Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Getting People To Buy Through Your Affiliate Website

Starting up a website for the purposes of making money can be a very exciting prospect. After all, it’s easy right? You put up a website, send some traffic, and BOOM! You’re supposed to start making money right away, aren’t you?

Well, let’s face it - if that was really the case, EVERYBODY would be making money on the internet.

Understand that putting up a website is just part of the equation of starting a successful internet business.

If you were to start a real brick-and-mortar businesses, opening your store would only be the first step. Once the store is open, you need to attract people to come inside the store, and then once they are there, they must BUY.

If you are doing any type of selling on the internet - especially if you’re an affiliate - you need to convince people that buying through your website - and your website alone - is the way to go.

The best way to do this is through a process known as “preselling.”

This is where you, as an affiliate, attract a prospect to your website, and convince them that the products you are reviewing are the ones that they’ll want to spend their hard earned cash on.

The following are some tips you can use to become an effective “preseller,” and get people to buy products through your website…

Preselling Tip #1: Establish Authority

People respond well to authority. Policement, judges, doctors, and politicians are all example sof people who can get others to follow their instructions based around the “status” of their authority.

So the best way for people to do what you want them to is to come off as an authority figure on the subject you are talking about.

For instance, telling people they should buy one product over another doesn’t carry any weight. But when you come off as an authority on the subject, people are more willing to accept your evaluation.

Saying something like:

“I have been golfing since 1998 and have competed in 12 professional golf tours…”

Is much more effective than saying:

“I’m really passionate about golf.”

In one instance, you are stating why you are qualified to be an authority on the subject, and in another instance, you are just talking about your affinity for the subject.

Keep in mind - you don’t ACTUALLY have to be an authority on the subject to establish your authority. Saying things like “I know what I’m talking about” and “I’ve done my homework” can go a long way.

Preselling Tip #2: Provide Contrast

When people are searching for information on a specific product or service, what they are doing is looking for reasons why they should or should not buy one product over another.

For instance: Is an XBox 360 better than a Playstation 3?

If someone is wondering which game console they should purchase, giving them a review that contrasts the two products is much more effective than offering them a review of the consoles on their own.

Let’s say that you, as an affiliate, get a better commission selling an XBox 360 than you do selling a Playstation 3.

What you’ll want to do in your review is state the reasons why you feel the XBox is better than the Playstation 3, AND why the Playstation 3 isn’t worth buying.

The key here is to never be overly-critical of the product you don’t want people to purchase. When contrasting products, a balances review is always more believable than a lop-sided one.

If you’re in a market where you have many products to compare and contrast, choose the top products in your market - the ones people are most likely to buy - and break down their pros and cons.

People will feel they are getting great insight for their purchase if they know all the reasons why they should buy one product over another.

Preselling Tip #3: Offer Personal Experience

Personal experience with a product or service is always far more powerful than a “general” review. So telling your prospect a story about your experience with the product you are selling is very powerful.

For instance, let’s say you were selling a book on how to lose weight. In your review, you talk about how you went on the diet the book recommends, what you felt like while you were on the diet, how much weight you loss, and how good it felt to finally find a diet that actually works.

As you can see, reading about someone’s personal experience is a much better selling point than saying:

“By following this diet, you’ll lose weight and feel good doing it.”

People respond well to stories, and they want to see proof that something works, or does what they need it to do, before they commit to buying it.

If you can show them personal examples, experiences, and results you yourself achieved, they will more readily believe your recommendation to buy.

Preselling Tip #4: Relate To Your Reader

It’s a well known fact that people are more willing to buy from someone they know than from a complete stranger.

The more you can make your reader identify with you and relate to you, the more comfortable they’ll feel buying from you. So you should always make an effort to relate to your typical website visitor.

For instance, let’s say your a single mother working from home, and you’re site is all about teaching other single mothers how to work from home as well.

Talk about dealing with the kids, doing laundry, having lunch with the girls, finding a babysitter for the night, and any other thing that single moms can relate to.

But also talk about common problems you experienced before you found the solution to them.

For instance, a big problem with single mothers is making enough money to support their family, and still having time to take care of their kids.

In this instance, you can talk about being worried about making enough money to support your family, and being too tired to take care of your kids the way you wanted to, until you discovered a method that allowed you to work from home, make good money, and spend time with your family.

Every single mom can relate to that problem, and once they relate to it, they will gladly accept the solution you offer them.

Preselling Tip #5: Give A Reason To Buy Through Your Site

Too often, affiliate marketers will simply post a review with their affiliate link in it, and that’s it.

But you always want to offer your readers reasons WHY they should buy now, and buy through you.

Actually telling people to click your link is a good start. Don’t just have a link to the product that says “Click Here To Buy Now,” have a link that says “Click Here Now To Quit Smoking Just Like I Did.”

Tell your reader about special offers the merchant is giving away, and make them think that buying through your website will give them access to them.

For instance, let’s say the merchant you’re an affiliate for is offering five special bonuses to anyone who buys his product. On your page, you can say:

“By clicking this link now, you’ll get access to 5 special bonuses.”

