Distraction!

More people fail due to being and staying distracted. It’s no secret that a lot of big marketers want you to stay distracted so you’ll keep buying their next product to finally learn “the secret.” It’s kind of ironic that they do mention you need to get focused, but you most likely skim that part.

All successful people have one thing in common. It does not matter what their niche is, what business model they use, or what their product offering is. The one thing that they have, and you need to have, is focus. They don’t let anything distract them from working and building their business.

By having laser focus on their business building and working during their work hours, they have the luxury of having more free time. They are in control of their time. I know you’ve seen these guys posting pictures of their latest travels or vacation and you wonder how they can run a business and goof off so much. It’s because of focus. They focus on business when it’s business time and they focus on play time when it’s play time.

How can you develop more focus?

1. Decide and define what matters to you. You need a strong passion and a strong reason for why you want to build and run an online business. Until you decide and commit to that, you’ll likely keep floundering around, distracted.

2. Make a list of 3 things you must do each day. These should be tasks that actually grow your business or your online presence. Do not do anything else until these 3 tasks are completed.

3. Avoid email, social media and anything else that distracts you. There is a time for these things, but while you are working on the 3 tasks mentioned above, you need to turn everything else off and tune it out.

4. Do not multi-task! I know, you think you’ll save time by doing 3 things at once. Unfortunately this rarely ever saves time. Give your full attention to each task.  If you focus only on one thing at a time, you’ll likely end up finishing before you thought you would. That creates more free time for you.

If you’re a parent I’m sure you’ve read advice to give each child their own special time with you if you have more than one child. Each child needs some one-on-one attention from their parents. It builds their self-esteem and makes them feel special. Treat your tasks as children if you need to. Spend time with each task. Give that task your undivided love and attention.

5. Take breaks. Try to do this before you start losing focus and feeling distracted. You can push this to the last minute, but by doing so you’ll likely waste time trying to push through something. Instead, go take a short walk or enjoy a soda, coffee or tea away from your work station. Go have a few minutes of “you” time to regroup. Be sure to set a timer or an alarm on your phone so you get back to work after your allotted break time.

Focus can be a hard thing to master, but the more distractions you remove from your work time, the more you’ll get accomplished. Clear out the clutter and close off the world until you’ve done your tasks. You’ll be surprised how much free time you can create by doing this. One day you may even be the one posting those pictures of exotic places.

Feel free to share your time saving tips or how you developed your own focus. We’d love to hear from you.

If you think you’re good at writing then there are thousands of individuals and companies willing to pay you for your skills. In this article I will be giving you a few tips to help you get people to pay you to write.

It is important that you know that some of the tips in this article take time to deliver results, and some can give you results almost instantly. Either ways, one thing remains for sure, the more effort you put in, the more results you are likely to get.

Focus on Building an Audience

The first step you should take when it comes to getting people to pay you for your writing is to build an audience. Without an audience, you will hardly be able to make enough money to sustain yourself, and it will be difficult to build a long term business.

By having an audience you will have cultivated a user base that love your work and making money from your efforts will be extremely easy as a result. One of the best ways to build a base and cultivate an audience is by having a blog. People will be able to find you and reference your content through your blog, and over time you will also be ranked in the search engines thereby leading to more traffic to your content.

You should know that building a blog is only one part of the equation, and that after building a blog you still have to focus on marketing yourself. I can easily list a few blog marketing techniques below, but nothing can beat the years of experience of numerous successful writers and bloggers, so make sure you check the marketing section of this blog for some tips to help you out.

Once you’ve been able to build an audience, the tips below will help you get great results.

Offer Your Services as a Freelance Writer

If you’re very confident about your writing skills you can also get people to hire you for basic writing jobs, or for more advanced copywriting jobs. Since you already have a blog and a reader base that loves your content, all you need to do is advertise your writing services, and you will get enough people to hire you.

The key to being successful as a freelance writer is to market yourself a lot, and to also work on constantly improving on your current skills and learning new skills.

Create an eBook Guide

Another step you should take once you’ve been able to cultivate an audience that loves your work is to create an eBook guide that solves a problem, and then sell the guide to your readers. If you lookout carefully, your readers have a lot of problems that needs a solution, and you can get paid for your skills by creating a guide that helps them solve these problems.

You need to realize that launching a guide alone won’t do the trick; you also have to constantly work on marketing yourself.

