These Myths Can Stop Your Affiliate Marketing Efforts From Ever Producing Results
This is an awesome post on what it takes to “make it” in affiliate marketing over on Eric Burnett’s blog…
Eric Burnett
The best part is, you can start off with any niche you want. For example, if your interested in the personal development niche, you can easily find a related affiliate program and get started.
Affiliate marketing is old but many people still assume that any form of Internet marketing is a scam. To be successful at this you need to get any notions about easy money out of your head and get into a business mindset.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of affiliate marketing success stories, and not one happened overnight. Making money overnight is not impossible for an experienced affiliate marketer but it is nearly impossible for someone who is new to the field.
When you become an affiliate marketer, you get the freedom to work from anywhere across the globe. The downside is that it is more work than your regular job, if you don’t outsource and have a good system in place.
When you’re doing a 9-5 job in a multinational corporation, you’re only answerable for the set of tasks that are given to you. But when you’re starting an affiliate marketing business, you’re carrying the responsibility of everything, right from generating traffic to minimizing the losses.
In business nothing beats having a plan. Affiliate marketing is your own real business. If you find anyone selling you a product that teaches you how to become a super affiliate ‘easily,’ stay away from it. Affiliate marketing is an incredibly simple and straight forward way to make money online, just be sure to follow the rules that are proven to work.
Most people wrongly assume that you need to have hundreds of blog posts or articles in order to compete. This is not true, or else all those affiliate marketers who make thousands of dollars from simple reviews would go broke.
What matters more than the quantity of the content here is how targeted it is. A common method that is used is to add dozens, or even hundreds of niche articles to a site and have a banner in place that links to the affiliate product.
Giving a personal and real review to your readers is a way to create instant credibility for you and the product, you will see better results like this. Your content has to be about the specific product you’re promoting.
Start the product introduction with a review then you can include other content that is related if you want. If your product is about empowering beliefs, then make sure it actually lives up to expectations.
Hard work is required in affiliate marketing, but not as much as some people make it seem.
Well, the real fact is that targeted affiliate sites don’t have much content to take care of. Your plan and system will keep everything in order plus you will have your priorities in order.
For example, if you write a review about a certain product, you can have that review up for a long time, unless the product owner makes some change of course.
All in all, the above myths regarding affiliate marketing don’t hold any water, so don’t get distracted from your main goal.
You tell ‘em Eric! Just keep moving forward. Slow and steady wins the race. 
There Are Our Customers Folks!
These are the people to whom we’re writing and marketing.
“What is a browser?” was the question Google asked over 50 passersby of different ages and backgrounds in Times Square in New York.
Check out the answers:
Keep this in mind next time you’re designing a web page, or ANYTHING that you’re going to put online! lol
WPSyndicator – Brand New MUST HAVE Tool for Bloggers
If you have a blog, you already know the importance of traffic.
What if you had a way to syndicate your blog posts across an assortment of Web 2.0 sites, where interested readers could get a taste of your content and then click on a link to go to your blog?
Well, now you do!
The WPSyndicator Plugin for WordPress Automates Your Content Syndication
WPSyndicator takes an excerpt of your blog post and posts it for you to 14 popular Web 2.0 sites.
PLUS it will automatically tweet it for you to your Twitter account. Of course, along with the excerpt will be a link back to your blog for the viewer to read the rest of the post.
Pretty cool, huh? Not only do you get direct traffic but a very valuable backlink as well (if you use anchor text for the link; you were planning on doing that, right? 
). You have the choice of what to set the excerpt to, with the default being 500 characters (around a paragraph or two).
The key is to give the reader just enough to get them hooked and be eager to go to your blog to read the rest. You can easily adjust the length of the excerpt, depending on the content you are syndicating, so you’ll always be able to have just the right amount out there as bait.
Andy also offers lifetime updates to WPSyndicator, which makes it even more of a bargain. He’s already issued a couple of updates that incorporated features suggested by his beta testers and pre-launch customers.
The latest update added…
- The ability to syndicate pages as well as posts
- Auto-syndication capability
- And rate limiting so you don’t get booted off the Web 2.0 sites for spamming
The plug-in itself is very easy to install and activate, just like other WordPress plug-ins.
It will take an hour or so the first time you use it because you’ll have to set up all your accounts for the various sites that your content gets syndicated to.
