An affiliate is someone who promotes a product or service to potential customers, in exchange for a commission on the sale or desired action when it occurs. It’s a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts. Examples include reward sites, where users are rewarded with cash or gifts, for the completion of an offer, and the referral of others to the site. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network, the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’) and the customer. The market has grown in complexity to warrant a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates and specialized third parties vendors.

Here is a graphical representation of the players and how they relate:

The sales process involves 3 basic steps. First, there must be a merchant, or someone who has a product they want to sell, and they need more customers.

The second player is the affiliate, who has an interest in promoting the merchant’s brand and product in order to earn a commission for those efforts. A business relationship exists between the merchant and the affiliate, where the merchant agrees to compensate the affiliate for his or her efforts, but only if the efforts bring the desired results (like new leads and new sales).

Many times a network may be involved, which brings affiliates and merchants together in a single digital location, provides the tracking technology and back end platform affiliates can get access to promotional tools, and also handles payment of commissions when they are due. The network is not always a player, and may not exist if the merchant has the tracking technology in place already.

The fourth player is of course the potential customer. Good affiliates understand marketing. They understand the target market. They understand how to use the various media outlets, technology, and the internet to get not only traffic, but qualified traffic that can then be referred through a specially coded link to the merchant’s website where the prospect becomes a customer, and the sale is tracked back to the affiliate who originated the traffic so that a commission can be generated.

All the players are vital for the affiliate marketing dynamic to work. Without a good quality product to promote, an affiliate has no way to monetize their traffic. Without a prospect to present their product to, a merchant won’t sell anything. Without the right tracking and affiliate management system in place, it will be difficult to recruit affiliates and convince them to promote products, so networks can be included to handle that part. And of course if there are no customers to spend money, none of this would work.

Why Become An Affiliate?

The top 3 reasons to become an affiliate marketer are:

• You don’t need to have a product!
  Since you spend your time promoting someone else’s stuff, you don’t need to take the time, energy, and money to create your own product to sell. And because the product is not yours… because you are earning a commission for referring customers… you DO NOT have the typical headaches associated with  product fulfillment, maintaining a merchant account, or dealing with customer and technical service.
• You can get started relatively quickly and inexpensively!It’s possible to be in business for a few dollars a day. The only things you really need to get started are internet access, a hosting account, and knowledge of how it works. Guess what, you get all that included with the Internet Toolkit! If you are really on a fast track to see results, it also helps if you allocate a monthly budget for marketing and advertising. Keeping overhead and start-up expenses low will help you if it takes a while for things to start clicking.
• Affiliate marketing leverages the reach of the internet!
  You can use the power of the internet to access the entire world… from your basement!

So How Does An Affiliate Promote Products?

There are many ways to drive traffic and promote products. Here are some examples:

• Blogging – Blogging is one great way to convince customers to buy the product you are promoting by giving them product reviews or product benefits
• Email Marketing – You can promote products through newsletters sent via email to customers
• Article Marketing – Another promotional method where you will write articles to be submitted to article directory sites like Ezine Articles
• Video Marketing – You can create short promotional videos to be submitted to video sites like youtube
• Pay-per-click (PPC) – You can promote products directly through Google Adwords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo

As a loyal reader of my blog, and to show my appreciation, I have secured free access to a popular membership training site called The Affiliate Profits Club.  Get more information on this free affiliate marketing resource here.

6 Steps To Creating A High Converting Squeeze Page

Whether you’re aware of what squeeze pages are in internet marketing or not, it’s time to make them a serious part of your online success.

Why? Because squeeze pages are designed to help you build a list of prospective buyers that you can email over and over again and add momentum to your online profits for years to come.

First, let me explain why you really cannot afford to leave squeeze pages out of your marketing mix:

Most people who visit your web pages will not buy. It’s a well known fact and cannot be avoided. IT is also fact that  many reasons they do not buy right away, including trust, not having the money available and also being distracted by their surroundings (such as screaming kids or a blaring TV). So how do we improve our ability to close or create a sale?

By capturing a name and email address via the squeeze page and staying in touch with that person in order to close the sale over time.  The fact is, we just are not typically ready to pull out our credit cards upon first exposure to a product. As an online marketer, it is vastly important to remain positioned so that when a prospect is ready to actually buy, or if they just need a little nudge to remind them to buy, they will buy from you.

Another reason to build a list via a squeeze page is because you have the opportunity to sell more related products to that list of people over time. Not only can you close down on one sale for the initial item, but you can also consider promoting complimentary products that your list subscribers will appreciate.