Even though these bonuses are accessable to everyone who visits the merchant’s site, saying they’ll get access for clicking the link on YOUR site makes it far more appealing.

You can also appeal to someone’s generosity to get them to buy through your site. Saying something like “If this review helped you, please be courteous and purchase your course through this link to show your support for my efforts.”

After all, if you’ve given them good information, they should feel compelled to return the favor if you ask them to.

Finally, if you’re really ambitious, you can offer your own bonus for people who buy through your website. This can be something simple like offering a Public Label Rights ebook, or as extravagant as an amazon gift certificate.

Just let people know that if they buy through your website and send you their reciept, you’ll give them something special in return.

Remember - preselling is all about making people WANT to buy, so that by the time they click on your affiliate link, they’ve already made the decision in their mind to make a purchase.


Info provided by www.therichbabe.com

Getting Free Traffic To Your Website

If you want to make money online, there’s no way around it: You need to get as much traffic to your website as possible.

Paying for traffic via online advertising is a good idea, but some people just can’t afford to shell out the money to do so.

In this case, you need to focus on getting free traffic by helping your site listed in the search engines and ranked for important keywords and terms.

Only by getting your site indexed and ranked will you be able to recieve the free traffic you want.

The problem with free traffic, however, is that its not fast. Indeed, it can take a good amount of time for search engines to list your content within the first ten results.

Here are some tips you can use to help you get listed in the search engines for the free traffic you want…

Tip #1: Get Your Site Indexed

Getting you website indexed is relatively simple. You can go to Google, yahoo, and MSN directly and submit your site to their serch engines, and eventually, thei “spiders” will come, crawl your website, and list it in their search results. You probably won’t be ranked very high for any keyword terms just yet, but at least you’ll be in there.

Another way is to bookmark your website on a social bookarking service, such as Del.icio.us or Digg. The easiest way to do this is create an account for yourself on one of these services and bookmark your own website.

These websites help rank online news stories and web pages based on user votes, which the search engines place a lot of importance on, so the sites listed in these services get crawled very rapidly. If you bookmark your own website, it can be indexed in all three major search engines in three days time.

Tip #2: Create A Sitemap

Creating a webpage that lists all the pages on your site in a way that’s easy for the search engines to see everything you have to offer is a great way to get your pages ranked. These pages are called Sitemaps.

Google has their own standard for sitemaps, so if you can create a google-compliant sitemap, you can be sure to optomize your chances that every single page on your site winds up being listed in the Google Search Engine.

Tip #3: Optimize Your Pages For Specific Keywords

The more you can gear specific webpages on your site towards certain keyword terms, the more likely you’ll be able to get them to rank for those terms.

To do this, you must make your page title, meta description, meta keywords list, and body content geared towards the keyword you want to be ranked for.

The key here is not to load each one of these factors with the keyword you’re targeting, rather, to use related keywords and themes so as to prove to the search engines that your page is relevant to someone who’s searching for the keyword you are targeting.

Tip #4: Submit Your Website To Directories

There are a great number of internet directories which try and catalogue websites out there, and submitting your website to be listed in as many of them as you can will be beneficial to getting free traffic.

Not all of these directories will send you traffic directly, but they will add weight and authority through backlinks to your website, which Google and Yahoo will definitely notice.

Tip #5: Get Backlinks To Your Website

Search engines place a heavy importance on links directed at your website from other websites. The more websites you can get linking back to you, the more important the search engines assume your website is.

If you can get other websites linking back to you using specific keywords in the link text, the search engines will assume your site is relevant for those keyword terms and rank you higher in their results listings for those terms.

You can do this by offering to exchange links with other website owners, submitting your site to link directories, participating in blog and forum discussions, and submitting articles to related websites.

Just remember that free traffic is all about being ranked in the search engine results listings. The more pages you can get listed in the top 10 results, the more free traffic you’ll get.


Info provided from http://www.therichbabe.com

Saturday, 6 September 2008

Be The Top of the search engines

Here's the fastest way I know of to get to the top of the search engines. 1. Create a good keyword optimized page on a parasite host. I recommend using Squidoo or Hubpages. 2. Use LOTS of tags. 3. Include a link to whatever you're selling in each module, and use your main keywords in those links. 4. Ping the page. (Usually handled automatically) 5. Get lots of keyword-rich backlinks to your page fast. The best way to do this in my opinion is to use a blog farm. A great blog farming program is the Blogger Generator package. You can create hundreds of Blogger Blogs fast, then automatically post articles to them (which can be quickly taken from EzineArticles.com using the BG Article Grabber) and then use the Blog Poster Pro that comes in the package to post an article to each blog with 1 or 2 links maximum per article. 6. Ping all of the blogs in your farm, the Blogger Generator Pinger tool is great for this too. This is an easy-as-pie way to rank for long term phrases and what we call "new" keywords. "New" keywords are things that pop up on Google trends that nobody has ever optimized for, usually related to the news and recent events. No paid traffic involved and easy 1st page rankings achieved. The only paid tool I recommend for this is Blogger Generator or any other automated blog farming program. IT WORKS. I'm also posting this to my blog today, just thought I'd add it to the forum here because not everybody reads my BH SEO review blog.