How To Cash In With Affiliate Programs
Introduction
Affiliate programs (also called Referral Programs or Partnership Programs or Joint Venture Programs) are essentially commission-based sales opportunities.
You recommend a site to your users and pick up a percentage of any sales those users generate. You benefit from the commission and the site benefits from sales it wouldn’t otherwise have made. If you’ve ever gone to a website and seen links to Amazon, those were affiliate links.
You can run an affiliate program from a site you’ve already set up, or create a site specially to promote a product or service. As long as it brings in more cash than you spend on building it and buying traffic, you’re laughing.
Simple affiliate programs
With ClickBank, it will allow other people to sell your products. They’ll run your affiliate program basically for you as far as putting that all together. They will send checks to your affiliates for you too and then they’ll send you a check every two weeks. ClickBank will send anyone that has ever made a sale for your product or service a check, and then they’ll send you a check.
It’s a pretty good deal. Depending on which way you want to go, however you may wish a little bit more control over your affiliate programs.
Seriously consider having a two tier affiliate program. The reason I say a 2-tier affiliate program is because of the perceived value. People are not going to make a huge a amount of money on the second tier, the fact is that it’s perceived value.
That’s what it’s all about! When it comes to marketing, most things are about perceived value. They feel that there’s a potential. There’s a hope. There’s a possibility that they may get that second tier sale. They may get money for essentially doing nothing. In fact, more people will sign up to your affiliate program if you have a two tier as opposed to a one tier.
Now, you will find that the majority of people aren’t doing anything, they’ll drive traffic. They probably still have your banners on their websites and they may advertise it a bit here and there. But chances are they’re not going to do anything. It’s just a fact. It’s okay. You can’t expect every single person to work to be an affiliate for you. But you can just build and build and build.
An affiliate program is very key to your overall business success. You should always have one. There’s a couple different ways for an affiliate program to work and if I didn’t explain to you about affiliate programs, I would be cutting you short at this point.
So here goes…
2-tier affiliate programs
I think that’s key – and also another important point is that with your affiliate program is that you need to break it down into two payments, obviously.
Consider something like: 35% and 15%. That will give you 50% that you will be paying out to your affiliates. If you are paying out 50% to your affiliates, that leaves you 50%.
So, if you make a sale you will get paid 100% minus processing fees or if an affiliate sells it for you, you still make about 45% of the money that’s processed.
Some people will have, especially lately, 60-75% and 80% payouts in their affiliate program. Quite honestly when you’re doing a joint venture or you sign up an affiliate and you offer that kind of price it’s because they want to grab people off you list. That’s what the deal is.
You have to understand that. If you market their product or service to your list, who do you think is going to buy? The people, who are your most valuable customers are going to buy from this person. So if you are going to give them your list if you promote their affiliate program and so be very careful as far as whose affiliate program you promote or make an offer on or put out and you should too. Always be aware of that as far as affiliates go.
Getting back to the actual affiliate payment, here’s the reason why you want to structure your program the way it is. You may structure yours differently, but always keep in mind. Whatever your percentages are as your payouts, you always have to make sure that you take into account that you have your processing fees for your credit card. So no matter how big or how small that is, you’re always going to want to come out on top.
Then you have whatever there is left. So, in your case, if you pay 50% and have about 45% left for yourself – that leaves you a great margin to make money from. Keep that in mind.
Joining An Affiliate Program
As with any marketing venture, you need to be careful in the selection of an affiliate program. The benefit of an affiliate program is that it gives you another way to make money from your users. Instead of selling them a product yourself, you send them to a partner and take a cut.
On the downside though, your affiliate ads will take the place of a different ad that you could have put in that same spot. You have to make sure that each advertising position on your site is bringing in the maximum revenue possible. If you’re not getting the most from your site, you’re tossing money away.
The key to success is to choose the right program, right from the beginning.
Now, a lot of commercial sites run affiliate programs. That’s because they know that they only have to pay a commission if a sale is actually made; it’s a proven way to generate revenue without risk. What that means for you is that when it comes to choosing an affiliate program, you’re going to have a huge range to choose from. What it all boils down to though is product and price.
While it might be tempting to go for the program that pays the highest commissions, the program won’t pay you a penny if your users won’t go there or won’t buy once they get there. You have to be certain that the service you’re promoting is of genuine interest to the kind of users you buy, whether you’re buying them from search engines or anywhere else.
Sure, you can work backwards: You find a high-paying affiliate program and create a small site to send users to it, but do you know where to buy users for a program like that? You’re going to have to research the field, check out the most popular sites, and negotiate banner campaigns and link exchanges.
That’s fine if you want to invest the time and the effort. But it’s much easier to find an affiliate program operating in a field you’re familiar with, and use that program to earn extra cash.
For example, suppose you had set up a dating site. You might make bit of money selling subscriptions, but you might make even more by joining Match.com’s affiliate program and selling them your users. Unless you’re planning to be the Internet’s biggest dating site, you’re not going to be able to compete directly and beat them, but you can join them—and earn money.
Or rather than sell your users directly to a ‘competitor’, you can look for services that complement your own. Visitors to your dating site, for example, might be interested in buying flowers, books on relationships or tickets on singles cruises. Instead of selling just one product—membership subscriptions—you’d be selling a whole range of different goods to the same people, and increasing the sources of your income.
Here are some tips to selecting an affiliate program that is lucrative and right for you:
1. Don’t accept less than 25% commission. You can find affiliate programs with great payment structures and high percentages of the purchase price in just about every field.
2. Look for comprehensive statistics pages that list the number of click-throughs, sales and earnings so you can see how you’re doing. The information should be broken down by month.
