Marketing

5 Tips For Affiliate Marketing On Your Blog

May 4, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Affiliate Marketing On Your Blog

One type of marketing people under-utilize and take for granted is affiliate marketing. Most affiliate marketers only get a few dollars from their efforts which isn’t enough to generate a full-time income. After analyzing other affiliate marketers who make six-figure incomes from promoting other people’s products, I came up with five tips for affiliate marketing that you need to implement in your blogging strategy.

#1: Search For The Higher Commissions

The successful affiliate marketers I analyzed like to promote other people’s training courses and products to get a higher commission. Some people who create training courses will give affiliates 50% of the commission each time a customer buys the training course through the affiliate link. Plenty of training courses get sold for $100 which means you would make $50 per affiliate sale. Udemy offers an excellent affiliate program where you get to make about half of the profit per sale…by promoting training courses that you did not create. It is practically impossible to find a reasonably priced product that you could make $50 per sale through the Amazon Associates program. Udemy currently uses LinkShare for its affiliate program.

[tweetthis url=”http://bit.ly/1EB73p3″]Look for affiliate opportunities that give you a high percentage of the commission. LinkShare is a good one.[/tweetthis]

#2: Only Promote Products Related To Your Niche

When you promote other people’s products, you must only promote products related to your niche. If you promote too many products that are too different from each other, your visitors won’t understand the meaning of your brand. When it comes to affiliate marketing, it is better to offer specific products than a wide range of products. A brand that is not specific has a vague meaning. Getting specific allows you to develop a clearer identity for your brand and offer more products that your visitors are more likely to buy. You may wonder if you could possibly find affiliate links of enough of your products if you get really specific, but in reality, there are thousands of products (if not millions) that you could promote as affiliate links. Running out of products to promote won’t be a problem that you come across. If you do come across that problem, then you need to use more affiliate platforms. You could also start creating products to fill in the gap.

#3: Don’t Over Promote Affiliate Links

Your blog is a place for people to read your content and develop a greater appreciation for what you stand for. If you primarily think of a blog as a money-making platform, then your blog is not going to generate money. Success on the web starts with your desire to empower others, and as you learn new techniques, money becomes the by-product. It took me several years and mistakes before I finally thrived on the web.

If your blog is filled with affiliate links, then you will ruin your readers’ experiences on your blog. The best readers are the ones who will come back to your blog and read your content often. These readers don’t stick around because you have a bunch of affiliate links on your blog’s sidebar. They stick around because they appreciate your content.

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1EB73p3″]Visitors will only stick around if they appreciate your content, not because of affiliate links.[/tweetthis]

#4: Don’t Rely On Affiliate Marketing

One of the most common mistakes I see affiliate marketers make is that they rely on affiliate marketing for their income. Some affiliate marketers are successful with this method and make six-figure incomes. However, the revenue affiliate marketers generate is dependent on products being available at desirable rates. If one affiliate generates half of your revenue, and that affiliate suddenly no longer becomes an option, then you lost half of your revenue just like that. If an affiliate decides to reduce the commission rate, then you lose more revenue. Although this is true for any marketer (even if the marketer creates his own products), these types of changes have a stronger financial impact on the people who rely on affiliate marketing to make sales.

Affiliate marketing is wonderful, but you must also create your own products. I promote other people’s products, but I also have over a dozen books on Amazon and a few training courses on Udemy. These products account for the bulk of my revenue because I get the best rates on my own products and I get to control the product creation rate.

Having your own products serves as a way to give you more options. You can still promote a fellow entrepreneur’s Kindle book and make 4% of the commission, but once you write your own Kindle book, you can promote that Kindle book and get up to a 70% commission per sale (KDP’s standard commission rate for a book priced between $2.99 and $9.99. You’ll make a little more by using your own affiliate link). Other affiliate marketers may decide to promote your products, and then you will get more sales in the short-term and the long-term. When affiliates promote your products, more people see them. More people seeing your products may lead to returning customers and word of mouth marketing. As you get more customers, you will build an authority on the web that will be impossible for others to ignore.

