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Posted on 17th August, 2010 | 2 Comments

The importance of preselling

The most important thing you can do to increase your affiliate commissions is to presell properly.

Before we begin, we need to first define what preselling is. Preselling is both an art and a science. The goal is to get your reader prepped to make a purchase. Then you send them to the site that sells what you’ve prepared them for. If you do it well, it’s completely invisible.

In a nutshell, you provide value. Then send them to the sales page. In a second we’ll talk about how to do actually it. First, it’s important to understand why we do it. Just a few of the reasons you want to presell.

• It helps your reader trust you – And gaining the trust of your readers helps them want to click your links. Which obviously means you’ll make more sales.
• It takes your reader out of defense mode – When you’re not hyping or pitching a product, your reader lets their guard down. And in turn they read to understand what you’re saying. And your intention is conveyed more easily.
• It puts them in a buying mood – Your readers are now receiving your message. Being open means, they are open to everything you give them. Like the info on product sales page you’ve linked to. Sending them to the sales page in this state makes them more receptive to the actual pitch.
• Your commissions go up – They arrive at the product website prepped to buy. Open to the sales message and feeling safe. This dramatically boosts your sales rate!
• It boosts customer loyalty – People like to make their own buying decisions. Instead of being manipulated into buying. So they are happier with their purchase.
• Your profits go up – Happy customers ask for refunds much less often. And that translates to more commission staying in your affiliate business.

Clearly preselling makes sense. You increase your profits. And produce happier customers. That’s a clear win-win.

OK, so how do you do it?

You’ve learned the importance of preselling. So, hopefully you’ve decided to start preselling. So, it’s time to break down how it works. Like we talked about before, it’s an art. And it’s a science.

Mastering the art

First, you have to gain the trust of your reader, so they let their guard down. And the only method of doing this is to give exceptional value to your readers. The art of this is to provide enough information to be of value, but not enough to satiate the hunger. The idea is that they want more and the sales page you send them to gives them more. Plus they’re not guarded, so they’re more open and likely to purchase the product.

Part 2 – the Science

You also have to include some very specific things.

The first is how you present the information. You need to know where you’re going before you begin. Your end goal is to make a sale of the product you’re preselling. You use the information to do this in one of two ways. First, you can provide useful but incomplete information. The second way is to provide all the information and let your reader discover how hard it is to actually implement it. In either case, the product you’re referring them to solves the problem for them.

Next, you have to use “convert linking” methods. Instead, you use a direct link to the product website. When you do this, you’re click-throughs go way up. But how will you earn affiliate commissions if you don’t use your affiliate link? Well, that’s part of the science of this whole process. You “pre-cookie” your reader before sending them to the sales page.

You also want to link to the sales page from inside your article’s content. It’s habitual to click on words and phrases that are hyperlinked. And if the words you hyperlink relate, your reader will naturally click them for more information.

Putting all of this together creates a powerful affiliate marketing formula for success.

Unfortunately…

This process is not easy – at all! Think about everything that goes into crafting an effective preselling article: Great content. First of all, you actually have to write great articles and give value to your readers. To do that you have to have enough information to be valuable and be able to present it in a useful way. Writing to presell. First, you have to give good information. But, you also need to know how to present the information in a way that give value to the reader. While at the same time making them want more. The other approach is to reveal a self-evident problem through the information.

Choosing your products. Next, you’ve got to pick the right product to presell. Even if you get the article written. Your efforts are completely wasted if you don’t pick a winning product.

The technical know-how And finally, you need the technical know-how to embed your image tag and make sure you get credit for the sale. This is fairly simple – you use a 1 X 1 image and set the “source” to your affiliate link. (But if you do it wrong, you won’t get paid for the traffic you send.)

Wrapping it up:

Now you know what it takes to be a Presell Pro. And doing this increases your affiliate commissions by over 500%! So, start now and develop preselling content for all your affiliate promotions. Don’t wait another minute. Make the extra effort required to propel your affiliate business to the next level.

Whats on the Inside of PreSell Pro?

Training - How To Increase Your  Traffic – Free

Several things you can do like pinging your articles.

Another service that I have just joined from Presel Pro called SocialAdr
gives links to other peope in the network and they bookmark in their profiles. It tells the search engines what other people are interested in what your doing not just yourself.

