Work at Home Based Business

Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing’ Category

This is a guest post by AffiliateTips.com. Have a look at their site to learn more about affiliate marketing, download helpful affiliate marketing tools or compare affiliate programs.

Targeted marketing is the wave of the future for Internet advertisers. The key to advertising is knowing what consumers want. Once an advertiser understands the potential consumer’s needs, he has a much better chance of making a sale. This is the theory behind online targeted marketing.

And while in the Internet’s infancy the best way to advertise via the Internet may have been to simply rapid fire your advertising message to as many places and users as possible, today’s Internet marketer can make use of targeted approaches to online advertising to create a more efficient advertising model. One interesting example of this is indeed behavioral targeting.

What is Behavioral Targeting?

Behavioral targeting is marketing ads to individuals based in prior buying or surfing habits. When an Internet consumer comes to a website enabled with behavioral targeting code, the site analyzes prior habits and places relevant ads on the site based on those patterns.

To do this a special program is used that, like we mentioned, gains access to where the visitor has been before. The program then uses this information to generate ads on the site.

Why Is Behavioral Targeting Useful?

Psychologists know that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. People who like to buy state of the art stereo equipment over the Internet are unlikely to restrict their online purchases to floral bouquets anytime soon. If advertisers can find out what someone has bought or taken an interest in before, they know the right things to try to sell to them in the future.

Putting the same ads on the same pages for every viewer to a certain webpage is simply a missed opportunity. Just as car manufacturers advertise in car magazines and makeup vendors advertise in beauty magazines, Internet advertisers want to advertise to people who are interested in their products, which is just what behavioral targeting allows them to do.

What Are the Concerns About Behavioral Targeting?

There is an ethical question of whether recording and storing people’s buying and viewing practices and habits is an invasion of privacy. However, since only the practices and not the personal information of the individual are analyzed by the program, this is not as much of an issue as some people may believe.

Hence these programs generally function “blind,” that is to say, they take the pattern data and spit out ads as a result. Not only does this benefit the advertiser but in the end also the consumer. Rather than being bombarded with irrelevant banners and ad-messages website advertisements is tailored to fit our needs and desires. It’s a win-win!

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When I see some of the boneheaded things that some affiliate marketers do, I begin to believe that the failure rate is indeed 95% or higher. So much of the failure could be avoided if affiliate marketers would just avoid some of these blunders. Well, in this article, I am going to cover just a few of the things that turn affiliate marketers into failures. Hopefully, if you avoid these, you’ll have a decent shot at becoming a successful affiliate marketer.

The first thing I want to go over is how affiliate marketers pick their products. Sometimes I think they just close their eyes and pick them randomly. Absolutely no thought goes into this process. Hey, let’s just find the top selling product at Clickbank and promote the heck out of it. Um, no offense, but this is probably the stupidest way to go about it. Product selection is critical and just picking the top selling product is NOT the way to go about it.

Next on the list is how affiliate marketers promote these products. Laziness doesn’t even begin to describe it. Most marketers simply take the ads that the product creators kindly write up and blast them all over the Internet without changing one word. Let me tell you something, this is no way to promote a product. Think about it. If everybody on the Internet promoting this particular product is doing the same thing, how does anybody stand out from the crowd? They can’t. And if they don’t stand out, how can they make any sales? They don’t. This is why this is such a stupid thing to do.

Finally, there’s getting paid, or more specifically, making sure you’re promoting a product where you know you’re going to get paid. Hey, I’m as guilty of this as anybody else. But after being burned way too many times, I have finally smartened up and made sure I was promoting a product where I could be reasonably sure that I was going to get paid. The last time I didn’t get a commission was a very long time ago.

There you have it. Those are the three biggest blunders that affiliate marketers make. They pick lousy products, they don’t promote them properly and they don’t even know if they’re going to get paid for their efforts. Okay, want to know how to nail all this down and more? Want to turn yourself into an affiliate assassin?

Check out my new book…Affiliate Assassin

Please don’t make the same mistakes that so many affiliate marketers make.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Turn Yourself Into An Affiliate Assassin

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Hey, remember those books by the great John Patrick, “So You Wanna Be A Gambler?” The series focused on what it took to become a competent gambler in the casinos. Well, if you want to become a competent affiliate marketer, there are some things that you need to know as well. I’m going to cover a few of those things in this article and then direct you to where you can get more information. Hopefully, by the time you’ve gotten all this info, you’ll know if affiliate marketing is right for you or not.

