How To Nurture Your Affiliates

As mentioned in my last post, I’m going to share with you tips on how to nurture your affiliates.

Those of you who have read the Insider Advertising Report will know that to be successful in advertising, you have to understand the characteristics of your prospects. Likewise in affiliate management, you have to understand the characteristics of your affiliates.

Here are the characteristics of your affiliates:

1. They are unmotivated.
2. They are uncreative.
3. They are lazy.

I believe these characteristics hold true for all affiliates, until you have their attention and interest in your program.

Once you understand the characteristics of your affiliates, nurturing them becomes a simple task of asking the right questions. The tough part is answering those question.

Questions that I keep asking myself are:

1. Why would someone promote our website?
2. How can we encourage affiliates to take action and start promoting our website?
3. What other creative tools can I develop to make it easier for our affiliates to promote us?
4. Since affiliates are lazy, is there a way to promote our program without having to promote it?

Let’s look at how we answer these questions in one of our websites, LeadsLeap.com.

1. Why would someone promote our website?

When our members promote LeadsLeap, other than making money, they are at the same time building 10 levels of leads whom they can advertise to.

In addition, whenever their referrals read ads, they earn advertising credits on autopilot. Many of our members earn thousands of advertising credits every month without reading any ad on their own because they have a team of people earning credits for them.

2. How can we encourage affiliates to take action and start promoting our website?

Our answer to this question is to have a Bonus Credit reward program, where members with just 20 personal referrals will receive 500 advertising credits every month, forever! Needless to say, many members try to get their 20 referrals by hook or by crook.

In fact, the rewards do not just end there. The more people they refer, the more bonus credits they receive every month. That’s why we have affiliates promoting our program on a continual basis.

3. What other creative tools can I develop to make it easier for our affiliates to promote us?

One powerful tool (or rather a system) that has brought lots of traffic to us is our blog referral system.

The way it works is quite simple. Our blog (which is the blog you’re reading now) is a viral blog. Our members can send traffic to any article in the blog with their affiliate ID. When the traffic signs up, it becomes their leads. When the traffic click ads, the members earn ad credits. This system alone has brought us lots of traffic because whenever we make a blog post, many of our members will inform their leads about the article. Sharing good information is always easier than sharing an opportunity.

To further leverage on this system, we create a LeadsLeap Widget that members can place on their websites. With this widget, our members will be able to send traffic to read the useful information on our blog while helping them to build leads and credits on autopilot.

4. Since affiliates are lazy, is there a way to promote our program without having to promote it?

Is it possible to get someone to promote your program without that person promoting it?

Definitely yes. Google uses this trick all the time.

The answer is to provide useful tools that webmasters can use. At the same time, those tools carry your brand.

We have quite a number of such tools and we are developing more. An example is our SlideSense advertising system. Members can use it for their own advertising purpose, but indirectly they are promoting LeadsLeap. Other tools we’ve developed include our Advanced Link Cloaker and List Building Script.

Some Final Notes

You may think LeadsLeap is an advertising system. That’s why we have the luxury of advertising credits and tools that we can leverage on to come out with incentives that address to these questions.

It’s not true. (At least you can’t allow yourself to believe it’s true.)

Regardless of which niche you’re in, you will be able to find a similar solution for your niche. Just believe and think hard. One day, you may wake up with an innovative idea that may just work.

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Read This Before You Start A New Online Business

What are the most important things to consider before you venture into a new online business? Is it the technical know-how? Or perhaps it’s the traffic strategies?

In today’s blog, I’ll give you a checklist that you can refer to whenever you want to start a new online business.

1) Is the market easily targetable?

Before you do anything, you need to make sure that the market you are trying to get into is targetable. What I mean is your prospects should belong to a community that you can easily locate. This is important because when your business is launched, you need to know where to look for your customers.

This may seem common sense, but in reality, many netpreneurs believe that their product targets everybody. As a result, they advertise everywhere and have no idea why the traffic doesn’t convert.

2) Is there a problem in the market you’re targeting and does your product address to that problem?

In most cases, a business idea is generated when the founder faces a problem that he fails to find a good solution in the market. If this describes the cause of your business idea, then congratulations, as you’ve found THAT problem.

However, if you have no idea what problem your business is solving, you really have to think of one and sell that idea as a problem. Otherwise, you are going to have a hard time convincing people to buy your product.

3) Is your product unique in the market?

To me, this is the most important point before I take action on any business idea.

If you have studied marketing, you may recall the term USP, which stands for Unique Selling Proposition. A good USP is one that not only provides a solution to the problem in Point 2 but one that is unique.

You don’t have to be Einstein to create a unique product. A product can be unique by simply combining two or more ideas into one, or it can be an idea that exists in some part of the world but not found in your territory or country. Or it can even be a cheaper way of providing the same solution and the low price itself can be the uniqueness.