Image Credit

Product reviews are a great income booster and can be quick and easy to write. When you write a great product review, it is seen immediately by your loyal followers, but it can also be found in search engines for months and even years to come.

Here are some quick tips for writing great product reviews.

Recommend Outstanding Products

This is an absolute must. If you didn’t pay for the product yourself or you don’t highly recommend the person behind the product, your recommendations will suffer. Find people that you know are upstanding and promote their products.

Keep YOUR Customer in Mind

When you make a recommendation, these people are essentially your customers too. Keep their best interest in mind and let them know that you care about them. This will help ensure that they come to you for your recommendations on a continual basis.

Be Honest

Don’t sugar coat your review. If you don’t like something about the product, let it be known. Yes, you can write a good review and promote a product even if there is something you don’t like about it. By sharing that information it shows your honesty. What you don’t like may not be a concern to your readers, but they need to know about it up front.

Describe the Product

What kind of product is it you’re promoting? Is it an ebook alone, are there videos involved? Is it a membership site with a recurring monthly fee? These are important details to people and should be mentioned.

Discuss the Price and its Value

Price is important to some people and not so important to others. However, you need to list the price and how much value you think it’s worth. Many times people will pay more for a high value product than a low cost alternative.

Offer a related bonus for buying through your link if you can. Don’t just throw something in the mix. People love getting free bonuses. You can either offer it right on your sales page or as a surprise included in your download email. If you do offer a free bonus, this is a great way to get people on your list instead of just passing them off to someone else. Always keep that in mind. You may not want to build a list in that specific area, but you can put them on a special customer list so you’ll know the types of products you can recommend to them in the future.

The Details

One of the best ways to write a product review is to just be you. Pretend you are speaking to a friend who has just asked you your opinion. We freely share recommendations for movies and restaurants. If you truly enjoyed something they will know, your enthusiasm will come through.

Don’t worry about writing the perfect review, worry about promoting the perfect product instead. Just get your review out there in front of people. After you’ve had some practice and honed your review writing skills, you can go back and edit your original reviews to be more up to date and streamlined.

image credit: http://www.personalbrandingblog.com/

Answer to this question is easy enough to understand.  Anyone can do this.  The way you sell goods and services to the populace is through showmanship, and more importantly, advertising.  Advertising has been a key to commercial ventures for a long time, probably since the first people began to barter and trade with one another so many millennia ago.  In the nineteenth and twentieth century, men and women were able to purchase a variety of goods and services through a variety of avenues.  These included traveling salesman, traditional establishments such as corner stores, and drug stores, as well as mail order catalogs.

In the modern era, all of these advertising methods are still available.  However, technology has changed the game yet again, as it so often does.  The development of the Internet during the 1980s and 90s has changed virtually every aspect of human society from interpersonal communication to commercial ventures.  Millions of people spend billions of dollars every day on the web purchasing everything from books to medical insurance through websites.

If everyone is purchasing and selling goods and services on the web, then why not improve your businesses marketability through the use of web-based advertising?

I am not telling you to engage in the absolutely ludicrous, wholly ineffective, totally annoying type of advertising which necessitates the transmission of the blanket-e-mails across the Web.  This type of advertising is wholly outdated, and viewed as a nuisance by many of us went the Internet on a daily basis, because of the fact that these bulk-email-advertisements constantly fill our Internet e-mail boxes, and are usually deleted without ever being opened.

Does this sound like a surefire way to sell your products to the public? I think not.  There is a much more effective type of Internet-based advertising, which has become prevalent throughout business world recently.   Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is one of the only types of advertising available on the web, which allows business owners to make a profit through their advertisements, while also allowing them to increase their customer bases exponentially through ever-increasing public exposure.

Furthermore, the types of advertisements generated by PPC software such as Google AdWords allows business owners to set up target audiences based on factors such as ethnicity, religion, gender, interests, as well as other factors.  At the same time, these types of software also allow the business owner the ability to track the effectiveness of any PPC advertisements on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, which in turn allows business owners and their employees to constantly revamp and rethink marketing strategies in an effort to improve their products’ overall marketability.  PPC software is among the most difficult software to operate on the web.

However, many corporations offer well-organized tutorials, which will greatly increase any users understanding of the software.  At the same time, privately maintained websites such as www.PPC.org also provide discussion forums and articles, which offer a copious amount of PPC tips and PPC tricks for anyone’s use.

