The Secret To Finding An Online Business You Love

 

Ever wonder why it is difficult for a beginning marketer (or “newbie”) to succeed with affiliate marketing?

Let’s look at the challenges, and then THREE excellent solutions to this problem.

Just consider the things that it takes for a person to actually make any money online.

First – you’ve got to choose products to promote that will actually make sales.

The process of turning strangers into customers is called “conversion”.

There are hundreds of thousands of products on the market and many of them just never make any sales at all.

Choosing the right products to promote is vital to your success.

Next, you need to build your own mailing list.

The last thing you want to do is work hard to drive traffic to a page and end up only building someone else’s list! But that is exactly what most affiliates do.

NOTE: If I were going to give you one piece of advice about succeeding as an affiliate it would be this … build your own list from the very beginning.

When you build your list you put yourself in position to sell not only one product but an unlimited number of products!

Lastly, it is vital to leverage the power of email followup marketing.

With follow up email marketing you can send emails to remind people to consider buying the products you are promoting.

Best of all, this process can be completely automated!

Imagine this – a person arrives at your squeeze page, joins YOUR mailing list, and then receives a carefully created series of follow up emails giving them reasons to buy.

That is automated marketing, and it’s a beautiful thing!

HOW DOES A NEWBIE GET ALL OF THIS DONE?

There are three key factors that will help you.

ONE – Work with proven leaders.

Many people online will claim that they’re some big “guru” or they’re making SO much money. They will even show you fake screenshots of their income.

They look so convincing, right? So how can you know who to trust?

What you want to do check out their web page very carefully and look for testimonials.

Don’t just look for testimonials from anybody, look for testimonials from people who are leaders in their industry too.

If you come to a webpage in the internet marketing space, let’s say, and there’s a testimonial from a big time marketer or from a New York Times Bestselling author, that is a very good sign.

You also do want to look for testimonials from regular people like you and me.

TWO – Make sure that their product is up to date.

If you’re taking a look at a webpage and see a copyright notice at the bottom that’s five years old, that is a warning sign.

You want to make sure that the product they’re offering you, the system they’re offering you, is actually upgraded for current methodologies.

For example, the internet is moving to mobile very quickly so you want to make sure that whatever you’re promoting is mobile friendly.

Once you get access to the product, either buy purchasing it or getting a review copy, look around and make sure the advice is current.

THREE – You want to do something that works FOR YOU.

One of the big downfalls for new marketers is they don’t know what works so it’s easier for them to fall prey to people who claim that their method will work, but it’s not proven.

When it comes to selling things online and making money as an affiliate marketer, what actually works?

If you don’t yet have experience, you need to rely on your instincts.

Most of us know more than we admit we know about how the world works. Our parents gave us the gift of common sense.

So what really works online?

The things that work are the things that help people achieve their goals,

Because the Internet is mostly about information, information products that can be accessed or downloaded immediately are wildly popular.

Popular also are sites that offer discounts or help you save money on items you buy every day.

You want to look for a system, an overall system, that really makes sense to you.

If you understand how a system works, the odds are the people you reach in promoting the product will connect to it as well.

Let’s recap for a moment, and then finish with perhaps the most important point of all.

You want a way to capture leads so you build YOUR list. That means a proven lead capture page.

You want a way to make sales with follow up email marketing. That means a proven follow up system.

You want high conversions. That means a sales letter that converts strangers into buyers.

Those are really the core elements: list building, followup email marketing, and converting strangers into buyers.

My advice is this – if you are a newbie, rather than learning how to build squeeze pages, learning how to write emails, learning how to do sales pages, tap into an existing system that already does all these and can prove that it is working for people.

What you want to do here is find a system that is recognized, is provided by a recognizable person, has testimonials from both average people like you and me and from big time well-know people like New York Times best selling authors or top marketers.

Once you have that, make sure it is a professional looking site and one that uses the basic elements of success;  which means building your list, selling with email follow up marketing, and converting people into buyers.

If you find those things and you can plug into that system, you can work that system and let it build passive income for you while you learn the skills you need to take the next step in your own online evolution.

Once you find your system, jump in with both feet, work that system hard and let it earn the income you seek.

Do that and you will have options. You will have freedom.

And having options is a beautiful thing!

Secrets Of The Super Affiliates Revealed!

One of the most important things when it comes to affiliate marketing is having the right set of tools.

You don’t want to have too many tools and you especially don’t want to have duplicates, but you absolutely do need a core set of tools that will serve you well.

Let me give you a short list of the tools you need to succeed and then focus in on the one that’s most important.

You really need the following:

1. An autoresponder. This is a must.
2. Web hosting. Why hosting? Because you really do need to have a blog of your own.
3. A Blog where you can build your list and make offers.
4. A traffic source that you really trust. It needs to be reliable and affordable.
5. A way to build webpages.

 

THE SECRET SUPER-AFFILIATES WON’T SHARE!

Many people don’t know that when it comes to succeeding as an affiliate marketer, building webpages quickly and professionally is very important.

Did you know …

• The average successful website has 47 landing pages.
• Most websites have only one or two landing pages?
• Most affiliate marketers don’t know how to create a landing page.
• ALL super affiliates use many landing pages.

So what IS a landing page?

Well, first of all, the words “landing page” can be a little confusing.

It simply means the page a person lands on from a link that you promote.

It’s very important to understand that the links that we promote are going to bring people to one specific page.

