Thursday, October 31, 2013

Affiliate program - Building Traffic Part 6

Affiliate Program
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 Affiliate program  

Starting your own affiliate program is a must for your business. An affiliate program is a strategic partnership that allows your visitors and customers to resell your services for a commission.

In essence, your affiliates are your virtual salespeople. In order to encourage participation, you’ll need to offer higher commissions. The higher the commissions percentage you offer, the more affiliates will promote you. If your margin is low, you won’t be able to offer high commissions but you should diligently search for affiliates who are in similar business to yours who are interested in promoting your site anyway due to possible high conversion rate.

E.g. if you are selling car insurance, car dealerships might be interested in promoting you in exchange for commissions . However, if you’re selling digital product and you’re offering lower commissions (30% or lower), you likely won’t generate enough interest to justify the effort. In these instances, 50% commissions are considered standard.  


Some time ago when I initially started my affiliate program, my business grew by about 400% within one year. In all honesty, I didn’t know how to handle the new business. In fact, I received so much traffic that my slow web server couldn’t handle it. I then selected a few choice affiliates. After much trial and error, I learned how to decipher between the serious affiliates and those that were literally trying to trick the system.

In a nutshell, the affiliate program can be an indispensable solution for your business but you have to be willing to work through any kinks. You have to be willing to learn from your mistakes. You also must partake of the 80/20 rule. This rule stipulates that 80% of your affiliates will produce 20% of your income and vice versa. Your goal is to notice the top producers and to reward them appropriately.

I typically offer 20% commissions to my average affiliate and 25% to those who are in the top 30 for the month. Gold Members get paid 30% commissions.  

I’ve also learned that you should arrange your affiliate program in such a way that it offers second level commissions. This motivates your affiliates to sign up new affiliates. I then offer a 5% commissions from the second level. Notice that this is not MLM pay commission structure but is considered a two-tiered affiliate program.  

Since affiliates are only paid when the sales are completed, there is no risk for you. You should be interested in having as many affiliates as possible.  

Here are the components for an affiliate program to function properly.  

  • You need a website with a domain name. (If you have no domain name, nobody will treat you seriously and won’t join your affiliate program)  
  • You must have a suitable product to sell. 
  • You must utilize tracking/reporting and follow-up components where you can check up on your affiliates.  

It is quite easy to setup an affiliate program today. There are various companies offering affiliate solution where ongoing fees are applied and you can buy ready to use solutions and install them on your web server.  
If you chose to hire a company to manage your affiliates for you, there are several companies who can do this. They will track your affiliate’s sales and will pay them commissions. They will also notify you whenever your affiliate has made a sale and will handle invoicing as well.

Such known companies are Commission Junction and Click bank.  
To signup with Click bank, please visit http://adlandpro.reseller.hop.clickbank.net
To signup with commission Junctions, please visit. http://www.cj.com 

 You should also understand that if you use a third party tracking company to track and report on your affiliates, this will cost you more.  
Once you start your own affiliate program, you may wish to submit it to various affiliate directories so affiliates can learn about unique opportunities.

With this in mind,  please visit http://www.associateprograms.com to announce your new affiliate product. 

Bogdan Fiedur

Adlandpro.com Copyright 1998 - 2013 - All rights reserved .
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Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Autoresponder!

Now I have to be honest and say that until recently I was one of the people who “kind of” cursed at them, mainly because I never really understood them and how useful they can really be, but once I went beyond the typical sale pitch style emails that I used to get (being on the receiving end by the dozen of autoresponder messages I signed up to), I realized that there is so much more that can be done and done well when using auto responders if you take yourself out of the box and see the potential.
A few ideas  when to use an autorepsonder
Tips – many people use autorepsonders to send valuable tips about a specific niche. I know of one company that did this and their vistor rate jumped quite high.
Free courses – creating a sequence that helps a person learn about your niche, with good quality information is a sure fire way to keep people remembering you and your business

Continue reading....
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Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Ten Simple Ways to Increase your Sales

We humans are funny creatures. We have the ability to think in very abstract and creative forms, yet we generally work best within a structured environment.
Creating lists and framing business plans is an absolute necessity, if you want to be successful.
Such frameworks and instructions, even when written by ourselves, to ourselves, give us a track to run on and a way of keeping our focus. They give us the ability to gauge whether or not what we are doing is working, how well it’s working, and where we need to work harder. We need a “track to run on!”

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Self-Promotion tips

This is what everyone keeps hearing by the way and its no wonder so many people are always confused about marketing especially when on social media!
While many may argue that there is a fine line between the act of self- promotion and promoting oneself on social media the fact is there is ( at least to me) a difference.
When I think about a person who is self promoting I have this imagery of a person going around saying..look at me, I’m so good and talking only about what they are doing or have done and really not giving a damn about anyone else – other than themselves. Kind of sad when I think about it!
Promoting yourself ( notice the difference?) is different in terms of what you are doing and why you are doing it.

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Thursday, October 17, 2013

Good Software

Finding good, reliable, safe and free software for most of your computing needs is just plain smart business. Every cent you save in any area of your business is money you have for other things that you can budget in, like extra traffic campaigns, or one time ads, or a much needed and well deserved break at the local coffee shop (where you can also develop new contacts.)
However, the word, “almost,” means, “not absolutely all the time.” There may be times when you want software for a particular task that you just can’t find, free.
There are two I will recommend, today. These are both very good, and will save you a lot of headaches if you use them (or at least write them down until you need them!) Neither of these are free, but they are worth every penny of the few dollars they cost. (I am not an affiliate for either.)



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Sunday, October 13, 2013

Happy Thanksgiving!

English: "The First Thanksgiving at Plymo...
English: "The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in Canada and Happy Columbus day to those in the United states.


While the turkey is in the oven and the pumpkin pies are are ready to eat, I was thinking about what thanksgiving means to me both as a person and as a person who works online.
I have been given a battery of tests as my health has not been the best over the last few months and was given the news by my doctor ( I gave him a hug by the way which totally astounded the man and had him going red ha ha ha) that while physically my health is good, I need to destress myself more as it is affecting my health and not for the best!
When we work online for any reason, its easy to fall into the trap of just staying online and forgetting about the world outside of the screen and it can affect us in ways that we are not even aware of!

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Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Saying Goodbay to a friend- Branka Babic

In loving memory of Branka Babic | A Tribute to a Special lady


Free Software

Adlandpro Freeware
I recently wrote an article about the best free anti-malware software for 2013, and mentioned that I load my own computers, tablets, smartphones, etc., with all the software I use, other than the operating system my device comes with.
This raised so many questions, it has become important to write a followup article that answers the when, what, why, where and how of downloading and installing software on your device from the internet.
The first question, then, is “When should you use free software?” The simple answer is that it’s always a good idea to use free software if it does what you need it to do, reliably. The money you save by not spending it on expensive software can be used for other things. That’s as good as making money!
What kinds of software are available? The chances are that if you need software, you can get almost anything you need legitimately and free. This is not the so-called kind of free where you have to do something else, take a poll, sign up for a trial, etc., etc., that some companies advertise as free. Those are NOT free. You are paying for them with your labour, whether or not you recognize it.



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Monday, October 07, 2013

Drip marketing and Social Marketing

A great example is posting an educational or information post on a blog. When you do that you are inviting people to respond to the author and then they share with others – that is drip marketing that is interactive!
It actually is pretty exciting when you think about it and here is a post that I think will give you an even beter idea on how to do drip marketing through social media.

 Just a question for you  - Do you agree that it takes 29 times for a person to view a “marketing message” before you get a customer?  That number seems rather high to me, so let me know your experiences and why you agree or disagree?

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