3. Look for programs that offer a wide variety of promotional tools to put on your Web page, including text links, banners and graphics.
4. Find out how often you will be paid and make sure that the payment schedule meets your expectations. Some programs pay monthly, others quarterly; which is best for you?
5. Look for examples of marketing methods that successful affiliates are using to get the best results.
6. Make sure that top level support is given. If they can’t answer your questions promptly and intelligently, you don’t want to work with them.
Managing and tracking your affiliate programs
The key to any business is to promote your products and services to people who need them. Your affiliate business is no different. In order to earn commissions you must put your products in front of the people who need them. The beauty of marketing affiliate programs is that it is anybody’s ball game. This is the one place you can burrow deep into your own niche and stick it to the so-called ‘big wigs’.
You may create your own affiliate program or you may promote other popular affiliate programs that are related to your product or service. The best way to manage and track affiliate programs is by creating your own affiliate program website. This is where you can list all your affiliate programs.
Staying Organized
There are many affiliate networks that provide multiple affiliate programs and merchants. Keeping a track of all affiliate programs in a single network is easy. You would generally be given one username and password as well as a single interface that controls all the programs. However, if you have many of your own affiliate programs or you promote several stand-alone affiliate programs from your website, the task of staying organized becomes a bit more complex.
There are many software programs available on the Internet that organize and keep track of all data associated with affiliate programs. Some of these are My Affiliate Program 2000 and Affiliate Assistant 1.0. These programs maintain databases pertaining to information about all your affiliate programs. A typical database would consist of the following fields:
Program Name
Date joined or created
Contact Name
URL
Email Address
ID
Password
1st Tier Percent
1st Tier Sale
2nd Tier Percent
2nd Tier Sale
Total Income
Additional comments
Once the program information has been entered, you can add information about individual sales made and checks received. The program then keeps track of sales to date, amount collected and receivables. Besides, some of the advanced software programs also provide analysis and comparison tools for all affiliate programs. If you take the time to input collected data about clicks, sales, and page views, impressions, emails sent etc. from your various campaigns and enter all of it into the program, it will show you:
Click to Sale Ratios
Impression to Sale Ratios
Amount Earned Per Impression
Amount Earned Per Click
Apart from these are a few other tips that might help you manage your affiliate programs.
Always ensure that your website is up and running. On a Daily basis type your URL into your browser’s address bar, refresh the page and find out. The danger in not knowing that your site is down comes when you are running a pay per click advertising campaign. The click costs add up whether your site is functional or not. If your site is down, you are paying for advertising, but no one is buying.
Check your statistics daily, maybe even twice a day. This will give you a better idea of your income trends and also highlight affiliate programs that bring your business. Visit the statistics interface for each network and individual affiliate partner and input your total revenues into any accounting software. Using such software frequently will also keep you informed as to whether certain checks have become overdue.
Be prompt in answering any queries from affiliate partners or customers, especially when these are about your products or services. This probably means that the customer trusts your site and is thinking of buying your product.
One of the main aspects of any affiliate program is residual income. You’ve got to make the most of each and every customer you receive. The best way to do this is by promoting affiliate programs that offer residual commission.
This allows you to repeatedly get paid for work you do once. For example, if a visitor arrives at your site and purchases auto responder services, newsletter subscriptions, ISP/hosting services, you will collect a portion of the monthly fees for as long as they remain a paying customer. Membership sites are a good way to collect residual commissions and are steadily growing in popularity. There are many affiliate programs that offer residual commission.
A well placed recommendation placed at the end of an outgoing email can bring in extra sales. Target your audience, what are their specific needs? If you can offer them a product they need/want, often times the end result will be a sale.
Finally, track all your affiliate links. The best way to accomplish this is by setting up tracking software for your affiliate links. There are a number of scripts that will do the job. Most tracking programs typically allow you to setup tracking links for any product you promote, telling you how many hits each product has received, and where the hits are coming from. A more detailed view of tracking and analysis is given in the section below.
It is not enough to have a few banners and classified ads. You must provide as much help as possible for your associates if you want them to be successful. You should have tested and proven endorsements, testimonials, sig files, ezine ads, and other unique tools and techniques. You must also make yourself available, either through email or the phone, to help your affiliates implement these tools and to answer any questions they may have.
Whether you run your own or participate in an affiliate program, you must be able to determine what methods work best in a particular medium. For instance, which ezine ads work best and in what ezine; which banner ads produce the greatest clickthroughs and from which sites or banner exchanges; and where on your website is the most effective spot to include a testimonial.
Some affiliate programs, have implemented unique payment procedures to get affiliates their commission checks on a timely basis. Some of these procedures include: online electronic payment services, direct bank deposits and checks by fax. If you can solidify your payment procedures from the start, you will save yourself an administrative headache and more importantly, keep your affiliates happy and working to promote your program.
Evaluating your website’s performance
Website statistics and affiliate sales figures are essential for evaluating the effectiveness of your affiliate programs. Before you start recording and analyzing data, it’s worthwhile to know what statistics you’re trying to calculate – and why. Following are some of the key questions that need to be answered periodically to ensure the success of affiliate programs.
What percentage of the website visitors become customers through affiliate programs?
What percentages of sales are new or renewals?
What is the average revenue per visitor?
What is the average revenue per sale?
The most important figure you need to keep track of is the visitor to customer conversion. It tells you exactly how well you convince your visitors to buy your affiliate products. Average conversion ratios for affiliate programs range between .5 and 1.5 percent. Anything above 1.5% is really good. This figure, however, indicates the total conversion for all the affiliate programs. If you promote more than one affiliate program you need to also calculate the conversion rate for each of the programs.
