April 20, 2008

Where should an Affiliate Begin in Finding Merchant Partners?

Filed under: Commerce Success @ 2:42 pm

Every affiliate needs to define its user groups. Interests, product needs, products they probably already have (with potential for upgrades), favorite activities, income - describe the typical visitor as you would a person. Then describe the focus of your site or primary products. Then the easiest way to begin is to review and add a few highly relevant sites from Affiliate Marketers, such as Linkshare and Commission Junction. Then go to the sites of brands and products you know appeal to your market. Look for a link to their affiliate program and join them individually, once you are satisfied with the site quality and the quality of the products.

Decide where on your pages you want to put affiliate links and banners. You may not want every page to be a selling page, and the best positioning on each page will depend upon the content. Links at the end of an article are a natural, following the flow of the reader’s eye. Links or banners on pages that are transactional, with buttons and boxes, work better near the action.

Once your site visitors have had the opportunity to shop at your merchant sites, take a hard look at what is working and what is not, and make some adjustments. With knowledge of what your visitors want, make a wish list of companies and products that will round out your merchandise offerings. Then search the web and identify the sites. There’s no problem if their sites don’t make reference to affiliate programs. Approach them anyway, and negotiate an agreement. You’ll know the range of commissions customarily paid for their categories of goods and services from your relationships with other merchants. And if you are polling your site visitors you’ll know products, product features and accessories they are ready and willing to buy.

Karen Kari’s articles and more information on the affiliate business can be found at:

http://www.affiliatebandit.com

http://www.advertisingcellar.com

http://www.billionfreeads.com

March 30, 2008

Seven steps to increased business

Filed under: Commerce Success @ 6:21 am

Objectives: Make sure the promotional products and run are linked to a stand well-defined marketing objectives. The targets must not be overly complicated.

The target: In making an target, custom promotion items campaigns should be directed to specific audiences. An objective for each audience should be acquired.

Messages: Promotional products need to convey a predetermined message to each audience. This subject matter needs to be clear and concise. No individual run must attempt to communicate too many messages. Usually, the most beneficial outcomes are accomplished when only one or two key items are accented.

Subject: An “umbrella” program theme should be developed. The idea should take into account subject matter, audiences and the nature of the wares or service.

Originality: Custom imprinted items themes and items need be as original as possible to pique interest.

Utility: Promotional products need be practical items that recipients will use time and time again. If the item is not used frequently, it should be be unique or ornamental and remain in view.

Follow-ups: Some of the most effective promotional product campaigns result in an improved rate of response from recipients or permit sales force follow-ups either by phone or in person. In this way a program can become a door opener.

March 13, 2008

One Of The Fastest & Most Profitable Ways To Skyrocket Your Online Sales & Boost Your Profits

Filed under: Commerce Success @ 1:15 am

Joint ventures utilize the powerful marketing concept known as “leverage”. This form of marketing utilizes the existing strong bonded relationships and goodwill that other companies have already established with people who are your potential customers.

The main draw of joint ventures is that it truly is a win-win business proposition. It allows you and your joint venture partner to leverage each other’s assets and resources for the benefit of all parties - you win, your joint venture partners win, and your customers and subscribers win.

It has extremely low cost and low risk, and is one of the fastest ways of bringing your product to market by using other people’s resources.

It is a great way to acquire new subscribers and customers with practically no costs. It allows you to leverage your joint venture partner’s traffic, existing subscribers and customers. You don’t have to incur expenses in acquiring new traffic and you can be pretty certain that the traffic you get from your joint venture partner is targeted, therefore, likely to be profitable.

Cutting joint venture deals doesn’t necessarily need to be confined to only non-competitors. You can cut deals with your competitors too, and you should!

Find out who is selling to your target market, what products and/or services they are selling, and who your target market trusts and has a good relationship with. You will then want to contact them to propose a joint venture deal by offering them complementary products and/or services. If you are a reputable company that offers high quality products/services, it should be really easy for you to find other companies to partner with.

To form a successful joint venture, it is necessary to first be absolutely clear about one’s own goals; second, be clear about the attributes one is seeking in a partner; and third, when negotiating with potential partners, be open and prepared to give as well as take.

If you plan on hosting products through joint venture endorsement marketing, you must build a strong relationship with your audience. Or, if you are the beneficiary, you must team up with hosts who have a good relationship with their audience.

