You’ve probably heard or read the same advice over and over again. The growing numbers of affiliate programs are all claiming to be the best of the best.

Besides that, many of them make you think, that you don’t have to do more than just placing a banner or two to start earning more money than you could ever dream of. But, sorry I have to break this on you, this is not the case. This may apply to some who have already built up a successful site and are accepted to be an “expert”. But for the rest of us, affiliate marketing needs a little work and time.

The Basics

Email can be an effective affiliate marketing instrument. (Check out Marketing Is Not What You Think It Is to find out why it’s just an instrument). If done correctly, it is. But with it comes spam. If you want to use email for your affiliate marketing, you have to be sure that you stand by what you are offering. The easiest way to do this is to actually try and use the product you want to promote.

Try to differ from the usual

The masses of existing affiliate offers made people already resistant to the sales and marketing pitch being presented. Don’t blame them. Imagine yourself being bombarded by these things each and every day and you will feel the same.

Squeeze out your creative juices and give them something original enough to stop them from leaving and make them stay to read on. Be unique.

Patience is essential in affiliate marketing

Keep in mind that most types of advertising do not give out results instantly. Putting up a banner for your affiliate product and getting it off after a few days should not be done. You may think that they are not being effective or that they are not working. It takes time. Look at your stats to find out what works and what don’t.

Some of the affiliate marketing strategies that have worked successfully for you in the past may not work the same way on other campaigns. It is worth the try but do not expect the results to be exactly the same.

If you are having continuous problems with your affiliate program, get in touch with the product creator. If they are committed to their business, they will help you in every possible way. It all boils down to affiliate marketing being the survival of the best of the best, the smartest and the most patient.

Follow these basic steps and you will eventually find yourself climbing up the ladder of affiliate marketing.

1. The best affiliate marketers cover their links.

Cloaking affiliate links may not seem necessary, but it actually is. Apparently, visitors will not tend to click on your link when they see that it is leading to an affiliate program on your site once they point their mouse over them.

The usual tendency is for them to go directly to the affiliate domain. Thus ignoring your affiliate ID from the URL displayed. The best way to avoid this problem is by covering your URL. There are cloaking tools available over the Internet that you can take advantage of. I just started using the free WP Affiliate Link Cloaker.

2.    Successful affiliate marketers create and distribute their articles.

Writing articles regarding your market niche is necessary to expand your reputation as a specialist in your field.

You can get the greatest benefits not just from writing these articles but also from getting those articles published and reprinted by other site owners and ezine publishers. Your articles will then give you both reputation and links from other web sites because of the resource box attached at the end of each article.

3. Affiliate marketers focus on a niche.

Loading your site with content that is focused on a certain product or service niche is one way of getting more web traffic in your target market.

There are tools over the Internet that can help you point out market niches that is important for your website.

4. Top affiliate marketers use autoresponders.

Autoresponders are important tools that enable you to send out a timed series of email messages to those persons that signed up for them.

Most of the time, these autoresponders are sent through by a third party provider like AWeber.

5. Smart affiliate marketers build web pages in order to pre-sell.

Create either testimonial pages or review pages that talk about and pre-sell the product or service you are affiliated with. This is a great method of getting increased orders for your chosen affiliate programs.

Many programs even offer an article or recommended text for email messages to sell their products for you.

6. An outstanding affiliate marketer collects email addresses.

The best affiliates gather email addresses on their web site by presenting free reports through autoresponders, giving out ebooks, eCources or even Software or Templates.

This method is best used in building your own list of email addresses to contact. A great tool I use myself is Pop Up Dominatation.

7. Affiliate marketers optimize for the search engines.

SEO is now getting more complex as new and more webmasters participate. But the basics put into your site (on page SEO) can add to your visibility over time.

The most critical of the many SEO techniques is to use title tags that show individual page content. Many authors write a master title tag and apply that site-wide. This is the worst thing you could do for search engine rankings.