Try looking around on the Internet without the aid of search engines, and you’ll easily find yourself clucking around like a chicken without a head. Now, the services that Google and a lot of these other websites are invaluable, because they serve as the online information gateways of the Internet. This makes these search engines the best possible place to start advertising next to popular websites and blogs. But of course they’re way ahead of what you’re thinking. Google has set up a service called Google AdWords. The way this works is simple. Clients bid for keywords to tag their ads with. This way whenever a keyword is searched, their ads automatically come up on the side.

So why not just climb the results page?

Good question, but there’s a thing that you have to understand about search engines. They usually like to keep their search results as truthful and as relevant as possible. Adding a couple of websites or ads with links on the results page would really degrade the integrity of the results. People would only get the results advertisers and companies would want them to get. Now they wouldn’t be a very nice thing for search engines to do would it? Instead, they allow people to place ads next to the results list. Besides, these ads are just as relevant as the links on the search results themselves. The problem with climbing search results is that it takes time and a lot of reputation to get to the top page. This is why a lot of Search Engine Optimization companies are so popular because they serve to raise rankings, but that’s for another discussion.

What does any search engine get out of it?

It has to do a lot with how these ads work. You see, these AdWords work like Pay per click ads. Actually, they do work like PPC ads, which means that Google charges the owners of the ad per the clicks the links receive. Pretty neat until the website you’re advertising gets a lot of hits without targeting the specific people you want. Luckily there are ways to get out of it. People can actually change the specifics on how their ads are placed. They can choose the time, and location where their ads are shown. Pretty neat isn’t it?

While Google Adsense is a recommended and loved source of revenue for many, it can also lead to excessive space being used on a site, and also displaying unwanted and ugly banners. The next best solution? In content advertising has been on a steady rise, as many bloggers are looking to monetize their content, but not jeopardize their reader’s experience or wanting to place banner ads through out the site.

For those web site and blog owners looking to monetize their content, VigLink has created a solution for you. VigLink has based their business model off creating an advertising platform that works within the content of your blog… the real meat that everyone is actually visiting your blog to read, yet is also under monetized by many. The video below is a fun and quick walk through of how their in content advertising works.

Why VigLink is Cool and How It Works

Hats off right away to VigLink for creating a video that really explains what their service does, and making it simple and easy for everyone to understand. In a nutshell, VigLink can place relevant advertising through out the content of your web site. Instead of getting paid pennies per click, like you would with Google Adsense, VigLink is setting up actual affiliate links, so you can earn a nice commission on all referred sales.

You can see an example of how VigLink would work on your web site if you happen to mention “ebay” in your site or blog content.

Sure, you could join a ton of affiliate program and set the links up on your own, but this would be a massive job in itself… especially if you have hundreds or even thousands of blog posts! Then you would have the issue of having to login and track all of these affiliate links separately, and possibly have to wait for multiple sales before every meeting the check minimum. With VidLink, all of those nasty complications are solved and run within one network. and platform.

VigLink is also great because they are compatible with many other advertising platforms as well. If you want to serve Google Adsense on your web site, you can also serve VigLink as well. Are you writing reviews on products and linking back to Amazon.com? That’s still fine… now you can monetize your web sites in more ways than before, and not have to worry about your ad spots competing with each other.

All it takes is an email address to get started, and you won’t have to wait for an approval team to get back to you. Once you sign up, you will have instant access to your site code and can start serving content ads on your site. Join VigLink now and start getting paid for your blog content.

However, you need to find out the legitimate methods of making an earning online without falling into the traps of ‘get rich quick’ schemes. My experience tells me it is wise to avoid any online jobs which would ask you to pay a token amount upfront if they have to hire you. It could be an Internet scam. There are many opportunities to make money working online either part time or full time.  Here I have listed a few.

Online Tutors

There is a great demand for qualified online tutors who can coach students of various age groups and on various subjects. There are many websites where you can register your profile.  These websites would introduce the tutors to the student(s). Here the pay is on an hourly basis. It is wise to maintain an online time-tracker such as Apptivo’s Timesheet App to keep track of the hours spent.

Online Surveys

There are many legitimate online survey firms who pay you for opinions on their products. Online survey firms are actually market research companies who work for the manufacturers. There are some firms who pay for surfing. However, beware of the scams.

