Create an Awesome Home Business » Internet Marketing

Best of Create an Awesome Home Business

Martin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:18:23 +0000

One of the problems with a blog is that the older an article becomes, the deeper it gets buried in the archives.

And that’s a shame because it means that some very good articles are often never seen by newer readers.

So I figured I’d do a ‘best of’ series. Once a month or so I’ll go back through the archives and pick out articles that got a lot of views, or a lot of comments, or simply have a message I think is good.

And I’ll post the links in a new article.

So here, then, is the first ‘Best of Create an Awesome Home Business’.

This one contains 5 steps for people new to working online to help you get through the ‘dip’ – that period after you start working online when you’re becoming disillusioned and ready to try something else:

Just Wait Till You Quit

In the same vein, here’s one that’s also designed to help you if you’re not yet seeing the success you thought you’d be seeing by now. What you’ve done and what you’ve learned in getting to where you are has given you some important skills:

Create an Additional Income Stream

This one’s quite recent but, for me, it holds a critically important message for anyone trying to make money from blogging. And it’s a message that a surprisingly large number of bloggers don’t get:

Sell Something

Twitter has been one of the longer-lasting success stories in the world of social networking. That said, I still see people working online who deride it.

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, but here’s how I use Twitter – and it’s brought me new business as well as exponentially growing the traffic to my sites. Be sure to read all the way to the bottom of the comments, because this one generated some interesting arguments:

Is Twitter the New List?

Although the title of this one is about marketing an MLM business, what it contains applies to any online business. Here, then, are some effective (and cost-effective) ways to promote your online business:

How to Market Your New Business

OK – that’s it. I’ll do another ‘best of’ in a month or so.

Cheers,

Content Marketing Experiment – a Quick Update

Martin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 07:10:02 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I told you about my content marketing experiment and, although it’s extremely early days yet, I thought a quick update would be good.

Remember, the experiment was to see whether I could start earning affiliate commissions off a travel site on which I did no paid promotions of any kind, at any stage.

The content marketing element is being provided by the blog section of the site, where I write about the various places I’ve visited in Asia.

Site Configuration

One area I didn’t cover last time was a description of how I’ve set up the site. So let’s correct that right now.

As I mentioned, the site is set up on WordPress, configured to look like a traditional static site with an integrated blog.

I’ve used the Thesis framework to provide the layout and appearance and a lot of the SEO functionality I need.

I’ve also used the following plugins:

Akismet and Bad Behaviour to control spam
Broken Link Checker to pick up any broken links
Contact Form 7 and Really Simple CAPTCHA for my contact page
Google XML Sitemaps to automatically create and update the sitemap
Login Lockdown and WP-Security-Scan to improve security
Raw-HTML to give me full use of HTML and CSS on my post and page write screens (by getting around the WordPress HTML filters)
Subscribe to Comments and Thank Me Later to encourage return visits
Thesis Openhook to make using Thesis hooks quicker and easier
Tweetmeme to enable people to Re-Tweet articles
What Would Seth Godin Do – I’m using this to create an automatic invitation to visit the tours page at the bottom of each blog post. This was not what it was originally intended to do, but you can use this plugin to create any automated message, script or banner ad at the bottom of posts by removing the original code and message, and replacing it with anything you like.
WP-DBManager to create automated database optimisations and backups

Using Thesis enables me to avoid using the All-in-one-SEO pack (or any other SEO plugins). The All-in-one is an excellent plugin, but Thesis does the same job just as well and, as I’ve mentioned before, the less plugins you can use the better.

Two others I may introduce once there’s a reasonable amount of content on the site are Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and SEO-Smart-Links, both of which link related posts and subjects together and are good for SEO.

So what’s the progress to date

The site was set up on 1st February, so it’s been going for just over 3 weeks.

In that time I’ve had 129 visits with peaks on days that I’ve published articles. Most of those visits are to the blog articles.

There have been 20 visits in total to the tours pages, which indicates that the internal linking structure I’ve used to encourage visits to them is working as I want it to. I’m now looking for ways to increase that percentage.

There have been 2 direct visits to the tours pages, both provided by Google. This is the figure I’m really interested in.

