http://www.articletrader.com/ Articles at ArticleTrader en-us http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliates-must-pre-sell-dont-make-the-mistake-that-will-most-hurt-your-business.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/affiliate-programs/affiliates-must-pre-sell-dont-make-the-mistake-that-will-most-hurt-your-business.html Sun, 02 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0600 The Internet is bursting with Web sites created by affiliates to steer visitors to merchants’ sites. This is the simple elegance of affiliate marketing–create a Web site, sign up as an affiliate with companies that sell products you like, then sit back and watch the money pour in. At least that’s the theory. But many affiliates make the one mistake that most hurts their business. They fail to pre-sell their customers.

Creating a Web site that is one big sales letter is not going to lead to huge sales. Why? Because visitors will resist your sales pitch no matter how enticing your Web site, and they will not likely click through to the merchant's site. Even if they do click through, they will be faced with another sales pitch, possibly with some of the same wording. By selling you are actually hurting your chance to make a profit.

If this doesn't make sense, keep in mind why people in the millions everyday go on the Internet–content. They want to learn something, or they are looking for help with a problem, or they have some other need.

People don't go online to be confronted by a sales pitch. That's why your affiliate site to be successful must create a sense of credibility by offering lots of interesting and informative content--articles, headlines, news, blogs, forums, free newsletters and email courses, and links to more content that might be of interest. These things will keep your visitors interested and they will then click through with pleasure to the merchant’s site in a mood ready-to-buy.

This is the beauty of the pre-sell. It’s this pre-selling that puts your visitor in a positive frame of mind, which leads to a sale. If you turn your visitor off in the beginning with an obvious sales pitch, it’s almost impossible to overcome that, and you’ve lost a potential customer.

There are two important things to remember to effectively pre-sell your visitors:

Carefully craft your site to the theme of your merchants’ products or services.

If you are signed up as affiliate with several dating sites, then your site should obviously be devoted to dating and getting people together, along with anything associated with relationships–flowers, candy, special holidays, jewelry, cards, or gifts. You name it. Be creative. Obviously a pitch for the greatest money-making opportunity won’t fit.

Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes.

Analyze your site with brutal honesty and try to understand how a stranger would feel navigating through. Is the site complicated and hard to figure out? Do all the links work? Does it have a central, specific theme? Does the site deliver valuable, appropriate content? Do you get a trusting feeling? Will it make the visitor more open to buy? If so, then you can safely recommend merchants to your visitor. People will usually only buy from someone they trust. And that should be you.

Pre-selling works because it’s a two step process. The first step is up to you by providing a content-rich, interesting site where visitors will feel comfortable. As you gain their trust, they will pass on to step two by clicking through to the merchant’s site. By now they are interested enough to buy, so they will not be turned off by the sales copy.

Let the merchant do the selling. Your role is to educate and help your visitors by providing answers to their questions or solutions for their problems through quality content.




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Dave Starner is a former teacher and coach. Visit the Net’s #1 Infoproduct Site to instantly download great ebooks, and sign up for free bonuses and money making information. Article reprints welcomed as long as all texts and hyperlinks remain unchanged.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/online-business/infoproducts-how-to-earn-more-from-your-infoproduct-business.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/online-business/infoproducts-how-to-earn-more-from-your-infoproduct-business.html Mon, 27 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0600
Create a physical product

The hottest selling items on the Internet today are infoproducts. Ebooks, software, how-to courses, ezines, newsletters, self-improvement guides and an endless number of digital products are in demand on every conceivable topic. And with customers’ ability to instantly download their purchases, producing and selling a quality infoproduct can be your road to success.

Although the beauty of infoproducts is the ability to instantly download, the best way to increase your profits for the same product is to burn it onto a CD and include a printed companion manual. Selling a kit that might also include an audio CD and some kind of bonus materials has several advantages.

You can charge more for a physical product. Customers are willing to pay more for something they can have in hand and keep on the shelf or at their disposal on their desk. An accompanying manual or any other printed material is great for reading on the train home from work. And who hasn’t experienced the anticipation of the package delivery man at your door.

Another great benefit is that your affiliates now can earn larger commissions. There’s no better way to attract more affiliates and encourage your existing affiliate base.

But what about all the storage, packaging and shipping? Won’t that take a lot of time?

Yes, if you did it yourself. But that’s not necessary. This is where the whole concept comes together.

Since your goal is to build your business, not to take orders, burn CDs, print booklets, and get them to the post office, you can farm out all the work to allow you to concentrate on marketing and producing more and better products. Naturally it will cost money to have a third party do the work, but, again, the time you save can be better used to build your business.

There are many resources available to help you:

Manuals and booklets

Printindustry.com is a website run by a group of professional printers set up to connect a print buyer with printing companies. When you submit your print request, let’s say 500 copies of a 40-page booklet, it is emailed to all the member printing companies that specialize in that type of printing. They then respond directly to you with price quotes. This can save you huge amounts of time from shopping different sites for competitive quotes.

CDs and DVDs

Do a search for “CD replication,” and you will find many sites that will replicate CDs and DVDs for very competitive prices. For example, nationwidecd.com and tripledisc.com, to name just two, can supply a CD in a paper sleeve for under a dollar each.

For a little extra they will supply a jewel case with inserts in black& white or color, card board or vinyl sleeves, and any kind of labels. Nationwidecd also does some printing, so you might find other sites that also do both.

Fulfillment

A fulfillment company warehouses your CDs, DVDs, manuals and booklets, puts them together and ships the orders. These companies handle every step from processing credit card payments to returns.

Fullfilmentadvisor.com is a good site to visit for resources on every aspect of fulfillment.
Here you’ll find detailed articles on exactly how fulfillment companies work, how to choose a fulfillment house, problems to expect, costs, and more. There are also hundreds of links to companies that perform every type of fulfillment service.