You can sign up for free and upgrade. I’m glad I did!
http://bit.ly/a0DBhkSocAdr

Posted on 16th August, 2010 | No Comment

If you’ve got traffic coming to your site, you’re 99% there. The other 1% is what you do with that traffic, but if you have to traffic – you can figure out the rest. After getting the traffic you just need to convert it into subscribers and customers . . . but that’s the easy part. The most crucial aspect of this process is getting the visitors to your site.

Let’s talk about how to generate traffic…

Here are a few of the most popular way to get traffic to your site – for free:

• Web 2.0
• Articles Directories
• Video

OK, so how do they work?

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines “index” their content regularly. And that’s important to you because it means that Google and the other search engines treat links from these sites as more meaningful than links from other sites. So, if you place links to your own site inside your content, you get a search engine ranking benefit from those links. That’s the real benefit of adding content to this sites – search engine ranking means ongoing free traffic. How to generate web 2.0 traffic is something we’ve only scratched the surface on. I don’t want to be exhaustive – I want to give you an overview of all the methods…

Article Websites

The next thing we want to talk about is article marketing. Article directories fall under the category of web 2.0 sites. Just like web 2.0 sites, article websites allow you to upload your own content – as articles. And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And along with your article, they have to include your author information and a link back to you – so you get more free traffic and SEO benefits. If you want to generate traffic from articles follow these steps:

• Do your keyword research
• Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
• Hyperlink these keywords to your website – both in the content of the article and in your author’s info section.

Video Sites

The last of this group is video marketing. Just like article directories, video sharing sites also rely on user-generated content. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. The extra top secret benefit of video marketing is that it’s much easier to rank for competitive keywords than in any other medium.

Here’s how to get free traffic using video…

• Sign up for YouTube
• Turn off all the modules in your account profile
• Use the tags in your profile to enter the keywords you want to rank for
• Add a link to your website
• Upload at least 1 video
• In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

Putting it all together.

This is a great overview to get your started generating massive traffic to your site.

Posted on 15th August, 2010 | 12 Comments

Let’s talk about niche selection. This is very important to ensuring the profitability of your membership website.

Number 1 – Discover Niches with Fanatics

If you want your membership business to be profitable, you have to find a marketing with fanatics in it. What’s a fanatic? It’s someone who is so excited about a certain topic that they will spend their time and money on information about it. OK, so we know what a fanatic is, but how do we find them?

• One simple idea that’s easily forgotten is to scan the magazine racks when you’re out and about. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to run a print magazine. So if you see one on the shelves you know they are making money, which means that there are enough people interested in what they’re saying to make it profitable. This is a very good indication that it’s a good niche for you to go into.
• You’ve got lots of opportunities every day to see what people are interested in. Just pay attention to what people talk about on the radio, at social gatherings, at the store or restaurants and anywhere in public. If people are talking about something, they probably want to know more about it. Which means you can start a membership business providing information on it.
• Don’t forget about clubs and organizations. If there are enough people to to build a club, there are certainly enough people to start a membership site on the same topic. Conventions are expensive to hold and attend, so if one if going on that’s another strong indication of a good niche to go into with your membership website.
• And of course there are all the things you have an interest in, too! There’s a good chance that others are interested in these things, as well. The icing on the cake here is that you get to build a business doing something you love.
• Google Trends. This is a great way to figure out what people are interested in. Google Trends tells you the most popular current search terms. The reason people are searching Google for info on these topics is because they are interested. And the fact that it’s made it into Google Trends tells you LOTS of people are interested. Building a membership business around things people are actively searching for is a great way to ensure your success.

Next – Figure out if there’s money in it

Once you found a potential niche or topic to center your membership site around, you need to figure out if you can actually make any money in it. An easy way to determine this is to figure out if anyone else is making money in this niche.

Here’s how to determine if you can make money in your chosen niche

• First go to Google and type in the name of your niche followed by “blog” and “forum”. If there are blogs and forums related to it, that’s a good sign. This means there is a large group of people already assembled for you to market to.
• Search Amazon, Google shopping and eBay to see if people are creating and selling products in the niche. What you’re trying to figure out is if anyone is making money in this niche, and if people are selling products it means they are making money.
• Monitor Google Adwords to determine if people are running the same ads for weeks in a row. If they are, this means they’re making money on these ads – otherwise, they’d stop running them. Which means there is money to be made in your niche.

