Posts Tagged ‘promotions’

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

If you read my earlier post on acquiring visitors’ email addresses, you understand how important it is to build an email list, and how a newsletter can be a great way to get value from those subscribers. But how can you promote products in your newsletter series without sending your subscribers running for the “unsubscribe” button? How do you promote newsletter loyalty and, at the same time, monetize it to the max?

Let me share with you my 7 steps to a killer newsletter: How to grab readers’ attention, hook them, and sell to them. We at Affilorama employ this strategy quite regularly with our newsletter lists, and with subscribers topping 100,000… we must be doing something right!

Step 1 – Refer to it as a ‘6-day mini course’ instead of a newsletter

• Firstly: It’s more exciting than a newsletter – Essentially it’s the same thing but it sounds a lot more interesting. And, because you usually pay for a course, subscribers will feel like they’re getting something of value for free!
• Secondly: It lowers the commitment barrier – By signing up for a 6-day course, subscribers will not feel like they’re being added to a list they’ll never get away from.
• Thirdly: It builds trust – By creating a 6-part series of high quality emails, you build a good reputation with your subscribers and get them used to opening your emails.

Step 2 – Build an inviting sign-up box

You need to make it really obvious how to subscribe. A good idea is to have your sign-up box display “above the fold” and appear on every page of your site.

Your sign up box really has to pack a punch. Don’t just shove a little form in your sidebar and hope for the best. You need to sell your newsletter – almost as if it was a paid product.

We’re not saying that you have to create a huge sales letter for it; a few bulletpoints covering what people will learn in each lesson is sufficient. But don’t give too much away. Create a bit of mystery, and make it enticing!

Step 3 – Make sure your content is the very best you can offer

It’s an old saying that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and it’s true for your newsletter. If you don’t capture the attention of your readers from the start, there’s every chance they will unsubscribe and you will have lost them forever!

Conversely, if they haven’t unsubscribed within the first 10 to 15 emails, then they will probably stay on your list for good. Fantastic! Another reason to make sure that your first 10 emails are first class.

The quality of your content also sets the tone for how much readers will respect you as a source of trusted advice. If the content has obviously been copied, scraped, or lacks substance, it’s likely your readers won’t view you as an authority and your product recommendations will be far less successful.

Step 4 – Include affiliate promotions, but leave the hard sell at home

While there’s nothing wrong with including relevant affiliate links to ClickBank products in the body or signature of your emails, the focus really needs to be on valuable content. So avoid the hard-sell in your mini-course.

One technique is to just say “if you’re looking for the best guide to XYZ, I really recommend ABC. It gets right to the heart of 123 and will teach you XYZ in no time” and then return to your main content. You need to remind yourself that you are trying to build trust. A constant sales pitch will undermine that.

Step 5 – Day 7 promotional email

After the 6-day course has ended, your subscribers are ready to get a hard-sell promotional email. This could be a product review or talk of a recent product launch. Pull out all the stops and sell, sell, sell. Include limited, time-sensitive offers or create truly unique deals by adding your own bonuses that you’ve put together for this promotion.

Step 6 – Keep emailing them every 3 days

At this point you need to decide which direction your newsletter will take:

Option 1 – If you want to build loyalty and have long-term subscribers, then offer a mix of informative and promotional emails, emailing every 3 days, with every 3^rd email being something promotional like a product review.

Option 2 – If you’re not interested in building up your email list as a long-term asset, you can take the option of ongoing, rapid-fire promotion. Product reviews, launch offers, YouTube reviews and affiliate links should feature heavily in all your emails. True, your subscribers will probably end up growing tired of it but hopefully by then they’ve bought from you at least once!

So, is emailing every 3 days too much? Surprisingly, our tests proved that emailing two or 3 times a week was optimal. There are reasons for this and why email frequency is a vital part of your newsletter strategy but the key is: don’t be afraid to email people frequently. Chances are they won’t be opening all your emails so in reality they aren’t actually getting 3 emails a week after all!

