire a Writer – If you don’t want to write the reports yourself, you can hire a contractor to write the reports for you. A short report is usually about 4000 to 4500 words long. You can usually hire someone from 12 dollars per page and up. So budget about 120 to 200 dollars for your short reports.

    * Give Them Away – Use the report to give away for free. You don’t even have to collect an email address, since the report has links for the membership. More people are likely to download the report if they don’t have to give any information.

    * Exchange Them for Email Addresses – Another way to do it is to give away the report for an email address. They’ll get the marketing inside the report, plus they’ll be signed up for your email list that is targeted to the people who downloaded the report.

    * Encourage Sharing – When you are using a report to promote something like a membership, you want the people who download it to feel free to share it with everyone they know. If you make it interesting enough, and able to stand on its own enough, they will share it.

    Promoting memberships with small reports is a very effective way to get people to come to your membership. You can give them a discount based on which report they are coming from, for example, whether from an affiliate or from you directly.

    Categories: membership, website Tags: Tags:

    Promote Memberships with Kindle Books

    The way to really catch your membership on fire is to make it one that is mentioned a lot by others, and to make it popular through a published book. Kindle makes it easy to publish books. Anyone can write a book and publish it and have it live within a few days. Plus, your book doesn’t even have to be that long to promote it and publish it via Kindle.

    * Teach Something to Your Audience – If you have a membership program, then that means you also have knowledge about something that other people want to know. You can write a book; it doesn’t have to be long. 30 or 40 pages is enough. Teach them something tangible that is related to your membership.

    * Write a Book of Case Studies – If you have had the membership for a while, you can create an anthology of stories from the members with their permission. People will clamor to include their success story in a book. Just be sure to get a signed statement of permission to print, and you’re golden.

    * Tell Them Multiple Ways to Find Solutions – In the book, don’t just include your membership as a solution. Include a variety of them, but mention your membership too. You don’t want the book to appear overtly promotional.

    * Give Clear Examples of Success  – Using your members as a source, include clear examples of people who have experienced success using the methods explained in the book. Even if they used these methods outside of the group environment, the important thing is that they used the methods.

    * Let Your Book Stand on Its Own – Your book should not be a 40-page sales letter; it should be able to stand on its own as an interesting and informative book. The message should be clear in the book and they should not have to join the membership to get the whole story.

    * Give Away Something Free – In order to get them interested in the membership, give away a free month of membership for purchasing the book. That will help keep an influx of new members so that your membership is active. Plus, if your membership is good, they’ll stick around longer.

    * Start an Affiliate Program – If you want other people to promote your group in a book, it’s important to start an affiliate program. Your members will come up with book ideas all on their own, to promote your membership.

    * Encourage Others to Promote in Their Books – Give the idea to your affiliates to write a book to promote the group. Encourage this by actively promoting authors who include your affiliate link and group mention in their book to your group.

    Promoting memberships with books doesn’t have to be just your own memberships. If you are part of any group that has an affiliate program, you can write a book that includes the information about the membership, as long as it’s relevant to the topic of the book.

    Categories: Membership, website Tags: Tags:

    Planning Your Email Marketing

    Your best chance of success with email marketing is to create a plan based on the products that you want to promote. It all starts with your product funnel, which leads to your content marketing plan, which leads to your email marketing calendar. All email marketing should be focused toward promoting your products and/or services and that requires planning. The following steps will help you increase the results of your email marketing.

    Craft a Working Product Funnel – You probably already have various products and services, but you may not have designed a product funnel yet that helps you understand how everything is interconnected and works together. Understanding this can help you keep your different lists and promotions in order.

    Design Sales Pages for Each Product – Each page should tell your audience the benefits of purchasing the product. Remember a sales pages focus is on the audience, not on you. Benefits over features, always – pretend you are the client and answer all the questions and concerns they might have right on the sales page.

    Start Appropriate Email Lists for Each Product– Using your autoresponder, create the lists for each product or service that you will promote. At the minimum you will want a general email list for people who visit the front page of your blog and then two lists for each product you sell. Create one list for people who purchased the product and one list for people who just want more info about the particular product. Name them appropriately so that you know where to put the messages based from where the audience joins your list.

    Develop a New Product Launch Calendar – Knowing when each product is being launched for new upcoming products and or services will help you identify which lists you can include the announcements and information on. Plus, it will remind you to create new sales pages, lists, blog posts and email marketing messages for each new product.

    Create a Blog Post Publication Calendar – Based on the product launch calendar, write blog posts and set deadlines for them to be scheduled. Ensure that some blog posts promote the various sales pages, and other blog posts are designed for those who purchased already. For each message, consider who will see it and where they come from.

    Create a Social Media Content Publication Calendar – Develop social media messages in a series based on your blog posts that will attract your readers to click through to your sales pages and purchase or sign up for your email lists.