Remember, I’ve set up the sitemap and the internal linking structure to point people (and, therefore, the search engines) towards the tours pages, with the ultimate objective of getting the search engines to send search traffic directly to them.

If I can get decent natural search traffic going direct to those pages then the chances of making affiliate commissions are greatly increased.

How have I promoted the site so far?

I’ve made sure that the META tags on each page and post are properly set, and the Google XML sitemap generator automatically pings Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask every time I post a new article.

I’ve got an extensive ping list in place

I use RSS through Twitterfeed to get tweets of every article onto Twitter, and the full article (in each case) onto Facebook.

I use my profile settings in LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Blogcatalog and Plaxo to make sure that all articles that are tweeted (all of them) are also published on each of those sites.

I’ve got a link to the site in my signature on Warrior Forum and Wealthy Affiliate. On LinkedIn there’s a link to it in my profile.

I continue to be active in Warrior Forum, Wealthy Affiliate, LinkedIn and Blogcatalog to ensure that a) I’m remembered and b) my signature appears regularly.

Other promotion methods I’m looking at

Article Marketing. I’ll be writing a few articles and using the Submit Your Article (that’s an affiliate link, by the way) service to manage the distribution of them over time and as widely as possible.

OK – that’s it for today. I’ll report back in another month or so.

Cheers,

Content Marketing: An Experiment

Martin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:24:43 +0000

Last week I mentioned that I’d been building a new travel site. It’s up now, and it’s an experiment with Content Marketing.

So here’s my thought process behind the site and the way I’ve set it up. Going forward, I’ll update you on the progress of the site as it grows and (hopefully!) starts to earn me some money.

I’ve been an affiliate for a travel company for some time. I’ve focused on tours to the US and I’ve made a bit of money from it.

But I’ve used PPC (mostly) to drive traffic and, of course, that’s eaten into my profits.

So I wanted to see if I could set up a travel site, attract visitors and make some money without spending anything (money, that is) – whether it be on PPC or any other form of paid advertising.

Because I was already an affiliate for this travel company, and because they offer tours in Asia, and since I live and travel in Asia, the logical move was to set up a site promoting tours in Asia.

Which is what I’ve done.

What I wanted

Knowing that the search engines like lots of regularly updated content (something I aimed to achieve by displaying a travel news feed on my original travel site), I figured I’d achieve it this time via a blog.

But I didn’t want the site to look like a blog.

I wanted the blog component there so it would attract visitors and readers, but I wanted the site to be very similar to my existing site and for there to be lots of cross-over.

An important consideration when setting up a blog is to be sure you have the ability to keep producing good content for it over the long haul.

Well, I have a stack of pictures and memories from various trips I’ve done around Asia in the past, so there’s lots of raw material to start with.

Plus I’m well kitted out with a camera and video cam, so (as long as I remember to take them with me!) producing new content, even from just around Hong Kong, will be easy enough. So no problems there.

What I did

So I’ve set up the new site on WordPress, setting the front page as a static page and having the blog as a menu item in the navigation bar.

That makes it look like a normal site with an integrated blog.

The look and feel is very similar to my existing site, so anyone moving from one site to the other will know they’re part of the same business.

I’ve cross linked it with my existing travel site on multiple pages. This includes linking to the tours search function that sits on my existing site but serves search requests for tours to all destinations.

I’ve created a Tours in Asia page. This introduces the Asian tours and links out to child pages that list summaries of (and links to) tours to different parts of Asia.

I’ve linked to the Tours in Asia page at least once on every other page in the site, including every blog article.

That creates lots of internal links to the Tours in Asia page, which lets the search engines know that it’s the most important page in the site.

I installed the Google XML-Sitemap generator plugin and gave the pages a higher importance ranking than the blog articles and the home page. Pages are ranked at 1.0, the posts are at 0.9 and the home page is at 0.7.

Again, that helps to direct the search engines towards the Tours in Asia page.

I’ve installed the ‘Subscribe to Comments’ and ‘Thank Me Later’ plugins to encourage readers of the blog articles to return, but I’ve not installed CommentLuv.

The reason for not installing CommentLuv is that the type of visitors I will be getting are much less likely to have blogs of their own (other than personal diary type blogs) than are readers to this site. So CommentLuv would be irrelevant to them.