To make it even easier for you, Andy has included instructions right in the menu plus some helpful videos to walk you through many of the steps. He even built in the bit.ly connection so your links are automatically shortened for the micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Plurk.
One of the favorite features for many of the early users is the ability to syndicate past posts.
Once the plug-in is installed and set up, you will see a link that says “Click here to syndicate” whenever you go to edit a post. You can syndicate old or new posts with the click of a button.
However, be careful not to overdo it as you will look like a spammer.
Andy recommends doing just a couple posts per day, perhaps one new and one old. This will also give your readers time to see what you have to offer on the Web 2.0 sites instead of drowning them the first day out.
Web Users Judge Sites in the Blink of an Eye
Here’s an eye-opening discovery for anyone with a web site. I had heard that the time interval was a few seconds, but this reveals it to be much quicker!
From Nature.com…
Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.
Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second.
A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.
We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts.
“My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,” says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1.
Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal.
Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny.
In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice, the researchers say. “Unless the first impression is favourable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors,” Lindgaard warns.
First Impressions Last
For a typical commercial website, 60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google, says Marc Caudron of London web-design agency Pod1. This makes a user’s first impression even more critical, he explains. “You’ll get a list of sites, click the top one, and then either say ‘I’ve engaged’ and give it a few more seconds, or just go back to Google,” he says.
The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the ‘halo effect’: if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content (such as this article, for example) more favourably.
This is because of ‘cognitive bias’, Lindgaard explains. People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to ‘prove’ to themselves that they made a good initial decision.
The phenomenon pervades our society; even doctors have been shown to follow their initial hunches, Lindgaard says, relying heavily on a patient’s most immediately obvious symptom when making a diagnosis.
“It’s awfully scary stuff, but the tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize,” she says.
Beauty and Beholders
So what are the key ingredients of a good-looking website? Caudron suggests that the amount of graphics on the page should be strictly limited, perhaps to a single eye-catching image.
“It’s not about getting as much stuff on the page as possible,” he says.
These days, enlightened web users want to see a “puritan” approach, Caudron adds. It’s about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible.
For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that’s where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right.
Of course, says Caudron, the other golden rule is to make sure that your web pages load quickly, otherwise your customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression.
“That can be the difference between big business and no business,” he says.
Email Still Beats Social Networks for E-Commerce
Here’s a very interesting bit of news from the boys and girls over at WebProNews…
A new report from Econsultancy suggests that email still beats social networks when it comes to marketing for e-commerce. The report says that over a third (37%) of consumers don’t use a social networking site, and that those who have become a “fan” or “friend” of a company or brand online are still in the minority.
The report is based on a survey of over 1,400 U.S. consumers, which the firm calls “nationally representative.”
While Facebook may think email is “probably going away,” marketers are still having a great deal of success with it. And just as increased mobile adoption continues to fuel social media use, it’s not exactly hurting email.
The report suggests that the rise of mobile will continue fuel email’s success. It notes that each generation of chipsets moves mobile devices closer to the personal computer. “Advanced behaviors today (accessing the Internet or checking email from a mobile device) will clearly soon be commonplace, at least for people in their working years. Nearly two-thirds of people under 24 have checked email on a mobile device,” Econsultancy says.
“Online product research contributes a far larger percentage of total retail than the 8% directly attributed to e-commerce, while the evolving nature of digital interaction and customer service is changing the fundamental relationship between companies and consumers,” says Econsultancy’s US Research Director, Stefan Tornquist. “The winners will be those who use digital communications most effectively, to influence and enable both online and offline purchases.”
“Although a variety of media are competing for consumer attention, email continues to be the desired channel for many types of commercial communication,” adds Tornquist. “Social networking and its effect on the nature of brand is the hottest topic in digital marketing, and deservedly so. It’s still worthwhile for marketers to remember that social network adoption is far from maturity.”
The entire report can be found here.
Of couse, it’s not really a competition between social media and email. Both should be part of your marketing arsenal, and are effectively used together all the time. For example, another recent study from ExactTarget found that nearly 40% of consumers visit Facebook and Twitter to supplement the news, information or deals they receive via email marketing.
How do you incorporate social media into your email strategy? Leave me a comment!