#5: Promote Products With Different Price Ranges

When you become an affiliate marketer, you need to promote three types of products: low-priced, mid-priced, and high-priced products. These three different price points depend on your niche, but some of the products you promote need to be priced at over $100. The more expensive products typically lead to greater commissions per sale but a lower volume of sales while the less expensive products attract a greater volume of sales but lower commissions per sale. Offering the perfect mix of these products will ensure that you get more sales and revenue when potential customers see your affiliate marketing in action.

In Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is a powerful type of marketing in which you don’t have to put in any work to create a product, but you can make revenue by promoting other people’s products to your audience. However, affiliate marketing only leads to a full-time income if you use it effectively. Moreover, affiliate marketing is by no means the right basket to put all of your eggs into. That’s too risky, and your earnings are dependent on affiliate platforms sticking around and keeping their commission rates at the same values. Affiliate marketing combined with product creation is one of the most effective ways to make money in today’s era.

What are your thoughts on affiliate marketing? Which tip was your favorite? Do you have any affiliate marketing tips for us? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

10 Easy Ways To Get More Product Sales

April 29, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

how to get more sales

Is getting product sales on your mind? With a massive inventory of products and millions of products getting created every year, it is harder to stand out in a world that gives us countless choices. In fact, it will be impossible for someone to buy and use every product that will get created this year. Getting more product sales requires you to stand out and grow an audience, but there are various components that go into standing out and growing your audience. In this article, I will discuss 10 easy ways for you to get more sales for your products.

#1: Create Landing Pages With Autoresponders

Landing pages are effective pages that are optimized for getting email subscribers. Landing pages are simply pages that promote free products and have a form where people can enter their email address. The only way to access the free product is by entering an email address which is why landing pages are very attractive.

If you are using a service like iContact or Aweber, you can have your new subscribers go through an autoresponder. An autoresponder is a series of emails that are spaced out by a day or two. These emails allow you to strengthen your relationship with your readers. At the end of your autoresponder must be a product related to the free product you just offered.

If you have more than one product, then you can create multiple landing pages and autoresponders. I have landing pages and autoresponders set up for multiple training courses, and I will continue to create landing pages and autoresponders for my future products.

#2: Test Out One Variable Every Week

Sometimes, one small change can make a big difference. If you want to get more sales, you need to test small changes to see which ones will lead to more sales. You need to test out one variable for your product every week and see how many sales it gets. If your product makes more sales that week, then the one small change you made is a keeper, and you should apply that change to some of your other products. If your product makes fewer sales, then you should go back to the old way. It is important for you to only test out one variable every week because if you make multiple changes to your product in a short amount of time, then you won’t know which change resulted in an increase or decrease in sales. Maybe you averaged the same number of sales by testing out multiple variables, but one of those variables could have halved your sales while the other one could have doubled your sales—still giving you the same average amount of sales. You want to keep the variable that doubled your sales, but you won’t know what that variable was if you change too many things at once.

#3: Promote Your Product On Your Blog

The best way to promote a product on your blog is through the menu. That way, your product doesn’t take up too much space on your blog, but it takes up just enough space on your blog to be noticed. I am careful about promoting my products on my blog because I don’t want to be over-promotional. Moreover, I want people to visit my landing page and subscribe that way so I can lead them through the autoresponder sequence. It’s still good to promote your product on your blog and occasionally reference it in your blog posts. Some people buy my products because they heard about them on my blog before hearing about them anywhere else.

#4: Get On Joint Ventures

Joint ventures are growing in significance. In a joint venture, you and a marketer agree to promote each other’s products to your email lists. You tell your subscribers about someone else’s product and that same person tells the people on her list about your product. Joint ventures allow your product to reach new audiences and generate more sales in the process.

#5: Connect Your Products Together

Many people like to list their products. At the end of the public speaking event, the public speaker may mention some of the products he created and list them one by one. That’s not connecting your products together. That’s simply listing what you have.