I’ve taken great care to ensure that the site works well in Internet Explorer. 78% of the visitors to my existing travel site are using IE. (Only 24% of visitors to this site use IE). That ratio will hold true for the new site.

The plan going forward

So, going forward, my plan is to write articles on a regular basis (2, maximum 3 a week – the same schedule as for this site) and promote those articles using the same channels as I use on this site.

I’ll also look for other channels (travel related) and create a presence there.

I’ll use videos more often than I have on this site.

I’ll post the videos on YouTube and embed them on the site. That will get my content more widely disseminated than would be the case if I used a video application on the site itself.

My internal linking structure will point the search engines towards the Tours in Asia page once they’re on the site (as I described above), and that page will start to reflect in natural search results for people looking for Asian tours.

I will continue to review the site and look for ways of improving the link structure and the on-site SEO. That will include the installation of a couple of SEO related plugins that aren’t there yet because there’s so little content.

The result (hopefully!) will be to make the search engines increasingly notice the site. This will cause it to start climbing up the search results, ultimately earning me some money from affiliate sales.

Well – that’s the plan, anyway.

And I’ll post articles here at various intervals to let you know how it’s going and what changes I’ve made, based on experience.

If You Want to Make Money Online Sell Something

Martin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 13:01:59 +0000

A statement of the obvious? Not necessarily.

When I first started researching the idea of working online I found a gazillion sites offering me ‘foolproof’ systems that would ‘guarantee’ to have me earning thousands a week by this time next month.

And none of them involved a product.

Many (if not most) of the MLM or Direct Sales type businesses I’ve seen, some of which do have good products behind them, focus on signing up new members.

Not on the products.

Adsense is a popular way for people to monetize their sites but, again, no product. Plus, if you’re going to make money from Adsense you usually need to do a LOT of work for a paltry return.

And, as soon as Google changes it criteria, your income can be cut off. Overnight.

So what’s my point?

To have a sustainable, profitable online business you must build it around selling a real product or service.

The primary off-line businesses I can think of that built an income based on complicated, non-product related deals are the banks.

And look what happened to them 18 months ago.

Successful, sustainable off-line businesses sell good products that add value to people’s lives. And it’s no different online.

It doesn’t matter whether your product is an information product, software, a membership site or a service. As long as it adds value and meets a market need, you’ll have the basis for a good business.

How to get a product to sell?

Actually, getting hold of a product to base your business on is not that difficult.

Here are 4 ways:

Create your own.

If you’re a programmer or have specialist knowledge in anything, you can create a software application or an information product (an ebook describing how to do something) and distribute it online.

Sell someone else’s product.

Affiliate marketing is well established and a lot of people make a lot of money from it.

Places like Clickbank, Commission Junction and ShareASale are great places to find products to sell and they have very good support for affiliate marketers (particularly Commission Junction).

With affiliate marketing you’ll earn a commission from the product owner for each sale referred by you.

Buy the re-sale rights to someone else’s product.

In this model you get to keep all the revenue from each sale. The downside is that where people are selling re-sale rights the products, as they stand, are often not good enough for you to make a living off.

You need to edit and add your own value to them and, before you do that, you need to make sure the re-sale rights enable you to do so.

Sell yourself.

Set up and run a membership site focused on your skill area or simply sell yourself as a consultant

So pick an area you’re interested or expert in, and research your market. See what kind of questions people are asking and what kind of problems they have.

If you know how to fix their problems develop your own product to do so.

Otherwise, find a product that fixes their problems, via one of the other methods above, and build a business around it.

And, once you’re ready to build your business, this article on how to start an Internet Marketing business will be useful.

Mistakes to Avoid When Launching a Website

Martin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:40:01 +0000

A couple of incidents recently reminded me of two important principles when it comes to launching websites:

Firstly: KISS

Secondly: GIOT

KISS stands for Keep It Short and Simple

GIOT stands for Get It Out There.

Despite my best efforts, the project I’m currently leading here in HK is in danger of failing because of KISS – or the lack of it.

