B2B Affiliate World

     The “trick” isn’t to apply new tactics, it is to apply proven tactics to the online market. Let’s take three examples:

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. When you go to the dairy section in the grocery store do they have laundry detergent, canned tuna fish and dog food on the shelf next to the butter and eggs in the cooler? Of course not! Similar items are grouped together: brooms and detergent in the cleaning supplies, milk and butter in the dairy section, tuna and sardines in the canned fish section. People like to shop for one thing at a time and focus on the item they are shopping for.

   Don’t be tempted to lump everything together just to save some money on web hosting costs. In times past, monthly hosting costs were expensive, but not today. Services like HostGator are very inexpensive if you are only hosting one site. If you want to host multiple sites, HostGator and other hosting services offer reseller accounts. The purpose of such accounts is to enable you to offer hosting services for a fee, but you don’t have to use them for this purpose. Instead you can use your reseller account to set up multiple websites, all for one monthly fee.

   Product reviews are essential. You want your visitors to understand what the product does, and if you have used the product, it adds credibility to any sales claims you make. If you can get testimonials from users who have already tried the product, you will add even more credibility to your sales pitch. Of course, you want to be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

   Write articles that emphasize how the product is used and put them up on your site as a separate page. Do not forget to include a call to action on these pages. People are not going to act on their own just because you write something that is interesting. You have to suggest an action to take and make it easy for the reader to take that action.

2. Offer free reports to your readers in return for their email address. If possible position them at the very top side of your page so it they simply cannot be missed. Look at the top left hand corner of this website. You can’t miss where the free stuff is–I have it in big caps so you can’t miss it. I’m constantly on the lookout for new free reports that I can put up to share and add to the page.

   Be sure you put up quality information. If you constantly put up free info that people can use, then readers will want to come back every time you put up something new because they have learned to trust that you only put up good information. Once you build this trust, it is easier to get visitors to give you their email address so you can notify them when new content is posted, and make them aware of other products or services they might like. If you just put up nonsense that is useless and is only there so you can grab someone’s email address, you will find that either people will never sign up or, if they do, you will only get bogus email addresses.

   Why do you want to obtain email addresses instead of just giving away the free stuff? Because your ultimate goal is to have the visitor buy a product so you can earn income, right? Well, research shows that, on average, the retail customer must be exposed to a product seven times before they actually take action and buy. This means you need to remind your customer more than once about your product and how it can solve their problem.

   The only way to do this is with an email list. When someone visits your website, only one of two things can happen: you close a sale or the prospect leaves the page and never returns. By sending emails on a regular basis, you remind your readers of the product they wanted but were not yet ready to buy. Sooner or later, the time will be right, and they will make the purchase.

   Your follow up emails should focus on important points like how your product can make life easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email, but avoid using the word “free” because some there are still older spam filters that dump emails with those subject lines into the junk folder. You want to convince people that they will be missing something important and useful if they don’t sign up. You do that by building trust, and you do that by providing quality information and no-spam emails.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. You want the person visiting your website to have an interest in what you are offering, don’t you? You want them to come to your site because they think you have the answers they are seeking. If they don’t have an interest in what you offer, why come to your site? And if they come to your site and don’t find what they seek, why would they return?

   How do you get people to come to your site? You need to make them aware you exist. One of the best ways to do this is with article marketing. I didn’t originate the phrase, but it is true: “Content is King.” Websites are constantly looking for new content. Perhaps you think you can’t offer anything new. While it might be true that just about every topic has been written about, it doesn’t mean you can’t offer something new. No one has your experience, so write about a topic from your perspective. Take some time to read what’s already been written. My experience is that most articles on a topic sound the same, like they have just been copied and pasted; there is always some aspect of a topic that isn’t covered. You can also write one article about two related topics, subjects that are often only the subject of one article.

   Your goal is to have your articles posted on multiple websites. There are two ways to do this. You can submit your articles to article directories, which are websites where companies and professional writers submit articles based on a specific niche. The content is free for people to copy and put on their website, as long as they state that you are the author, and they include your resource box, which contains links to your website. The advantage is that people who have a specific interest in what you offer are publicizing your site to others.

   Click here to see the extensive list of article directories I have compiled. You might be surprised at just how many article directories there are–I know I was. Take a good look at the article directories list and you will see that some of the sites are specialized; they focus on health, energy or environmental issues, for example.

   The second alternative is to use an article submission service, which, for a fee, will submit your article to various websites. The advantage of this is that it saves you time; you submit your article once, the service submits it to multiple sites for you. Not only does this save you the time it takes to submit your article, it also saves you the time to search for the various websites where you can actually post your article. I personally use and recommend SubmitYourArticle.com, which also provided excellent results for me. They do a good job posting, and they also offer an excellent article spinning tool.

   An article spinning tool is essential to article marketing. While you benefit from having your article in multiple websites, you do not benefit from having the exact same article on multiple websites. You want your articles to convey the same information, but to have it worded in a slightly different way. This way it seems as though you have more articles on the web for people to read. The details are beyond the scope of this article, but here’s an example. If you submit the same article to five sites, Google will consider all five articles to be one article. If you submit the same article to five sites, but on each site the article has different wording and a different title, Google will consider all five articles as five different articles. You do not have to belong to an article submission service to use an article spinner. There are many free article spinners on the net that you can find by searching Google.

   If you can write a minimum of 2 articles per week, of 300-600 words in length, and maintain that pace, you can attract as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day. Volume is important: typically, only 1 person out of the 100 that visit your site are likely to buy your product or get your services. That’s an average of 1% conversion rate. If you attract 100 people a day, that’s 3,000 visitors per month and 30 sales per month. You can see that, at that rate, you don’t have to offer an expensive product: if you sell 30 copies of a $15 ebook, you end up with $450. That’s a good number. If you don’t think so, consider that for many people, $450 is enough to cover a monthly utility bill or to pay for the groceries for at least half the month.