Conclusion

If you understand and make use of the above mentioned techniques, you can be one of the top people that are making it big in affiliate marketing. What are you waiting for?

Marketing is bringing the market to desire your product and not a collection of tactics to do so.

Common beliefs are, that marketing and advertising or selling are the same. But there are differences. Advertising is just a part of Marketing and sales are the result of good marketing.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MARKETING AND ADVERTISING

Marketing and Advertising, although they sound similar in reality they are not. Advertising is only a part of the bigger game called Marketing.

• Marketing encompasses complete conceptualization of a brand right from research to designing to advertising to sale.
• Advertising, on the other hand is a component of the marketing process which is nothing but conveying the message through variety of mediums to promote the product.

Advertising

Advertising is one of the most important component of a marketing strategy and also the most expensive. Advertising constitutes sending the message across the public about your company, product or services. It also constitutes behind the scenes work like the process involving formation of various strategies and coming up with a right one to target the viewers.

The strategy consists of planning things like placing ads, deciding what media to use, what time, frequency etc. The advertisements are generally placed via mediums like television, snail mail, newspapers, internet, emails, radio, magazines, mobile messaging, flyers, billboards etc. The most popular one is of course television although advertising on the internet is becoming increasingly popular too.

Marketing

The Easiest way to differentiate advertising from marketing is to consider marketing as a cake and if you cut the cake, advertising is one of the pieces of that cake. The other pieces of the cake are market research of the product, product designing, media planning, PR, product pricing, customer satisfaction, customer support, sales and many more. All these components or pieces of the cake should work independently but collectively in achieving the bigger goal i.e. sell the product and build the company’s reputation on the market.

Marketing is a marathon process involving many tasks that involve hours, sometimes days of research. The research part of marketing takes the longest duration as it involves thoroughly understanding the behavior of people towards a product. Designing the product and developing advertising strategy is also a time consuming process. Marketing can also be perceived as a medium between consumers and the company.

Don’t get confused

But many entrepreneurs often make the mistake of confusing advertising with marketing. They try to ape big companies like Coke and Pepsi in advertising but they simply ignore the work that goes behind that. The classical example of this is, take the case of logo for instance. Many business owners are so hysterical about the logo of their company in their advertisements, that they think that it will simply bring in the sales. But what makes a logo work is nothing other than the reputation of the company and the logo must have a feeling to it and should truly reflect the company’s values.

You should also remember that these companies spend fortunes on advertising which a new start up business can’t. Rather than spending unnecessary money on branding your product one should invest money and time in communicating to the consumers that they can address their expectations. After building reputation and growing to a big size company you can think of these lavish ideas. Educating the consumers also helps as it will give them an understanding that you know what you do and are best at doing just that.

Smart marketers are aggressive in the approach rather than passive. They provoke reader’s minds by prompting them to do something rather than just making them knowledgeable of the product. Smart marketers also bring home the names, addresses and contact numbers of people who are really interested in hiring your company by employing aggressive marketing. Thus having a good marketing campaign speaks a lot about the company and their products and advertising gives that finishing touch to the hard work done by the marketing people in selling a product.

MARKETING AND SALES: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?

Marketing and sales are one of the most important components of a business’s survival in the market. While both are dependent on each other many people confuse marketing with sales and vice-versa which is a big mistake.

• Marketing involves designing a product according to the needs of the market and customers, promoting the product through advertising etc. and setting up a competitive price for the product. Marketing is a platform which drives sales.
• While on the other hand the sales process is what you do to successfully sell a product and fetch a contract.

Sales and marketing together is a part of selling and one cannot do without the other. They can also be called activities. The success of a business is critical to the success of these two important activities.

Marketing is the backbone of a company’s future and launching pad for the sales. While the marketing process encompasses the design of the product, advertising etc. the sales process is the execution of all the efforts which involves direct interaction with client either by in-person meetings, cold calls or by networking. But there is always an ongoing rivalry between the two one claiming dominancy over other.