Since the start of the project (a new eCommerce site, and the first for this company) the message to the Marketing team has been:

‘Come up with simple offers, that are easily understandable by visitors, will enable us to launch a bug-free site and which we can develop as we gain experience’.

All of which has been ignored.

As a result, the project timeline has been compressed as the developers attempt to meet increasingly complex requirements and the site, which is due to launch in about 10 days, is currently buggy and unreliable.

I do realise this is pretty usual with this kind of project. But that doesn’t lessen my frustration!

Keep It Short and Simple

It doesn’t matter whether you’re launching a mini-site to sell an eBook product, or a full fledged eCommerce site.

It has to work when you launch it. Flawlessly.

It doesn’t matter if the design is not quite right, or the copy could use some polishing. But it must be easy for customers to follow and it must work.

If it crashes, or if customers can’t understand your offer, or if whatever they need to do next is not clear, you’ll lose the sale.

Get It Out There

We set a very firm deadline for this site launch and we’ve adhered to it rigidly.

The reason is because it’s all too easy to keep tweaking, with the result that you never get anything launched at all.

With this project, we could already have added months to the launch date if we’d attempted to accommodate all the requests that have come up.

They’ve all been captured and an initial release schedule developed, but we haven’t moved the launch date.

And, again, that applies to any site – large or small.

Even if you’re launching a 4 page mini-site, keep it simple, make sure it works and get it out there.

Websites evolve over time – all mine do and I’m sure yours do too.

It’s only natural. New technologies become viable, design fashions change and we all update our sites to keep them contemporary.

So you’re never going to launch with the perfect site and you’re always going to be making changes.

So just keep it simple and get it out there.

You’ll have plenty of time after launch to refine it, and you’ll have the benefit of experience and user feedback to help you.

Banned for Life

Martin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:44:06 +0000

You’ve been banned for life by Google. No recourse, no further discussion.

That was the opening message in an advertising pitch I saw recently for a book on Google Adwords.

And it annoyed the hell out of me.

It’s the kind of advertising that gives Internet Marketers a bad reputation, and yet it obviously works or people wouldn’t continue to use it.

But let’s look at reality.

Can Google ban you for life? You personally?

No. How could they enforce it?

They could terminate your Adwords account, but you could change ISP’s (to get a new IP address), change your hosting provider (another new IP address), get a new PC (to remove any tracks), open another account in a different name, with a different credit card, and you’re back in business.

You could even get a proxy if you wanted to.

And, at the end of the day, Google wants your money.

The way they deal with someone who doesn’t play by their rules is to give your campaigns such a low quality score that you’re paying 10’s of dollars a click.

The simple fact is Google can’t ban you for life because they could never enforce it.

And, even if they get all shirty and de-index your site, you can still go through the tons of information that’s available in Google Webmaster’s Tools to learn what they like.

Then you can fix up your site and ask for it to be re-indexed. As long as it meets the guidelines, you’ll be back in business.

So when you see advertising that’s based on scaremongering stop and think things through logically. And if you’re new to the game ask someone who’s been around for a bit.

I can almost guarantee that the claims being made will be wildly exaggerated.

You Can Build it But They’ll Not Necessarily Come

Martin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:57:04 +0000

10 years ago ‘build it and they’ll come’ worked on-line. Today it doesn’t.

Today there are so many web pages out there that any site that hopes to receive visitors has to be positioned well and promoted cleverly.

And the bar is getting higher all the time.

Someone with next to zero technical skills can sign up with Blogger or WordPress.com and have a well optimised site up and published within half an hour.

The barrier to entry is a fraction of what it was 10 years ago, but the bar to being found is a zillion times higher.

So how do you get found on-line quickly today?

Here are the steps I go through to get a new site established on-line:

Step 1: Make sure that each page on your site is structured properly (on-site SEO).

That means creating your META tags, using your H and image alt tags correctly and writing focused content.

Each page on your site should be focused on a specific subject.

There are lots articles that talk about optimising a page for certain keywords. When I first read things like that I felt intimidated. It all sounded too technical and complex.

But if you focus each page on your site on one specific subject it will automatically become optimised for its keywords.

For example, if your site is about web design services and one of the services you offer is WordPress installations and maintenance, then you need to use one page to talk about your WordPress services, and only your WordPress services.