Connecting your products together is far greater than listing them. When you connect your products together, you are letting your customers know that your products properly segue from one into the other. Think Part One’s and Part Two’s, but every product you create properly fits somewhere in the sequence. You may have two unrelated products, but if you can create a bridge in between those two products filled with the proper segues, you can get the two most unrelated products to be connected. What’s the segue from a Twitter book to a Pinterest book? What’s the segue from a photography training course to a Javascript training course? What products would you need to (and want to) create to form the proper bridge? If you don’t want to create products that create the necessary bridge, you can simply expand on those two areas. For the photography training course, you can create more products relating to photography while for the Javascript training course, you can create more products about coding languages. Just make sure no product stands alone.

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1NM9pnK”]Connect your products together so none of them stand alone. [/tweetthis]

#6: Build An Email List And Communicate To It

A landing page is a great way to grow your email list. Here’s one of my landing pages (the free product will show you how to get more email subscribers, so it’s relevant here). However, a landing page and an autoresponder can only go so far. Many of the people who go through your autoresponder will choose to not buy your product. Then again, that’s with practically every product. Most people who see a product won’t buy it. That’s simply the nature of the game.

When you have a large email list, and you communicate to the people on your email list, you are opening the door to returning customers. Once every six weeks, you should promote your products to your email list. The money is in the list, but only if you interact with the people in your list in an effective manner.

#7: Use Social Media To Promote Your Products The Right Way

Social media is not the place to say, “Buy my product! Buy my product!” Social media is a place where posts with pictures and stories rule. If you can turn your product marketing into an effective story or advice in the form of pictures, your efforts will really pay off. Take for example Kim Garst who recently published Will The Real You Please Stand Up, got the book on multiple bestsellers lists. For part of her book’s promotion, she went on Twitter and tweeted to her large audience of over 300,000 followers. The tweets were valuable, contained pictures, and promoted her book all at the same time. Her tweets spread, got attention, and led to more book sales. Here is an example of one of her tweets about the book.

[tweetthis twitter_handles=”@MarcGuberti” url=”http://bit.ly/1NM9pnK”]You can use #SocialMedia to promote your products, but only if you use it the right way.[/tweetthis]

#8: Offer Discounts

Why doesn’t love discounts? Discounts are attractive because they make us feel like smart buyers who know how to effectively spend our money. Offer discounts to your subscribers and social media followers so they are more likely to buy your products. Discounts may not generate as much money, but you’ll get a sale, a customer who can spread the word, and your product will get more exposure.

#9: Over Deliver

When you offer a product, be sure to include bonuses and give your customer more than what he was expecting. Over delivering doesn’t necessarily change the amount of sales you make for an individual product, but your customers like when you over deliver. Some of your customers will expect an over delivery in your future products and become returning customers. Over delivering in your products doesn’t lead to much short-term sales, but for the long-term, you could get thousands of returning customers who expect you to over deliver and are grateful for all of the value you provide in your products. All you have to do at that point is consistently over deliver.

#10: Create More Products

One way to get more product sales is by creating more products. A second product opens the doors to returning customers. 20 products opens the doors to a higher percentage of your customers becoming returning customers. If you have one book about Twitter and one book about Pinterest, it is possible for you to get returning customers. However, some people will like Twitter and not care for Pinterest and vice-versa. If you have additional books about Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and a few other social networks, then there is a greater likelihood of a customer becoming a returning customer. One of the options is bound to attract a customer’s attention.

In Conclusion

Getting more product sales is on the top of many marketers’ strategies. Part of getting product sales is the marketing itself, but another part of getting product sales is the experience you provide for customers who buy your products and the experience you provide just before someone buys your product. It takes a lot of marketing to get numerous sales for your products, and in some cases, the marketing is more challenging than creating the actual product.

Which tip did you like the most? Do you have any additional tips for us? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

8 Word Of Mouth Marketing Tips To Get More People To Talk About You

December 1, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

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Word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful ways to spread your ideas, products, and overall message. The more people there are talking about you, the more you will spread. Spreading farther allows you to get more subscribers and customers. Friends tell their friends about you, and those friends tell their friends about you, and the cycle continues.

