Affiliate Business Trends

Archive for June, 2009

Yesterday I talked about how blogging can be used as a tool for Internet Marketing.  Today, I’m going to talk about ways to expand your market through Blogging.

Blogging is becoming more popular than email to reach and expand your market.  Mainly because it is alot faster to click on a blog site than to log in and download your email.  But if you use your email marketing wisely it can be a great tool for bringing readers to your website.

Be sure to have an email capture on your blog.  To entice people to sign up, offer them something free.  Don’t make it junk!!  Offer something of value.  Then when you have permission to send them emails, use a short email to tease them into clicking to read more at your site.  Or offer worth while information in your email, possibly a short term free lessons.  Use your email signature to get them to your website if your email has to do with an unrelated subject.

You want to be sure that you use their email address’ responsibly.  No one likes a spammer, besides I think it’s illegal.

Conduct a survey.  That way you can get information right from your readers to help you to understand them, their profiles and advertising preferences.  If you want to know something, want feedback on a post, or a link or a subject that you talked about, ask!!  Let your readers know that you want their feedback.

Use RSS, it’s the fastest growing tecnology on the internet today.  RSS feeds to your blog can add interest to your site.

Use video, You Tube adds yet another dimension to your blog.

Bring in a guest blogger, that way you get a fresh idea and your readers stay interested with a different perspective.

You may even want to run a contest.  Have your readers leave comments and then randomly choose a winner.  it will certainly get people talking.

I hope this has sparked some ideas for you.  If you think of something I missed, leave a comment.     I love to hear from my readers.

Are you an Internet Marketer?  Did you know that Blogging is one of the newest Internet Marketing tools?  Let’s look into why you should have a blog.

A blog, short for Web Log, started back in the late 90′s.  What started as a comment on an existing webpage has turned into a way for individuals to write about what is on their mind.  It could be a personal blog that no one other than yourself sees, kinda like a journal or diary.  Or it can be a place to vent or just talk about topics that are of interest to you.

As Blogging becomes more and more popular, it has become one more way to monetize an Internet Marketing Business.  So why should you be blogging?  Here are my thoughts, see if you agree.

1.  Blogging is easy.  If you have a computer and an internet connection ( and who doesn’t these days?), then you too can have a blog. 

2.  Blogging can be free to do.  You can start a blog for free, without owning a domain name or having a website, but if you are serious about marketing you will want a paid blog.  Mainly because on free blogs your content may not be your own.  If you inadvertently breach the terms of use, your blog could be taken down without any notice and all your hard work would be gone.

So what do you talk about?  Just talk about your ideas or if you want to use it as a marketing tool, talk about new products you’ve tried and your experience with them.  Did you like them?  Why?

3.  Which brings us to our third reason.  Blogging is real.  People like to buy things, they don’t want to be sold to.  Think about it.  Everyday we are bombarded with advertising.  Commercials, touting that their product is the best.

The difference with a blog is that it’s like talking to a friend.  Telling them your first hand experience with a product, why you liked it.  What you hated about it.  Would you use it again?  You’re just giving your opinion.  It’s real!!

4.  So if you are real, then it stands to reason that you will become believable.  Which will give credibility to your posts.  As your credibility builds, your readers will come to rely on your information.  As word spreads of your expertise, you may even become the go to expert in your field. 

5.  Which builds readership.  As your readership grows, so grows your market.  Let’s face it, unless you are a big time name, no one is reading your blog except your mother, (or in my case my husband and 2 grown children). 

So tomarrow we will expand on how you can use a blog to build your market, and get more readers.

I have been reading Nicole Dean’s blog now for several weeks.  Wow!  I am really learning a lot.  Nicole is doing a Rock Star Summer Tour.  She is guest blogging on 15 different blogs all summer long.

One of the blogs she will guest blogging on is Click Newz.  Click Newz is operated by Lynn Terry.  Nicole interviewed Lynn back in April.  The interview was very interesting.  So off I go to Click Newz to check it out. 

Lynn is a Super Affiliate, that means that she makes a darn good living online as an affiliate marketer.  Like Nicole, Lynn offers a lot of really good, useful information on her blog. 

I am learning so much from both of these women, but I feel like there is so much to learn that I will never learn it all.

More later.

After signing up for Jimmy D. Brown’s affiliate program, I met, (actually just spoke through emails) Nicole Dean.

Nicole is Jimmy’s affiliate manager, so she handles all of his affiliates and helps them to succeed, by pointing them in the direction of articles or emails that Jimmy has written for his affiliates to use.  But Nicole is much more than that.

Nicole is an affiliate marketer, but she is also a business woman.  She has many blogs and ebooks that she has written.  So as a result of Jimmy D. Brown, I have now come into contact with a woman I can learn from.  Someone who is doing it all, has a husband, children, and all that goes with that, but also is making a full time living online.  YIPEE!!  Someone like me, except for the online successful business.

So I started reading Nicole’s blog.  Nicole gives away a lot of really useful information, along with her ebooks that are for sale.  And she has an affiliate program also.  I cannot wait to see what I can learn about affiliate marketing from her.

More later.