Personal and Business Development Consulting

Without making things complicated with the following affiliate marketing tips a simple explanation of what affiliate marketing is – it’s a method of marketing and selling products in which you sell products for another company.

In most cases, companies will give affiliates a URL that contains their affiliate identification number. This link allows the company to identify all traffic that is driven to their site through your link.

Affiliate Marketing

Special cookies are set up when a potential customer clicks on your URL. These cookies will let the company know if the customer purchases something after clicking on your link. This cookie is stored on the potential customer’s computer which allows the company to know if they purchase something even if it is not on their first visit to the website.

The length of which the cookie lasts varies from company to company, but some cookies last for extremely long periods of time such as two months. There are several ways in which companies choose to reward or compensate people that affiliate with them. The first method of compensation is Pay Per lead in which the marketer gets paid whenever someone visits the website through their link.

With this method, the affiliate marketer still gets paid even if a sale is not made. With the Pay Per Sale method, the affiliate marketer will only get paid if a sale is made. Each company will usually give a percentage of each sale to the affiliate marketer.

These percentages vary from company to company. Many companies prefer to use the Pay Per Sale method because it is more cost effective.

The best types of products as far as this affiliate marketing tips is concerned are the ones that help with an extremely specific task or solve immediate problems.

It is extremely important to develop a method in which you can develop a proven method of marketing as well as promoting your products. After you have had success with a few products you can diversify which products you choose to promote. Diversifying the products that you are selling will help you to earn the most money over time!

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To become more productive in your business, you must first take note of how you are currently spending the majority of your time.

What matters is how productive you are. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend working on your business, if you’re not doing the things that really matter, you’re just wasting your time.

You can spend hours of time visiting various sites, spying on your competitors, reading different articles or blog posts, and researching the forums to see what people have to say about specific topics related to your market, but this type of activity, in and of itself, isn’t productive.

It doesn’t matter where you spend the majority of time, write down every little thing you do with your time. Include the amount of time spent on those activities, so you can begin the process of cutting unnecessary activities from your life.

Do you get caught in the “OCD Loop?”

The OCD Loop involves a phenomenon among many Internet marketers where they exhibit a form of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in the way that they are obsessive about following a specific sequence of actions repeatedly throughout the day, in many cases.

What a lot of marketers will do before they take action on anything truly productive for their businesses is to start off by checking their email, where they take the time to read various emails, reply to emails, and even decide to write new emails because of something that reminded them to do so in another email.

Then, once they finish checking their email, maybe they decide to jump over to check out Google Analytics or another web stats program to see what type of traffic their sites have received, or maybe they login to their shopping cart to check out the details of any orders that may have been placed.

Once they’ve reviewed their latest conversion rates, opt-in percentages, and so on, they may surf over to their favorite discussion forums or blogs that they read on a regular basis to do some research on their target market, or even to other sites like CNN or ESPN to check out the latest news or sports scores.

Then, the amazing thing that happens after they’ve checked out all of the sites that they are accustomed to visiting, is they decide to check out their email, again, to see if they’ve received anything new that might interest them.

When they’re finally done checking their email a second time and visiting all of the sites they found promoted within those emails, they jump back over to their stats program, again, to see how things are going with their websites.

If you’re really honest with yourself, you need to ask yourself how often you actually allow yourself to fall into this OCD Loop, and fail to stay focused on doing the things that bring money into your business.

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The Magic Formula of Success

Have you ever asked your self what percentages of your proposals actually win the business? To business owners and sales professionals alike, writing proposals can often be a black art, and guaranteeing their success can often be extremely difficult, if you don’t have the magic formula of success.

But imagine if you could ensure that your proposals won more business than even before. Could you even go as far as thinking how in six months time you looked back on today and remembering that today was the day you learnt how to double your success rate?

You may not have asked yourself just how important great testimonials are to succeeding in business, or even why your prospective clients really want to know precisely if your service will work for them.

So when you are next faced with a proposal to complete and you reach into your filing cabinet to pull out your testimonials, you should be able to realise precisely how your existing clients put a value on your service.

By the way if your existing testimonials are either non-existent or even if they do not accurately reflect the way you can uniquely position massive value to your client, not only MUST you know your unique value proposition – you MUST know precisely what value your prospective client puts on your service or product.

By the way, in case you are not already aware of it, that is the magic formula for success – You MUST ensure that you get YOUR prospect to put a value on owning whatever you are hoping to sell. The value of ownership must be greater that the cost to purchase. In fact that is exactly the rationale all our clients use before they decide to buy our services.

So once you have asked the right questions, been completely straight with your customer and they have told you that they see exactly how you can provide specific value (You must know by now what that value is) you need to write your proposal.

You probably won’t need our help as long as you feel completely confident that you can write your value proposition in compellingly influential language. Let me give you an example of a statement, that if it applied to you might even compel you to take a look at our sales services.

“If you had a desire to grow your business by 100% in one year, and if you are already turning over €500k per annum with a gross profit margin of 30%, this would yield an additional profit of €300k, would you be interested?”

OK, so were you starting to do the maths, like a one of the people that I once met with did? If you were then you probably realise how powerful statements like that could be in the opening paragraph of any proposal that you delivered to your potential prospects.

Now you have clearly demonstrated the value the customer will get, and by the way it could also be expressed in non-monetary terms, such as feelings, especially if you were selling something like a BMW. The next step is to present evidence of how the customer will definitely obtain that value.

This again can be done through testimonials or reference visits, or could be by proposing a pilot project with clear success criteria, or even guarantees similar to the puppy dog sale, such as; “Why don’t you bring this puppy home and if your six year old daughter doesn’t love it in 2 weeks, we will take it back and you don’t have to pay us a penny.”

Now you know the essential aspects of writing a winning proposal. If you wanted a structure for the key sections of a proposal, it could be something like this.

• Executive summary – here you state pains and desires of the customer and precisely how they will benefit from your offering along with a short summary of what is contained in the rest of the proposal
• Back Ground to proposal – here you look at the customer’s business, what their key issues are and why they need the solution that you are proposing and indeed why they can’t do it themselves.
• Value Proposition – Now write about the unique of your offering and specifically how it is differentiated from competition and how it will precisely solve the customers issues and will deliver value.
• Implementation plan – give the customer timescales and deliverables and indeed what is expected from their side.
• Testimonials and case studies – examples of similar implementations and the results achieved
• About You – Now and Only now you write about who you are and what is great about your company
• Technical Appendix – If there are technical specs or features – include them here in the appendix.

If you follow these guidelines then you will soon find yourself winning more business, it is really that simple, trust me!