Secrets to Getting Affiliates to Sell Your Niche Products

Secrets to Getting Affiliates to Sell Your Niche Products

One of the quickest methods of increasing the sales of your niche product or service is to start an affiliate program. An affiliate program is simply a system you can implement which allows other people to sell your product or service and earn a commission on each sale. The higher the commission you pay, the more affiliates you will attract to sell your product.

Your best affiliates are unlikely to want any help from you when it comes to selling your product or service; they will most likely be experienced marketers themselves and could probably teach you a thing or two about selling online.

You can't rely only on experienced affiliates, there will be a considerable number of people who will join your affiliate program who are inexperienced in some aspects of internet marketing and the onus is on you to help them in any way you can.

First things first however, you need to set up your affiliate program so even the most seasoned internet marketer will feel comfortable joining your affiliate program. Important issues you must address are:

1) Pay a reasonable commission on each sale. Most information product authors pay commissions in the 40% to 60% range. The point is not to be greedy, make it worth the experienced marketer’s time to promote your product.

2) Pay the commissions due your affiliates regularly. Once per month is the average for most affiliate programs so you never want to exceed that. When sales are good, you might want to consider twice monthly payments to your affiliates.

3) Don't use an overly high minimum payment threshold. In the old days when check payments were expensive to generate, many affiliate programs introduced a minimum earning threshold. They did this because it was pointless raising a check for a small amount when the bank charges and postage costs were more than the value of the check. Another reason the minimum was introduced was because it was so expensive for foreign affiliates to deposit the checks into their bank accounts.

Now days international banking has become common place and therefore considerably cheaper, and there are also other payment mediums such as PayPal which make it feasible to pay smaller amounts to your affiliates.

4) Always pay your affiliates on time. Never miss a payment date unless you have very good reason to do so - not having any money is NOT a good reason, you must plan for all your payments. Nothing will scare experienced marketers away quicker than somebody who misses payment dates and then has no reasonable excuse. They might forgive you once, but not twice.

5) Use an accurate system for recording sales, commissions due and commissions paid. People need to know how they are doing with your affiliate program. They need to know how much traffic they have sent to their affiliate link. They also want to know how many sales they have made and when they can expect payment. If you have paid them they need to know when you sent the check or made the transfer.

Pay attention to these five issues and your affiliates, particularly the experienced ones will be happy, but you also need to offer a helping hand to your inexperienced affiliates by creating:

1) A number of text advertisements that can be used in the affiliate's email advertising, be it in their own ezine or for solo ads in other people's ezines.

You must test these text advertisements and make sure they are effective at generating sales before placing them in your affiliate resource center.

2) A number of classified ads for affiliates to use either as classified advertisements or as top sponsor ads in those ezines that accept advertising.

As with the text ads, you must test all your classified ads before placing them in your affiliate center.

3) A few different banner ads - there are still a few places where banner ads can attract sales, but for the most part banner advertising is not that effective.

One type of banner advertisement that is worth spending some time getting professionally made because it attracts sales is the 120 x 240 pixel, or the slightly longer 120 x 600 pixel banner which people can place under the Google Adsense code on their web pages.

4) Links to training materials which will help your affiliates become better internet marketers. You have a vested interest in their success because the more successful they become, the more money you both make.

Boosting Traffic to Increase Profits

4 Simple Methods For Boosting Traffic And Increasing Profits

The life blood of any website is traffic, not traffic in the real world sense, but a large flow of internet visitors to your website. The more visitors to your website, the more money you will make. But getting a large flow of visitors is not as easy as it sounds, it doesn't just happen, you have to make it happen, and here are 4 very effective ways of doing this:

1) Conduct joint ventures with other webmasters or list owners. Creating an effective joint venture is one of the quickest and most profitable ways of boosting your website traffic and massively increasing your sales.

A joint venture is simply an agreement made between two parties in which they both benefit. In your case, you have a product to sell and what you need to find is somebody who has a large list of subscribers and who is looking for good quality products to offer their list. You would offer the list owner a percentage of each sale in exchange for them recommending your product to their subscribers.

The key with joint ventures is to find list owners who are not direct competitors. For example, if you have a product related to puppy care you joint venture with somebody who has an ezine dedicated to dog breeding, or you could joint venture with your local vet.

2) Write articles related to the topic of your niche product and submit them to as many article directories and ezine editors you possibly can. Writing articles serves three purposes:

i) It sets you up as an expert in your niche. If your articles appear in many newsletters and hundreds of websites, people will perceive you as an expert.

ii) At the bottom of each article there is a brief bio in which you can place a link back to your website. If people are impressed with the content of your article, they will click on the link to your website to read more.

iii) Each of your articles that are published on the internet is one more link back to your website. The more links that point back to your website the more relevant your website will appear to the search engines and the higher your page will rank.

