Online Selling – Page 45 – TP Javeton WebNet

Traffic: Key to Web business success

In an online marketing business like affiliate marketing, no traffic means no sales. It’s that simple! Driving traffic to their websites is the primary reason why most affiliates and webmasters easily shell out substantial amounts of money just to get top rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you – or any other affiliate – begin promoting a product or service on your website or web page, you need to attract a constant flow of visitors (traffic) to your site that can become potential consumers of your merchants’ products and services.

Visitors to your website/web page is one of the fundamental rules for success in any online marketing business; especially if you are just starting out, in which case you’re expected to make a few mistakes while perfecting your method of transacting business on the Web. Even though you might do some things wrong, having enough visitors to your website still gives you a chance to succeed. And no matter how hard you work you’ll never find yourself on the road to success if you lack the one basic element of running an online business. Traffic!

Most successful affiliate marketers will tell you that getting enough highly targeted traffic to your website or product page is the key to success in the affiliate marketing business. However, there are various marketing methods that are proven to be effective in promoting or reselling products and/or service onlines. One such method, which is among the best and most secured marketing strategies that affiliate marketers can employ, is paying for performance. Utilizing this strategy will mean that your advertising dollars will only be spent on results: additional sales, increased income.

Pay for performance preserves the budget

Consider for example, that paying for performance could mean giving a commission to a sales person only when that salesperson generate a new sale. This strategy assures you real profit because you will be in a position to calculate the amount money you have to spend for every new sale that is made. You can also avoid spending any money for marketing, because every penny you expend has resulted either from sales or will help to generate future sales.

Another method proven to be most effective for acquiring sales in the affiliate marketing business is driving laser-targeted traffic towards your web site and converting that traffic to sales by means of “Pay-Per-Click” Search Engines (PPCSEs).

Overture, which was purchased by Yahoo in 2003, claims to be the Internet’s best pay-per-click search engine; and it is the world’s leading resource of Pay-For-Performance search on the web. What’s more enticing about Overture is the that when you advertise in Overture Premium Listings, your site will absolutely appear in the leading U.S. search engines like Yahoo, InfoSpace, MSN, Netscape, AltaVista, Lycos and more. Plus, you can get the benefit of reaching more than 80% of active Internet users.

The laser-targeted traffic strategy

PPCSEs like Overture can generate impressive sales activity for you because the search engine permits you to pay for performance by means of attracting precise targeted traffic to your niche. This means people or site visitors who are actively searching for precisely what you are offering or selling. Overture’s secret is to drive laser-targeted traffic to your website by proposing or bidding on keywords that are related to the product or services that you’re offering.

The strategy works this way: the more exact the keyword is, the better results you’ll receive and the less you will have to spend for each new sale.

Overture drives targeted traffic by keeping you away from the general keywords that tend to be very common and usually more expensive; but by casting a wide net of laser-focused keywords which are more targeted, and not as expensive, results in higher conversion rates. Any marketer, advertiser or website publisher will attest to the fact that attracting laser-targeted traffic through Overture is nothing but a “Win-Win” Situation.

Overture’s strategy also allows your visitors to respond; and you might ask, what’s so important about getting your visitors to respond? Well, in answer to this question, this feature gives you a chance to develop lifetime customers that will patronize your website and will buy products you promote over an over again. Keep in mind that one-time sales can’t be a key to creating a highly-profitable business, especially online. A marketer can only achieve this through PPCSEs like Overture, which gets his/her site visitors to respond.

A traffic strategy for the long term

Another strategy utilized by Overture to drive laser-targeted traffic is having a “Back-Up Response” for those who “almost bought” your product on the first visit. To successfully implement this technique, you need to market and advertise to these visitors over and over until you convert them to new customers. This includes offering them an incentive so that they’ll allow you to advertise to them repeatedly over a specific time span via e-mail or post mail.

Here are some of the back-up responses which you can use:

Send a free e-mail newsletter
Give away a free catalog
Offer a promo
Run a sweepstakes which gives them the chance to win free merchandise.

Other things that will surely attract lifetime customers to your site is offering valued customer discounts, giving seasonal and special offers especially to your repeat customers and any other incentives to purchase. Don’t get me wrong with this; the abovementioned strategies can certainly develop a trusted relationship between you and your customers, but there is no silver bullet or “guaranteed” formula. Aside from patronizing your products over their lifetime, they may even refer others to you or to your site.