Knowing how conversion rates compare between programs is useful when deciding how to direct your promotional efforts. For example, if you discover that Program ‘A’ converts at 1% and Program ‘B’ converts at 2%, it might be time to spend more time and effort to promote Program ‘A’. Most tracking software would give you detailed information about each of the affiliate programs promoted on your website.
All affiliate programs that have a low conversion rate should be dropped. While this may seem like a lot of work to go through to track your site’s performance, it really is a worthwhile endeavor. Once your tracking mechanism is set, and you’ve done the inputs a few times, you’ll be surprised at how simple it becomes. In fact, you may find that eventually you look forward to ‘adding things up’ at the end of the month to get a clear picture of where your affiliate business stands.
How to attract affiliates
One of the biggest fears new Affiliate managers have is in finding new affiliates. This fear is a stumbling block that stops many site owners from getting started with affiliate marketing. Interestingly, with a proper marketing strategy, getting affiliates may not be very difficult. Given below are some tips that may help in attracting new affiliates.
Find complimentary sites - “Complementary” sites are a sites that sell products or services that compliment your offerings. If you sell “gardening tools”, a site that sells books on “gardening tips” would be a perfect affiliate. If you sell software, try looking for sites that sell computers or computer parts. Finding sites that already attract your target market, and can benefit from recommending your product or service to their visitors, is the goal.
Find content sites – There are many sites that do not sell any kind of product or service but are mainly content-oriented sites. Such sites promote an idea, concept, study or belief. Content sites that are used as a resource for your target market are ideal affiliates.
Finally, there are several sites on the Internet dedicated to listing affiliate Programs.
Get your program listed in this directory.
The “host” is Allen Gardyne and he has been “online” since 1996!
http://www.associateprograms.com/directory/
Classifying Affiliates for better management
Now, the hardest part of administrating an Affiliate Program is deciding what your affiliates need to help make the sale. But, by carefully categorizing your affiliates, you can easily determine what their needs are and how to accurately meet them. The plan given below helps in categorizing affiliates in order to manage your affiliate program better.
The first step is to pick at least three types of affiliates.
Take a look at your affiliates and try to determine one outstanding characteristic that can easily be compared across the board and choose at least three types of the characteristic. Here are some examples:
Level of Sales - You may find that your affiliates are so completely different that it’s hard to find something to classify them by. Try classifying them by the level of sales they’ve reached with you. You’ll most likely find that you have a few forerunners that lead the pack with a number of sales, quite a few affiliates that have sporadically made a sale or two and some that have yet to make a sale. This will help you classify them based on sales.
Products – If you sell a wide variety of products for specific interests/needs you may be able to classify your affiliates by product. For instance, a financial site could classify types like Personal Finance, Small Business Finance, and Corporate Finance.
Industry – If you market commodities like office supplies, health and beauty products, house-wares and so on, you may find that your affiliates come from a wide variety of industries. You can most likely classify your affiliates according to their industry.
The Second Step is to determine the needs of each type.
Each of your affiliate types will have different needs; some of their needs will overlap, but you should find a distinct difference in many of their needs. If you find that all of them have the same needs, go back to step one and re-think your types.
Here are some basic things to look for:
Linking Methods – Different types of affiliates will need different linking methods. Let’s use the example above where we had different groups based on sales. Your low sales group may be satisfied with a banner or two to place on their site. Your medium sales type may be interested in an article or two for added content on their site. Your high sales group will probably pass up banners for articles, guestbooks, email ads and signature files.
Capturing visitors is what you want. In order to do so — you have to know what they want. Visit your affiliates’ sites to see what visitors are looking at and looking for. Ask yourself, “How does my product relate to what I am seeing?”
Different types of affiliates may expect different commissions. You’ll have some Affiliates that have joined your program “on the side” and others that plan on earning a substantial income from the program. Determine what effort they are putting into advertising, how much other programs in your industry are paying, and the amount of time they devote to your program.
The Third Step involves the process of creating and compiling linking methods for each group of affiliates.
Based on the needs you identified in Step two, create and compile linking methods for each type. Here are a few linking methods to think about.
Banners – Though they aren’t as effective as other linking methods, banners are still widely used and expected. Make banners in a variety of sizes to fit tops of pages, bottoms, toolbars, sidebars and other miscellaneous areas.
Articles – These are great for affiliates that need content for their websites and newsletters. Be sure that your articles are articles and not ads.
Email Ads - Your active affiliates may be interested in placing ads in e-zines or their own newsletters. Try writing a few ads in different lengths.
Signature Files – Dedicated affiliates may even add your tag to their signature line. Give them a few witty lines to choose from.
Guestbooks - Let your affiliates help you build your Opt-In email lists with guestbooks. Offer them a commission for each email address they send you, or each resulting sale from the subscribers they send you.
Product Images - Give your affiliates images that show and link directly to specific products. They’ll be able to choose an image specific to their site, or choose several images to display.
Review each affiliate Type and match them up with your new linking methods. You may have some linking methods that overlap Types — this is okay. Just be sure you are concentrating on the affiliates’ needs.
The Fourth Step is to decide commission levels.
Your first decision will be to determine whether you want to pay a flat rate or percentage of each sale. Based on the needs you identified above for each of the affiliate types, decide on a commission amount for each Type. If you have a two-tier program, consider the possibility of different second tier rates as well.
The Fifth Step is to devise promotions for affiliate groups.