Step 3 – Determine ease of entry

Once you’ve found a niche and figured out that there is money to be made in, you need to determine if you can break into this niche. Here are some things to look at to figure this out:

• Look at the product types in this niche. You want to find a niche where information products are being sold as the norm. That’s because it’s much easier to build a membership business around information vs. any other kind of product.
• The next thing to look at is the competition. You don’t want to try to break into a saturated marketing, so figure out how many people are already selling in this niche.
• Size vs. Competition. Some competition is good. It means that this is a profitable market. And as long as the size of the market is large enough to support the competition, you’re fine.
• Market readiness. Are people ready to buy? Are the receptive to marketing messages? Every market is different. Sometimes people are looking for information and are ready to pay for it right now. And sometimes it takes weeks, months or even years for them to make the decision to purchase.

In Summary

So far, we’ve talked about exactly what it takes to pick a great niche: One with a hungry crowd of fanatics, who are ready to spend money on information about their topic. And you’ve determined your barrier to entry is small enough to give it a go. Now that you’ve prepared properly, you’re success is 99% guaranteed. How to actually run your membership website is the only thing left to talk about…

Posted on 13th August, 2010 | No Comment

Affiliate Marketing Strategies

One of the easiest and fastest way to make money online is through affiliate marketing. What “affiliate marketing” means is that you just send traffic to someone else’s website, they handle the sales, support and billing, and you get a percentage of the sale price as your commission, which for digital products can be 50% of more.

These are a some of the benefits

1. You’re able to start instantly without having to develop a product, write the sales page, design the website, create marketing materials, or get a merchant account and CRM.
2. It runs on auto-pilotfor you because they handle the billing, support, maintenance, etc.
3. Your efforts are risk-free, because the product owner has already done all the research , development and testing. So you know that your traffic will result in sales.

Looking at these benefits, it’s clear that affiliate marketing is the way to go!

OK, but it’s not all rosy…

After all your hard work of generating traffic to the sales page, you will never see any of those visitors again. Unfortunately, the majority of those visitors (at least 90%) will not buy on their first visit. The 10% or less that make a purchase now belong to the product owner. She can sell them additional products, but you can never sell to them again.

What’s the solution?

What you need to do is capture the contact info of your visitors before sending them to the product website. This way you can follow up with them and keep sending them back to the sales page to increase your chances of making the sale. And if you want to do it like a pro, you’ll give them some great content before sending them to the sales page.

Here’s what these affiliate marketing strategies will do for you:

1. Owning a list of potential buyers gives you the ability to market additional products at the push of a button.
2. By providing great content without a sales pitch, you put them in a buying mood. So when you do send them to the product website, they’re much more likely to buy.

In order to set a system like this up, you will need the following :

A squeeze page, and even better a Video squeeze page.

1. At least a few pages of great content
2. At least a 5-Part Email Followup Series

Instead of sending visitors directly to the product sales page, you’ll send them to your lead capture page first. This page is where you collect your visitors’ contact info and add them to your autoresponder, which in turn starts sending them the multi-part email series. Once your visitors have been subscribed to your email series, they are sent to your content pages.

These high-quality content pages provide value and build good will. This way your visitor is more likely to buy when they get to the product owner’s website. While they’re reading the content you’ve provided, your email system is already following up with them to send them back to the product website again and again.

There’s no doubt that it’s worth the effort to put a system like this in place, because doing so will increase your profits by 500% or more. And once it’s set up, it runs automatically – you just send visitors to the squeeze page, instead of the product website.

Setting it all up yourself requires some skill, and if you’re not up to it, you can use a service.  Services like this design the enter system (the video, the video squeeze page, the email series, the content pages, etc). The benefit is that it’s much less expensive then you could do it yourself, and it’s instantly set up. The downside is that other people will be using the same  tools as you. But the internet is pretty big, so this isn’t much of a concern.

Alternatively, you can use a service like Elance to “outsource” each of these components. Whichever way you decided to go, it’s critical to get an an affilate marketing system like this in place, if you’re at all serious about your business.