Before people can talk about you and spread your message, they need to know who you are. In order to spread farther, you need to optimize these 8 word of mouth marketing tips.

#1: Utilize social media

Social media is a powerful place to connect with more people. There are millions of people on various social networks, and with this big of a selection, there will be thousands or even millions of people who will be a part of your target audience. The people in your target audience will be the ones who talk about you the most.

In order to boost the chances of these people talking about you, you need to do two things on social media. The first thing you need to do is share valuable content. Sharing valuable content will make others see you as a credible expert in your niche. The second thing you need to do is interact with your followers. Interacting with your followers will allow you to build strong relationships with those followers. Those strong relationships may result in people spreading your ideas, products, and overall message through word of mouth.

#2: Post valuable content on your blog

Although it is great to share valuable content on your social networks, it would be ideal to post valuable content on your blog and share that content often. Sharing your content with your audience allows that audience to paint a better picture of who you are. If you are constantly promoting other people’s content without promoting your own, your audience will not know much about you.

The content on your blog is your unique voice on the web that people talk about. When people talk about the Huffington Post article you tweeted out, most of these people will only reference the Huffington post article, not the tweeter. If you tweet your blog posts, and your blog posts spark up a conversation with a group of people, you will get referenced. Then, some of the people listening will ask who you are. The person who talked about your blog post tells them who you are, and word of mouth marketing continues to spread your message far.

The more someone visits your blog, the more inclined that person will be to tell their friends about you. The best way to keep someone on your blog for a long period of time is by writing valuable content. It may take more time to write valuable content than the content that anyone could create, but the extra time you invest in making your content valuable is well worth it. In fact, if you keep someone on your blog long enough, that person may become a subscriber and/or customer.

#3: Over deliver

We like to talk about the people who put in 110% in their expertise because we want to give that person kudos. We like to talk about the people who influence our decisions and how we act. We like talking about these people because we want others to get influenced as well, and it allows us to show off our intelligence.

Over delivering is something that few people do. Over delivering means going the extra mile that others have deemed as unnecessary. Some of the people who talk about your niche will talk about you with their friends. Just as bosses like to reward the good employees with raises, we like to reward the over deliverers by spreading the word about them.

#4: Have a compelling story

Your compelling story is another factor that determines how conversations about you develop. There will be people who have not heard of you before. When a friend asks who you are, the person who was talking to you needs to be armed with the appropriate knowledge to answer that question.

Your compelling story is what the people talking about you need to know in order to advance the conversation. A compelling story allows people to know

Who you are
What you have been through
What your mission is
A simple, general idea on how you plan on accomplishing that mission
Your credible accomplishments.

While including this knowledge in your compelling story, it is important to write a compelling story that people would want to read. A compelling story is not the opportunity to go on a boring rant about how awesome you are. A compelling story conveys those five main points in a way that makes people want to read from the beginning of the compelling story to the end.

The compelling stories all have those five main points, but there are slight differences for how a compelling story is written based on the niche you are in. If you want to create a compelling story, I recommend looking at the stories that other individuals and businesses have on their websites. While reading the stories, ask yourself whether they were compelling or not. If a particular story was compelling, ask yourself why you thought that story was compelling. Then, use that knowledge to add elements to your story so you can make it compelling.

#5: Turn yourself into someone worth talking about

This phrase simply means to accomplish goals and do things that people would want to talk about. You want to be remarkable in your niche and stand out of the crowd. We like talking about well-known people who have a lot of credibility.

Even if you have many credible accomplishments, you should always strive to boost your credibility. There is no limit to how much you can boost your credibility. The more things you do, the more things people can mention when they tell their friends about you.

#6: Reward your returning customers

Your returning customers are the ones who may end up buying your products for years to come. In order to strengthen those relationships and turn customers into the customers who will buy your products for many years to come, you need to reward the returning customers.

You should offer returning customers an exclusive deal, or better yet, an exclusive product. The more you reward your returning customers, the more likely those customers will be to buy your products over a long period of time.