Once you have your affiliates properly categorized and your system under control, consider developing promotions for your affiliate groups. Give them special incentives to sell more during a certain time frame, move seasonal products, or increase business during your slow months. Offer them additional commissions, or even bonuses for reaching a specific amount of sales.
Cooking Off the Spam
Any time you run a program where your affiliates rely on other “sign ups” to generate profits, you will eventually have a problem with spam. One of your affiliates will inevitably get it into their head to blitz the Web with unwanted garbage.
When this happens you need to be ready to take action—otherwise it will cost you! Your Internet company can boot you off your server and you can find yourself blacklisted. Not good for business. If you get an email from someone claiming they received spam with your URL, then take it as an early warning. I am not advising you to immediately terminate the affiliate’s account, but be sure to contact them to follow up on the complaint. Let your affiliate know you received a complaint and advise them to remove this person from their list.
If you only get one or two complaints, it’s probably not spam—the complainants might simply have signed up for an email list and forgotten all about it. You will know when one of your affiliates is spamming, because you will get anywhere from 10 to 100 complaints in the same day all regarding the same URL. The best thing to do in this case is to immediately terminate or disable the account of the affiliate URL that was spammed.
A few avoidable errors
Many affiliate marketers make a huge mistake of posting their ads on forums. Forums can be used to promote your affiliate programs and your website but in a proper manner. Posting banners is very similar to spamming and may easily upset forum administrators.
Always do your research before promoting your affiliate program to a potential customer. Do not offer affiliate programs to visitors who are not at all interested in the products associated with the program. This is a futile endeavor.
If you promote affiliate programs offered by other merchants, ensure that you develop your own advertising copy. Many websites commit a common mistake of using the same advertising copy as used by the merchant themselves.
Avoid Copyright infringement in all cases. Always use original content or ask permission to use graphic images or text found on other websites.
Do not submit your programs to free websites. These may be free but your programs would hardly ever be noticed, especially by Search Engines. Moreover, your own ranking would get lowered if you submit your affiliate programs to such websites.
Avoid using caps on your web page or email ad. Using caps is symbolic to shouting, which never goes well with potential customers. A few words may be written in capital text to give them additional emphasis. However, such practice should be limited.
Always respond to all queries sent by visitors as soon as possible. A slight delay in your response could easily result in loss of a potential client.
Do not use pop-up ads along with your webpage. Most surfers are likely to close their browser if they come across pop-ups.
Do not host your website on a free server or use free email accounts. This gives a negative impression to visitors. Using free hosts and email accounts looks cheesy and loses sales.
Many websites do not have an opt-in list. Create an opt-in and opt-out list for your visitors. Without these, there is no way of tracking potential customers. Visitors should be allowed to opt-in at any time as well as opt-out at any time.
Most sites have a poor tracking mechanism. It is essential that you track all business activities. Accurate record keeping is crucial. There are many software tools, discussed earlier in this chapter, than can automate your record keeping process with minimal error.
A ‘mall’ site is best used as a central hub to send visitors to your other domains. As a main or only site, unfocused mall sites don’t get traffic from the engines, and they don’t convert well to sales. Highly focused theme sites attract traffic and sales.
Offline advertising may not be effective. A lot of money and effort should not be wasted on offline advertising. Most people rarely check websites that are advertised in local magazines or newspapers.
Avoid focus on animated banner ads. These simply use up bandwidth, thus making web pages load slower.
While advertising do not degrade other competitors. It is recommended that you highlight your products’ uniqueness and superiority but never mortify other products.
Banners or text links that expire are guaranteed to eventually send your visitor to a broken link or show a broken graphic on your page. Time sensitive advertising is best used only in email advertising campaigns.
Never put affiliate links on your homepage. This is similar to asking your visitors to leave immediately. Give them a chance to browse, sign up for your newsletter and decide that they’d like to come back to your place before introducing them to your affiliates.
Technology changes with amazing speed. To keep up with this rapidly evolving industry, you must invest time and money in research. The investment is a tax write-off, and will pay you back many times over in additional revenue.
Finally, persist with your plan. It might take you time to get established even if you have a solid marketing plan. Persistence is the single most important factor in determining success online or off.
Setting up Your Own Affiliate Program
Joining an affiliate program is a neat way to make money from your users. But just as you can join someone else’s affiliate program, so you can set up your own program and invite webmasters to sign up.
What would that bring you? The same as you’re bringing your affiliate partners: deals. Every time someone sends you a user who gives you money, you give a portion of that money to your affiliate. It’s an easy way to generate traffic and earn cash.
And you don’t need to be a programming genius to set up an affiliate program. There are a whole bunch of companies out there that offer entire affiliate kits right off the shelf.
You can have ClickBank run it for you.
Or you can have a “3rd party” run it for you…
I use Josh Anderson’s Nanacast System
Look at the features. Compare the features, and you will see that it’s the best solution offered online today.
Affiliate management in-built with your payment gateway – ClickBank
Clickbank has a built-in affiliate program. It offers all features of a good affiliate program. There is no need to install any expensive scripts on your website. You can start signing up affiliates right away as soon as you open your account.
The beauty of Clickbank is that it integrates the affiliate management program with an in-built payment gateway. ClickBank is one of the most popular and easiest services to use for payment processing online. Sign-up is quick and you get approved and running in one day.
The Clickbank Control Panel is easy to use. You can get familiar with the whole system in no time. It costs $49 to open a Clickbank account. This is pretty cheap when compared with other payment processing systems. Once you open an account, all your transaction money gets deposited into your account. You are paid the full balance every two weeks.