No one can tell you if one USP is more profitable than another. This is where your vision comes into play.

4) Is there a viral component to your business model?

If you think getting traffic is tough, that’s because there isn’t a viral component to your business model. If all the traffic has to be generated by you personally, it’s just a matter of time before you give up internet marketing.

To truly understand the meaning of viral, look at Facebook. While most people think Facebook is doing the world a favor, by providing a good platform for people to connect, in actual fact, the world is actually doing Facebook a favor, as every Facebook user is a free promoter of Facebook, helping Facebook to expand its user base.

Viral components can include many things, from having an affiliate program to providing viral tools. However, the best form of viral component is a system that can easily convert your users into your affiliates, without them having to intentionally promote your website. This means the more they use your product or service to benefit themselves, the more they promote you!

5) Do you have a traffic retention strategy?

Getting traffic is easy, keeping the traffic is harder, converting the traffic into sales is the hardest. A good traffic retention strategy will help you keep the traffic that comes to your website, so that you not only have more chance to convert the traffic into sales, but also have more people promoting your website, if you’ve done the right thing.

The most common form of traffic retention strategy is getting people to optin by giving away freebies. As I said, this is the most common form but with more and more marketers using such trick, you need to be more innovative than that in order to stand out from the rest.

6) Do you have an automatic sales conversion strategy?

People need to be reminded to buy from you. If you need to do this manually, both you and your prospects will get sick and tired of it. Instead, what you should do is to think of a subtle sales conversion strategy that is always reminding your prospects that there is something better waiting for them.

Imagine a person who needs to get from point A to B everyday. He can either get there on foot or take your taxi. It will be annoying if you were to approach this person everyday. Instead you just have to make sure that he sees you everyday and he knows about your offer. One day, when he sees the value of your service, he will buy.

7) Is the need for your product long-lived?

If you sell something that people will only need to use once, you will have to find a new prospect after every sale. That is tedious.

On the other hand, if your product can service a person for live, like an insurance policy, you are going to have recurring income from every sale you make.

Another way of looking at ‘long-lived’ is are you selling a fad? A fad is something that suddenly bursts into a full buying frenzy and then, just as quickly, fizzle out. If you are selling a fad, you may be making some quick money but such income is not lasting. Soon you will be back to square one and you have to start all over again.

8) Is the operation of your business self-running?

How much time will it take for you to keep that business running? If the running of your business requires a lot involvement from you, it means this business is going to keep you so busy that you may have no time to expand the business or explore other business and investment opportunities.

As a basic principle, you should spend most of your time growing your business or establishing other businesses, not running the business.

Of course, no business is 100% self-running. If most processes can be automated or can easily be outsourced, that business is worth exploring.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by running a business. Say if you run a membership site that provides new video tutorials every month, you will have to spend time preparing the videos. You can outsource, provided that the outsource personnel can do an equally good job, and the business is profitable enough for you to engage that person.

However, there is an interesting twist. If you are indeed in such a situation, you can turn the ‘maintenance work’ into a growth opportunity. For example, you can turn your videos into a MRR (Master Resale Right) product and allow your customers to sell or bundle it with other products. This way, the same videos suddenly become a viral tool that will bring you more traffic. You can also produce videos based on interviews with other marketing gurus. This way, you are growing your affiliate network while at the same time delivering good values to your customers.

9) Is your business building an asset?

Most people do business to make money. But that’s not enough. In addition to making money, you have to make sure that your business is building an asset other than money. An asset can be a collection of websites, which the guru call virtual property, or it can be a network, which can be in the form of a subscriber list or a network of affiliates, or you may be building an infrastructure that you can use for your future businesses.

Looking beyond money and focusing on building assets is the way to ensuring that your online venture is a lasting one. Whether your current business is going to survive tomorrow or not, you know that you are sure to win because the asset that has been built is going to benefit you no matter what.

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Product Launch Strategies

So, you’ve spent the last six months preparing your website. Now that it is ready, do you just make it available online or what?

Think about it. If Jacky Chan had a new movie release, what would he do? Just release it quietly, or you’ll see lots of ads and news about his new movie?

Have you ever seen a new cafe selling its coffee for just $0.50 on the first week of its launch? It gives people a good reason to talk about the new cafe, which in turn becomes a free publicity. In a short span of a week, everyone in the neighbourhood knows about that cafe. That’s what you want to achieve with a good product launch.

Product Launch vs Traffic Generation

You may ask, what’s the difference between product launch and traffic generation?

To put it simply, product launch is traffic generation on an impulse! Whenever there is something new in the market, bloggers have an impulse to blog about it, list owners have an impulse to broadcast it to his/her list and more importantly, people have an impulse to try it. For some reason, people always think new is better. Your product will only be new ONCE. That’s why product launch is important.

