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Wednesday, April 29, 2020

14 Tips to Reinvent Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Laptop computer, glass of water, blue pen on a white notepad and a mobile phone on a garden work bench.
Even if you are experienced in affiliate marketing, there are times you get stuck in a rot. That is the time your business needs reinventing. The quickest way out is to expand your knowledge about the business and to review your routine practices. By expanding your knowledge about affiliate marketing, you stand to benefit immensely from expert tips. Whatsoever tips/information you learn from experts, no matter how little can be applied to reinvent your affiliate marketing business for better results.

These here tips are strongly recommended by many expert marketers if you want to reinvent your affiliate marketing business.

1. Sell More Big Ticket Products

Characteristically, affiliate marketers invest the same amount of efforts to sell all products no matter how small. It thus makes good marketing sense to sell more of big ticket products that bring in bigger commissions and revenues. If you target the right audience with big ticket products, your business tends to make more money as a result.



 

2. Never Pay to Join Affiliate Programs

Most high-commissions-paying and rewarding affiliate programs are free to join. Many train you free and provide free tools for you to do the business. It is mostly scam affiliate programs that demand money from affiliates. The reason you must be weary of affiliate programs that demand fees to join. It is thus advisable never to pay to join any affiliate marketing program. When any affiliate program demands that you pay a “membership fee” or “training costs”, it is more than likely just a scam. What they are mainly after is to simply take your money and that is it. Good and reputable affiliate marketing programs are free because the product merchant companies earn most of their revenues from the traffic and sales their partner affiliates manage to send their way.

3. Market Only Products Related to Your Website Niche

 
If you have managed to build some good audience/followers over time, it shows the audience shares same interest in the business niche you have identified with. It is thus easy for you to promote special products of mutual interest to such audience. It pays therefore to simply pick affiliate programs that are related to the general topic/niche of your website. When readers visit your website, it is only because they like and identify with the content. They generally see your subject matter as helping to solve problems related to their needs. As a marketer, if you choose the right ads targeted at such audience, you can succeed better at marketing to them and making more sales as a result.

4. Use long-tail keywords

With the help of Google’s free keyword tool, you can search for relevant long-tail keywords to help promote your affiliate marketing products. Such keywords tend to lend some form of uniqueness to the product you are marketing which is what tends to make it stand out on Search Engines. They help to give it some bit of advantage over its competitors thereby enhancing its ranking on Search Engines. When the product manages to get higher Search Engine rankings, it gets searched better and more frequently. The product attracts more inbound traffic and better patronage as a result.

5. Be Open and Honest With Your Readers

Online business marketing thrives on trust and honesty engenders trust. No good marketer ever wants to be caught in the web of dishonesty. By being open and honest with your readers, you can build trust more quickly. Many affiliate marketers have since discovered that it doesn’t really pay to be dishonest. Your readers are more likely to believe and click on your ads if they have a very good cause to believe you as an honest affiliate marketer.

6. Borrow Ideas from Other Affiliate Marketers

It helps in affiliate marketing to always study and even follow the activities of other affiliate marketers. That is with a view to knowing what to do well and how they do it. Doing so enables you to borrow and adopt good and workable ideas from other affiliate marketers particularly those in the same business niche you are. You can easily get useful ideas and information if you visit your competitor’s website/blog and subscribe to their newsletters. Doing so can help you to regularly analyze how and what they do best that enables them to get good traffic, leads and sales. That is how to get good information on which marketing techniques work best for others and how you can best use same and even improve on the techniques to make more sales. 



 

7. Use Free Shipping to Deliver Products

Free shipping remains a very attractive advertising gimmick which works wonders for marketers. This is because it touches on reducing costs for buyers, the reason buyers like it. As a marketer, you can use free shipping/delivery as a major incentive to entice your customers. If however your own business lacks adequate financial resources to ship products free of charge, you can consider offering combined shipping to save your customers’ money and positively drive sales. For this reason, if you are designing an internet marketing campaign or mailer, you must remember to include the very important phrase “Free Shipping” in the subject line of the e-mail message. That phrase alone at times may be all it takes to get your message recipient to open the message and the message reaches and impacts its target as expected.

8. Research Products Vendors Thoroughly

 
A good research study always helps marketers to gather very useful information and data about product merchants and vendors. It is about the most reliable way to detect and avoid vendors who may be running some scams in the name of business. Such scams may include cheating affiliates out of commissions, underpaying commissions, dodging commissions payment altogether and even promoting non available or fake products. There are quite a few vendors out there online running disreputable businesses and many unsuspecting persons sometimes fall victims. You cannot be too careful in thoroughly checking out the persons you want to do business with online if you want to avoid scammers.

9. Learn From Evergreen Blog Posts

In blogging business, evergreen blogs are immensely valuable to any affiliate marketing business. You can look back to detect the content you’ve posted in the past that continues to attract good traffic. Next is to identify and keep track of the keywords you used in the content. When making new posts, you can insert affiliate links which are appropriate for the topic then reuse the keywords from the earlier popular post to help drive more traffic to your website/blog. That is one great way to get more traffic and even clickthroughs.

10. Create and Use Marketing Videos Generously

Visual content marketing materials like videos are often very good for inbound traffic and even clickthroughs. If you can create a series of videos showing expert demonstrations or how-to’s, or some other content which people will want to watch, it helps to attract traffic. It is easy to embed these videos with your affiliate links and you get hits through reviews and referrals. That is good for inbound traffic.

11. Promote More Products with High Demand

 
Of course, in marketing parlance, the more popular a product is, the more it is in demand. There are literally hundreds of thousands of affiliate products out there which affiliates can freely promote. It is advisable however to choose and promote only products that resonate with your readers. These are the kinds of products that usually get your site’s readers to come back over and over because there is something about your site that resonates with them. That shows popularity about what you are promoting from your site. Your personal and genuine recommendation of products easily gets the attention of your readers because of the trust they already have in you. Converting them to buyers becomes a natural consequence of such efforts. 