If you’re serious about earning serious money on the Web, then you’re going to be spending a lot of time checking out affiliate programs and tracking your responses. It’s one of the easiest and most reliable ways to make cash with a website.
LinkShare – Affiliate program that can bring you great results
LinkShare hosts a password-protected website that offers affiliates a choice of hundreds of merchant programs. On the site, affiliates can join new programs, get links to put on their sites, and then see reports about how their links are performing and how much they have earned.
When a visitor from an affiliate’s site clicks on a link and goes to a merchant’s site, LinkShare keeps track of all of the transactions that the visitor makes. If that visitor buys something on the merchant’s site, you get a commission. In some cases, affiliates are compensated even if the visitor doesn’t buy anything, just for having driven traffic to the merchant’s site.
LinkShare also provides affiliates with customer service, notifies affiliates about new programs and new opportunities, and offers resources for affiliates to learn about how to get the most out of their programs.
Viral Marketing
Viral Marketing is defined as “Any advertising that propagates itself the way viruses do”; E.g. When Hotmail users send e-mails, they “infect” the recipients with the tagline at the bottom of their messages. Viral marketing denotes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Thus, the name “Viral”! Viral Marketing is also called V-Marketing, organic marketing, word-of-mouth marketing or word-of-mouse marketing.
Viral Marketing works best when it induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message’s visibility and effect. In simple words, you pass your message on to 10 other people – each of these 10 people pass on that same message to 10 other people and so on. Such collaborative communications, by nature, needs others in the chain. Everyone simply tells everyone else. ICQ, a service that prompts you when selected friends or colleagues are also online, is an example of a service that is viral by its nature. Its users want to tell their friends about it so that it will be more useful to them.
Viral communication is clearly an enormous opportunity for creating brand growth. Get it right and the rewards are enormous. Your consumers will spread your message for you, at astonishing speeds to a phenomenal number of people. Get it wrong and your carefully crafted proposition will get little further than the marketing director’s in-box.
Viral Marketing is not a pyramid scheme
MLM (Multi-level Marketing) has its own detractors as well as champions. It is important to point out here the main differences between MLM as is generally practiced and the viral marketing concept that is being discussed here. Just as MLM differs from the infamous pyramid money making schemes (that were grand con efforts), viral marketing is significantly different from MLM.
The major criticisms against MLM are two:
MLM thrives on an unending infinite multiplication through down line proliferation. At the same time, what is being marketed is a physical entity. The participants in MLM are oblivious of the fact that there is a limited supply of the products and there seems to be no one controlling the chain and ensuring that supply can be matched with demand. If the market were to get over saturated, and there is no supply to meet it, the people at the lower rung of the chain are going to get burnt. Those who joined early have nothing to worry as they have made their bucks from their down lines. The criticism thus is that the persons who started this and the early perpetrators in the chain have not pointed out to their down line that there is a limit to how far the chain can actually see fulfillment. Moreover, the participant has first to pay a deposit to join the chain. As long as he/she can see their returns from the deposits coming from their down line, everything is fine. When this stops (due to supply constraint or failure of the primary seller), there would be large number of participants at the lower rungs who paid deposits expecting to recover it from their promoted down lines, but cannot do so.
The second criticism arises from the fact that what the participant is earning from is from the participants’ down line and not from the actual sale of goods or any tangible value. Thus what is being marketed is a dream and the economic theory tells us that this cannot go on.
Well, viral marketing, as we are discussing does not suffer from any of the two above. What you are selling is primarily information, and the transactional cost of either supplying the information or of spreading the message is very low. Thus the risk factor is practically negligible. There is no supply constraint. You can sell as many copies of the e books as there would be persons that you can find in the chain. Moreover, there is no deposit being asked; the upfront investment, if any, is minor. You will not be faced with a situation where you have signed up down lines, but have nothing to offer. Also remember that content that can be offered can be as varied as you get persons to join the chain.
Secondly, the earnings being made are from tangibles. They are from real people visiting sites and subscribing to the information that is provided or through buying of other goods and services that were advertised. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It is one of those wonders that are offered by the Internet medium and technology.
Viral Marketing through Ebooks
Viral Marketing can be performed in several ways. Many of these different forms of viral marketing have enjoyed enormous success over the years. Viral marketing has been applied to emails and the World Wide Web alike. Another proven technique is the use of E-books as a powerful tool for Viral Marketing.
Ebooks or Electronic books are self-contained “executable” files of HTML. This HTML may be a web site you’ve created or HTML you’ve specifically prepared to be compiled into a downloadable .exe file for distribution. When downloaded, this file will self install on your client’s desktop.
Ebooks are very similar to normal physical books in the sense that they are rich in content. They are a huge resource for information. Anything you can put in a physical book, you can put in an Ebook. If your site is about tropical birds, why not write a tropical bird guide. If your site is about web design, you could write a beginner’s web tutorial.
An Ebook basically is a packaged offline web site that allows authors a great deal of flexibility in presentation of content. Ebooks can be downloaded from your website and stored and read offline at any time. Ebooks come with user friendly navigation tools that lets the reader skip to any page or search for any keyword in the Ebook.
Ebooks can be completely interactive with the Internet and can contain live links, graphics, forms, JavaScript, embedded video, audio, animation and more. Hyperlinks and internal search engines enhance navigation, allowing the reader to find items of interest quickly and easily. Ebooks combine the functionality and purpose of physical books along with complex software.
Ebooks play a very important role in Viral Marketing, no matter what the product or service offered by a company is.
Why are Ebooks an effective viral marketing tool.
First of all, it is essential that your Ebook contains interesting information.