Product Launch Strategies

1) Do a beta test

If you have a new product, you will need some people to test it before you launch it. But that’s not my purpose of doing a beta test.

Beta test is a way to extend the life of your product launch. You can’t have a product launch for a month, but you can have a beta test for as long as a year!

During the beta testing period, you can promote your website as usual, giving special offers for beta testers. Other than getting feedback and bug fixes for your new product, what’s more important is you are building your launch partners.

When you are ready to launch the product, you can invite your beta testers to be your JV partners. Many of them will be honored to be a JV partners because they don’t get much chance to be one. Assuming you’ve got a good product, a good launch offer and a good compensation, many of them will be willing to promote your product to their leads.

You can find your beta testers in the forums. Many of these ‘forumers’ are bloggers. Some even have a huge social network and an opt-in list. If you get some super-affiliates as your beta tester, your product launch is likely to be a success.

2) Work with a JV broker

JV brokers are people who link up joint venture partners with product owners like you. They usually demands a 10-20% cut from all the sales generated from their referred partners.

JV brokers have their schedule planned way ahead of time. You will have to contact them at least 3 months before your launch date. Also, you will have to get your commission tracking system ready, so that all commissions can be calculated automatically. Try to get yourself recommended to a JV broker because JV brokers don’t trust newbies. There are too many players and too many products in the market, and most of them are junk. You will have to prove to him that your product is different and you are credible, and the best way to do so is to have yourself recommended by someone he already trust.

3) Have some form of contest or extra reward during the launch

To encourage people to promote your product during the launch, it is important to have some form of contest or extra reward.

For example, you can organize an affiliate contest where the top affiliate walks away with a free ipad. You can even do something out-of-the-box like giving $0.10 for every new visitor that your user send to your website for a limited period of them.

The whole idea is to get people to start promoting your website during the launch. They may be blogging about your service or sharing in the forum. Whatever they do, these info are likely to stay online and bring you traffic in the long run.

4) Advertise

Nothing is as reliable as advertising. In advertising, you don’t have to rely on other people to bring you traffic. As I wrote in my previous article ‘Guaranteed Success In Any Advertising Campaign. Possible?‘, if you have the right strategy, success is guaranteed.

You can launch your product in beta and advertise to get beta testers. Due to the novelty of beta testing, it is often easier to get beta testers than users. Encourage your beta testers to submit testimonials, which will pave the way to converting more people when the product is launched.

Product launch is an important aspect of internet marketing but is often overlooked. With a good product launch, you will see yourself busily running an online business in no time. Without one, you may end up asking yourself everyday ‘how else can I get more traffic?’.

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Why Blog – The Purpose Of Blogging

In my last blog post, I said that blog plays a different role in advertising. As a follow up, let’s discuss the purpose of blogging and the role it plays in advertising.

My discussion is purely from marketing point of view. If you are blogging for fun or to pass time, that’s another purpose but it’s not our focus here.

So, why blog?

1. To Use It As A Bait

Blog is a good bait to attract traffic to your website.

First, if your blog is search engine optimized (I discussed this last week), it is a good bait to hook search engine traffic.

Second, if you provide useful information on your blog, it is a good bait to hook more traffic through networking and referrals from other bloggers.

Last but not least, it is a good bait to hook your existing traffic, who will revisit your website again and again.

2. To Differentiate Yourself From Others

With so many websites and competition on the net, it’s really not easy to make yourself stand out from the rest.

But with a good blog, you stand a much better chance.

Through blogging, you can connect with your audiance, let them know you better and thus foster better relationship with them.

People like to do business with people they trust. You know this, don’t you?

3. To Stimulate Your Creative Juice

Someone just posted a comment on this blog saying that he run out of things to write for his blog and ask how about me.

I don’t have such a problem because when I read the comments you guys and gals have posted, I will have new ideas for my next post.

The comments in my blog can also help me to generate ideas for my future projects.

The Purpose Of A Blog In Advertising

I said in my last post that it’s not a good idea to advertise your blog directly because the traffic is not likely to stick long. If you were to advertise, advertise to build a list.

But you can use a blog to increase the conversion rate of your ad, by using your blog as a tool to build your prospects’ trust and confidence in you.

If you have a decent blog, with some good posts and comments from the readers, you can direct the traffic from your squeeze page to your blog.

In the past, I thought this will reduce the conversion rate, since you send traffic away from the squeeze page. But my recent test shows that doing so can actually increase the conversion rate because people know that you are real and you really provide values.

Just a quick technical note. Make sure that you open the link to your blog in a new window, so that your prospects do not navigate away from the squeeze page.

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