The marketing people say they have an upper hand because it is them who designs the product, lays down the strategy and also develops the essential tools for sales. They say sales are the outcome of marketing and thus should follow its directions. The sales people might not agree with this view and may take the complete opposite in their opinion. They think that it is the sales people who actually sells a product and bring money to the business.

But many experts believe that marketing should play a pivotal role among the two. A successful marketing campaign makes sales easy and makes people believe that it is actually the sales people who are the dominant leaders. The most important role of a marketing department is to create opportunities for the sales department. Marketing drives sales and sales drives companies’ success. Marketing is like a life support for sales, one who is constantly backing up the sales department and enabling them to successfully deliver the end product. There shouldn’t be a race to gain supremacy over another department but a race to win the market and customers working together.

Many businesses combine sales and marketing together but in reality they have different targets:

• The sales department is interested in fulfilling the requirements of what the customer asked for
• The marketing department is actually busy studying what the market demands.

The goal of the marketing department is to foresee how the market will shape up in the future. They should envision their product catering to the needs of the market for next few years and be ready to make design changes in their product accordingly.

It is very important that a company integrates their sales and marketing department in a well fashioned manner. It is the correct integration of these two important entities that fuels the growth of a company. Each department has its own role and should go hand in hand in selling the product of the company and should be the foremost important criteria.

1. You pretend to be an expert in order to build more credibility but in reality, you do not have any idea about blogging.

How to fix:

You need to research and learn more about how to use your blog features and the basics about blogging and the community before you even start one. Get to know how to make use of your blog for visibility and accessibility over the Internet. Have a basic knowledge about trackbacks, commenting,how to use social media and permanent link features. It will prove important and necessary.

2. No blog category. The readers are confused about what topics are you writing about. They do not have any idea what they are getting into. They probably would not even attempt to find yours if they have to guess first what it is you are trying to say.

How to fix:

Try to answer these questions: What is your main message? Your focus? What will be in your blog that your readers can benefit from? What is the aim of your blog? Who would you like to see reading your blog?

3. Your blog does not reflect you and your business. Your blog is a mess and your customers cannot seem to find any similarity between your blog and your business.

What can be done:

Look at your blog as an extension of your business. Make your customers feel like they are doing business with you in the comfortable ambiance of your office. Your blog should reflect your business image. What do you stand for? How would you like the people to talk about you?

4. You have no idea about other blogs in the same field. You do not spend time looking at other blogs to see what is being written about and to see the strategies that others are using. You do not know what is happening on the market.

What I would do:

Blogging takes commitments. If you want to make it big, treat it like a business! You should start using a Feed reader, subscribing to other bloggers newsletters, using the Twitter Search function etc. You better know what others are talking about to find out what the market wants and needs.

5. Your blogs have no appropriate contents posted. If all you ever have in your blogs are advertising and marketing about your products, expect your readers to get bored, go away and never come back. They have had enough of sales being presented to them.

What I would do:

Spare them the sales talk. Try to write something not about what you are offering. Find other related topics you can talk about. Get them to subscribe to your newsletter, and make your money there!

6. You have not visited your blog site for some time. One of the sins in blogging is not updating. Expect to lose the traffic you have been getting.

What I would do:

If you are not doing anything about your blog, why have one in the first place? Make a schedule. Commit yourself to update your blog on a regular basis but on your own pace. So you don’t stress yourself and let your readers know that you are present and that they are able to contact you through your blog. Give some of your time to your blogs.

What would you add?

What do you think are other common traps to avoid and how would you do that? Please share your knowledge and experience in the comments below.

When a business decides that they would like to have some help selling their product or service, they will then start an affiliate program. When they do this, they are allowing others to sign up and sell their products or a particular service that they are offering. The ones that sign up to the affiliate program have multiple ways that they can market the service or the product that we will get into later. However, the company that needs the help selling the product, will then give all of their affiliates a unique ID number that they can use in their links, and so that the company can see who the sale came from when a sale is made from an affiliate.