It is very difficult to market something if it is of no use. Readers of your Ebook should get to learn something from the Ebook. In this sense it is very similar to a physical book. A reader would throw away a book after reading a page or two if he/she finds it to be boring and dull. The same is the case for Ebooks. No one would want to download your Ebook if it is not rich in content. In other words, your Ebook should have some useful information that the reader wants.
To use Ebooks effectively as a viral marketing tool they should be offered to visitors of your website for free. The production and distribution costs of an Ebook are generally very small. This is what makes it an effective tool for viral marketing.
The Ebook would have the layout and feel of your business service or product, which would familiarize readers with your brand. The Ebook you create would have a message promoting your website and a link to it. This will bring back the reader to your website and create an opportunity for more business. Thus, Ebooks can contain advertisements or links to your website that would persuade the reader to come back to your website. For example, a footer on every alternate page can have some message about your business and a link to your website that would interest the reader and encourage him to visit your website by clicking on that link.
How does Viral Marketing come into the picture here? How do you ensure that Ebooks can be given to more and more readers and in turn generate traffic for your website? A very simple way of doing this is to allow other visitors to your website to either download your Ebook for free or sell at a very nominal rate and then allow them to sell the Ebook to their customers. Be sure to include hyperlinks to your web site all over – at least one in every two pages. Also, you can include brief advertisements and all kinds of other things. The advantage of such a strategy is explained in the above paragraph.
Your customer can either upload the Ebook on his/her website or offer it individually to his/her friends through email in the form of an executable file. Note that Ebooks can be created in the form of executables (.exe) with the help of various software. These software(s) are explained later.
To make the Ebook more appealing to your customers you can offer them incentives. For example you can offer your customer a commission every time a person visits your website through your Ebook on your customer’s website. Tracking software can be integrated with your website that would give you a detailed analysis of all your visitors and track the website from where they were directed to your website.
This will allow not only your direct customers but also customers of other people selling your Ebook on their websites to come back to the source of the Ebook, which is your website. This will benefit your customers in two ways. First of all he/she can sell your book at his/her own price. The second benefit is that every time your customer brings in traffic to your website through your Ebook, he/she would get a commission. Your customers can again employ the same strategy and allow their own customers to market the Ebook, thus, making the Ebook viral.
To further benefit from Ebooks, allow your customers to copy, change, and co-brand the Ebook, which would contain a few ads and links about their own sites in addition to your own links. This will also help your customers to generate traffic for their websites. This is a proven strategy and should be employed.
Ebooks are one of the best promotional tools online. With its vast variety of uses, just one quality Ebook development and distribution can produce an on going viral marketing tool that will work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and multiply itself by leaps and bounds.
Tips for creating a Viral Ebook
The most important aspect of an Ebook is the content. Unless, the content is well written and interesting, you would find it hard to attract customers. The importance of content in your Ebooks is already known.
The format of the Ebook is very important. You may create an Ebook using Adobe Acrobat (.PDF format) or as a solid .exe file. The main advantage of using PDF is that it works with almost all operating systems whereas executable files generally cater to only Microsoft Windows users.
Make sure your source code is protected. This should be done for security reasons. Your source code may allow unauthorized users to hack into your website which is the last thing you would want from a marketing campaign.
Allow icon customization (allow using custom icons for your EBooks).
Allow resizing of the compiled EBook to the preferred size. Resizing and icon customization basically allow your customer to change your Ebook according to his/her preference. You should allow your customers to reformat and edit content from your Ebook. However, care should be taken that they are not allowed to delete advertisements and links to your website. Making links and advertisement un-editable can be done while creating the Ebook.
Allow co-branding of your Ebook. This is a very successful strategy and gives your customers a huge incentive to download your Ebook and pass it on to their customers.
Create an Ebook search function. This provides easy navigation. Readers should be able to skip to any page in the Ebook directly. They should also be offered keyword search functionality that enables them to search for a particular keyword in the Ebook.
Support Flash Files, Shockwave, JavaScript, DHTML, Audio, Windows Media, Midi Files and other formats.
Insert a tracking feature in your Ebook that not only tracks users downloading your Ebooks but also provides different statistics.
Viral Marketing through Emails
Email is one of the best ways of spreading your message – it’s fast, cheap and, most important of all, it can be viral. Have you ever sent a message to your friends, maybe a joke or a story, only to have it sent back to you days later with several other email addresses in the CC field that you don’t recognize? That’s because your friends have sent it to their friends, and these friends in turn have sent it to their friends and so on. The Email chain is endless.
It’s fair to say that email is an ideal mechanism for viral marketing, because a message can be spread to multiple recipients almost instantly.
Email allows us to touch people at any time and in any place. Email enhances a whole dimension of branding by allowing our brands to be directly connected to the times and places in which we deliver them. Because we can touch people more precisely, we can brand ourselves more precisely as well.
Email that you send to your customers and friends, if interesting, would be again forwarded by your customers and friends to their own customers and friends.
A good illustration of viral marketing through Emails is through Ezines and newsletters. The term Ezines is coined for publications sent through Email. These publications could be anything – articles related to your website or business, press releases for a new service offered by you or any other write up inviting people to visit your website.
Email Newsletters or Ezines
If your newsletter contains information of value, such as tips, hints, news or tutorials, you’ll find that subscribers will forward it on to others.
The use of newsletters can also help build content for your web site which increases search engine visibility. Another great benefit is that your newsletters, or ezines or ebooks will proliferate links on many sites that point to your site. Several leading search engines, primarily Google use Page-ranking algorithms that measure how many links point to your site and rank your page in search findings accordingly. The way to do it would be to promote uploading of your material on your customers’ sites.