As long as you do that, the fact that you’re only talking about WordPress on that page will automatically result in it being optimised for the keyword ‘WordPress’.

There are some steps you need to add manually:

Make sure ‘WordPress’ figures in your heading and sub headings.

And include ‘WordPress’ in your META title, description and keyword tags.

As long as you do that then, hey presto – your page will be optimised for the keyword ‘WordPress’.

So the message is: keep each page focused on one subject, and make sure your keyword figures in your title, description and keywords META tags.

Step 2: Create a Sitemap and submit it to the search engines.

There are lots of places on-line where you can create an XML sitemap (for the search engines) for free. It will take you no more than 10 minutes, unless you’ve created a huge site.

So create your sitemap, save the sitemap.xml file and upload it to the root directory of your new website

Then submit it to the search engines.

This does not mean using one of those submission services that ‘blasts’ your site to thousands of search engines. That’s a sure way to death on-line.

You only need to submit your site to 3, maximum 4 search engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.

So be sure you do so manually – don’t use a submission service!

The easiest of all is Google. If you don’t have a Google Webmaster’s Tools account get one. It’s free and, as long as you have a Google account, all you have to do is add it to your services.

When you’ve got Google Webmaster’s Tools set up you need to add and verify your site. Unusually for Google, this is a reasonably intuitive process.

They’ll give you a verification code that you need to put on your site. You can do this in two ways:

By adding a META tag (which Google will give you) to your index page
By creating a blank HTML file using the code they give you as the filename (with the extension .html).

Once you’ve uploaded the file (either the index.html file with the extra META tag or the new HTML file) you select whichever method you’ve chosen from the drop down menu, click ‘Verify’ and, as long as Google finds the code, you’ll be verified in about 5 seconds.

Then you need to submit your site map – which is simply a case of adding the URL of your sitemap (for example http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml) to a field on the sitemap page and clicking ’submit’.

That entire process will take you around 10 – 15 minutes. It will then take Google anything up to 24 hours to download your sitemap.

Indexing your site (so that it appears in search results) will, though, take them a lot longer. This is the process of crawling your entire site (not just your sitemap) and adding what it finds to its cache.

But once you’ve gone through those steps all you need to do is wait – everything else will happen in Google’s time.

Step 3: Let the bookmarking and social sites know your new site is there.

Be careful here because some sites (like Digg and Newsvine) don’t like you promoting your own stuff exclusively. So this works well when you promote your new site on social sites where you’re active.

For example I’m active on Twitter, so promoting a new site there is effective for me. I’m not active on Digg, so promoting it there would not work.

One site that I find very useful is OnlyWire. This is a site where you can add your login details for up to around 30 bookmarking and social sites.

Once that’s set up you only need to bookmark a page on OnlyWire and OW will automatically add your page to all the social and bookmarking sites you’ve set up in your profile.

So when I’ve put up a new site, I’ll pick a page and bookmark it on OnlyWire. The OnlyWire bookmarking page gives you options to add tags and your own comments, and these are passed forward to the social sites you’ve set up.

On a side note, this works particularly well with Delicious because you can set up an automatic distribution from Delicious to your blog of the bookmarks you make.

So my process goes like this: I bookmark a page with OnlyWire and add my own comments in the comments section.

OnlyWire distributes that bookmark to Delicious (among others) and Delicious then distributes that bookmark (along with my additional comments) to one of my blogs.

That creates a new blog post.

This is the only way that I’ll use an ‘automated’ process to create blog posts. It’s not really automated because I am actually writing the post myself (by adding my own comments in the OnlyWire comments area). I’m just submitting it via OnlyWire and Delicious.

If you haven’t looked into OnlyWire you should.

Step 4: Consider a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign

On some of my new sites I set up a small PPC campaign to kick start some traffic.

As soon as I’m getting as much traffic from the natural search results and other non-paid sources as I am from PPC, I cut the PPC campaign.

PPC is a very quick way of getting targetted visitors to your site quickly, but be careful: it can be hugely expensive if you set it up wrong.

Step 5: Create as many links to your site as you can.

If you have other sites (blogs, Squidoo lenses, HubPages or similar) link to your new site from them.