To sum up, one of the most effective and secured marketing strategies that any business person can utilize, particularly those who are involved in online marketing, is the approach of paying only for performance; and one of the most helpful online strategies to create more sales is by attracting laser targeted traffic to your website and converting them to sales by means of Pay-Per-Click Search Engines like Overture.

Dispelling an affiliate marketing myth

The promise of earning profits without really doing much of anything has attracted a sizeable number of individuals to the Internet in general and affiliate marketing in particular. However, the questions that arise as a result of this perception are these: Does affiliate marketing really work this way? And does anyone believe that s/he can earn a profit without really doing much?

Such a perception is derived from a description of affiliate marketing that is only half true. That all an affiliate is required to do is simply place merchants’ ads on their websites and then virtually do nothing but wait for someone to click on one or more of those ads and later collect his/her profits. Easy, right? Well, not quite! Many affiliates earn almost nothing from their affiliate programs simply because they do nothing. They fail to grasp that affiliate marketing is but another form of marketing and, as such, affiliates definitely need to market their merchants’ products in order to earn.

Successful affiliates in any program simply don’t sit there and wait for money to come in, because there is no money in simply sitting and waiting. If you want to achieve success in affiliate marketing; and if you want to consistently grow your affiliate checks, you’ll be compelled to do something. To think of creative and unique ways of promoting your merchants’ products and services. Think of ways to induce your website’s visitors to click on the link or ad provided to you by your merchant. In other words, think of ways on how to increase your affiliate sales!

Become a product expert! Get hosting!

So if you’re new to affiliate marketing and you try to follow the easy go lucky route that most unsuccessful affiliate marketers follow, then you’re definitely on the wrong track. But we’re not advising you to stop right there. Rather, we want you to take some steps to make your affiliate program work better and gain more commissions for you. How? The paragraphs which follow consist of a few guidelines that may help you to continually grow your affiliate business while increasing the size of your affiliate checks

You can promote do a better job promoting your merchants’ products and services if you are thoroughly familiar with them and their uses; and in order to gain such knowledge, the best thing you can do is purchase your merchants’ products yourself. This way you can tell your customers about your first-hand experience using the products. You can even write a testimonial or a personal endorsement ad about them; but even you are unabler to purchase the products, you can at least research them.

Get your own web hosting space or at least purchase a domain name that is short, easy to remember and relevant to the topic of your website. You certainly wouldn’t expect a visitors to remember a very long and incomprehensible URL; because if that’s the case you also wouldn’t expect them to visit your website any time soon; which would mean less traffic for your site and the less chance for your affiliate ads and links to be clicked.

Write affiliate ads and maximize networking

It is also a good idea to create a private website and offer access to it to anybody who clicks on any of your affiliate ads. Visitors usually get interested with these private websites; and you must keep in mind that private websites also provide you with a venue to promote your back-end affiliate products.

Many merchants usually wouldn’t mind if you write and design your own ads for their products, as long as you obtain permission from them and present them with a copy of the particular ad before posting it on your site. This gives you a greater advantage over a lot of other affiliates who might be advertising the same affiliate products.

If you previously ignored chat rooms discussion boards and forums, then it is time for you to start focusing your attention on these sources of leads via increased exposure. You can start your own chat or join an existing chat related to your product. You don’t have to promote your affiliate product at once, but find the chance to advertise and promote it as you go along. The same would be true for message boards, discussion boards and forums.

Create a free ezine or newsletter

Ezines and newsletters are periodical publications whose aim is to inform a group of people about a certain subject. In your ezines and newsletters, you don’t always have to promote your merchant’s product since doing so could greatly annoy your subscribers. Rather, find a way to insert your affiliate ads and links on some portions of the letter; but don’t forget to promote your ezine or newsletter on your website.

These are but a few guidelines on how you can increase your affiliate sales and continually grow your affiliate checks. Of course there are several other tips which can be incorporated into your marketing strategy if you think they would work; we won’t discourage you from utilizing them. What’s important is that you be able to find a way to attract more traffic to your site; induce your visitors to click on the ads on your site; and be able to promote your merchants’ products even outside the boundary of your website. If you can do these, there’s no you shouldn’t be able to grow your affiliate marketing business.