Provide a product for re-sale. Make it free, at or near cost.Commonly referred to as "Affiliate Marketing" this is nothing more than providing a product or service that others can re-sell. People like to make money and there are so many e-Commerce sites that lack quality products.
E-books can be an excellent product.
Example: If you sell tools then you may find that a small set of ebooks on home repair to be a tremendous traffic generator. Give it away to re-sellers and place your URL at the bottom of each page.
E-courses are another excellent example. Email provides a way for you to contact interested parties at virtually no cost.Example: If you sell gardening supplies, running a 5 part email course that teaches how to build a beautiful garden will provide a valuable service that others can sell or give away as an incentive. This can also be an extremely powerful lead generator since you'll establish credibility with these subscribers, not once... but seperate 5 times.
An excellent piece of free software for email courses is our very own
Infinite Responder. It's under the GPL so it's completely free! We do offer custom installations for a small one time charge if you're unfamiliar with Unix or MySQL.Infinite Responder:
Try it out!Whatever you choose to create for re-sale, whether you take a percentage of the sale or not, the goal is to use these 3rd party sales to create more traffic. Do something in the product that draws purchasers or downloaders to your site for more information. This can be something as formal as calling those people that purchase via affiliates or something as informal as a free to sell ebook with an ad banner or an "update" reminder that lets people know how to get a current copy of the ebook for free.
You will likely need to market your affiliate marketing program in some fashion. There's a lot of sites you can target, and a lot of ways to do this.
Tip:Be aware that giving something away for free can have a negative impact as a lot of people will only sign up to get the freebie. If you use a freebie as an incentive to join your affiliate program, you'll get a lot of people that sign up with no intention of actually reselling your product.I have found success by making affiliate programs "by invitation only." Then advertise that invitation process, perhaps with an incentive. This will help to weed out the slackers from your affiliate list and separate you from the "Please please please join me!" crowd.Whatever you decide to do make sure you consider the costs. If the average affiliate is generating only a few leads per week, and it's costing you thousands to run, it's probably not worth it unless you have a lot of affiliates each generating their share of leads. Personally I find it easier to manage a smaller list of people that generate higher volumes than the other way around. It's just easier to motivate a smaller team. For that reason I suggest regularly pruning the list of inactive affiliates (3 months of zero sales). It'll help clear out the dead wood and make it easier to get an accurate picture of the real situation.
Do more than your average affiliate program.Things to try:
1. Motivate your affiliate team with a high-quality weekly or monthly newsletter.
2. Provide an affiliate support system.
3. Keep your products updated regularly.
4. Be sure to provide a list of marketing techniques that have been proven to work. Simply put: make it easy to sell your products. Even if you never see a dime from the products themselves the leads they generate could change your entire business. Take your affiliate marketing seriously and it'll give you serious results.
Provide a free service that's fun or that people need. Games, dictionaries, anything. If you're always at the computer going "dang, I wish I could..." then chances are someone else is to. If it can be done cheaply, then it'd make an excellent marketing venture. People will visit and pass around your URL if it's free for them to do so. Like always, just make sure that the cost of creating such a campaign is figured appropriately. Remember, you'll probably have to have some kind of marketing campaign for this product or service to get things started. You might be able to tie it into your other marketing or sales efforts if you're lucky, but even then there will be some costs involved. Make sure that sustain this effort long enough generate a positive return on your investment.
Track visitors, add up all of the profit you make in one month from the campaign, figure out an average and then give an estimate for the number of months you'll need to break even. Can you reach that mark? Some careful assumptions here can help you determine if it'll make you money before it even gets started.
The break-even formulas for each product:
1. Number of sales needed = Campaign Cost / (Product Price - Product cost)
2. # months = Campaign Cost / [# sales per month * (Product Price - Product cost)]Remember that if you have more than 1 product per campaign then the cost can be spread out over the cost of each product. If you've got one product that's more profitable that others then you may want to spread more campaign cost over that product to reach profitability quicker. Of course that's an accounting issue that's best discussed with your accounting department.