We build trust and long term security for our online businesses through list building, but it is hard when you are unable to get people to sign up in the first place. That’s why a squeeze page is so effective, because it literally forces a person to opt in to your list in exchange for valuable, free information or rewards (what I like to call “list bait”).

There’s no distraction, just action, and this is the power that well designed squeeze pages can offer.

So here are the 6 steps to transform (or create) your killer squeeze page:

1. Use professional graphics and a nice, clean layout. This will inspire trust and help towards removing any doubts about what your intent is;

2. Sell your free information just as you would the actual product. Remember that people are busy and untrusting, so you really need to emphasize the main benefits of handing over their name and email address.

3. Remove all distraction. A squeeze page is designed with one thing in mind, nothing else…to capture a name and email address. It is surprising how many pages I see with other ads, tons of links and too much text going on. Just give the visitor enough clear cut reasons to opt in, no more and no less.

4. Use call to action phrases. It’s a proven fact that people respond better when actually asked (or told) to do something specific. It makes sense when you think about it, and a simple “fill out your name and email address to the left/right” is all it takes. This should be obvious to more experienced marketers, but you’d be amazed at how many people miss this.

5. Tell them what’s coming. Make sure you let the reader know what will happen next and exactly when it will happen. This will improve the opt-in rate and reduce distraction on the other side of the opt in after taking action.

6. Use a serious disclaimer. Show the visitor that you’re not interested in spamming and where possible, try to reinforce this by referring to your auto responder policies which will do everything they can to stop spamming occurring within their network of customers.

So that’s it. 6 actionable tips for you to implement today.

I know, easier said than done. I recommend starting out with a good squeeze page template, and re-working it to meet your own needs.

Here’s a couple free squeeze page templates for you to use.

Use the freemium model of membership marketing in order to achieve business success!

In this article, we’re going to discuss “membership marketing”, and how it’s almost a requirement for a successful website. If you’re selling anything online, whether it’s ebooks, digital products or anything of that sort, then the membership system we discuss below can deliver those products in the most effective and profitable way.

Business Success Means Avoiding Churn and Increasing Revenue Per Customer.

To be a business success, you’ll need to avoid is customer churn (or “turnover”). If you get 100 new members, but 99 of them quit after 30 days, it’ll be hard for your business to survive. In a membership context, it’s the period of time someone will keep paying their membership fees. So while it’s vitally important to constantly acquire new customers, it’s just as important to maximize the revenue of each customer you already have. So what we’re talking about is the back end, and the marketing funnel you have in place.

With a subscription membership model – where you have a recurring billing system in place – the backend is the recurring fee itself. The issue becomes keeping people as members of your membership sites.

Let’s see examine how this plays out in the context of three popular business models:

Traditional Product Sales

Let’s first consider the traditional Internet marketing (publishing and sales) model, which is used by most online business owners. In this model, you create a product and a sales page, drive traffic to that page, and hope the traffic converts into sales. The average for that conversion rate is somewhere around 1% to 2%.

Assuming you have a $37 product at a 2% conversion rate, it means that for every hundred people you send to that page you’re going to sell two of those products at $37 ($74 total), and you’ll have a visitor value for each of those 100 people of $0.74.

Recurring Membership

The average conversion rate for a recurring membership site is often less than the traditional one product sale model; it’s generally 1% or less. So let’s now assume now that you’re going to charge $17 per month, rather than the original $37 product price point. But we start to encounter churn with monthly billing. In our experience, the average membership stick rate is between three and five months.

So for every 100 visitors, we’ll get one membership sale, and that customer can be expected to stick around for approximately four months. That means you’re going to generate $68 in revenue from that one signup (four x $17 = $68). That gives you an average visitor value of $0.68. When you use the membership model, you can also put backend offers in place. So once you already have a paid member, you can assume additional backend sales and commissions from that member – around $5 per month.

Now you have that one member, and they’re paid the $17 for the first month – will likely do so for about four months – and they’re also worth an additional $5 per month over that same period of time. So now you have $88 from that signup, and the average visitor value for the 100 visitors is $0.88.

Single-Payment Membership

The next structure is a paid membership with a single payment. Your conversion rate will increase because you’re asking people to make less of a commitment, and a membership generally has a higher perceived value than a simple product sale. You can expect a conversion rate of 2.5% to 3%.

Because there is less commitment, you can charge more still keep the conversion rate up. So let’s assume a one-time fee of $37 instead of that $17 recurring. Now your churn goes way down. The customers have already paid, so very few of them will actually terminate their membership. You’d be safe in calculating an average stay of 12 months.