Write a blog article introducing your new site (as long as the content would be relevant to your readers).

If you don’t have other sites you should create some. The bigger the on-line footprint you can get the better, and adding a new site to an existing network of sites will get it noticed more quickly than setting one up in the middle of nowhere.

OK – so those are the steps I go through to get a new site noticed as quickly as possible.

What steps do you use?

How to Get Started in Internet and Affiliate Marketing

Martin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:48:12 +0000

A question I saw in a forum today: How do I get started in Internet and Affiliate Marketing?

The person asking the question had read tons of guru books and tried a whole lot of different things, but nothing had worked for him.

Here’s the answer I offered:

Boy, do I sympathise with what you’re going through..! That’s exactly where I was, about 3 years ago.

One very useful forum you should join (it’s free) is the Warrior Forum.

Join and spend some time reading the more popular posts – there’s a lot of information there.

Then you’re best off picking an area you want to work in, finding a product and jumping in.

Having done all that reading and research, you’ll learn more, and far more quickly, by jumping in and doing it than you will by continuing to read books and watch tutorials!

My suggestion is that you start building a business in an area you either know something about or enjoy.

Just picking random products from Clickbank will result in just random results.

A good way to start is to take a problem you’ve personally had to deal with – something on which you have personal experience.

Weight loss, for example. If this is something you have experience of dealing with, you could find a weight loss product you like and write articles on your experiences of losing weight.

For example: what prompted you to start, how you felt, what were the most difficult challenges you faced and how you dealt with them, what goals you set and how long it took to achieve them, etc.

Although you can do affiliate marketing without a website, if you’re serious about this you definitely need to create your own site from which to base your business.

First you’ll need to buy a domain name – choose one that relates to the subject of your site.

Then, having got a domain name and a site, one of the things you need to do to be successful is to put your own character into it.

Putting your own character into the site means creating some useful thoughts, advice, opinions, experiences, guidance or reviews around the product you’re selling.

Use these articles to create a site featuring your experiences and weave links to the product you’re selling into the text of the articles.

Some people love those long sales letter pages that take an age to read. I don’t, but if you do then you can incorporate your experiences into a single sales letter type page.

If you don’t, then you can make your sales letter page shorter, with abbreviated versions of your experiences, and have other pages with all the details.

If you’ve not created a website before, probably the simplest way to do it is to set up a Blogger blog.

You can get an account, set up a Blogger blog and have a website ready to go in about 30 minutes with no technical expertise at all. And it’s all free.

Plus, you can use the domain name you bought with a Blogger site.

The next thing to do is to take a look at how others in the niche you’ve picked are designing their sites.

Don’t worry about the graphics – that’s taken care of by Blogger for now.

Look at how they lay out their articles. How they use headers and sub-headers, and how they break up the text.

Go to Google and check out a few of the sites that are promoting a product in whatever niche you’ve chosen.

Make a note of what you like and don’t like about their sites, and incorporate the good bits into your site.

Keep it simple at first.

Again, a Blogger site without any of the sidebar widgets to distract readers is a good way to get something up quickly.

If you haven’t heard it before, you’ll hear it now: content is king.

So work on getting a site set up with lots of information about the product you’ve chosen.

Not just the product itself, but information around the product and, best of all, write about your personal experiences.

Although this is counter-intuitive to someone starting out in affiliate marketing, at first it’s actually better not to put up links to, or ads for, whatever product you’ve chosen.

Concentrate on building up a site with lots of content and getting traffic to it. Then, as your traffic builds up, you can start to monetise the site.

Later, after you’ve built up some momentum, you can decide whether you want to jazz up the look and feel.

The next thing to keep in mind is that this will take time.

The worst thing about starting an online business is all those gurus telling you that you can be earning mega bucks by this time next week.

It just won’t happen.

It takes as much work as any ‘bricks and mortar’ business, and more if this is your first time marketing online.

Again – join the Warrior Forum. There’s a huge amount of information there. Spend some time reading some of the more popular threads.

You can also find other articles on Internet Marketing on this site – click here.

I hope that gives you some food for thought – but leave any questions in the comments area.