Design Websites/Uploading Videos

If you know the technologies to design websites, you can earn online very well. There are many online tools that are free of cost. Get paid for uploading videos and reading/sending emails. Though you will not earn a lot, these jobs can be undertaken on a part-time basis. You can send invoices

Reviewing Websites

It is an upcoming trend. There are many website owners and bloggers who are willing to pay you for writing product reviews on your site. You can advertise their product on your website and also give your affiliate link for the product in your reviews. When someone buys that product clicking the link in your website, you get paid.

Virtual Assistant

One of the recent trends, which are becoming popular, is being a virtual assistant. Nature of the job is to assist the online researchers on their research projects, support busy professionals with work etc. You would be paid handsomely depending on the difficulty of the task you shoulder. The researchers would want you to conduct surveys and make phone calls on their behalf and also do a bit of research on their behalf.

Start Off by Making your Presence Felt Virtually

Upload your professional profile in sites such as Linkedin and other social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and more. Build your online credibility by creating your blog using Apptivo’s WordPress App. According to your field of freelancing, register in a few good discussion forums.  Actively participating in forums and answering the questions correctly will make you noticeable. As you gain popularity host your website to exhibit your skill set. Last but not the least invoicing is mandatory to keep track of your billings and payments. Apptivo’s Invoicing App is a free and easy to use tool for this.

In this post we are going to focus on contextual advertising any why many bloggers are moving towards this form of monetization and staying away from traditional forms of advertising such as selling banner space.

What is Contextual Advertising and How Does It Work?

Contextual advertising is the concept of advertising that is built within the content of a web site, while also serving advertising that is already based on a web site or blogs topics. The best way to explain contextual advertising, is to think of Google Adsense, but without the banner ads.

When you create content and articles for your web site, contextual ad networks will look through the content on your web site and pull out individual text words that would relate to their directory of advertisers, then turn them into text based links. This is all done through the backend of their site tracking and is automatic. Some contextual networks will also offer a wordpress plugin for better link/site options and setup.

Instead of serving banners, your text content will have contextual ad placements through out your site. You would be paid on pay per click basis, every time one of your visitors clicks on a contextual link. You can see a preview of what links might look like on a blog serving contextual advertising. Upon hovering over a contextual based text link, a hover box will appear, which the user can then click on again if they are interested.

The pros of contextual advertising versus banner advertising, is that it does not take up any extra space or pulls your readers eyes away from the real content of your web site. As the owner of a web site that is running contextual advertising, you also have full control over what pages display contextual links, and how many links you would like displayed per page.

Who is INTENTclick?

The name INTENTclick might not sound familiar to many of you, but I’m sure the name Kontera does. INTENTclick is the new contextual ad network that is powered by Kontera. You will notice that BloggingTips.com is currently serving advertising through your contextual ad platform.

Kontera has become one of the largest and most trusted networks among high end blogs and web sites over the years, and through their new INTENTclick service, they are looking to make their web site partners even more money. Before signing up, you should make sure that your site falls within the requirements of their partner web sites, which are listed below.

• Site Content must focus mainly on Better Income or Save Money.
• 1,000 US users per month.
• A focused web affiliate business with high ratio of SEO traffic.

Once setup with your own INTENTclick account, you can start running ads on your site in no time. As mentioned earlier, some contextual networks offer wordpress plugins which make it extremely easy and efficient for you to install and customize your ad settings. INTENTclick has one of the best contextual wordpress plugins around. You can see an example of their plugin and settings below.

Once installed, through INTENTclick’s wordpress plugin, you can play around with the color of your contextual ad placements, along with where you would like them to display ads, and where not. For example, you probably wouldn’t want to serve contextual ads on your contact information pages, as it’s less irrelevant and you will only want to provide your readers with your legit contact information.

Getting Started and Making Money with INTENTclick

If you are looking for new ways to bring in revenue with your web site or blog, but already using traditional methods such as affiliate links and banner advertising, why not try your hand at contextual advertising. Sites focused on information, tutorials, shopping and reviews will see very high earnings and click through rates, as these are the markets where people are visiting web sites and looking for direct information and are already in buying more.

As a site partner of INTENTclick, you will have access to thousands of offers, which will automatically be converted to contextual advertiser links placed throughout your web site. With a quick and easy plug and play integration, you can add multiple web sites into your account and start serving contextual ads. INTENTclick also offers some of the highest payouts around, with minimums of .07 per click from the United States.

