Affiliate Marketing for Beginners Blog

List Building

Why You Need a List

One of the basic tenets of any internet marketing program is that customers rarely buy on the first visit. As a matter of fact, it is commonly accepted that it takes seven contacts before a prospect turns into a paying customer. What this means is that you need to establish a relationship with your prospects and keep in touch by offering useful information or help as they make their decision to buy.

How do you do that? You do it by putting your prospects on a list and keeping in touch. The customer list or mailing list or whatever you want to call it list, is your ticket to sales and revenue.

Database List

The creation and building of a list is an essential step in building your online affiliate business. Any affiliate online program you choose to join should have your list building in mind by offering you promotional tools and sales products designed to solve a problem or satisfy a need. If you have a list of a few hundred or a few thousand people you can communicate with, imagine the business you can draw if you have what they want.

Build a Relationship

Having a list is not all about constantly pitching a product or service. If there is anything irritating and certain to draw anger, it is the constant barrage of sales promotions many people feel assault them when looking on the web. It is far more important to build a relationship and draw a balance between giving away free information that can help your prospect and offering a paid product or service that meets a real need they may have.

To build a good relationship, a weekly newsletter or email can serve you well. By offering information with no strings attached you will build trust and confidence in your list members that you are a reliable and trustworthy resource. When they buy, they will buy with comfort and reassurance that you have their success in mind. In fact, you have their loyalty. That is the key to success to any affiliate online program.

Useful Information

What kind of information should you provide? How about valuable tips, case studies, interesting testimonials from real people, and stories from you own experience that can help them decide how to move forward? Once you start weaving stories and examples of success that they can relate to, you will have a dedicated pool of believers who will buy from you willingly and with confidence.

How do you build a List?

Begin with what your market research tells you and write a free special report. Design an eCourse or eBook to give away in return for your customer signing up for your newsletter. It will help build a list of names and email addresses. Create a newsletter sign up form on your Web site or Blog to grow your list. Promote the benefits your customers will get from getting the weekly information. Explain clearly what they will derive from the free reports and eBooks you will make available.

Once you have a good idea of what is driving your customer on your list, write articles about the subjects they will want to know about. Distribute those articles to Article Directories and in your author biography, include a back link to your Web site or Blog or to your newsletter sign up page.

You can also try posting in classified sites such as Craigslist or Adpost, to promote your free newsletter or Ebook.

Conclusion

These are some of the ways to build a list. Remember to use discretion and balance when contacting your list. People today are bombarded daily with SPAM and promotions so they are extremely sensitive to being sold and over sold.

If you take the time to get to know your customers, you will build a relationship that will get them to make the buy decision based on trust and confidence they have developed for you. That is the best path to prosperity you can hope to build.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous.

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A critical phase in setting up any business in general and an online business in particular, is conducting the right kind of market research from the very beginning.

2 Critical Characteristics

The most common approach is to find a group of people who share a common interest. This is called a niche. The niche must have two important characteristics. One is that there has to be a large number of people with defined needs and wants and the other is there have to be products and services available to satisfy those wants and needs.

Keyword Research-separate browsers from buyers

The most common way people search on the Web is by typing in words that describe what they are looking for. These words are called “keywords” and can consist of a single generic term “shoes” or can be made up of several words, “light summer shoes”. Whatever the composition of the keywords, your task is to research and create a list of keywords based on the number of people looking and using the terms for the product or service you want to market. This will ensure that you develop a business that will have known steady demand and that you will be offering products and services people want and need.

Keyword Tools

How do you to that? You use certain tools that will give you data to look at. One key tool is called Wordtracker. They offer a free trial product you can use to see how it works. Another is the Google Adword tool. The trick is to start with a generic term, “shoes” for example, and then look at the list of related keywords that the tool returns. From there you can mine down using words on the list, “shoes” can lead you to “summer shoes” for example. Repeat the process and see what returns come up. Invariably with a retail product, brand names will appear and search numbers will show you what the daily search rate is along with monthly search rates from a list of all the search engines.

The real pros in internet marketing like to see about 100,000 searches in any given month for a generic term related to the product or service they are interested in.