#7: Create a referral program

A referral program is a great way to get more people to spread the word about you regardless of how strong your connection with that person is. These people will promote your products and services so they can get a small cut for each sale they make. You will make an overall profit, and there will be one other person promoting you.

Creating a generous referral program (as long as you are still making a profit) may entice people with big email lists to promote your product. This will result in more people knowing who you are, and then word of mouth marketing will continue to allow more people to know who you are.

#8: Be nice

When people talk about you, it is ideal for those people to be saying good things about you, your expertise, and what you stand for. Having influence is not enough. You need to have a good influence on the people you impact.

There are nice people and mean people all over the world. Many of us enjoy talking and hearing about nice people, and they are the ones who remember in a positive way. Many people remember Chesley Sullenberger III for saving all of the passengers on a U.S. Airways airplane by crash landing into the Hudson River. Derek Jeter is another person who we will remember very well.

These people have a good influence and are embedded in our memory because they were nice people who we admire because of the actions they took to make a goal happen. When we talk about these people, we enjoy talking about them. We talk about how Chesley had to land the plane so effectively that it did not hit land. We talk about how Jeter got 3,000 hits and was the icon of his era. We talk about the nice people, and those are the people who easily have a strong influence on others.

You can utilize the other seven methods to get people to talk about you, but being nice is what will result in people saying good things about you.

In Conclusion

Word of mouth marketing is a powerful way to spread. In high school, rumors fly around at a crazy rate, and if one person discovers the rumor, everyone knows about it the following day. That’s word of mouth marketing at its best.

The more accomplishments you have, the better people will be able to talk about you. Therefore, any type of mediocrity that you have must come to an end for you to be influential in your niche.

Which tip was your favorite? Do you have any additional methods for effective word of mouth marketing?

6 Methods To Promote Your Blog Posts

October 15, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

6 methods to promote your blog posts

Your blog is a powerful tool to get more traffic and allow people to see free content so they are enticed to subscribe and buy products. The main way to get blog traffic is by promoting your blog posts and getting more traffic for each individual blog posts. If 10 of your blog posts get 20 visitors, that’s 200 visitors total just from those 10 blog posts.

That means promoting your blog posts so they reach more people is essential to getting more traffic. In this article, I will share with you six different methods you can use to promote your blog posts.

Include pictures in your blog posts and pin them. It is a shame that many marketers are not putting pictures on their blogs and are forgetting about Pinterest. Not only is Pinterest popular (it has over 70 million users), but it is still growing. Pinterest may even exceed 100 million users by the end of the year. Better yet, content spreads rapidly. 80% of pins being repins is one statistic that indicates how far content on Pinterest can spread.
Tweet your blog posts more often. Tweeting your blog posts more often means increasing the frequency in which you tweet and the percentage of tweets that contain your blog posts. Tweeting about your blog often is entirely okay, and tweeting more frequently will not annoy your followers. In fact, tweeting more frequently will help you a lot.
Create a Facebook Page. Although not everyone gets to see your Facebook posts, Facebook is still the largest social network of them all with over 1 billion users. These Facebook users are very active on the site and like/share other people’s content often. Here are some additional reasons for why you need a Facebook Page.
Create SlideShare presentations. SlideShare is the social network to watch out for this year and the year after that. SlideShare has had great success with big businesses and companies who boast getting more traffic from SlideShare presentations than from audiences that range from hundreds of thousands of people to millions of people on other social networks.
Promote your blog posts within your blog posts. The three links you see above this text are examples of this method in action. Including links to your older blog posts allows those blog posts to get more views while reducing your blog’s bounce rate at the same time!
Email the people on your list about your blog posts. Every week, I send out one email containing all of the blog posts I wrote for the week. These emails have seen massive success and numerous clicks. Writing multiple blog posts every day and using RSS to send people emails did not work as well.

Promoting your blog posts will allow more people to see your content. Some of the people who see your content will decide to subscribe to your blog and buy some of your products. What were your thoughts on the list? Do you have a 7th method to promoting blog posts? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

We Are All Witnesses And Talkers

September 19, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Word Of Mouth

One of the things I do when I go to Cape May is run up and down the boardwalk. The beauty of this boardwalk is that on one side is the beach, and on the other side are fancy looking hotels and big houses. Basically, there are plenty of things to look at throughout the journey.