Example of a Clickbank Affiliate Link:

Example of an E-Junkie Affiliate Link:

Types of Affiliate Programs

There are many different types of affiliate marketing programs. There are those that offer one time commissions off of a sale (some of them might offer lifetime commissions) and others may pay just for leads that you can get them. Whether it is for a newsletter lead, or something else. Just having interested parties sign up for things for more information is another one.

The type of affiliate program that you choose to have is completely up to the person that is the owner of the business. They can decide the percentage, or  rate that they are willing to pay for a lead or a sale . Then those who are interested, can sign up and help them make sales and get leads for a certain amount of money.

Ways to promote an Affiliate Program

Those signing up for affiliate marketing and different programs to sell for others, can do this many ways.

• They can promote the services or the products on a website that is relevant to the affiliate programs that they are a part of.
• Or they can also promote them on a blog.
• Some even use email and newsletter marketing as a way to get sales for others as well.

These are great ways to get traffic to your affiliate programs and make sales from them.  Which ever technique and way that you decide to use is up to you.

Once you have chosen the affiliate programs that you are wanting to market, you will then need to be sure to read all of the rules for that particular program because they will be different. Because of all of the different requirements and stipulations that you have to read, you may even need some software to help you sort it all out and decide which one is the best for you and your affiliate marketing business.

Conclusion

Choosing an affiliate program that you want to go with is not hard to do at all. Choose something that you know about, and that you can be known as an expert about. The more passionate you are about the service or product, the better, as it will shine through. Once you have all of your programs in place, check out SEO, and find out how to get your website up on the first page of the search engines. This is going to take hard work and determination, but you can do it.

Affiliate marketing is something that anyone can learn. Start out by reading a good Book (like KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays), an eBook or blog by someone that is a pro for the best marketing tips and techniques that you can use. Learn from others that have done and accomplished what you are trying to do. Go on the Mission 6 Figure!

As some of you know, I just came back from a long business trip to Ukraine. Ok, Ukraine is not Russia, but since it’s been part of the former Sowjet Union, there are a lot of cultural things that stayed the same. It was quite hard to understand their approaches in doing business, even though I was born in Ukraine.

Many of them talk twice as much as they do. Doing business locally, isn’t the same as it is in Germany or the USA. They simply see some things different than we do. Is steeling a business opportunity?! Faking the facts, corruption, etc. isn’t one either!

You can’t change their mentality, but you can teach them a couple of things:

Status symbols

Russia is always up for showing what they have to demonstrate how successful one is. Big and fast cars from abroad, golden accessory, … are normal. If you don’t have that, you’re not part of the “club”. Showcasing the income to demonstrate ones ability to run a successful business is normal, too. The fear of not been taken serious if you can’t demonstrate how much you earn, is a big hurdle to go for ones dreams.

What you can do for them:

• show them that they don’t need to have the biggest something to be successful: Even with a small number of subscribers you can run a successful online business…
• money doesn’t equal authority  : Teach them how they can become an authority without having a million at the bank.
• etc.

Networking

This topic is not only a country specific problem. But I’ve noticed that networking is done differently over there. Friends have friends who have friends. Those friends’ friends know ones friends who’s friends… But this is not networking. They call when they need something and that’s it.

What you can teach them:

• Initiating direct personal contacts
• Marketing others more than themselves
• Benefits of feeding the contacts: not only call when help is needed
• Investing in opportunities: give before receive
• etc.

Niche Business

Big is great. Big makes you more money. This is something I heard often. Many of them don’t understand that you don’t need to do, know or have everything. Many of them don’t understand the benefits of specializing.

What you can help them with:

• Specializing on niches
• Benefits of niche marketing
• Benefits of not being an all-rounder
• etc.