Your role as a business owner is to provide the best product you can to your customers. Creating a physical package in addition to your digital product, and farming out the order processing and fulfillment, will allow you more time to focus on building your business and increasing your profits.

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Dave Starner is a former teacher and coach. Visit the Net’s #1 infoproduct site at www.ebooksnet.com to instantly download great ebooks, and sign up for free bonuses and money making information. Article reprints welcomed as long as all texts and hyperlinks remain unchanged.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/internet/online-business/protect-your-domain-name.html http://www.articletrader.com/internet/online-business/protect-your-domain-name.html Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0600
This happens every day because of a perfectly legitimate process known as “drop catching,” where people quickly snag the domain names owners have let expire and try to resell them or use the links associated with the names, which could be extensive, to create Web sites loaded with advertisements. You can easily avoid becoming a victim of a drop catcher by better understanding how the domain registration system works to protect your domain name.

Your Web site, with all the content you have so painstakingly added, sits on a computer with a unique address called an IP address, which is simply a series of numbers. A domain name is an address forwarding service that directs visitors to the site using this IP address. Domain names are used instead of numbers because most people find it easier to remember a name rather than a bunch of numbers. It’s as if you could dial your friend’s name into the telephone instead of his phone number.

You can purchase a domain name by registering it with a provider of domain services such as GoDaddy.com , the largest on the Web, or any number of other registrars. The name can be registered for just one year, for about $10, or for as long as ten years, for around $80. Many register for only one year because it’s cheaper, or they only want the site for a limited time.

At the end of the year, the registrar usually sends an email renewal notice to the owner. If the owner doesn’t respond to the renewal notice, the domain name will eventually be made available for purchase by someone else. Roughly 20,000 domain names become available every day because the owners allowed them to expire, or the owners didn’t realize that their domain name was up for renewal

According to the rules established by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN), domain registrars have 45 days after the expiration date to notify the owner that their domain name is going to be dropped from the registry. If the name is dropped, the guidelines then call for a 30-day grace period during which the owner can still claim the name. After this grace period and then another five-day holding period, the name is dropped from the registry and anyone can claim it.

Since 2004, however, a number of domain service providers, starting with SnapName.com, have created an auction process for expired names which bypasses the original drop process and makes the names available in as little as thirty days. GoDaddy.com begins the auction process even before the names have officially expired, although it does warn the auction participants that the owner could still claim their name.

These providers of domain services each have tools on their sites to make it easier to grab expired names. They provide constantly updated lists of expired names, various auction services, search engines, and other free tools for anyone to quickly and easily find available domain names. Some sites also offer software for sale that further simplifies the search for expired and soon to be expired names.

With the surge in online advertising, drop catchers will continue to seek out domain names from sites with good traffic, anxious to exploit the established links. Protect your site and your business by checking the expiration date of your domain name. Relying on the registrar to send a renewal notice that could easily be sent to an old email address or get lost in the spam catcher, could cost you years of hard work.




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Dave Starner is a former teacher and coach. Visit the Net’s #1 infoproduct site at www.ebooksnet.com to instantly download great ebooks, and sign up for free bonuses and money making information. Article reprints welcomed as long as all texts and hyperlinks remain unchanged.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]> http://www.articletrader.com/business/advertising/ezine-advertising%96simple-techniques-to-drive-traffic-to-your-site.html http://www.articletrader.com/business/advertising/ezine-advertising%96simple-techniques-to-drive-traffic-to-your-site.html Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0600
This is why ezines are such a good choice. As long as your ad relates closely to the theme of the ezine, the person reading your ad is already halfway toward buying what you have to offer.

There are three types of ads that you can place in your chosen ezine: a classified ad, a sponsor ad, and/or a solo ad.

The classified ad is the smallest and least expensive. This three to five line ad is often run in a block with other classified ads, one on top of another, similar to a page of classified ads in your local newspaper. This contains just a brief description with an email or link to your web site. This costs a few dollars, generally about half the cost of a sponsor ad.

A sponsor ad is placed at the top of the ezine, often under a heading like: "Please support our sponsor.” This ten to fifteen line ad will draw more attention since it is the first thing the reader sees when the email is opened. This is priced around twenty dollars.

The most effective, and naturally the most expensive, is the solo ad. This is not part of the ezine, but instead goes out as an email to everyone on the mailing list. The message is all about you and your product or service. This ad can be as long as 700 words, allowing you to go into great detail, and will cost in the neighborhood of forty to fifty dollars, about twice the cost of a sponsor ad. However, some of the larger ezines may ask for hundreds or even several thousand dollars for a solo ad.

Once you’ve written your ad and chosen an ezine, the best way to proceed is to think like an educator. The most effective teaching method is repetition. Experienced teachers will cover the same information in several different ways. They might lecture one day, followed by a reading assignment and discussion, and then an essay, all on the same topic.

Very few people learn something thoroughly the first time they see it. And few people respond to an ad the first time they see it. Since you are trying to educate and motivate your target audience, you want them to see your ad more than once.

This is best done by first running a solo ad, then running a sponsor ad in the next two or three issues of the same ezine. Finally, for the next five to seven issues run a classified ad. The readers will see your ad for many weeks and begin to understand the message and warm up to your offer. They need time to mull it over, compare products and prices, and decide if they really need it. Give them time, educate them, and they will buy.



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Dave Starner is a former teacher and coach who markets ebooks and software. Visit the Net’s #1 infoproduct site at http://www.ebooksnet.com and instantly download great ebooks and software on Internet advertising and hundreds of other topics.

Source: http://www.articletrader.com ]]>