Step 7 – Track your newsletter performance like a bloodhound

Don’t fire and forget. Know which newsletters are helping and which are hurting.

• Check your autoresponder statistics to see which emails are generating the most unsubscribes. Look at what might be offending your subscribers in these emails. Can you fix it and keep them hanging on?
• Use ClickBank’s tracking IDs (TIDs) to see which promotional links are getting the most clicks. Create a new tracking ID for each newsletter. If nobody is clicking the links in a particular email, can you see why that is?
• Don’t forget to use redirects or other link-rewriting services to make those nasty affiliate links look pretty and inoffensive to click on!

Hold up just one minute – Is your niche newsletter-worthy?

Before you even start down the road of building a newsletter and getting sign-ups, you need to determine if a newsletter would be helpful or appropriate for your niche. Not every niche works well with a newsletter series. Dog training, World of Warcraft, and dating niches are good because people have a passion for these topics. On the contrary, I am yet to meet anyone who has an ongoing interest in yeast infections or hemorrhoids. Nobody wants to be reminded of these problems every three days!

Don’t underestimate the value of a good newsletter

Many affiliates find that a large portion of their earnings comes from their newsletter series. Sometimes they earn more from their newsletter than their actual website! Rolling out a killer newsletter strategy is one of the most profitable exercises you can undertake – you just need to make sure you do it right!

Have you used this newsletter strategy? Did you modify it to boost its converting power or did it not work for you?

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend you review the Do’s and Don’ts of Email Marketing before kicking off your next campaign!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

So, your page has been a success, you have some good rankings and you’ve decided to give the product its own full-blown website. Now comes the delicate task of directing that traffic to your new site. This is a strategy I use, and it works well for me. There are many ways to do it, but by following this strategy I minimize the disruption to my hard-earned rankings.

• Build the new site with a number of articles, each optimized for their own key phrases.
• Build external links to your site as usual.
• Wait a week or two.
• Assuming you are using a fresh domain, and depending on the extent of your link-building efforts, you will most likely be in the Google sandbox, and will be indexed, but not ranked for much.
• Put up an identical copy of your original product testing page that has been hosted on your other site. This time around, integrate menu and site links into the page and theme it with the rest of your new site. I recommend linking to all key pages on your new site from this page.
• Use a 301 redirect from the location of the test page on the old site, to the location of the test page on the new site.

This method ensures that approximately 70% or more (in my experience) of the PageRank or “Link Juice” from your original pages is passed on to the new page. You should see your old page fall out of the search results and your new page replace it. Additionally, the internal pages linked to from this article are given a boost as well, resulting in your new site gaining good search rankings at a much faster rate than without this boost.

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.

Posted by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

A common promotional technique used by many affiliates is to build a website based around an interest they have and promote related products in that niche, relying on organic search rankings and in-bound links for traffic.

Keeping the products that are being promoted relevant to the site content ensures that visitors to the site already have an interest in the product. This typically results in a much higher conversion rate than promoting unrelated products.

But following this strategy means that if the affiliate wishes to promote a product in an entirely different niche, a new site must be built from scratch – and a new site takes time and resources to build. It takes even more time for this new site to receive organic search traffic and to build links.

When you stumble across one of those truly exceptional opportunities to pair a high-quality product with what you believe is a hot market, there is no question that you have to act quickly.

This leads to the following question:

What is the most effective way to bring an untested product to market as quickly as possible?

The following tactics can be used to test a new product on an existing site, which lowers your costs and can lead to quicker results.