• That could be a blog post.
• It could be a sales letter.
• It could be a webinar registration form.
• It could be one of many different things.

What is needed to really succeed with affiliate marketing is the ability to drive people to one SPECIFIC page that helps them and helps you.

In order to do that, the most important tool in your affiliate success toolkit is going to be a good, high quality page builder.

Now, here are the attributes I look for when it comes to building pages quickly and professionally.

#1: Use one tool to get everything done.

You don’t want to use five or seven different tools in order to write a headline, create a bulleted list, or make an add to cart button.

You want to have one tool that you know, trust, and can use to get it all done.

When I say “get it all done”, what do I mean?

I mean every type of page you will need as an affiliate marketer.

This includes:

• Opt-in pages
• Sales pages
• Membership pages (if you’re selling membership sites)
• Webinar pages
• Product launch pages
• Coming soon pages
• Bonus pages
• Upsell pages
• About me pages (Your about me page is very, very important!)
• And even more!

When you have one tool to get it all done, you will lower your costs by not paying for multiple services.

It’s all too easy to have a squeeze page service, a sales page service, a shopping cart and on and on.

Those costs can add up to hundreds of dollars per month!

By avoiding such excessive cost, you can take all that money and put it into driving traffic to your affiliate offers.

 

#2 – You want to have rapid implementation.

By rapid implementation, this is what I mean:

If you get an idea this morning for a squeeze page where people can opt in to get on your mailing list, you want to be able to have that page built and published this afternoon.

You don’t want to outsource that to someone, pay extra money, and wait three or four days.

You don’t want to struggle with some kind of an HTML coding situation.

What you really need is a drag and drop page builder that can help you create pages quickly because it uses professional templates.

One of the things to look for when you choose a page builder is pre-designed templates. You want to have a library of templates to choose from.

Ideally, you want 30 or 40 of these, or even more.

 

#3 – You want a page builder to be drag and drop.

This simply means that you don’t have to type code into the page. You select what you want to see and drag it into place.

Drag and drop is very important because it removes traditional page building limitations.

If you can dream something, if you can see a page in your mind, you want to be able to create that page very quickly. Drag and drop makes that happen.

Along with these three qualities, you also want to make sure that your page builder will tie into your autoresponder and e Commerce tool very, very easily.

Let’s say for example that you’re selling a product and you want to collect payments through PayPal. You want to make sure that your page builder instantly integrates with PayPal.

Or let’s say that you’re doing a webinar and you’re going to use GoToWebinar. Your page builder should instantly connect to GoToWebinar.

The same thing if you’re building a membership site. When you use a tool like WishList Member, you want to make sure that that page builder that you choose will tie into WishList Member quite easily.

These are very important aspects when considering which page builder to use.

If you want to succeed with affiliate marketing, no matter where you stand now, the right page builder can change things for you.

The right page builder will help you save time, save money, sell more and build bigger lists.

Go find a page builder now and commit to it.

Use that page builder for everything and you’ll find that it really helps skyrocket your affiliate marketing results.

4 Tips for Emails that Get Opened and Convert

Email marketing is a bit of an odd duck;

 

As other marketing channels have seen a distinct rise and fall in the face of social media and new communications technologies, email marketing still remains effective.

In fact, despite all of our new ways to communicate, people still retain the use of their email for daily use.

Receiving invoices, communicating with customers, etc.; sure, other platforms have sprung up for these communications, but none are as ubiquitous as email.

That said, email marketing has aged, and therefore it has changed. Getting your emails opened, then read, then obeyed, is no easy task.

It was hard in the beginning, and it’s super hard now that everyone and their mother is used to receiving promotional emails.

Let’s take a look at how your emails can be the exception to the rule in a “no open” world.

1) Give before you take

Many marketers have gotten a lot smarter about this now, but it wasn’t always the case, and there are still many who fall flat on their face when balancing their value.

Think about the reasons you follow the accounts you do on twitter. Think about which emails you open when they slide into your inbox.

They’re the ones that are important to you, not the ones that sell and annoy you the most.

Your customers are just like you, so make sure you’re building trust and value through emails that really offer something, before you every ask for any action(s) in return.

 2) Avoid subject line cliches

This is the most controversial piece of advice here. Most people these days are used to the types of subject line formulas that have traditionally performed well, and haven’t realized that their effectiveness is dying down.

Consider simply summarizing your subject lines in a way that makes them sound like they’re from a genuine person.

Companies now more than ever perform better when viewed as individuals or collectives of individuals rather than businesses.

3) Keep it short

How many of you have received emails from some marketer whose email list you opted which are pages long?

How many of you read them to the end?

How many of you send these types of emails yourself?

If you want an email to be a sales letter, keep it short, visual, and enticing, then use a CTA to get people to click out of an email and onto one of your pages where you have more control.

People are turned off when they expect a helpful message and are greeted with a 9 paragraph sales letter in email form.

4) Get feedback

One really can’t stress enough how valuable it is to hear back from your customers directly about how you’re doing and how they interact with your brand or your product.

The assumptions you make may not be helping you at all, so it’s important that you reach out and invite feedback; you may just find that a slight tweak to your sales funnel could address something that is currently a huge conversion killer for your customers.

This could take the form of either a personal email message or a survey.

There you go, my 4 tips to emails opened and convert?

What do you think? Do you agree? Please comment and let me know if you feel you can add more tips to this post.

Here’s to email opens……. cheers!