Affiliate Program and Martketing Blog

Well it been a busy couple of weeks, my website has had some major changes and takes a new path. The way I am building my links for search engine ranking has evolved and I am trying out a new advertising idea. 

Due to the two months of reject my site suffered, the fact I now have a better understanding on how to use frontpage and my business partner has allowed me to use his free traffic seminar, I decided my site needed a make-over.  The first thing I did was make it similar looking to Virtual Affiliate Trainer, which is the site of my business partner. The reason I have done this is to make the transition from my site to theirs smoother and to give a more professional feel to the selling process. 

The purpose of the site has been changed; it used to be a warm up review page for Virtual Affiliate Trainer.  A simple asset that I was going to get ranked for some medium volume keywords, now that I can give away an hour long seminar on ‘Getting traffic to your website’ I have turned it into a list building site, which is a far better asset.

In my opinion list building has far more money making potential over the internet. As a popular online saying goes ’The moneys in the list’ , which is totally true.  Lets have a think about this for a minute, when you are building an online business you have to advertise to get traffic, the problem with this is potential customers are dubious about buying of sites they don’t know, thats why a 3% conversion rate on a site is classed as good.  With list marketing, if you have built an good relationship with the list you can expect a conversion rate of 15% plus, over and over again.

So instead of spending money on advertising your site, spend that money on building your list, build a good relationship with the list by giving them free reports, audio, videos, ebooks, programs, newsletters and so on. Then after a while you will have a couple of thousand highly responsive customers that will buy when you recommend a product or service.

Sounds easy doesn’t it?  Well to be honest it is, admittedelly at the start it can be hard going but thats true of most internet businesses.  So what I going to do is cover how I have set up my website for list building, I know I’m not an expert but hopefully it will give you the general idea.

My site is set up as simple as possible.  I have the main page where I describe why 99% of affiliate programs fail and that the free seminar I offer will solve that problem. When someone registers for my list they are taken to a confirmation page informing them to check their email to confirm the subscription.  Once done they are then taken to my free seminar page where there is a link to Virtual Affiliate Trainer. I have an follow up email series in place which encourages my list to watch the seminar and visit Virtual Affiliate Trainer.

All you need is a domain name, hosting and an autoresponder and you are away.  How I am going to get subscribers you might ask?  Well apart from my SEO efforts, which I will be covering in abit,  I am going to try co-registation. Co-registation is when customers are offered the oportunity to sign up to your list when they sign up to an related list or product. MSN is an good example, when you sign up for an free email account you get offered loads of free newsletter, products and application to sign up to aswell. I am using an company that will update my autoresponder as soon as I get subscriptions, so I can send the seminar information straight away, which is very important when using co-registation.  I will cover co-registeration fully in a later post.

To build ranking with the search engines I have been writing articles to get one way links and using this blog. In my first post I stated ‘for the SEO I will be using the products ‘Stomping The Search Engine 2′ from Stompernet and ‘The SEO Mindset’ by Brad Callen’. Although these products are very good they both only cover getting links to a website for ranking briefly and unfortunately getting links to a site is the most important factor for SEO as ‘contents plus links equals ranking’ always remember that.

After some searching through the hundreds of email I get from the American gurus (lightly phrased), I found the two websites I was looking for 1waylinks and 3waylinks by Jonathan Leger. These sites were created last year but at the time I didn’t take much notice, as I was not aware of the importance of links. Both sites provided quality ‘one way links’ to a website, one way links are seen like a thumbs up by the search engines, they are the best kind of links for SEO.

The idea behind both sites is to build natural one way links to your website, 1waylinks uses blogs to achieve this and 3waylinks uses a link page on an websites. Due to the way they are implemented the search engines love these links and reward you with ranking. So if you understand the importance of links I strongly recommend you check those two sites out.

I have just learnt, the hard way, the most important factor to running an online business. This is to concentrate on just one project at a time and not to let yourself get side-tracked. You see, for the past two months I have been learning front page and setting up another website when I should have been putting that effort into my virtual affiliate trainer project.

The time I spent on my new website could have been used getting virtual affiliate trainer running smoothly.  I could of then made enough money to pay someone else to do the hard work for me, which should be one of your goals if you’re serious about making money online.

Even through learning front page is going to make my work easier in the long run and having another website will supply me with another income stream.  This does not really matter when virtual affiliate marketing will be supplying my main income. When working on a project you should try to give it your full attention until it is at the stage when it’s either running itself or you only have to spend a couple of hours a week on it. 

Learn from my mistake; if you are starting out on an internet venture don’t let yourself get districted from your project. Stop reading emails, stop buying products, stop reading sales letters, stop listening to new ideas and if you come up with a new idea write the details down for a later date. The most important thing to remember is to plan what you are doing and keep to that plan.

While I am cleaning out the closet I through I might cover another one of the mistakes people make when starting an online business, which is learning to much. Yes learning to much, what a lot of people do is spend all their time taking in as much information on a subject as they can but they never get going with their online project due to this. You need to get your ideas and plans sorted, then get your head down and get cracking. Below is an interesting article I found relating to this:

Reverse The Flow For Profits

Information comes to you in multiple formats. You’re listening to teleseminars, replays, watching webinars, reading email, ebooks and articles. There is rarely a moment when you are not consuming some type of information. 

Information coming in is great when you are just starting. All of us have had the experience of getting excited about a new topic - then consuming everything we can get our hands on new puppy, your new car or your new computer. Regardless of the topic, you recognize the symptoms - insatiable curiosity and appetite for information.

The problem with that behavior comes when you don’t step out of the learning mode into the action mode. You see the symptoms in every area of interest - someone becomes a Learner - but never seems to take action. Particularly in money-making endeavors like real-estate investing, business opportunities and making money online, this is a self-defeating pattern seen in a lot of frustrated would-be entrepreneurs. 

So what is the cause of this problem - which someone continues to learn but never earns? In fact, it seems that the longer they are in a topic, the less action they take. 

Their information pipeline is full. And until they can clean it out and “reverse the flow” they are stuck.

Your information pipe is a certain size. When you first start learning a topic, new information is flowing in. But it doesn’t fill the pipe, so you still have some information trickling out in the form of action.

But when your actions don’t yield the results you want as soon as you like, you go looking for more information. The cycle repeats until your pipeline is so full of incoming information - that there is no space for outgoing information.

The best thing you can do is stop the input! Stop reading emails, stop buying products, stop reading sales letters, stop listening to new ideas - just until you reverse the flow. You cannot move forward until you have stopped the influx of new information.

Once you have stopped the flow inward, start the outward flow. Write an article. Write a blog post. Post to a forum. Answer a question. Get into the habit of sharing *your* information with others. The information doesn’t have to be perfect - it just needs to be outgoing information.

When you begin to practice flowing information out, you will be amazed at the results. You’ll get more traffic to your website, generate more leads, and find people who want to do business with you. You’ll start to make money.

The key to this process is to step out of your comfort zone. You are comfortable learning and absorbing information because you’ve been conditioned for years to be a good student. You’re in the learning zone.

But no one pays you to learn. No one pays you for being a walking encyclopedia of knowledge on a topic. It’s only when you begin to share your knowledge that you get the recognition you deserve - and the money along with it.

Clean out your Information Pipeline and watch the profits flow.

About The Author

Dr. Jeanette Cates is an Internet strategist who works with new and intermediate online business owners who are ready to create Online Success.