Most importantly, a newsletter should contain valuable information, not just sales copy – otherwise interest will quickly drop off and you’ll be getting a number of unsubscribe requests. Worse still, your ezine will be deleted as soon as it arrives; leaving you with a valueless list that only sucks up your time, resources and bandwidth.
Ezine Advertising is one of the most powerful ways to market and promote your products and or services. There are literally thousands of electronic newsletters on the Internet with millions of people who subscribe to them. Placing ads in online newsletters is an inexpensive way to reach your target market quickly — especially when you compare it with other forms of advertising.
In 2002, ezine publishing took a quantum leap, as its status evolved from “amateur’s hobby” into becoming the most powerful marketing tool for business online. Email newsletters have come of age, and increasingly, more ezines will take this route, as subscribers prefer them to drab, lack-luster text-only ezines. In the coming year we’ll see more ezines published.
There are tens of thousands of Ezines being published every month, with a collective audience of millions. And the editors of most of those Ezines are all looking for quality content for their newsletters.
If you master this technique you can get your name and your website URL in front of 100,000 or even a million readers. Right now there’s a shortage of good Ezine Articles. So, if you write well and you know how to do research on the Internet, there’s a huge market waiting for you.
However, Ezines and newsletters can go unnoticed easily. People get a lot of junk newsletters which they delete without looking at them. Subscribers would only subscribe to Ezines which are actually useful to them. Besides, it’s very important to inform subscribers exactly what you will be doing with their details as the Internet is rampant with mailing lists being sold off by web masters. Savvy surfers are becoming more selective in what they’ll subscribe to – they’ll expect some sort of commitment that you won’t be distributing, selling or renting their email addresses.
Tips for Creating an Ezine and Emails that are viral
Pick a topic that you know something about and then go to the Search Engines and find as many websites as you can that deal with that subject.
As well as collecting information for your article, make a note of any URLs that offer free resources dealing with the topic of your article. Include those URLs in your article.
You should choose a topic very carefully. Once the topic is selected, doing enough research on the subject is vital. Organize the material and write in an interesting style. Make sure that you provide links to free resources.
The content in your Ezine should not be pure sales copy. There has to be valuable and genuine information. Promotion of your product or service should be subtle. Viral marketing using Ezine is different than running an E Mail marketing campaign that blasts millions of mail messages to unsuspecting readers.
At the end of your article, attach a 5 or 6-line ‘Resource Box’ that includes your website URL and/or your email address.
When you have finished your article, do NOT send it off straight away. Let it lie fallow for 2 or 3 days and then come back and read it again. You’ll be amazed at the improvements you can make. Those final improvements are what make the difference between an article that gets published and one that doesn’t.
Viral Marketing with affiliate programs
Affiliate Programs create powerful alliances between an online merchant’s web site and various “affiliate” web sites. Affiliate programs as discussed earlier, are a great marketing tool, especially due to the fact that they are viral in nature.
However, affiliate programs are attractive only if they offer useful and valuable incentives to the customers. The best form of incentive would be cash in the form of commission from product or service sales. This is a great incentive for your customers to join your affiliate program and spread your message in turn.
Tips for making your Affiliate Program attractive
Here are some tips to help you in attracting customers for your affiliate programs on your website. Doing some research would help you immensely in increasing traffic to your website and making the affiliate programs as viral as possible.
The most important aspect of any affiliate program is the incentive. You should offer better incentives than your competitor sites. Money is the biggest and best form of incentive you could offer your customers. Offering a percentage of your sales revenue resulting out of each successful hit can be a great incentive.
Apart from the normal incentives offer something unique such as cash awards and bonuses for three customers who are responsible for bringing in the highest traffic or highest business to your website. This would provide greater motivation for prospective customers to not only join your affiliate program but also refer your website to more people.
Most standard affiliate schemes reward only the subscriber directly responsible for bringing more traffic. Develop a second tier incentive program for your affiliates. In other words, reward both the affiliate responsible for bringing visitors to your website as well as the other person who had originally referred this affiliate. Let me illustrate this strategy. Let us say John referred Max to your website and your affiliate program. Max liked your affiliate program and joined it and eventually bought your product or service offered on your website. In this case, John would get a percentage of the profit. Now let’s say, Max referred your website to a friend of his – Harry. Harry visits your website – likes your product – and buys it. A single tier incentive program would reward Max by giving him a percentage of the profit generated. A two tier incentive program would offer Max a percentage of the profit as well as John a percentage of the profit because John referred Max in the first place. This strategy is expansive but very fruitful.
The above point can be explained in simple terms as “Make it as easy and as natural for affiliates to promote your product or service as possible, by letting your affiliates benefit those whom they refer”. This will encourage your affiliates to convince more people to visit your website and even join your affiliate program.
Keep updating the content of your affiliate program. For example, if your affiliate program is subscription to a paid or even free newsletter, make sure that you update the topics and content of the newsletter constantly. The content should always be informative and unique.
You can offer incentives to your customers and affiliates for getting your site visitors by sending referrals to their friends, and you can also provide incentives to get these friends to respond.
However, if you make the incentives for both parties the same, then there is no reason why a friend will become a carrier.
The trick is to make the incentives for each party different, and make the incentive for the carrier greater than the one for their friends. This has the effect of motivating each friend to then become a carrier.
Using Ebooks for Affiliate Marketing
Let us discuss of all the ways that an e-book could fit into an affiliate marketing business.
If you’ve been delving into affiliate marketing at all, you’re no doubt aware of the viral potential for e-books, first of all as affiliate products. It’s the affiliates who make them viral, after all, passing the word about the product to their website visitors, e-zine subscribers, and clients, in hopes of earning a commission from a sale.