    Create an Email Publication Calendar – Based on how everything works together above, create a series of emails that you can edit appropriately for each separate list that you may want to promote the new product to. Load them into the right auto responders, ensuring they link to the right sales pages depending on the audience they are sent out to.

    Craft Follow-Up Messages – Don’t forget to craft all your follow-up messages too for each product that you sell. Once sold, you will want to keep in contact with the customer who bought it so that you can market future products and services to them.

    By creating a plan of action to follow, you can make sure every single time you launch a new product that you can cross-promote other products and services without bombarding your list too much with messages they don’t need, thus increasing your conversion rates exponentially. If all the content you create goes together like a puzzle to promote all of your products and services in a seamless way, it’ll be that much easier each time to set up for each new product.

    Categories: Email Subscribers Tags: Tags:

    Nine Ways to Promote Your Membership Program

    You’ve built an awesome membership program and now you need to get members. Members will bring in regular income on a monthly basis that you can count on. But, first you have to get the attention of your target audience. You do that by promoting your membership program in a variety of ways.

    1. Social Media – Not only should you post information in your updates about your membership, but you should also put information about your membership program in your profile. On LinkedIn, for example, you can even put videos and other information for viewers to see so that they can get more information.

    2. Blog Posts – Create a lot of blog posts leading up to the launch of your membership program. Discuss problems, solutions, and how your group fits in. You can put the posts in different formats like videos to get even more reach.

    3. PPC Ads – Social media like Facebook is a good place to run pay-per-click advertisements about your membership, because you can laser target your audience using the tools provided.

    4. Affiliate Marketers – Let other people market your group by setting up an affiliate program. Offer your affiliates all the tools, graphics, emails, posts and more to help them promote your membership.

    5. Webinars – A popular and effective way to promote your new membership program is to have a webinar that offers some solutions for the problems of the target audience. At the end of and throughout the webinar, promote the membership program as an extra form of help.

    6. Email Marketing – Using these other venues, get people onto your email list. Then send them a series of emails educating them about their problems and how the membership is the solution.

    7. A Great Sales Page – Your sales page for your membership is very important. There are a lot of tools you can use to ensure that you create a good sales page, like LeadPages.net or InstaBuilder.com.

    8. Magazines – You can put advertisements in specific magazines that have to do with your niche. Trade magazines often have cheaper advertising costs than popular general magazines, so look for the right niche magazine.

    9. Personal Networking – Whether in person or online, networking is an important component of helping spread the word about your membership program. Tell everyone you know that you have it when the opportunity comes up.

    Promoting your membership program is imperative if you want to get enough members. You can’t build it and expect them to automatically find you. You have to be proud of what you’ve created, and get your membership program to more people who are in your target audience by promoting it.

    Categories: Membership Tags: Tags:

    Nine Ways to Participate in an Online Community

    One of the ways to make an online community work is to practice a high level of participation. When you get involved in your online community, it will really pay off in a big way by making you closer to the other members. You and the members can become awesome resources to each other throughout your business’s growth.

    1. Introduce Yourself – When you become part of an online community, start out on the right foot by introducing yourself according to the rules of the group. Most online communities have rules that prohibit sharing of URLs or advertising, but most allow you to introduce yourself to get started in the group.

    2. Ask Questions – Once you’ve been properly introduced, start asking questions to get the discussions going in the group. This is a good way to get to know each other as well as to get to know your audience. When people answer your question, be sure to comment back and thank them and add to the discussion.

    3. Answer Questions – When other people ask questions that you have an answer to, be sure that you answer the questions honestly and openly, without any intent to sell them anything. Give of yourself freely and you will end up with a large return on investment.

    4. Comment on Stories – When other people introduce themselves or tell a story, be sure to comment on them. If the community often posts informative articles, be sure to comment on those too and to point them out to others in the group for reading.

    5. Create a Good Signature Line – Most groups allow you to have some type of signature line that has a link back to your website. Be sure to provide a specialized link just for that group that offers specials for group members.

    6. Fill Out Your Profile Completely – Additionally, most online communities have a profile area. Be sure to upload a nice headshot, and to fill out the entire profile. That way when someone wants to learn more about you they can easily do so.

    7. Invite New People – When you know that the group would be a good fit for someone you meet elsewhere, share the group with them. Bringing in new people to the community keeps the community alive and fresh.

    8. Be a Resource to Others – Never be afraid to be an open book resource within your area of expertise. If you want to be known as an expert, show that expertise within your answers to others.

    9. Start a Subgroup – Once you’ve become well known and people start coming to you more, see if you can start a subgroup inside the group. Ask for permission before doing that, but it might be of help to the group owner if you don’t own the group.

    If you make it your goal to do everything on this list over a period of time, you’ll notice something amazing happening. You’ll notice that you’ve built real relationships with the people in the group, and that they are referring you to potential clients and you are potentially referring some of them to clients too. It’s a two-way street when you are part of a community. The fact that it is online doesn’t mean it’s not real.

    Categories: organizations Tags: Tags: