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Important Hints - Work At Home Programs

Add comment October 31st, 2008

Why Affiliate Marketing is a Top Business Model

As an affiliate marketer you basically sell or pre-sell other people?s products or services. You refer leads to affiliate programs, write reviews on your blog about the products or place ads somewhere on the internet that people can click on, get redirected to the sales page, join the program or buy the product. The affiliate marketer does not sell anything directly; he s just spreading the word about a certain product or service he is affiliated with.

Compared to a product creation process with all of its time and money consuming requirements, affiliate marketing is an absolute no-brainer. An affiliate marketer has no production costs to cover, no employees to pay at the end of the month, no inventory to take care of, no order processing or shipping, no customer service and very low start-up costs. All in all there is little to no risk in being an affiliate.

As an affiliate you are not a sales person. You are only introducing potential buyers to the companies who have something to sell. The people you refer buy, join or they don’t. The affiliate gets the commission when a sale is made. There are hundreds of affiliate programs on the internet in a variety of different niches. Someone who has spent some substantial time marketing on the internet or maintaining a website has probably downloaded and read quite a few free reports and e-books on affiliate marketing. These reports talk about how to make money with affiliate marketing and each one of them has its own little approach but all of them mostly agree that it?s better to set up your own website or blog, search for a good converting product, drive traffic to that product sales page, get lots of back links to your site to rank high on the search engines, submit your website to directories, engage in web.2.0 or social marketing and so on.

This is a whole lot of work. Additionally it takes time to learn how to do these things if you are fairly new to marketing or the internet. At the same time your mailbox is overflowing with information and promotional emails and staying focused on a few important tasks sometimes compares to trying to swim a river upstream. Good organization and persistence in the first months, preferably having a personal mentor to talk to or exchange emails with, are the main factors which determine success or failure.

Technically speaking affiliate marketing is a business model for people like you and me. The learning curve may be different for different people. Are you open minded, creative and determined to succeed also in the long run? Then you will certainly hit gold. The question is: how long does it take? Nobody will be able to answer this question for you. You are the boss and the employee, the writer and the virtual assistant. The responsibility is totally yours - this is the beauty of work at home programs. The process of setting up an affiliate business in order to make a substantial profit to live on depends not only on the technical details I mentioned above. Far greater responsibility comes into play when things don?t work out the way they are supposed to.

Why do so many people start online and give up after a couple of months? Have you ever thought about it? In my opinion affiliate marketing is easy to learn and practice. But dealing with failure, rejection, negative expectations, however, a competitive market, debt or financial problems, health issues just to name a few, is far more complicated and distracting. In Times of national recession people have a tendency to search for more security. Will they find financial security as an affiliate marketer online - they will have to go through the process to find out.

How To Get Your E-mail Marketing Letter Read

Add comment October 31st, 2008

More and more people are using e-mail marketing in their business as a way to instantly contact hundreds if not thousands of prospects. However, few people fail to realize that there is a lot more to e-mail marketing than that.

E-mail marketing is no different than any other type of marketing, the same type rules apply. It is important to understand that e-mail marketing is just a tool and like any tool you must learn how to use it. Your goal should not be to make the sale, but to get the prospect to request additional information.

Most e-mail marketing is doomed from the start, in that over 90% of e-mails sent will never be read. Why is that?

1. Poor subject line - screw this up and the rest of your message is irrelevant.

Your subject line announces your e-mail and tells the reader if the message is important to them or not. Your subject line should do one thing and one only - get your reader to open the message and read the first sentence. Simply stating “You can make $20,000 in the next 30 days” just won’t cut it. In fact, a line like this will increase the chance that it will be considered spam. The more hyped your subject is, the less chance of getting a response. How do you attract the reader’s attention without hype? There’s no magic formula, but personalizing the subject line with your prospects name almost guarantees a second look. But name alone won’t get you great results; you still need to craft the rest of your subject line without the hype.

2. Don’t confuse the prospect in the first paragraph

Now that the prospect has opened up your message, another 90% or more of your prospects will not make it past the first sentence. Your goal is to get them to read the first sentence, which leads to the second and so on. Don’t state in the first sentence why you sent the e-mail message, how to opt-out, apologize for your message and for sure don’t state that this message is not spam! Every sentence should contribute toward moving your prospect towards your objective what ever that objective is. If your subject gets the prospects’ attention, the first paragraph should lead them into the rest of you message. You should always keep one thing in mind; your prospects only care about one thing - what is in it for them.

Provide your prospects with something of value and they will take you up on your offer. What do you have that can help them in making a decision? What can you give away that will be an asset to them? If you become a resource to your prospects you will see the quality and quantity of responses change for the better.