Join INTENTclick and Increase Your Revenue Today

VigLink has compiled a top 10 list for the hottest selling items during the holidays. All of the information is backed by their own sales figures, which tracks what people are actually clicking on and buying across millions of web sites. You can view each of VigLink’s top 10 blog posts below:

• Top 10 Mobile Devices for the Holidays
• Top 10 Gaming Consoles for the Holidays
• Top 10 Hottest Kids Toys for the Holidays

Focusing your efforts on creating a niche blog around any of these topics or hot selling items is a great idea, but nothing something you can wait to throw up right before Christmas. Many of the items found on these lists are recurring products that you will see every year, just with new versions and updates. (ie: iPhones, Barbies, Video Games).

How to Monetize a Niche Product Web Site

When it comes to monetization of your niche web site, you have a few options. You can link to Amazon.com, which is always a great idea, but the commissions are usually very small, as the margins are so small on Amazon. Google Adsense is another great method, but then you have to make space for advertising banners on your blog. The next best thing is advertising through a contextual network like VigLink, which can place relevant links within your blogs content.

The short 90 second video below is not only fun to watch, but it quickly breaks down the different ways you can monetize a web site. (banners vs. in content advertising)

Earn More this Holiday Season with VigLink, and Win Prizes!

It doesn’t matter if you have a web site or blog that is focused on buying trends, holiday shopping, or even just a personal blog that is getting traffic… you can still monetize your web site through VigLink without having to throw up ugly or distracting banners on your site. In the screenshot below you can see how a simple description and comment on a blog can quickly become monetized with relevant content, without the need for direct link building from the site owner.

For a Limited Time: Install VigLink and Win
If you aren’t currently a VigLink customer, now is the time to signup. If you register and install VigLink before Dec 15th, you’ll be entered to win one of the top 2 products on each list that are featured on the top selling holiday products that were listed above. VigLink installs just like AdSense and does not interfere with your existing monetization efforts (including existing affiliate links on your site — VigLink can overwrite these but does not by default).

Take a look at the holiday buying trends, along with how you can monetize your existing blog with VigLink.

On my last entry about information products, Sharon Akinoluwa, of wealthandriches.net, left a really good comment. At least I thought it was a good comment. It reminded me of how many times people with regular jobs ask me, “Do you get paid for that?” The truth is, I do a lot of things that I don’t get paid for. I give away as much free information as I can get a hold of, not all of it created by me, but it’s informative.

People with regular jobs are merely trading hours for dollars (or pounds or whatever currency they use.) Most people do no more or no less than they think the hourly wage is worth. But you’re an entrepreneur. You’re building a business. You can’t think like a person with a regular job.

So all of this brings up topics like over-delivering, customer service, etc. You want to make money in your business, but everything you do isn’t about getting paid. At least it shouldn’t be. If it is, I’m afraid your business may see some initial success, but will fail when people decide that you’re all about the money.

In one article I brought up the fact that at the end of the it’s all about people. Your business is people, it’s not products. Sure, you offer products and solutions to problems, but without people looking for products and solutions, you don’t have a business.

Part of Sharon’s comment stated, “I tend to place more importance on internal rewards than external rewards.” That is a very powerful statement and so true. You get more satisfaction out of helping others and putting them first than you do from making sales on products. Until you start giving of yourself and helping others, you won’t see much success. You truly do recieve by giving. The more you give, the more you recieve, and that’s not just about money. That’s about recieving something more important than money.

You’re probably wondering how you can make money if you give everything away. You don’t give everything away, but you do offer enough free bonus material that the customer feels like they received enormous value. When you do that, they will become a lifetime customer and continue to purchase from you in the future.

It’s Christmas time in the US. That means it’s the season of giving. People love this holiday because they can give other people gifts. In your business, it should be Christmas every day. You should give something each day, whether it’s advice, a free report, and encouraging word to someone.

Don’t worry about getting paid for everything, worry more about the value you give to your customers. The rewards will come. It will also help you build your brand and become an authority figure in your niche.

Whether or not you celebrate this season as a holiday, you should celebrate the gift of giving every day. Your first thought, when you sit down to work should be, “What can I give today?”

Happy Business Building!

What to blog about?