Then, reseller licensing of the e-book product, or allowing those who buy the books to give them away, adds another viral layer to the promotion. In either case, there’s now even more incentive for the book to be pushed along.
The possibility of re-branding the e-book (that is, customizing certain portions of it, or changing the affiliate link coding so that the current host of the download can gain from the affiliate commissions) also adds pass-along momentum. Re-branding might be offered for a low cost or even for a free Ebook.
Let me explain the concept of re-branding further. If you’ve created a useful Ebook which also promotes your products or services and where affiliates can change the links in your book to point to their affiliate links, you can let your affiliates give this book away to their visitors and subscribers, so that they are giving their visitors something useful and they have the chance of selling your products to them as well.
A merchant’s affiliates, or an affiliate’s sub-affiliates, could use their own links instead of the author’s. If there’s another goal that overrides the affiliate commission, or perhaps if only some of the affiliate links will be re-brandable, or the downloader who re-brands a link will have to purchase the product first in order to use or evaluate it, then the loss of immediate affiliate commissions can be amply made up for by the viral spread of the book.
Free as well as “for sale” ebooks might be used by affiliate merchants to promote their offerings. An e-book can be a report, a catalog, a sales presentation, a detailed list of features, and so much more – the possibilities are endless. It could be whatever that is helpful to your visitor and your customer. It can contain graphics, hyperlinks and, with some compilers, even animated graphics and multimedia stuff.
You might create e-books around a subject that pertains to your affiliate program/s. Your affiliates can then create “adjunct” e-books around your program offerings. For instance, a businessperson whose core is consulting of some kind might produce a book that elucidates the importance of his service in achieving clients’ greater success. Another could write a book on how to use her product to its fullest advantage. Or an in-depth discussion of an interesting issue could lead into a mention of the product or service “in the background”.
Either an affiliate or a merchant can use downloadable ebooks to enhance the attractiveness of his/her website or ezine, of course, as an incentive, or to engender a feeling of trust in his/her visitors/readers, by providing good information and advice therein.
This technique certainly trains affiliate program merchants to help their affiliates to become more acquainted with viral marketing. Using ebooks as a source of affiliate viral marketing can only increase traffic and in turn profits for your website.
Viral Marketing on the Web
How many times have you followed links from one site to another and another – only to end up at the first website? The World Wide Web is easily one of the best mechanisms for Viral Marketing.
The simplest and most obvious way of getting people to link to your site is to make it an incredibly useful site packed with informative material. This takes advantage of the main reason people use the Internet – to find information. If you narrow down the focus of your site, you have a much better chance of being found on the search engines, and by those who are looking for the specific information you provide, and hence your chances of being linked to increase greatly.
Another strategy that would immensely help is increasing the link popularity of your website. You want to be found wherever possible and appropriate, throughout the Internet. If your competition is there, you should be, too. Inbound links from other websites to your website provide two benefits: increased traffic to your web site and increased rankings in search engines that calculate inbound links in their algorithm, like Google.
Like you, other site owners are trying to increase their link popularity and require reciprocation or give preferential placement of your link on their site if you provide a link in return. This means you need a page or directory on your site to provide reciprocal links. Creating a links page or directory within your site makes your site more content rich and certainly more viral in nature.
Also, you can encourage your visitors to link your website to theirs. This is only possible if your website is useful to them and rich in content. Sometimes, providing incentives to visitors for link reciprocation would do you a world of good. You can encourage visitors and other complementing sites to reciprocate your website’s link in return of commission and “giveaways” for each person visiting your site through their link. This strategy may pay rich dividends.
Word-of-mouth Viral Marketing
Word-of-mouth is considered the very best marketing, because it is unsolicited. Here are some ways to encourage friends to share with friends, and use their network to promote your site.
Install software for website referral. Such software allows visitors to recommend your website to their friends and customers. It is imperative that your website is informative and useful. Try and provide something unique on your website. This could be a new product or a new service that would interest your visitors and encourage them to spread the word for you.
Make it easy to e-mail or fax your web page to a friend. Encourage readers to e-mail your web page to a friend. This is similar to recommend your site, but allows your visitor to send specific content as well. This is easier to accomplish without a database-driven site.
Create Email newsletters and send these newsletters to your friends and customers. Always encourage readers to forward your e-mail newsletter to their friends. Do this at the end of a newsletter, and you may jog some readers to do it immediately. It’s easy to do.
Create attractive Press Releases with a link to your website and send these to customers and friends. Press Releases are very viral in nature. By providing a link at the bottom of the press release, you ensure that the reader would click on the link and visit your website. It is a good idea to submit your press release to publications that have the same type of target audience as you.
Measuring Viral Effect and performance
As with any marketing campaign, tracking the results and optimizing performance over time is absolutely necessary. Understanding how viral and effective your marketing campaign is crucial information, not to mention interesting. You may be reaching a huge audience with your viral campaigns but the key is to analyze how many of these actually visit your site. You may have the right viral marketing strategy but somehow your message may not be efficient enough to bring back visitors to your website. Fixing it could increase your sales by 200%. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of the viral effect and performance of your campaigns.
Thankfully, sophisticated viral marketers can track insightful and actionable data that can be used to evaluate performance. Important metrics to analyze are pass-along, click-through, and conversion rates. Marketers should separate the click-through and conversion rates by original customers from referrals and evaluate their respective performances. These metrics will alert a marketer about the offers and customers that drive the highest ROI.
All the very best in your marketing efforts!
