Tips for Successful Affiliate Marketing Program

 If you are involved in affiliate marketing, no doubt you want to do business and make money. If that is the case, here now are some tips to help you in that quest by increasing the conversion rate of your affiliate marketing campaigns:

You Must Be Authentic

Rely always on ways to present the facts as they are but in a compelling way while recommending only good quality products and services. Do not over sell any product; hype it or lie about in order to get people to buy. You must endeavor to be authentic at all times because that is the best way to build a good reputation.



Focus more on Targeted Traffic

In affiliate marketing, traffic is important, but targeted traffic is king. Targeted traffic ensures your content is seen more by people who have a buying intention. That is all you need if you want to be really successful as an affiliate marketer. The more targeted traffic you get, the better your results.

Habitually Track your Performance
 
Results, results and results, that’s what most marketers really care about.  Knowing what people are looking for puts you in a great stead to give it to them. Sometimes, visitors may be looking for products on your website that you currently do not cover. Knowing about these content gaps opens new earning opportunities for you. By deploying online tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track content gaps, you can get the intelligence information you require to target your content better to satisfy your visitors. The real reason you must endeavor to habitually track your results.

Be Contextual

One of the best ways to succeed at affiliate marketing is to ensure that the promotions you are sharing are relevant to the content and your audience. The trick is to ensure that affiliate ads you are promoting match the content you are selling. For great effects, your content should always be relevant to the product you are promoting.

Use Deep links

The business of affiliate marketing if online is all about promoting and propagating links online. Most affiliate marketing programs usually offer links and banners to make it easy for you to start promoting their products and services. The problem with these promotional materials is they are usually pointing to the home page or a category page, which is most cases is too generic. For best results, it is recommended that you use deep link tools to point to the exact product or service you want to promote. Why, because the deep link tool will enable you convert any product link from the merchant website to an affiliate link thereby enhancing click rates.

Small Business Solution: Don’t Handle All Performance Issues Same Way

As a small business owner, there is no other way you can measure progress without being able to track your performance. As the business grows, it is inevitable that your workforce will grow along too. As your team grows, you might opt to create a Human Resources department to deal with hiring and other employment related issues. That is a direct and logical way to go in expanding but handling all performance issues in the same way is not advisable. Issues relating directly to employee performance are very sensitive and should be handled differently. If not well handled, you risk hurting employee feelings thereby experiencing even more issues that could impact their work performance.

Granted that your HR department is responsible for employee performance issues, it is not advisable to send all matters relating to employee performance to your HR department. You get better and quicker results by empowering team leaders to speak directly and right away with associates who are experiencing performance issues. This is because many workers always feel that all poor performance matters referred to the HR department involve disciplinary measures. Having your managers or team leaders speak with them directly to see if they need any help always allays such fears. Showing them some support outside the HR department can often help workers more than going right to some form of generic disciplinary action which many HR departments are notorious for.

Top 5 Ways to Stay Calm under Pressure

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If you run a business, there is no doubt you must be running into pressure from time to time. Your ability to stay calm even while under pressure counts for much in your productivity index. What that means is that your ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance on the job. Therefore, if you want to stay calm under pressure, learn to do these here 5 things.

01. Staying positive. Staying positive is one great way to avoid being stressed up. Positive thoughts help make stress intermittent by focusing your brain’s attention onto something that is completely stress-free. When things are going well, and your mood is good, it is relatively easy to handle. But when things are going poorly, and your mind is flooded with negative thoughts, this can be a challenge. Your way around such challenges is to have something positive that you're ready to shift your attention to when your thoughts turn negative. That way, you can manage to remain calm even while facing real challenges.

02. More rest and sleep. Credible research has shown that that the stress hormone cortisol is greatly reduced with better rest and sleep. When you sleep well, your brain literally recharges and your body rejuvenates. That way, you can think better and more clear-headed in your thinking. But when you are deprived of sleep and rest, your stress hormone levels go up and that presents a real challenge to your productivity. Getting enough sleep and rest enables you to remain calm even under stressful conditions.