Personally, I think that you should always blog about things that are important to you.  If you don’t blog about something that is important to you, you will quit after a couple weeks.  Blog about something you are passionate about.  If you are passionate about something that people will buy this is an extra benefit.  You can blog about things that you enjoy and give reviews of things that people will buy.

How to gain attention?

You can always gain attention by blogging about a hot topic to the holiday season.  Remember back in the day when pogs where the thing to buy.  I would like to think that there were several websites out there that made a ton of money on pogs because they blogged a ton about it.  Blog about a specific niche and only blog about things in that niche.  This will help you to become the expert in your field. I personally say that 90% of niches out there can still be dominated in a matter of 6 months of hard work.  This would be blogging 5-6 different times a week.

Where do I start?

Start now, get off your ass and do something. If you want to become something in this life you just have to get out there and do something. Making money during the holiday season isn’t hard, but you do have to be out there and doing something.  Get off the couch and write about something you are passionate about.  I didn’t realize that I could make money online till I put up my first site and started doing it.  I have designed 100′s of sites since then.  You can make money online with your blogging skills but you have to be out there working at it.  Do it.

You can use them in several ways. You can add them to your newsletter, create tutorials or training courses. They’re a great platform for building your list. Simply give them away as an incentive for people to sign up to your email list.

If you’re new to information products, or haven’t started using them yet, there are some great benefits to doing so. A few things you need to consider is how profitable they can be for your business. Spend a day thinking about how and why to incorporate them.

Start by planning your content and creating a game plan. Things you need to consider are:

–advantages to your business.
–ideas for topics.
–demand for the products.
–pricing the products.
–marketing the products.
–use as free gifts.

The benefits of giving away free information products:

–build your list
–get subscribers on a membership site
–includes affiliate links for future sales
–build credibility

The benefits of selling information products:

–builds credibility
–builds trust
–offers value
–low start up costs and low cost to produce
–can sell to many buyers over a long period
–low overhead costs
–no packing or shipping costs

How can you get started?

–You can write your own content. Choose a topic that you have a lot of knowledge in.
–Use your older blog posts as starting content and expand on it.
–Conduct interviews and use that material as the base for your product.
–Purchase pre-written material, like private label rights content and add your voice and style to it.
–Use screen capture software to create a step-by-step tutorial.

Creating information products is not that difficult but it can seem overwhelming if you’re new to it. Don’t forget, if your budget allows you can outsource most of, if not all of the work required.

Having your own information products can provide you with a very profitable source of income. It also builds your reputation as an expert in your niche. If you’re not ready to start creating your own products you can promote and give away other people’s free reports to earn money as an affiliate. In fact, you can do this at the same time as building your own information product business.

First of all, I’ve mentioned that no one likes being sold to. Admit it, even if you completely understand the concept of selling and that it does need to be done to make money, you hate being sold to.

How many times have you stopped at a car lot, just to look around, and an annoying salesman pops up and tries to convince you to buy a new car today? You may be in the market for a new car, but maybe it’s just not today. Now, if that salesman personally owns the car you’re looking over and can tell you what he likes and doesn’t like, you’re more likely to keep an eye on that car. He may even convince you to buy it without actually trying to sell it to you. Welcome to pre-selling.

Pre-selling is simply sharing your thoughts, feelings or concerns about a particular product. In the case of an affiliate sale or promotion, it helps if you have personally used the product that you want your reader to purchase. If it’s your own product, then you just need to speak of the benefits without actually pushing it onto the reader.

Let’s say you’re an avid gamer and you recently purchased a great game. When your friends ask about this game, you will most likely be very enthusiatic about it. You will tell them all the great qualities that you like in the game. You’ll probably even tell them a few glitches that you didn’t like, but still recommend it. Since they value your opinion and know that you’re one of the best gamers they know, chances are they will buy the game because of your recommendation.

You weren’t trying to sell them the game. You don’t get paid for it, but you love it enough that you want to share it with friends.

Pre-selling works the same way. You just give the facts, share your likes and dislikes and have the reader ready to buy before they click the link to the actual product.

You aren’t pushing this product on them, you’re simply sharing the information, preferably in an enthusiastic manner, so the reader decides they simply must have the product. If you pre-sell well enough, or rave about the product in an honest manner, the chances are they will skip reading the actual sales page and scroll down to the buy now button. If you are effective in sharing the product, they won’t need to read the sales pitch.