Research and Service

Why do the Chinese business offer their employees housing next to their working places? Why are they offering them nannies for their kids? Right, to have them near the working place so they don’t spend so much time to get there. This saved time can be invested in more working time. More working time means, that more can get done. The more is getting done, the more money the company makes. You get the point. But this doesn’t apply to the Russian speaking market. Most don’t see the point in investing in things like that. Many don’t think about how such investments may benefit them in the future.

What you can teach them:

• Not only concentrate on yourself: know what your readers want
• Benefits of catering to those you want to benefit from
• etc.

Other things you can teach them

• Hustle
  • Know what you want and go for it
  • Concentrate and focus on the goal
  • etc.
• Structuring and Planning
  • Benefits of planning the effort: laying out the things that need to be done to achieve the desired goal
  • etc.

Doesn’t that look like an opportunity? Think about what you have to offer to help them. Tell me in the comments below what you think about catering to the Russian speaking market. Have any question? Use the comment section below…

Announcing the winner

To make it short, the lucky person to get a free eBook translation is: Sharon Hurley Hall

You can find her on sharonhh.com or getpaidtowriteonline.com and connect with her on Twitter @SHurleyHall

The winner now has time until September 10th, 2010 to claim the price by sending an email.

Contest Reloaded

So you’ve missed out the first contest or didn’t win this time? Don’t worry, I’ll give you a second chance: Head over to the contest post where you find all details on how to enter / re-enter the contest.

How to enter (short version):

• Subscribe
• Follow me on Twitter
• Tweet the contest
• Comment
• Write a post

The new winner will be announced on Oktober 7th, 2010.

So congratulations to Sharon and good luck to all those who want to be the winner of a free eBook translation as well.

Want to try the translation service, but don’t want to pay the full price? Then this is your chance to get your hands on the eBook and article translation service of V.O.I.C.E. media and publishing.

Get 50% off!

If you want to get the 50 % discount, simply chose the service you want (eBook or article translation), leave the language to German and click “Add to cart”. Before checking out, make sure to enter your coupon code, which is ” HAPPY “.

Note:

The code only works for German translations and will expire on Sunday 18, noon CET (6AM Eastern)

Your coupon code to get 50% off is: HAPPY

Mike Cliff-Jones wrote in his article “Translation Service for Bloggers” about the results he gets using Google for his search term “How to use Twitter” in English and Spanish.

A few excerpts from this conversation:

“I speak Spanish, and can write it. But there’s nothing worse than reading something written by a non-native speaker. So, for me, the next step is to get my book translated. And that’s always been expensive, until now.”

“The Internet has opened up a global market for those who produce their own products. Having your product translated into various languages is a very wise and probably a profitable one at that.”

“Your opening example shows how much of a market there is for translating digital products into various languages. This opens a new path to success. I’m sure this service will do well and I plan to use it myself.”

Read the full article over at Mike’s Life: Translation Service for Bloggers.

An other conversation started over on Hot Blog Tips. Keith Bloemandaal explained that it could be beneficial to capitalize on international sales, by showing demographics.

A few excerpts from this conversation:

“So, why wouldn’t we want to capitalize on sales by simply getting a translation of our information products? I know I would.”

“Whoa man good idea and the service looks pretty good too! I never thought about translating eBooks. Thanks for giving those statistics.”

“Think of it this way too. With so many people online around the world, if you’re only going after your country you can be missing out on a huuuuuge opportunity – just think of traffic you could be receiving from China!”

Read the full article over at Hot Blog Tips to see the international statistics and what else has been said: Are You Missing Out On International Sales?

Are you thinking or talking about the benefits of international sales? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

The world of blogging meets the world of music. See what a blogger and a musician have in common.

What John says about his eBook:

This book will help in guiding you along the right steps. It uses practical examples that would give you a clearer picture of how this blogging thing works from a business prospective. It’s also a fun way to learn.

Review of Build a Superstar Blog

Cover

In my eyes the Cover of Johns’ Build a Superstar Blog is well designed. By looking at it – with its red carpet – I got the feeling of success and glamour. Great feeling!