The key with articles is to submit them everywhere, to as many different places as possible. Submitting articles manually will take days, so use a paid submission service.

3) Promote your website using pay per click search engines. Your first task is to find as many keywords and keywords phrases related to your product (that people are typing into the search engines) as possible. We're not talking about ten or twenty, but hundreds, over a thousand if you can. Next you need to create a brief classified type advertisement which has a catchy benefit laden headline.

When you have these, enter them into your pay per click search engine and decide on a maximum bid for each keyword (the amount you are prepared to pay when a person clicks on the headline for your advertisement). When a surfer enters the same keyword phrase as one of yours associated with your advertisement, your advertisement will be displayed as a "Sponsored Listing" and if the surfer clicks your ad, you get charged the bid amount and the surfer is taken to your website.

4) Get as many links as possible pointing to your website. As mentioned earlier, the more links pointing to your website, the higher it will rank in the search engines for the keywords you have optimized the page for.

There is another side to having hundreds or thousands of links pointing to your website... You also get a considerable amount of traffic from people clicking on those links. This type of traffic tends to be very targeted as people won't click on a text link unless it is of interest to them.

Other than article writing, there are two major ways of getting links back to your website:

i) You can purchase text links back to your website from other high ranking web pages. The key is to buy links on pages with a similar theme to your website.

ii) You can create a reciprocal linking directory on your website. For each link you receive from another website, you will place a return, or reciprocal link back to that website. The ultimate link directories are categorized to help surfers find interesting links and also because links of a similar theme give the page they appear on the same theme, which is important for link relevancy and search engine optimization.

How to Develop Your Own Niche Products or Services

How to Develop Your Own Niche Products or Services

If you create a product based on what you like, or what you think people will like, you will be extremely lucky to sell one single copy, and you'll probably have to bribe the person to buy it!

The only way to create niche products or services that become best sellers is to discover what your potential customers want. What problems are they facing that you can solve. What pain are they experiencing that you can soothe.

There's only one way to get this information... You have to conduct some research. You have to uncover your potential customers needs, their pain, even their dreams and aspirations. Here are a few idea to get you going:

~Use Forums

Use the search engines to find a number of forums related to the niche your're interested in. Visit these forums regularly and find out what questions people are asking and how often they are asked. The same question asked by many different people on many different forums is a possible topic for your product or service.

~Use Surveys

If you own an opt-in email list, send a brief survey to your subscribers to discover the problems they are facing. If a common problem emerges from your survey, providing the solutions to this problem is a possible topic for your product or service.

If you don't own an opt-in email list, you could send a solo advertisement to a few ezines with a large subscriber base and invite people to take part in your survey by offering a useful reward for their participation.

If you own a website which receives a lot of traffic, you could use a popup to invite people to your survey.

~ Use Wordtracker

Wordtracker.com is one of the most useful research tools on the internet. You can use it to uncover what people are searching for on the internet.

Not only that, you can use it to find out how often people search for different topics. It is a great tool for discovering niche markets.

On its own, Wordtracker is unlikely to point you to your next best seller, but when used in conjunction with surveys you have a very powerful research tool.

Once you have discovered what problems your potential customers are facing it is time to set about creating a product to solve them using any of the following three methods:



1) Use products which come with Private Label Rights.

If you purchase a product with Private Label Rights you can do virtually anything you want with the existing product, you could:

- Insert your name as the author/creator

- Re-arrange the contents

- Add to or remove contents

Private Label Rights is by far the quickest method of creating your own product. The only real disadvantage is other people will be using the same content as their own, so if you use the contents "as is" you won't have a unique product.

2) Use products found in the public domain

If a product is in the public domain, it means the copyright on it has expired and you are free to use the contents. While not as quick as Private Label Rights products, using a product from the public domain means you can get yourself a unique product.

Do a search for public domain products and once you have found one purchase a copy and have it digitized (made into an e-book). You could do this yourself with a scanner and good character recognition software, but you will be busy for many hours proof reading and correcting. A quicker route is to have the work professionally digitized as they do all the proofing and correcting as part of the service.

You can copyright your new digitized product, meaning nobody can sell copies in that particular format.

3) Create your own product

Even going this route doesn't mean you have to do all the work. There are many people willing to write articles, write e-books and even code scripts for a price.

By going to websites such as Elance.com you can negotiate a fair price with people willing to do the work for you. Part of the contract being you keep the copyrights, they simply provide the finished content (known as ghostwriting).

The biggest disadvantage is you have no idea whether they have used other people's content. If they have you will be charged with copyright violation, not them. Before using a ghostwriter, try and do a background check and check their references thoroughly.