If you’re familiar with SiteSell, you know that the method they teach of building a business is:
Content–>  Traffic–>  PREsell–>  Monetize.

As an affiliate for many products, I know first hand that when I’ve used a product yourself and can write a good recommendation, those products get more sales than the ones I’m not as familiar with. Instead of selling to your reader, just share great content and great information. The sales will make themselves.

Build Product Portfolio
I discussed that you should start off small with only one or two products. However, over time, you will want to add more to that so you can create multiple streams of income.
Another thing you want to promote is recurring products like membership sites. With these types of products you get monthly income as long as your referrals stay with the program. This can add up to a nice bit of income.

Build Your Email List
I’ve mentioned this in several posts that cover affiliate marketing because it’s that important. Your list is pretty much your life line, especially if you make the people on your list feel special and offer them great products and valuable information.

The people on your list are your best buyers. They are more willing to purchase your product recommendations than strangers are. Build that list and treat it like a gold mine, or better yet, treat it like a hard to grow exotic plant that needs lots of love and care. You can’t go wrong by treating people like they are important and special.

Promote High Quality Products
If you don’t believe in a product and love it, you’ll never make any affiliate sales. People can see through a blatant sales pitch. If you don’t have a personal investment in the product you’ll never be able to convince other people to try it. You may have a few sales here and there, but to get life long customers who trust you, you need to have some passion for the products you promote. Always promote the best products, even if the commission is lower than a shabby product. You won’t regret it.

Grow Your Traffic
You need traffic to build your list. Without traffic, you’re just dead in the water. Spend time each week promoting your website and getting people to sign up for your list. You can do this through social media, guest blogging or using article directories.

Building your list is like building a mouse trap. A mouse trap is no good if there aren’t any mice to catch, it’s just a useless contraption.

Grow your traffic, grow your list.

Don’t Forget Pre-Selling
This ties into having passion about the products you promote. Your objection here is to have people ready to buy before they ever click your affiliate link. If you can get them excited before they click the link to find out more, your conversation rates will be much higher.

This is where pre-selling comes in. Pre-selling is basically sharing your enthusiasm for a particular product. If it doesn’t excite you, it probably won’t excite anyone else.

Do you have any successful affiliate marketing tips you’d like to share? Feel free to let us know in the comments section.

image credit: ljleavell

Here are some tips to keep you from avoiding the worst mistakes in affiliate marketing. The most important thing to remember is that sleazy tactics are out. Yes, some people still make some quick cash with those kinds of methods, but it’s short lived. If you want to create a nice long-term affiliate marketing business, do it with integrity.

Pre-Sell
It’s important to learn the art of pre-selling a product without sounding like a sales pitch. The best way to do this is to share personal information. Use the product so you have bragging rights to it. People will appreciate it more and buy more if you’re honest.

Also, don’t be shy about explaining things you don’t particularly like about the product. No product is absolutely perfect. Share with your readers what you think is missing or where it falls a little short. This will let your audience know that you did use the product, you did see results from the product and even though it’s not perfect you still think it’s a great deal and can be valuable to them.

Be Human
This also falls under writing from your heart. You don’t need sales copy to get a sale; that’s the job of the sales copy. You simply need to have the reader ready to buy before they click your link. You do this with being human, being honest and truly caring about people.

Most sales pages have testimonials. A lot of people rely on these to help them make their decision. When you pre-sell a product, use YOUR testimony.

Build a List
You need a way to capture an audience. The best way to do this is by building your email list. People who sign up for your free report, ecourse or newsletter already want to hear from you. They are already starting to trust you. The emails you send out is simply a way to build more trust. This results in having people who are willing to buy on your recommendations.

Make a connection
If people are leaving comments on your blog posts, you need to reply to them. You don’t have to answer every single one if you get a lot of comments, but do make a connection with people. They’ve taken the time to say something, be courteous and reply to them.

Social media is another great way to make connections. You need to do it in the same manner as blog comments. Never just promote your own stuff on social sites. Get involved with conversations and engage people, share their tweets and status updates too.

Share valuable information
When you share information with your readers, only about 20% of it needs to contain a sales pitch. For example: If you post to your blog five days per week, only one of those five posts should be about trying to promote an affiliate product. However, that post should be just as valuable and informative as the other four posts.

You can hint at reminders once in awhile, but as far as trying to get a sale every time you write something, that gets old and will cause you to lose readers.