03. Limiting your caffeine intake. Caffeine is a well known stimulant present in common beverages like tea and coffee. Ingesting caffeine somehow helps to trigger the release of adrenaline which is a “fight-or-flight” hormone.  The more caffeine you take, the higher your “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism which defies rational thinking. In such hyper-aroused state induced by caffeine, your emotions somehow manage to overrun your behavior. That is clearly a stressed-up scenario. Ingesting less caffeine therefore, is one sure way to stay calm even under pressure.

04. Engaging more support system. Taking on too many tasks at a time and heaping much more on yourself is stress-inducing. To be calm and productive, you need to recognize your weaknesses/limitations and ask for help when you need it. That is a very smart thing to do anytime you have too much on your plate. One great way out of stress is to tap into your support system when you find yourself in a situation challenging enough for you to feel overwhelmed. Getting a helping hand during such challenges is one way to stay calm and be productive.  Asking for help in times of need helps to mitigate your stress level and strengthens your relationships with the people you regularly rely upon to help out in such scenarios.

05. Routinely disconnecting. Every human being has his own limits of endurance and it varies from person to person. Disconnecting is a way of shifting attention away from the work at hand to focus on other mundane matters which may or may not be directly related to the work at hand. That way you can refocus and somehow get rejuvenated when you turn your attention back to your main work. For example, if you work online, sometimes, forcing yourself offline and taking a short walk, stretching out and grabbing a cup of tea or coffee can help you disconnect somewhat. This is one more very smart way to maintain some measure of calmness even while working under tremendous pressure.

 

Why You Must be Courageous

“The fear of failure is often worse than failure itself.” -- Shiv Khera

Every human being is gifted with the power to control his or her own mind mostly through his or her thought process. Whatsoever affects this process affects human performance, effectiveness and efficiency. Fear is basically “False Evidence Appearing Real.” It could be positive or negative; it could be real or imagined. “Fear never pleases and never attracts anything except its counterpart.” Of all human emotions, fear is the most destructive. “It is the only force powerful enough to stop you from acting on your dreams.”  Though basically a state of the mind, it is very destructive to human psyche. A state of fear paralyzes human reasoning, reduces enthusiasm, imprisons person-ness, promotes doubt and uncertainty, inhibits ambition, beclouds memory and generally dehumanizes. There are very few diseases known to man that are as debilitating as fear. 

'The late John Wayne, a popular cow-boy film star once defined courage as “being scared but moving forward all the same.” This shows that courage is not the absence of fear but it is in spite of it. Courage is using fear positively instead of negatively. By taking control of your mind, you can make fear a motivator instead of an inhibitor. Sir Edmund Hillary became the first man to reach the top of Mt. Everest. After the feat, he was asked, what was the biggest obstacle he faced in his quest to get to the top of the mountain? He replied that his biggest obstacle was to overcome the psychological barrier which nearly forced him to talk himself out of trying. He nearly gave up trying because of the fear generated in his mind. Once he overcame this barrier, climbing the mountain became an easy thing to do. His feat removed the fear from the minds of many others who have since climbed the mountain themselves. Those who earlier thought it was impossible to climb the mountain found it easier to do after one attempt succeeded.

In his best-selling book “100 ways to motivate yourself”, Mr. Steve Chandler tells the story of one Anthony Burgess who at 40 in January 1960 was told he had cancer and could die within a year. He knew he had a battle in his hands as surviving cancer then was near miraculous. Being broke at the time, he had nothing to leave behind for his wife Lynne who was soon going to be a widow. Burgess had never been a Professional Writer but he knew he had a latent-talent as a writer. Because his time was running-out and he needed to leave something behind as royalties for his wife to live on after his passing, he put paper into his typewriter and began to write. He wrote so furiously and energetically that within a year, he had written five novels. This feat alone surpassed what even acclaimed Professional Writers like E.M. Forster and J.D. Salinger could do within the same period and time frame. As it turned out, his cancer went into remission and Burgess did not die as predicted. In his life-time, he ended up writing more than 70 books.

If not the fear of death that Mr. Burgess faced, he may never have exploited his latent-talent of writing talk less of writing over 70 books in his life time. Many people are like Anthony Burgess. They have enormous talent and potential deep within them which could come out if they allow fear to motivate them instead of paralyzing them.