If you have your site up and are either selling physical products or infoproducts, you need to get people to your site to make a sale. Internet marketing’s key to success is getting customers to your site, and the competition can be humbling. If you are in a highly competitive market such as making money online, you will be competing with millions of other websites. Sadly, many of them have been online for a long time and know how to get a high ranking.
When you start out, you must see what your competition is and if it might be too big of a challenge to get good ranking. First, you must go back to your keyword analysis to see the competion for keywords relating to your product. Don’t go with the general terms like dogs. You need to use two or more word phrases as I stated in an earlier post. Find the “longtail” keyword phrases so you can have less competition to get higher rankings.
You need to get backlinks to your site. These are links that point toward a page of your site. If you can get backlinks from websites that have a high page rank you will do wonders in increasing your ranking. One way links are the links of choice, not reciprocal links in which you link back to a site that is linking to you. Google does not like reciprocal links as they have been abused in the past to give some websites a false ranking of importance.
One avenue of internet marketing is having a site that sell physical products. This can be more cumbersome than selling infoproducts or just being an affiliate. First you must research to see what products are in demand and can you get the product, sell it at a competitive price, and either have the products in your own warehouse or work with a dropship company that will deliver the product for you for a small percentage. Actually, the only way to go when you are starting out is a dropship company so you don’t get stuck with a warehouse of products that won’t sell.
You will have to have a secure order program which means using SSL encryption. Customers won’t buy from you if they don’t feel the transaction is safe. You must reassure the customer by having a notification that the transaction is secure.
A shopping cart is necessary to be able to sell the products and you should research several companies to find one that suits your needs. You must have a way to process payments and this is usually from a merchant account. This can get messy and if you have bad credit you probably won’t be accepted. The easiest way is with Paypal, who handle the payments for a small fee. The only hassle is the customer has to be a member of Paypal and if they aren’t, they will have to sign up. Besides paying online, you could have a toll free number for the customers to call and place an order. This is not such a big pain in the butt as it was a few years ago.
Once you go though all the work of lining up your products and getting your website up and running, you still must get people to your website or its all for naught. I go over some ideas for this on my next post.
One of the questions that doesn’t have a simple answer is how many products to promote. Obviously, with more products you will generate interest for more people who are looking to solve different needs. But, then again, when you key on one product, you can zero in on all the good points of the product and do a better job of promoting the product.
When you are looking for a specific product, you don’t really want to see a site that is promoting everything under the sun. Kind of a shotgun effect. You are looking for one specific thing and everything else is annoying. The customer gets distracted and looks elsewhere. When you read one of those long sales letters, they are promoting one product and they make sure they give a complete description of the product. If I am promoting a product that I think could be a great money maker, I am going to key on that product and give all the information possible to attract potential customers. I don’t want to lose customers by giving a snippet of information on my key product and turn around and talk about another product. You don’t come across as being passionate about one specific product. You are just trying to make a sale.
On the other hand, you can promote different products and be successful if all the products are in the same field. Many e-commerce sites use this principal such as a golf site that promotes golf accessories. The key is make sure the products you are promoting are related.
So it is really up to you want you want to promote and how many different products. If it is a large ticket item, it might be better to key on that one product and cover all aspects of the product. You can use other lesser products as an up sell. If you have several products that are similar then you could promote them, but make sure there is a relationship and are in the same category. If you do have several products, you still must do a good job of promoting each product or you will lose a potential customer.
There are some key points you need to go over and make sure you don’t ruin your chances of making some good money. Don’t pick a product to promote just because it is popular right now. You need to do your research to see if it is a quality product, sales haven’t peaked, there aren’t a lot of complaints about the product, and you can make a good commission.
Promoting a product that you don’t know much about will not lead to a successful campaign. You should purchase the product and try it out to see if it really is as good as you thought. Of course, you can’t purchase all the products you promote, but the more you know the product and sound like an authority on it, the more successful you will be promoting it.
Don’t make false statements about a product. You will lose credibility with customers and ruin chances for keeping good customers. All it takes is one false statement and your business is down the toilet. If you don’t know enough about the product, then you need to do your research before promoting the product. If it is not the best product, don’t sugar coat it, be honest and tell about its shortcomings. You will gain lots of respect and this will help you keep long term relationships with your customers.
Don’t just copy the ads given by the company. Most of the other affiliate marketers are using the same ones and you want to stand out from the crowd. Be creative so when someone sees your promotion it will be noticed over others promoting the same product.
The key is to plan ahead, do your homework, be honest and put some effort into producing a quality promotion. The results will speak volumes.
OK. So you did your research on what you think would be good products in your niche. You have a solid list of keywords phrases to key on that are related to your product. You know there is a burning need for your product and you have checked out various products to promote. Now you need to make sure the following points can be answered with a resounding yes:
- The product has a good salesletter that makes you want to buy it.
- The product is priced reasonably and you can make at least 50% per sale.
- The main site is attractive and well thought out. Not too many bells and whistles.
- The product goes along with the theme of your website.
- The company has good customer service.
- You get recurring commissions with same customer.
- No fee for signing up with company.
- What is time frame of the cookie? (A cookie is a coded piece of information on a computer that identifies the computer when it visits the website. You need a cookie that will be active for at least 30 days so anything bought in that time frame will be credited to you).
Make sure all these points are answered with a yes. Nothing worse than signing up with a company and finding out they have major problems or a bad track record. Do your homework first before you jump in.