Let me start off by saying that affiliate marketing does have its advantages over selling your own products. The biggest advantage is that there is simply a whole lot less work for the affiliate marketer to do. For one thing, you don’t have to go through the agonizing process of creating your own products. If you think it’s easy to do that, it’s not. I’ve been creating my own products for years and the amount of work is astronomical.

Aside from the time factor of creating your own products, there is the cost factor as well. Affiliate marketing doesn’t cost anywhere near what it costs to create your own products. Some professional quality software products needed to create certain types of products cost hundreds of dollars. For example, take Photoshop which is the top product for creating ecovers. You’re talking about $600 in cost. If you want to create video products, Camtasia is about $300. That’s close to a grand for just two products.

And then of course there is knowledge. To create your own products, you have to have a solid handle on the subject matter. All my products are created from what’s crammed into my head. That knowledge did not come overnight. Some of it took me years to accumulate. What you don’t know, you have to go out and research. And let me tell you, research can be a painstaking process. One product I created took me almost one year to create because of the research required.

Okay, so you can see where affiliate marketing has its advantages. However, we haven’t touched on the disadvantages and other pieces of info. Well, in my signature is a free report that you can pick up. It will go over all the pros and cons of affiliate marketing versus creating your own products. I am sure that by the time you’re done reading it, you’ll know whether or not affiliate marketing is right for you.

So you wanna be an affiliate marketer?

Then you better know what you’re up against.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
Why Affiliate Marketing?…Find Out HERE

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Every once in a while, you write an article that you know is not only going to take people by surprise, but it’s also going to cause a bit of a ruckus besides. Well, that time has come again. I know a lot of people are unaware of what I am going to disclose today about the Clickbank Marketplace. So hang onto your hats. You’re gonna love this one.

If you check the Clickbank Marketplace on a regular basis, you’ll find that all of a sudden, a product that wasn’t there the day before is all of a sudden number 1 in the marketplace with a gravity of about 300. Gravity is the number of affiliates making money selling the product. Ever wonder how these products get gravities so high? Well, here’s the deal.

The top products in the Clickbank Marketplace basically get there with this process. The product is handled by a network. One person in the network is responsible for creating the product. Another person is responsible for the sales process. Finally, and this is the critical part of the whole thing, another person is responsible for recruiting affiliates. And what this person does is he emails his list of thousands of marketers, tells them a new product is out, and tells them to go and promote it. After that, it’s off to the races and suddenly you have hundreds of people making money promoting this product.

That is why, as a single marketer with a new product, you can’t possibly get your product up to the top of the marketplace unless you have a huge network like that. It’s not going to happen.

Now, this isn’t a knock on the product. It could be a good product or it could be a crap product. That’s just it. You DON’T know. The product got to where it is simply because of the network.

So the next time you check out the Clickbank Marketplace and want to know how that XYZ product that wasn’t there the other day is all of a sudden number 1…now you know.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
The Real Truth Videos - Find Out All The Dirt About Making $$$ Online

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How many articles have you read, websites you’ve seen and posts on blogs that are purely sales pitches? Is it always hype that makes the sale or has the time come when its more important to be a little more personal?

I don’t consider myself to necessarily be a great salesperson. As a relatively new marketer I have found success by making a connection with people who read my blog, articles etc. Don’t get me wrong, there is a sales component but when you love what you do and love what you have the opportunity to share with others then people feel the connection. They do not feel they are being fed a sales pitch and begin to feel a more trusting relationship with you. That is the key because now you are approachable.

I like to write in a manner that I am speaking to a friend of my progress. I always let people know in my posts they can contact me by leaving a comment and they will definitely get a response and I will tell them all they want to know. I have had many people write comments asking for help, advice and want to learn more about my programs. My conversations with those people are even better.

I personally feel its important to be really honest. Honesty shows through. People can feel it and are drawn towards you instead of the many people who are promoting exactly the same program you are promoting. People seeking home businesses are becoming more savvy and many have been burned before. They are wary and rightfully so. If you give them the opportunity to connect with you then you potentially have a loyal downline member for good!

There are so many ways to make a home business work for you but I believe its key to show who you are, keep it real and be approachable. You’ll be receiving those emails, inquiries and sign ups in no time.

Take care,

Laura

Read more of Laura’s posts at http://www.moneymakingmathteacher.com/blog

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