Trading links is a joint venture because two websites are hosting the other’s website link, helping to drive traffic to the sites as well as increase search engine rankings. This particular joint venture technique is being used frequently on the web today because of the sheer importance of links and their bearing on search engine results. If you are having problems getting business then you might consider linking your products and services with another website that has a similar target market and complementary products. This way you can share the expense of the website, hosting account, and administrative costs, and split the difference on products. It’s a good way to cut down on overhead and increase your inventory at the same time.

You can also enter into a list building joint venture with ezine publishers where all partners promote each other’s ezine at the subscription thank you page. After someone has subscribed to your ezine, you’ll redirect them to the subscription thank you page where you display your joint venture partners’ ezines. In this way, all of you can build your list much faster as all the partners are leveraging on each other’s resources. You can increase the size of your opt-in and ultimately your customer list very quickly. It’s not uncommon to add hundreds of new subscribers to your list within minutes of launching your joint venture.

Joint venture with another website to write an e-book that outlines different services and provides good information for visitors. Ensure that reading the e-book is actually worthwhile and informative. Then, include advertisements for both businesses in the e-book and allow the e-book to be downloaded for free from both websites. This is great advertising and by giving something away for free you will make your visitors feel more positive about your company.

You may have a discussion forum. You invite several publishers to participate at your discussion forum. One of those publishers participates and then announces your discussion forum to his audience. When he does this, he gets his audience to go to your discussion board. Not only do the audience members gain helpful information at the discussion board, but they see the helpful posts of that publisher whereby their loyalty to that publisher is increased.

Free information/resource endorsements are the easiest to get on the internet. By creating an online infrastructure that supplies helpful information, publishers, who are obligated to supply helpful information to their audience, will feature some aspect of your infrastructure. This aspect is usually something that supplies helpful information, like a discussion board, ezine, helpful website, article, or what have you.

When writing product endorsement letters or scripts, you must focus on how you can make the endorsement appear as editorial rather than sales copy. This is harder to do in a product endorsement than a free resource endorsement. That’s why you need to make a special offer to the endorser’s audience.

The secret to executing successful joint venture endorsements is to have the endorser convey to his audience that he is genuinely trying to help them reach the end result they desire, through his endorsement… he’s not trying to sell them something… he’s trying to help them:

“My friend just released a new product… and after trying it out, I immediately contacted him to see if he could make a special offer to you, my customer. And here’s what he said…”
“After reading this information and trying the product, I couldn’t help but passing this on to you…”

“One of my long-time mentors contacted me the other day… After talking with him for a while, I convinced him to…”

“I was looking for a Valentine’s Day gift for my customers, and here’s what I found…”

“I can’t help sharing this with you… This is brand-new, and I wanted to let you know before every body else finds out…”

“My friend told me about this… I couldn’t believe it at first, but when I tried it out - it worked! Now, let me tell you about it…”

If done correctly, joint ventures can literally explode your online sales and profits in short order.

Wishing you success,

Monique Briand

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Claim your free 120-page ebook and view over 12 hours of free videos.

This is one of the many powerful concepts taught in these free resources which you can find at www.InternetProfitMentor.com.

More and more resources are added all the time at www.InternetProfitMentor.com so check back often.

February 21, 2008

Car Architype

Filed under: Consumers Den, Commerce Success, Activist @ 3:04 am

Its not really my sort of thing this car genetics - designing based on 10 previous versions of that car - I am more into Nitro Cars and Supercharged cars - they are faster and generally more fun than this boring crap I have to do all day - we are given little to no control really, I mean reshaping a bumper is all good and well but when I can’t reshape it …that much then its not the most fun, controlled jobs. Its not like I go around Idolizing random people that I meet in the company, but I do seriously wish I was in the division with the big M sport on the door - I can just see it would be a lot more fun and I wouldn’t be so restricted with my design choices there.

December 22, 2007

Increasing Shopping Cart Conversions

Filed under: Commerce Success @ 9:10 am

The percentage of Web users that shop online has increased year
after year. As online merchants and Web sellers learn how to
refine their shopping cart pages for increased conversions,
we’re able to identify several key components in this process to
the benefit of online enterprises bottom lines - the money you
end up bringing in from your marketing and advertising
efforts.