While running, I happened to overhear a conversation two teenage girls were having about SnapChat. SnapChat is a growing social network that allows people to create content that self destructs within a certain amount of time. While no content can survive for over 24 hours on SnapChat, there are many snaps that self-destruct in under five seconds. There are many graphs and charts that show SnapChat has grown remarkably, and most of it is because of word of mouth.

To think two teenage girls were talking about SnapChat as if they had been talking about it for a while indicates that those are not the only two teens out there who talk about SnapChat often. SnapChat is the type of social network where you and the other person must both have SnapChat accounts in order to share and see the other person’s snaps. It’s not like Twitter or any other social network where you can see someone’s content whether you are logged in or not.

Just like the FAX machine, your friends must have SnapChat accounts in order for it to be of any value. This set up gave SnapChat the framework it needed to spread through word of mouth.

Since I was on vacation, I was out for practically the entire day. After a nice shower, my family and I walked through the town, and I happened to overhear another conversation. This conversation was more based on a few people telling a friend how certain social networks work. Sure enough, SnapChat consumed most of the conversation.

In both of these scenarios, I was a witness to the word of mouth that resulted in SnapChat becoming contagious and sticky. You may have been a witness to the word of mouth that spread SnapChat, but you were definitely the witness to word of mouth for something else.

In addition, I am sure that you tell your friends about businesses, ideas, brands, blogs, and other things as well. That is also an example of word of mouth marketing in which you are the talker. We are all talkers just as much as we are witnesses. If you want to know some good places to visit in Cape May, I would be quick to give you a whole bunch of places you could visit such as The Washington Inn, which is the best restaurant I have ever been to. When I go to The Washington Inn, I eat very little throughout the day just so I could have two entries. That’s how good they are.

Just like that, I decided to talk about The Washington Inn. That’s word of mouth, and the restaurant deserves it. As I talk about how I have been eating at The Washington Inn for many years, I am being the talker, and you are being the witness.

This is how ideas spread. There are enough talkers who reach out to enough witnesses. Enough talkers can mean 100 Joe Schmo’s or 10 highly influential people. There is no exact number, and you won’t know how close your idea is to being big until it spreads far enough to the point where it becomes one of the big things. The early adopters of SnapChat needed their friends to create accounts in order for SnapChat to be useful. Then, it kept on spreading from there.

The Mighty Four C’s Of Digital Marketing

September 18, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Digital marketing is something that few people understand, but it is also something critical towards success. When people think of digital marketing, they think of all of the different P’s that apply to other aspects of business. However, digital marketing is a different kind of marketing that has 4 C’s instead of P’s. Here are the 4 C’s of digital marketing:

Creating: You need to constantly be creating products. If you create a book, create another one. Then create another product. Keep on creating so you have more products to market.
Curating: In addition to creating new products and content, you need to organize those products and content. Curating your content and products will make it easier for your visitors and customers to find what they are looking for. Some people who visit a social media blog like this one couldn’t care less about growing an audience on Facebook, but they do care about growing an audience on Pinterest. Curating allows people to find the specific information that they are looking for faster.
Connecting: You need to have strong connections in order to move forward. Nardo’s Natural’s success as a brand was made possible by Barbara Corcoran who invested in the brand in an episode on Shark Tank. Successful entrepreneurs like Barbara have numerous connections, and she got the brothers who founded Nardo’s Natural on Good Morning America through one of her connections. Without connecting with Barbara, Nardo’s Natural probably would have not made it to Good Morning America let alone become a successful brand.
Culture: The people who visit your blog, follow you on your social networks, and buy your products need to feel a sense of unity with each other. You need to either directly or indirectly create a culture revolving around your product, blog, or service. This culture will allow people who know you to unify together so they can promote you, talk about your products, and buy your future products.

Those are the 4 C’s of digital marketing. What are your thoughts on the list and which of the 4 C’s resonates with you the most? Please share your thoughts below.