Format and Styling

John uses a square full page layout, that prevents you from scrolling because it fits in the screen. He also uses only three colours: white for the background, black as basic font colour and red for the headlines and subheadings. That makes the eBook look stylish and minimalistic, which is good in my opinion. No distracting colours, only red to highlight the important parts like “Key Points” and the headings.

Though the big font size makes Build a Superstar Blog easy to read, it takes a lot of space and streches the text a bit too much. If one would want to trash about Johns’ eBook, he could say that this is just to get more pages filled. The same can be said about the line hight, which is a lot bigger than standard.

As I mentioned above, he uses the red colour for the headline and the subheadings. This makes it really easy to differentiate when a new chapter beginns, or when he starts to talk about an other point related to the topic. I would have made the subheadings bold though, to make them even more easier to spot.

Content

The table of contents is the the first thing you’ll see after the cover. It’s well structured and placed on the left hand side of the page. Headlines like “Leave footprints behind” are very appealing and teased me to read on. Well done!

Reading this unusual eBook, is not wasted time in my eyes, because John – as a former home-studio producer – knows how to compare blogging to the music industry and gives great examples.

Like this:

For bloggers, your tone of voice is almost the same as genres for music artists who may choose soul, rock or rap as the preferred method of expressing themselves.

I really love the fact that each chapter starts on a new page. But the best thing about Build a Superstar Blog is, that you are given a summary of the “Key Points” at the end of each chapter. Putting them all on one page, could give you a easy to follow “To-Do-List”.

The only really negative thing I found while reading this little but valuable guideline-ebook is, that I was confused to find a not ended scentence. That gave me the feeling of missing out on some information, because it didn’t continue on the next page. I don’t say that this was made on purpose, but I would say that this doesn’t have to happen.

Conclusion:

While reading this review, you might have noticed that I like Build a Superstar Blog. I like the style, I like the Key Points and I like the comparison to the music industry, because it is something new. I would recommend Johns’ eBook to all new and not so skilled bloggers. And to everyone who is interested in an eBook, that brings two totally different industries together, as well. Well, after reading you’ll see that they are not that different as you think

If you’re not familiar with the service yet, visit the following link where I’ve explained the benefits of a translation.

The official launch date: July 10, 2010.

To spread the word about this unique translation service for marketers and bloggers who want to expand their reach and take their sales to the next level, I need your help. But therefore you get the chance to win a FREE translation!

On Sunday, August 15, 2010 I will announce the winner that will randomly be chosen from the pool of those with the most earned points.

How to enter the contest and win a free translation:

1. Subscribe: Enter your name and email address in the form below and confirm your subscription.
2. Follow me on Twitter: @mariamcisse
3. Tweet about the contest:
   • Retweet this article
   • Use the following Tweet without editing for future Tweets:
     

     I just entered @mariamcisse ‘s contest to win a FREE ebook translation! Check it out at: http://bit.ly/winvmp and secure your spot! #winvmp

4. Comment: Leave a comment on this article telling how a translation could benefit one that is running a business in the internet and what language might be the most beneficial to be translated in from English (English to German, Spanish, Russian,etc.)
5. Write a post about this contest and the translation service, post it on your blog and link back to this article.

Subscribe

Climbing the ladder to win:

Each point mentioned above is a move that makes you climbing up the ladder to win this free ebook translation. For everything you do to help me spreading the word about V.O.I.C.E. you get points that will be added up at the end of the contest. The more points you have, the more likely you are to win the contest.

1. Subscription: 10 points
2. Follow me on Twitter: 5 points
3. Tweeting about the contest: 5 points
4. Comment: 5 points
5. Post an article with a link: 20 points

Note: The winner will be announced on Sunday, August 15, 2010 on the blog. He then has 3 days (until August 18, 2010) to contact me and claim the price.

Good luck to everyone!