Authority Rules, Reciprocity and Websites

Martin — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 01:20:00 +0000

Brian Clark recently released the Authority Rules report. If you haven’t read it you must – it contains enormous value.

But, even more interesting, he recently published a post on CopyBlogger that explained his strategy behind Authority Rules.

Rarely have I seen a better example and lesson in how to market on-line – both the Authority Rules report and the strategy behind it.

Brian’s strategy contained 5 pillars, one of which was Reciprocity.

And that’s the one that grabbed me.

Reciprocity is another way of saying ‘give and ye shall receive’.

Most marketers (including me) have persuaded people to opt in to their list with the promise of great things in return – a free report or some seriously enticing information.

Reciprocity is about reversing that process: give the free report out first because people will feel obliged to opt in to your list in return.

It seems that this is twice as effective as asking them to opt in first. This link summarises the results of the study that demonstrated this – and there’s a link to the study itself, but you’ll need to opt in to read it in full (ironic, that).

Anyway – reciprocity appealed to me so much as a strategy that I’m now half way through building a website that will take beginners through the entire process of installing and configuring WordPress, in baby steps, and a whole lot more besides.

It should be ready in another week or so.

Should I Disclose My Affiliate Links?

Martin — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:20:34 +0000

The question of whether or not to disclose your affiliate links came up in an article I read on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger blog today.

It often generates discussion, and the FTC recently got into the act by saying it thought that on-line advertisers should adhere to the same standards as off line advertisers.

It will, by all accounts, become mandatory for US based on-line advertisers to disclose their interest when they’re reviewing a product for which they’re an affiliate.

I have no problem with that at all.

But why does it evoke such emotion?

It comes down to the way business on the Internet has developed over the last 10 years.

The Internet has been largely un-regulated, except in those territories where the government controls access by deciding what you can view.

But for the rest of us the Internet has been free.

That meant there were zero barriers to entry and led to a disproportionately high percentage of people doing business on-line who are fly-by-night.

You should see what my Junk folder looks like each morning: I get hundreds of promises a day of being able to make $000’s by this time next week (usually ‘guaranteed’) if I just buy this book or follow that system.

People have been able to advertise and promote stuff on the web by making outrageous promises and there’s been no come-back when the promises turn out to be false.

Sure, they may need to make a few refunds – but the percentage of people who don’t ask for a refund is insanely high so, for the most part, the advertisers get away with it.

Of course, not everyone is a scammer. I’m not, for example.

But I was a beginner once. And one of the first things I learnt was that one way of getting people to buy whatever I was promoting was to write a review of it.

But as a beginner, and also being new to the entire concept of marketing, I didn’t grasp the fact that reviews should cover the downsides of any product as well as the upsides.

So I only wrote about the upsides.

I think I instinctively knew this wasn’t right, because I also made no attempt to declare my interest in the sale. In fact I tried to make my review sound as though I was an impartial reviewer.

Which, looking back on it, was a bit silly. I must have stuck out like a sore thumb.

But what’s the big deal with revealing that you’re an affiliate for a product you’re reviewing?

The popular answer is that it will lead to people saying your review is biased, so they’ll click off somewhere else and you lose the sale.

But I dispute that. Strongly.

Provided you do a professional review.

If you’re reviewing a product and you do so properly, discussing the bad as well as the good and relating your own experience from using it, whether or not you’re an affiliate is irrelevant.

The quality of your review is what’s relevant.

And if you’re also able to add some additional value, so much the better.

What’s the downside for your buyer? There is none.

They don’t pay any more by buying it through your link. They pay exactly the same price whichever link they buy it through.

And if you’re able to offer some value added service they may benefit.

Here’s an example:

I’m an affiliate for the Thesis theme for WordPress and I run a special offer: If someone buys Thesis through my affiliate link I will install and customize it for them free of charge.

They don’t pay a penny more than if they bought it direct from the Thesis site, but they get a free customization and installation – provided they buy it through my affiliate link.

And I’m totally up-front that they have to buy through my affiliate link if they want to benefit from my offer.

So, again, why not disclose you’re an affiliate?

No reason at all, as far as I can tell, provided you’d be proud to tell your Mother about your business and how you run it.