Hype Marketing asked:


Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell

What exactly is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is the single fastest growth industry on the Internet. It’s also true that affiliate marketing is one of the fastest and most creative ways to make money and have a career on the Internet.

Simply put, affiliate marketing is selling products on a commission basis. You own a business that advertises and sells products for other companies. You may have a product of your own to begin with or not. The things that a successful affiliate marketer must have are:

Your website is the jumping off point of all your marketing efforts. So the first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. You must build a user-friendly website, which will attract your prospects and motivate them to click on the links to the products and services you are promoting and make a purchase. There are companies whose business is building websites that you can hire to build one for you.

You must find products to sell, you must be able to determine whether there is a demand for those products and if people will actually buy them.  You may either have your own original product or products that are made by others. Which ever way you go, you must believe in the products.

It will be necessary for you to become an adept advertiser and be able to tell whether the advertising you are paying for is producing more income for you than the advertising is costing you.

It is necessary that you have good mathematical skills. You will need to be able to track your sales and determine profit, as well as, see to it that your suppliers are paid in full and on time.

You need the full and unwavering support of your family so that you can devote the time and energy necessary to launch your affiliate marketing business.



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Bard Marketing asked:

With the uncertainty of the economy, legal marketing agency Beyond All Reasonable Doubt Marketing is advising law firms to take a serious look at their budgets. While marketing, advertising and public relations dollars frequently are cut to reduce expenses, marketing experts agree that a down economy is actually the time when marketing efforts should remain in place, and if anything, be enhanced.

“When other law firms reduce their spending and cut their marketing, they have less presence in the marketplace,” explains BARD Marketing founder and president, John Sailer. “This means the time is ripe for a savvy law firm to grab market share – to reach the audience that is still there but who is hearing from fewer of your competitors.”

When planning your law firm’s budget, you should start by identifying how much you want to spend. While there are no hard and fast rules across the different types and sizes of law firms, it makes sense to budget your marketing as a percentage of expected revenue. Several studies have pegged overall law firm marketing budgets to be between 2 percent and 3 percent, with leading firms spending 5 percent or more.

Second, prioritize your initiatives by looking at both costs and expected benefits. This is easy if you tracked your efforts in past years. Remember that some of the lower cost initiatives may bring strong value while some of the higher cost initiatives may bring very little value. With this said, it is imperative to track outcome of every initiative.

BARD Marketing is experienced in budgeting and planning for short- and long-term marketing and advertising plans, and enables law firms to achieve and track ROI for their marketing activities. For more information or to request a report on Yellow Page Advertising Costs and Effectiveness, please visit www.bardmarketing.

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The Maverick Marketeer asked:


How to increase your affiliate web site marketing income…

Whether you are interested in creating a stable primary source of income online or just looking to supplement your existing income through marketing affiliate programs…increasing your earning potential will be a constant concern. After all, the goal of any business venture is ultimately to maximize profits.

As an affiliate marketer there are two ways in which you can increase your affiliate web site marketing income. This is simply based upon the method in which affiliate programs work. Regardless of the type or program (i.e. pay per sale, pay per lead, etc.), all affiliate programs are all performance based commission opportunities. When you refer customers to your affiliate company’s website and the customer completes a certain action like filling out a form or making a sale, you receive a commission.

Therefore, to increase your commissions you really only have two options. Increase the number of customers you refer to your affiliate company’s sales site or increase the number of customers who complete the desired action once they arrive there. This second aspect of the affiliate commission equation is also known as your conversion rate or CR.

Increasing the number of customers you refer is of the two options available, the one which you undoubtedly have the most direct control over. The reason being is that the number of referrals you make is directly tied to the success of your own affiliate web site marketing efforts. Whether you market through banner ads, pay-per-click marketing, or what have you, once the customer arrives at the destination site the rest of the process is largely out of your hands.

Realistically, your CR will tend to vary anywhere from 1% to about 10% on the high end. But, how can you manage your all important CR? I say all important for a very important reason. Increasing referral traffic is of course one of you main objectives as an affiliate web site marketing professional, however which would you rather have? Would you rather have 500 referrals with a 1% conversion rate or 100 referrals with a 10% conversion rate? As you can see here, generating 5 times the referral traffic earns you…lets see; half the commission?

A fundamental difference between generating referral traffic and managing CR is this. Traffic generation and affiliate promotion will always cost you, either in time or money. Managing CR however, doesn’t cost any additional time or money. Your CR will directly reflect several important things.

How you reach your prospects…

What you say to your prospects once you reach them…

How you refer you prospects to your merchant site…

To effectively manage your conversion rates pay close attention each phase of your referral process to make sure you do the best possible job preparing customers to have an open-mind once they arrive at your merchant site. Pre-selling your prospects will make all the difference in increasing you CR.

In summary, you’ll want to focus on two goals to greatly increase you affiliate web site marketing income. Your first goal will be to maximize the amount of targeted traffic to your affiliate merchants by only spending time and money that produce maximum profit for you. Your second goal is to maximize your conversion rates by making the proper adjustments within your referral process to produce the best possible results.



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