1) Educate and Inform: If you are selling product online,
then you have an obligation to your audience to educate,
enlighten and inform them as well. The most serious and
potentially damaging aspect to improving shopping cart
conversion is the presence, or lack thereof, of helpful
information on the products or services you are selling. The
Riggs-Meyer Paradigm - an independent study of Web traffic which
reveals that 70% of website visitors were researching
information and only 30% were actually ready to buy - suggests
that online merchants have an obligation to share not only
critical information about their products and services (such as
usage instructions) but also background information and general
educational materials for experts and newbies alike.

2) Simplify Site Use: Developing a goal to improve
conversion is essential. Online merchants notice when they
design or redesign websites, strange things happen to their
conversion rates - some go up and some conversion rates go down,
way down. Even if a site looks professionally designed, problems
always exist which can be corrected. Lower shopping cart
abandonment rates means more money in your pocket at the end of
the day, conduct research via polls or surveys, focus groups or
interviews to determine where navigation was problematic, if
graphics were poorly placed or not relevant to the mission of
completing the sale, if search functions were hard to find or if
they were helpful, and to what degree your shopping cart pages’
call to action made a positive or negative impact.

3) Express Trustworthiness: One of the most effective
ways to build trust among your visitors is to provide an
effective way to address visitors’ fears about the security of
shopping online by revealing information about your company such
as email and postal address as well as toll-free and local phone
numbers, or the location of customers support forms and privacy
policies. Services such as Thawte or ValidatedSite enable
website owners to convey their trustworthiness of their online
presence (the availability of SSL -secure socket layer - pages)
and the corporation and people behind the website.

December 19, 2007

Small Business Marketing Opt In List Secrets. Super-charging A Cyber Venture With Your Small Business Marketing Opt In List

Filed under: Commerce Success @ 12:54 am

Before revealing the mysteries of the small business marketing opt in list, here are myths and untruths that need to be cleared before one indulges into building a small business marketing opt in list. Being in the dark about small business marketing opt in list secrets will be a hindrance when it comes to success online

Realize that hardly any organizations take the time to use small business marketing opt in email marketing, much less build an actual small business marketing opt in list.

Small business marketing opt in list email is possibly the best marketing practices in todays marketing world as email is as common as the handwritten letter of the old days.

Marketing via small business marketing opt in list email methods can upset a lot of people. The key to mastering Spam complaints is by practicing honest small business marketing opt in list or “permission-based” marketing. There’s no harm in trying after asking for permission.

It makes no sense to email Spam. The way to being successful in this area is to exclusively send email to those who have become members of your small business marketing opt in list. You need to know your niche audience in order to prosper with a profitable small business marketing opt in list.

The truth about building a small business marketing opt in List.

Once you understand the truth about small business marketing opt in list marketing, you can then realize the absolute power and potential of email in a business sense - creating your own small business marketing opt in list. Establishing a small business marketing opt in list isn’t always easy particularily for those lacking the knowledge.

Here are a few tips on how to have success with an small business marketing opt in list.

1. Thoughtful Accumulation of Information

Know which information from your audiences can aid you in lessening overhead and/or make sales flourish. Systematically create a system that pays back your visitors and encourages them to provide the info you need. Too much info is not a good thing either. When creating a small business marketing opt in list, just try to capture their full name and email addresses. Always update your list and be sure to use a program to prune your list to avoid spam complaints.

2. Proper Execution.

The old adage says everything - action speaks louder than words. This is potentially the key reasons so many who want success online stall, procrastination! Stop preparing and start doing. It’s a good thing that various methods, usually inexpensive, abound to hasten and help the creation of one’s small business marketing opt in database.

Keeping track of your small business marketing opt in database can pose a problem to some.Opt-in Technology and relevant sources should be employed in making this part of your marketing more controllable. Keep your most responsive names in a separate list that you continually update.
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Increase Your Customer Base With Email! Small Business Marketing Opt In Tips.