• If you have a number of sites, pick the site that is most closely associated with the new product. Think about the demographics of your sites’ audiences and how the new product could potentially fit into their lives. For example, if you were looking at promoting an eBook on “recipes for make-at-home, home cleaning products”, an existing site on dog training would be more complementary than a site on how to conquer World of Warcraft due to the demographic profiles. Use your judgment to match the new product with a similar demographic and appropriate existing site.
• Research three to four key phrases with a minimum of three words each using Google’s External Keyword Tool, and find the lowest competition/highest search count you can get away with. Take into account factors like how often your website is updated, how much “weight” you have in the search engines (PageRank) and how many external links you have pointing at the pages on your site. Generally speaking, the stronger these factors are, the higher the competitiveness of the key-phrases you can target, the faster you’ll have your new page ranked, and the more likely it is you’ll see a top 10 ranking.
• Build a promotional page on your existing site. This page could be in the form of a “Special Review,” a report on the new product, or simply an article on what the product you are promoting is about. Optimize this page to rank for the previously researched key phrases. This page should have obvious and well-featured links to the product you are promoting. Do not integrate this page into your existing site, and be sure to remove your standard menu from this page. However, include links to your homepage for those visitors that have reached this page from an internal link, and are not interested.
• Link to this page from within your site. The link should be visually featured as something different and unique, making it stand out and allowing the standard site visitor to identify it as somewhat unrelated to the theme of the current site. If a visitor is genuinely interested in the product, they’ll click.
• Build some links to this new page from external sources. Between 10 and 20 PageRank 1+ related links is ideal! This step is essential for emphasizing to the search engines that this new page is worthy of being taken seriously.
• Optional: Supplement with paid traffic. This may take the form of Google Adwords, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, or one of the many other paid search networks. Bear in mind that bigger is not always better. Some smaller networks have decent search volumes and much lower bid prices. In some cases, click-through and conversion rates are even better! This step is not essential, but it does allow you to begin seeing some results faster. If your return on advertising investment is positive, continue to tweak your campaign and leave it running even as your organic listings start to appear. A special note for those using Google Adwords: You may want to add links pointing to internal pages on your site to avoid being “slapped” -be sure to spend time researching and use good judgment.

Depending on a number of factors, you should start to see your organic rankings appear anywhere from as little as a few days to a number of weeks.

Continue to refine and test this single page for as long as you need to draw a conclusion as to whether it is profitable and worth pursuing.

Tomorrow’s Part 2 will discuss how you can move your product promotions over to a new, more relevant website without losing the promotional “juice” you’ve been creating!

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education and software tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers.

Please note: Any opinions expressed here represent those of the author, and are not necessarily recommended or endorsed by ClickBank.

Posted by: Dush Ramachandran, VP of Business Development

Every time I go to a large department store, I think the seasons are coming earlier and earlier. The weather outside is a balmy 90°F and the fall fashions are already on the shelf. Almost before the ghouls and goblins of Halloween displays are put away, holiday music seems to flood the stores.

But when you think about it, seasonal marketing makes a lot of sense. Even on ClickBank, where a number of products have year-round appeal, there are products whose appeal is definitely seasonal. Capitalizing on these seasonal trends can be a very lucrative approach for both affiliates and publishers.

For instance, looking up searches on Google Trends for specific seasonal terms like ‘Halloween costumes’ or ‘Christmas ornaments’ shows not only the time of year when these searches peak, but also the top 10 geographic areas from which these searches originate. This knowledge allows affiliates to not only plan their spending on AdWords and SEO efforts, but also to geo-target their advertising by having their ads shown in specific geographical markets.

Just as an example, I looked up ‘ski fitness’ on Google Trends and found that, predictably, the searches started in middle of the last quarter of the year, peaked from around the end of the year to the middle of the first quarter of the following year, and remained flat at zero volume for the remainder of the year. The top four countries these searches came from were UK, Australia, Canada and Switzerland. Doing a search on the ClickBank Marketplace for ‘ski fitness’ yielded a number of fitness products, including one that is specifically aimed at ski fitness.

So with a little forethought and planning, you could have a series of different promotions for each season, geographical area and topic of interest.

‘Tis the season to promote, it would seem.