As you mine down your keyword list you should end up with 100 to 200 keywords in your category that you will use to grow and develop your business. The standard for a niche is to see if you can find a term that gets 80 searches a day on the low end with not more than 30,000 web pages devoted to that product or service for that niche. That allows for you to find a way to compete and establish yourself as you start out.

Market Information Sources

Once you have determined what your market is, who your customer is and how you will reach you niche, you will want to confirm that your online business has a future. For that there are a number of sources that will help you in staying on top of your market. Among them are Online Publishes Association, a non-profit industry trade association that generates online advertising and media consumption data; ClickZNetwork, a great source of news and information in the interactive marketing sector; PRWEb.com the largest online press release newswire and eBay marketplace that publishes transaction trends on eBay.

Setting up Google alerts in your niche area and tracking them on Google reader is another great way to stay on top of you market.

Whatever you chose as your business, the proper market research in the early phase of your business development will make the difference between success and failure. So give it the time and effort it deserves as you set out to make your mark in affiliate marketing. Affliate marketing for beginners is a process of trial and error. You can minimize the time and cost with a the right approach and making the right decisions early on.

May Your Travels Be Prosperous

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Abraham Lincoln was famous for his humorous and pithy remarks. One of them was; “You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

This pretty much sums up the dilemma of the marketer who is just starting out on the Web. Where do you start? Whom can you trust? What should you be doing first? If that is where you happen to be, then I may be able to point you to some options that will save you time and frustration, let alone money.

“You may fool all of the people some of the time”

There are some very savvy people who can fool even well seasoned marketers. Not the really super affiliate types, but just enough of the lower tier professionals. It goes with the territory but can be quickly caught on forums where seasoned online veterans meet. The Warrior Forum comes to mind. Once the word is out that a launch isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, you can always cancel out and get your money back. You may be beaten and chastened but you’re not out.

“You can even fool some of the people all of the time”

This is where you find yourself starting out. And there are enough new entrants on a daily basis to keep some of the operators in business. Mind you, their business is not repeat business, but the steady supply of “newbies” and the openness of the Web allows for this to happen.

If you were like me you started with the simple desire to do data entry. So you pay your entry fee and find out the site isn’t about data entry. It’s an aggregator for all these affiliate sites that will make you a millionaire in three easy clicks…all for another fee of course. Some of these sites have a “system”. So you fork over another fifty bucks and get a sixty page PDF all about Click Bank or Paydotcom or whatever… But no system. OK so you learned a few things you didn’t know but you’re no closer to making a living, not by a long shot. Not until you find the 30 Day Challenge offered by Ed Dale and his team. Or maybe you sign up with ClickNewz by Lynn Terry. These resources are free and full of useful information.

Though you learn fast enough to avoid the pot hole again, the nature of the Web is such, that there are thousands of newcomers right behind you ready to hit that hole just like you did. If they’re lucky they might join a forum and read one of your comments, but more likely than not, they are just going to have to go through the gauntlet just like you did.

The idea here is to find someone who can give the shortcut to decent information. Someone who knows it’s a business and that it takes time to grow a business.

“But you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

This is the stage where you may not be established but you are much more aware of the context in which you are working. Hopefully, you have found some good reading to start with. Rosalind Gardner’s The Super Affiliate Handbook is one resource that comes to mind.

It will take time, money, and determination to hang in there. You’ll have to work the forums and ask a lot of questions, but you’ll soon begin to see things more clearly. The scams with lousy graphics, endless sales pages that don’t tell you what they charge. The so called “free” offers that are never free. It will soon be more obvious to you. You might even find a system that works for you.

If you are into sales, maybe it’s a product marketing system that teaches you to buy resell rights and shows you how to set up your business. Maybe it’s a Web site building system that teaches you to create you own business out of your hobby or passion.

Whatever it is, you have now developed the instincts and ability to see through the smoke. You keep your emotions in check and coolly test and cancel promotions based on your well learned lessons of product quality and market knowledge you now possess. You may not be making a fortune and you may even not be earning anything yet; but you are on your way because you can lay out a realistic plan to develop your business.

In many ways, online business is no different than offline business, except that in the former, you work at your own pace and answer to only one boss…YOU!

So keep up the hard work and may your travels be prosperous.

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