Writing news and contentSyndicated content is a growing market on the Internet. More and more people want their articles published. More and more people need quality articles to be published. People have a basic psychological need to understand more about something before they buy it. There is always something related to your industry and your products and services that would make an excellent source of content for your site. Search engines love it and 3rd party syndication sites will publish it for free.Good places to get your articles published:
Go Articles!Idea MarketersWith a little work you can even get these published in an industry-based magazine. If they have a web site (which they should) then odds are that article will get published there too. Not only will this improve your search engine rank but it can also generate a lot of interested traffic to your site.
you have some news and content the goal is to get it read by as many people as possible. It may take a mini-marketing campaign to do this, but as long as you target people that can help spread your message... the results will be very effective and easily worth the cost.
Purchasing banners, pop-ups and pop-unders.
A banner used to be an 100x60 image at the top or bottom of the page. The size and placement have both changed in recent years, but they're still referred to as banners.
Pop-ups are those annoying little windows that "pop up" whenever you move from page to page. Pop-unders are pop-ups that appear at the bottom of the stack of windows so that they're left sitting there when you close everything else.
Unlike PPC, these options come in a variety of cost structures.
The most common:
Cost per hit.
Cost per click.
Cost per 1000 impressions (Called "CPM").
Infact, there are a dozen different ways. Be sure you fully understand the payment structure, contract terms, etc before you buy any of these.
Many banners are being sold by companies that are little more than scam artists... they put your banner on general portal site and charge you per impression (1 impression means it's been displayed once) regardless of whether it was filtered by the browser or if anyone clicked on it.
And don't assume big name sites are any better. Some of the biggest names on the internet continue to sell useless banners to anyone naive enough to buy them.
Keep in mind that banners and pop-ups are considered annoying intrusions. This means that a lot of effort has gone into creating proxies and software that can filter them. Some people get so fed up with banners that they've created blacklists of people that advertise with them. Be aware of this.
Still, banners and pop-ups can work if they're done correctly. As always you need to carefully track the campaign to make sure that you're getting your money's worth. Don't just settle for traffic or hits, if you're not selling anything due to the banner campaign then don't hesitate to ditch it. Of course like all ad campaigns you need to make sure you've given it a reasonable test period... otherwise you'll never know if it could've been successful or not.
If you know what you're doing, building a campaign with traditional methods can still be very effective. We offer a free consultation to help determine how these can best serve your business. If you lack the expertise, we can help you manage your banner and pop-up campaigns. If you'd like a quote feel free to
write us.Tip:You can test pop-up and banner ads by using a test compaign on your own site first. Use it to intice traffic from one area of your page, say your main page, to another part like a newsletter subscription.Do this randomly (PHP works wonders here). Some visitors should get them, some shouldn't. Track the data and compare the 2. This will allow you to refine your strategy first before paying large sums to others.Also, be careful about what sites your ads are appearing on. If you sell a family-friendly product then getting your ad on an X-rated site would be very bad for your image. Be aware that a lot of sites don't restrict the content of the other banners that show up there. A visitor could see your ad, move off the page, then come back to a completely different banner. If that other advertiser's banner is offensive... it's your image that'll be hurt. Perhaps the biggest trick with banners and pop-ups is to make sure that they're on relevant sites. Just having a pop-up on a big general portal isn't going to help you sell a niche item. It's a lot of wasted bandwidth and a lot of wasted media space... which translates into a lot of wasted dollars.
If you're still having problems with your banner, pop-up or pop-under campaign try changing one of the following:
1. Size. Big, little, standard, non-standard
2. Square, circle, triangle, long rectangle, whatever
3. Placement. Where it's at on the page
4. Text. Is it actually interesting?
5. Images. hat are they? Are they consistent with the text?
6. Download time. Are they hitting the stop button?
7. Location. The site it's on. Is it effective?Form.
Try converting between banners, pop-ups and pop-unders. Sometimes people filter pop-ups but not banners, etc, etc.
Any questions? Contact me today!
Aaron Colmanaaron@ibasics.bizPhone and fax: 800.314.3430
http://www.ibasics.biz