So the calculation is as follows: You’re going to see a 3% conversion rate, and the total one-time fees are going to be 3 x $37 = $111. Factoring in the backend offers ($5 a month per paid member), and over 12 months you’re looking at $180 in backend sales and commissions, for total revenue of $291. This brings your visitor value up to $2.91.

But there’s an alternative model that blows all three of these out of the water when it comes to down to making money for you – the Freemium model.

The Freemium Model.

The Freemium model is basically a free membership with an upgrade offer. It works like this: you put a “free” offer in place on the front end of the site (in a later article we’ll discuss how to make this free offer not appear to be “free” – and why you’ll want to do so), and you’re likely to see a front end conversion rate around 35%.

If you then place a compelling offer on the backend, you’ll see a conversion rate between 5% to 10% on that offer. It’s often much higher, so let’s use 10% for our analysis.

This means that for every 100 visitors – you’re going to get 35 free members, and then a 10% conversion rate on these 35 members on the backend. So what you end up with on average is 31.5 free members and 3.5 paid members.

On your front end that’s 3.5 x $37 = $129.50. The paid member back-end value is $5 x 12 Months x 3.5 People = $210. The free member back-end value is $1.50 x 12 Months x 31.5 People = $567. Adding these amounts and you have $129.50 + $210 + $567 = $906.50, so your average visitor value is $9.06.

That’s a big difference from the more “traditional” models we discussed above (and more than 10 times higher the most common product sale model)!

Here we’ve opened the doors, we hope, for a lot of people to recognize that this Freemium model is a very profitable model.

Click here to see an example of the Freemium Model at work.

Courtesy of Tellman Knudson and Shawn Casey (I hope they don’t mind me posting these here).

By the way, in case you haven’t done it yet, there’s still a little time to get List Pro’s free DVD offer.

I thought they were nuts, but Tellman and Shawn are giving this nearly $2000 value away for the cost of shipping!

You’ve got until….Whoops, this offer is closed!

But you can still get access to a free CD that walks you through the secrets of building a big list.

Download Tellman’s squeeze page templates

Download Tellman’s Thank You Page Templates

You can have the best product or service in the world. You can have a killer sales letter that could sell a pint of whiskey to a nun. But if you don’t have any prospects seeing your offer, you won’t make a cent.

That’s why we marketers spend so much time, effort and money trying to put our offers in front of targeted leads. But it doesn’t have to be that hard… not when you know which marketing methods work best.

Here are three proven tactics you can start using today…

#1: Social Media Marketing

Savvy marketers know that social media marketing is in its infancy – and it’s set to explode in the coming years! Those who set up their social marketing campaigns now are the ones who will benefit the most in the future.

That’s because social media marketing is all about building relationships with others and building networks and contact lists. The sooner you get started building a good reputation in your niche, establishing yourself as an expert and building social media networks, the more you stand to gain when you fully leverage your reputation, content and networks.

So where do you start? With  some of the biggest social media sites, including:

* Web 2.0 content sites, like Squidoo.com. These sites let you create one-page websites around niche topics. Google tends to crawl these pages often and rank them well.

* Social networking sites like Facebook.com. While you should focus on finding or creating niche-specific groups on these general networking sites, be sure to always seek out niche-specific networking sites.

* Social bookmarking sites, like Digg.com. These sites allow users to share content – and they can be a great tool in your viral marketing campaigns.

#2: Search Engine Marketing

You can pull in traffic from the search engines in two ways:

* By ranking well for certain keywords and appearing in the organic search engine results.

* By using pay per click marketing to appear in the search engine’s sponsored results (for example, Google AdWords).

You should add both of these tactics to your marketing toolkit. That’s because organic search engine results can provide traffic for months (and even years) after you get your pages indexed. But on the flip side, pay per click marketing allows you to get highly targeted, nearly instant traffic.

#3: Buying Ads

Yet another way to get your offers in front of eager prospects is by placing targeted ads. You can do this online and offline, including:

* Purchasing banner and text ads on highly targeted niche sites.
* Buying ads and solo ads in highly targeted niche ezines.
* Buying blog ads.
* Buying ads in offline publications, including niche magazines and the related topics of daily newspapers.

Which One Is Right For You?

This isn’t a matter of choosing the one tactic that provides the best results. And that’s because all three of these tactics are proven, time-tested marketing methods. They shouldn’t be used individually, but rather as part of your overall marketing strategy.

While powerful, these three main advertising methods are just the tip of the marketing iceberg. When you unleash these three alongside other equally powerful marketing methods, you’ll unleash a nearly unstoppable flow of qualified leads. And it all starts when you claim a free Silver Membership at TrafficGenerationClub (normally $27.00) – Just Use This Special Link For Access – www.webmarketingnetwork.net.