December 13, 2007

Bringing the World to Your Door

Filed under: Commerce Success @ 12:46 pm

According to Internet.com, by the year 2008 nearly 30% of offline purchases will be influenced by online research. If your site is a well-implemented ecommerce site, the web can significantly lower both order-taking costs and customer support costs after the sale has been made. You could also experience larger purchases per transaction. Through automation, you can sell the ‘back-end” on the front end by suggesting additional items at the time the purchase is made. You can offer your customer more information, such as order tracking. A customer can shop from the comfort of her or his home, in her bunny slippers or his boxer shorts. You can give the customer a larger variety of offerings. No need to send a great big catalog through the mail anymore. When you run out of an item, you simply remove it from the website. Makes shopping so much easier.

But first you have to get them there! No matter what function your site performs, whether it be to display your online brochure or ecommerce site, to get people to visit, you still need to market your site. It’s easy to create a new ecommerce site, getting people to visit yours is not so easy.

Getting traffic to return to your web site a second time is equally challenging. Provide a product or service the customer needs, and they may be back and they may even refer others.

What makes you different from the competition? Check them out. See if they are online and see what they are doing. Look for strengths and weaknesses in the site’s message, design and links. Find out who else is online. How do others fit into your target market?

Surfing is one thing, visiting another, but selling something online is the ultimate challenge of ecommerce today.

When creating or making improvements to your site, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Design a user-friendly site. Make it informative and easy in which to move around, so they will want to come back. Use light backgrounds with dark text for easy reading. It is also better to have less information on a page than pages full of text that will lose the reader’s interest. Have an eye-catching site that entertains and informs.

Keep graphics simple. Over-use of graphics and flash graphics take longer to download. Today, you have 5-10 seconds to grab your visitor’s attention. If loading your site takes longer than that, chances are good that they will quickly exit.

Keep your URL (uniform resource locator) - aka web site address/domain name - simple. It is the main way people locate you on the Web. While many of the good dot.com’s are taken, dot.net’s are a viable alternative. Soon, they too will be gone. If you have not already done so, get your domain name immediately. Make it memorable, something people might type in the subject line in a search engine looking for what you have to offer. Hard to spell words make it more difficult for visitors to find you.

Let’s assume you have built a great Web site. It is filled with great content, well organized, easy to navigate, and encourages customer interaction. But you need visitors. The following online marketing ideas will help you sell your products or services, offer better customer service, help you build your company identity and establish brand awareness in the marketplace. In fact, if you are relentless in your pursuit of marketing on the web, you’ll be hard to beat.

Here are just three ideas to “bring the world to your door.”

Number One: Lead with your benefits. As with any copyrighting, headlines can make or break your success. Clearly state the benefits your site has to offer in your headline. Use power words, words that appeal to your visitors’ emotions. It should describe how you will solve a problem, relieve pain, improve your visitors lives, educate them, give them something for FREE, save them time, and so on.

Number Two: Capture visitors. Add a form to your site so visitors can “register” - leave their name and email address. Tell them you want to use the information to send them periodic email message announcing special offers, and new products and services. It is important that you also make it easy for people to remove themselves (unsubscribe) from your list. Never send anything to this group unless you have something valuable to offer or say. Keep the emails short and succinct. Add links to your message that direct people back to your site for more information. Save time by automating this process with autoresponders.

Number Three: Start an Ezine This is an instant customer database builder especially if you offer it for FREE and it has a perceived value to your visitors. Ezines allow you to build a relationship with your customers and prospects. It should be short, interesting and filled with valuable information. I currently write five ezines. They are Self-Marketing News, Creating A Legacy, Ramblin’ Rose, Petals N Cents, and WECommerce News. Between the five ezines, we have a total subscriber base of nearly 30,000 opt-in prospects and customers from all over the world. In addition to the great marketing potential ezines offer, they help you develop a positive reputation.

As the World Wide Web continues to grow and evolve, more and more companies and individuals are turning to the Internet to serve their needs. Make sure the world knows to turn to you.

Excerpted from The PMS Principles - Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business by Heidi Richards

© 2004 - Heidi Richards is the author of The PMS Principles, Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business and 7 other books. She is also the Founder & CEO of the Women’s ECommerce Association, International www.WECAI.org (pronounced wee-kī) - an Internet organization that “Helps Women Do Business on the WEB.” She can be reached at www.HeidiRichards.com.