 

12. Promote Only Links of High Quality Products

Yes indeed! High quality products are almost always in very high demand. It therefore makes good marketing sense to only add your promotional links to products you know are high quality if you want to make better sales. Because your readers already have some trust in you, they will rely on your judgement if you let them know you’ve done the legwork for them by vetting inferior products and only bringing them the very best. For more credibility, be sure you check sales pages before adding your promotional link to products. The essence is to be sure these sales pages are also attesting to the high quality of such products. Similar effects too as choosing to promote only those products and companies that have built good and solid reputations which are well known!

13. Build a Credible E-Mail List

A credible e-mail list may take some time to build but the effort is well worth it since the list serves as a very valuable marketing asset that is lasting and durable.  When readers stop by your site and visit your affiliate link, you only get one chance to make a sale. But by adding readers consistently to your e-mail list, you get unlimited chances to send follow-up broadcasts and e-mails telling your readers/customers about your products. You also get the chance to send specific ads about specific products to specific e-mail recipients. You get better chances of making multiple and repeated sales as a result.

14. Choose and Use Only a Unique Domain Name

Because of the vastness, depth and peculiarity of the internet, uniqueness is a very good asset. Uniqueness means identity which if good has unlimited rewards for your business. Therefore, when you are developing your affiliate marketing website, you must remember to register a relative and unique domain name with a reliable hosting service. Your domain name should reflect on the products/services you will be offering and the business niche of the site. When Search Engines highlight and pick on this information, it helps to get readers looking for information on such products to your website. By registering such unique domain name with a reliable hosting service, it stands the chance of getting picked up easily by all the major Search Engines. That is good for unlimited inbound organic traffic.


 

Monday, April 27, 2020

Key Tips for Small Business Marketing in Tough Times

Smart mobile phone, computer, potted flowers and a creamy beverage in a white coffee cup.
Economic realities worldwide are always characterized by ups and downs. This affects marketers a great deal. When the economy suffers an unexpected downturn just like we currently have with the covid-19 pandemic ravaging the world, smart marketers must be able to think outside the box for their businesses to survive. Generally, at such times, there is always the tendency for most marketers to focus mainly on how to cut costs and save money. That usually poses very huge challenges for many marketers. If fewer and fewer customers begin to spend less money on your business, you will be forced to lower your business expenses to help your cash flow if your business must survive the unexpected turn of events. Part of the things you must do to help your business is to explore credible ways to ramp up your marketing efforts to get more sales despite the tough times. That poses some challenges no doubt but if you are able to take full advantage of these here key tips, you may turn out better than many of your competitors.


 

Review Your Marketing Strategy

Tough economic times are usually very perfect times to test out new marketing strategies and products/services to meet people’s needs during the times. Therefore, ramping up or even changing your marketing strategy in addition to testing new tools is worth trying out. In fact, anything you can do in your business which helps to lower your marketing expenses is worth trying. Marketing experts advise that in tough economic times, you can even do more marketing at lower costs. One of the commonest ways to do this is to simply switch from paid ads to free ads using online media tools to promote your business. With free ads, it is possible to increase the intensity and frequency of your ads without any additional costs and you get good results.

Redirect Your Products Offering

At times of economic downturns, it is better to focus on changing up your products offerings to better meet the needs of your customers since as the economy changes, your customers’ needs change significantly as well. That is called business adaptation. Not many businesses can survive tough economic times if they’re unable to adapt to such changing times. So, in times of tough economic downturns, when customers realize that you are striving to meet their needs despite the tough times, they tend to continue their patronage in reciprocity.

Adopt Grassroots Marketing

Many marketing experts like to recommend a grassroots approach as an effective marketing strategy when the economy is down. Many others like to call it “reverting to old school” marketing strategy. It relies hugely on word-of-mouth marketing which is as old as marketing itself and still very effective as well. It costs next to nothing too to pass on your message from mouth to mouth. Word-of-mouth marketing could kick start by simply passing a message to just one person, a few individuals or a small group. The words get out of there by way of normal people to people social/business interactions and the message will spread wider and faster to a much larger audience. On and on it goes just like that and your business benefits as a result. You can easily pass on good words about your business if you can seize any opportunity to speak at some religious/community/social events. If somehow, you manage to get your audience curious and excited about your business, they remember and many will pass on the information which may earn recommendations and referrals for your business.

Segment Your Marketing

Market segmentation remains a very good marketing strategy particularly in tough economic times. Economic downturns usually affect different people in different ways. That is why it’s smart marketing to be able to gauge where your customers are at in the economic downturn and to segment your marketing to meet them where they are. It is futile to simply assume that some people have or haven’t been affected by an economic downturn. If you can properly survey your audience to gauge their needs, you can then correctly segment your marketing to meet those needs. Doing so enables you to market the right products to the right people at the right time and even in the right place. That can help to boost their patronage even in tough times. Market segmentation may seem like a little too much extra work, but you’ll realize it’s worth it when the results start coming in.

Stay Connected and Available to Your Customers

When customers realize that you really care about them no matter how tough the times are, they too will remember and care about you. Simply caving in and disappearing during economic downturns is bad for business. It pays to remain steadfast and available to your customers despite tough times. Many customers do appreciate that as a great sacrifice for them and many never forget. The good news is that with the depth and versatility of the Internet, staying connected with your customers is much easier and reliable these days. No matter how tough the times are, it is still very easy and free of cost to send out regular email newsletters with helpful information and tips. It is easy to also provide updates on your business by posting tips on social media at no cost at all.