December 6, 2007

Christmas, Pit Bikes and RC Cars

Ever since last year my little son has been on and on at me about buying him a remote control petrol car for christmas, he says “dad can you…”, “dad pleaseeeeeeeee” - then I hit him but he keeps on so much that I end up giving in. Already this year he has had a 110cc pit bike for his birthday and now I am buying him a damned electric rc car for christmas - £300!!!

Pretty damn cool though, this thing is faster than his older brothers real car and does 0-60 in something like 5 seconds.  Pretty awesome for an electric rc car, and even more considering that the uk cant even produce a real electric car that can do 0-60 at all!!

November 26, 2007

118 118 - UK server for company telephone numbers

Filed under: Commerce Success @ 11:41 pm

It is a hard-working life, being a student. Among training or having fun there is hardly any occasion to spare looking for telephone numbers or contact information. However, with 118118 directory enquiry - the UK’s primary directory enquiry support service - you can find stuff from cinema listings to particular telephone numbers in a moment.

Book a belated night taxicab home from clubs and bars and dodge waiting in elongated queues. You will buy pizza, Oriental food, or find a wine and beers home delivery service without leaving from your sofa. We will even give you details for your school department, find interim employment agencies, or link you to valuable organisations using 118 118’s local company directory enquiries.

Each & every day, 100,000s of folks come across the places, information & services they need by phoning or texting 118 118, or by visiting www.118.com directory enquiries.

Talk, text or type fast for easy directory enquiries

It’s effortless to make use of 118118’s directory enquiry facility - everywhere you are. Ring 118 118 118 to talk with one of 118118’s skilled, forthcoming directory enquiry operators. Our operatives could facilitate you with practically any question about people’s contact details for people, places & businesses. You could moreover text 118 118 118 & get feedback wired straight to your mobile.

118118s webpage http://www.118.com permits you browse our full local organisation data-base online, listing anything from train times to personal telephone numbers. 118 118 118 is the most accurate local organisation data-base enquires facility in the UK.

November 4, 2007

The Nokia Corporation - a multi-national communications corporation– Making Headway in the Wireless + Wired Telco Market

Filed under: Commerce Success @ 4:58 pm

Nokia is a multinational telecoms corporation, engaged on the crucial growth areas of wired & wireless telecommunications. Nokia is today the planets greatest producer of mobile telephones, with a total telephone hand set market share of just about 38%. Nokia supplies cellular sets for each major market division and protocol. The company likewise supplies telecoms network appliances for applications, for instance, mobile and fixed line voice telephony, ISDN, broadband access, voice over internet protocol and wireless LAN.

Nokia has an exceptionally 0 role in the economy of Finland. Nokia is indubitably the biggest Finnish company, accounting for more or less 0.3 of the market capitalization of the Helsinki Stock; an unprecedented circumstance within a developed country. It is an important Finnish employer and assorted off-shoot outfits have grown-up into 0 businesses as Nokia’s subcontractors.

Nokia added to the GDP of Finland in excess of one and a half % in nineteen ninety-nine alone. In 04 Nokia’s share of the the GDP of Finland was 3.5 % and made up nearly 0.25 of Finland’s exports in 2003. In 2007, Nokia created revenue which surpassed the state budget of Finland. This has led some to refer to Finland as “Nokialand.”

Finns have ranked Nokia (many times) as the foremost Finnish brand and employer. Nokia is now the fifth most valuable global brand in BusinessWeek’s Best Global Brands compendium of the 20 most admirable businesses world-wide in Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies.

Nokia’s Mobile Phones branch serves folks with mobile voice and data products across a sizable assortment of mobile devices. The branch tries to target principally large-volume type sales of cell phones and devices, with the general public being the most significant customer segment.

Nokia mobile phones understands that design, brand, ease of use and price are established mobiles most important considerations for customers. Nokia’s product collection includes digital camera mobiles with special features such as megapixel cameras and MP3 players that appeal to the mass market.

In the first quarter of 06 Nokia moved more than 15 million MP3 capable mobile phones, which means that Nokia is not only the earth’s foremost fabricator of mobiles and digi cameras (as the bulk of Nokia’s mobiles feature digital cameras, it is also believed that Nokia has lately beaten Kodak in camera construction, making it the largest in the world), Nokia is now also the foremost fabricator of digital audio. Nokia wishes to sell 80 million music phones by the end of 2007, surpassing sales of things such as the iPod from Apple.