Reverse Tough Question Tuesday - YOU Ask ME!

Let’s turn the tables this week. I’m having kind of a crazy, backward week, so this will fit right in.

Usually on Tuesdays, I ask you a “Tough Question” regarding being an at-home Internet entrepreneur. This time, I want you to ask me any tough (or not-so tough) question you want.

Here’s a Few Rules: I want to be able answer every single question I receive, so let’s lay out a few ground rules.

1. Please keep the questions simple and precise. Please don’t ask for reviews of your site or ask me general questions about getting traffic, etc. Tough Tuesday is meant to be a quick Q&A type thing, so again, let’s keep it simple and precise.

2. Please ask me questions about me and my business. The idea of tough question Tuesday is to reveal something about the person answering. Although, my answer might be helpful to your own business…please don’t ask questions about your own business. Sorry to be selfish, but let’s keep with it in the spirit of Tough Question Tuesday.

3. Personal questions are okay, but be reasonable. You can ask me how many kids I have, what my favorite color is (not that those are TOUGH questions…LOL)…but don’t ask for my Social Insurance Number (SSN for my American readers), my home address or the details of my last tax return. Sound fair?

Okay, what’s your question for me?

How Do I Choose between Affiliate Products?

Q. Hi Alice, my question is how do I choose which affiliate products or programs to promote?

A. This is something I’m asked over and over again and it’s no wonder people get confused. The list of products and programs available is huge and everywhere you turn someone is saying “try mine, it’s the best one”. Here are some tips to help you choose which ones are right for you:

Remember Your Target Market

When comparing affiliate products or programs make sure you consider your target market. What type of products do they want? If your ads are about baseball equipment but your target market is moms with infants, you probably aren’t going to get many sales.

Choose Products You Believe In

It doesn’t matter if everyone else says a product is great; if you think its crap, you shouldn’t be trying to sell it. Choose products that you would feel comfortable selling to your friends.

Earnings per Sale, Click or Lead

Some affiliate programs pay you a commission on the sale of an item and some pay per lead or per click. Make sure you know which you are getting paid for and do the math. You may think you will earn more with a pay per lead deal because it’s easier to get people to click ad vs. buy a product. However, you could actually earn more by promoting a product that pays per sale. For instance, if you earn $1 per lead, you will need 100 people to take action to earn $100. If you earn 10% commission on a $100 product, you only need 10 people to take action in order to make the same $100. Make sense?

Understand Your Commission Rates

Don’t be fooled when looking at commission rates. A commission of 20% on a $50 product is $10 while a commission of 50% on a $10 product is only $5. You will earn more by promoting the product that pays a lower commission.

Know When and How You Get Paid

Companies have different ways of paying you. Some require you to earn a certain amount before they will send you payment; others pay at certain times of the month. The same holds true about how they pay. Some will only mail a check through standard mail where others will have the option of paying via PayPal or other program. Know when and how the company pays and ensure it is right for you before signing up.

Further Resources

My Affiliate Marketing course teaches you how to find a profitable market for your affiliate marketing efforts.

How Do I Find Affiliate Marketing Programs?

Q. What’s the best way to find affiliate marketing programs?

A. One of the easiest ways is to join an affiliate network. Places like Commission Junction (www.cj.com) and Linkshare (www.linkshare.com) manage affiliate programs for a large group of companies. As an affiliate, you can search their database for products that will meet your visitor’s needs and once you find what you’re looking for, you simply create your links and everything is handled for you. So you can offer a lot of different products and you only have to go to one place for your links and one company cuts your paycheck.

You can also find programs simply by visiting the website of a company you would like to partner with as an affiliate. Look for a link or page that says affiliates or something similar; it will probably take you to where you can sign up.

If you visit a website and you cannot find any information about their affiliate program, send them an email and ask if they have one. If they have been considering it but haven’t gotten around to it, maybe your email will get them to take action.

Further Resources

My Affiliate Marketing Sweetie course teaches you how to make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts.

How to Overcome a Setback

Q. I had some issues that made me put my business on the back burner for a while. Now, I’m not sure how to get going again. Any ideas? [Read more]

How Can I Increase My Conversion Rate?

Q. I’ve got great traffic coming to my site but very few people are signing up for my newsletter. How can I get more people to actually sign up?

A. How to get more of your traffic to do what you want whether its sign up for a newsletter, buy a product or click a link. This is called increasing your conversion rate and how to do it is a common dilemma. Luckily it’s fairly easy to fix.

Make Your Headline Stand Out

Your headline is the first thing your visitors read; therefore it needs to grab their attention. Make it catchy but also state clearly how your product can benefit the reader.

Don’t Leave Them Hanging

Many times pages are written well but are lacking the call to action - directions that tell the reader what to do after they’ve read the content. The content simply stops and the reader leaves because they don’t know what else to do. If you want your readers to do something, tell them! “Click here to purchase”, “sign up now” and “buy now’ all tell them exactly what you want them to do. Remember, if you do not ask them to take action, they won’t.

Use Bullets

People are so busy these days they don’t have time to read. They simply want to scan web pages to see if the information offered is what they are looking for. For ease of reading, use bullets to explain your products benefits. Your visitors eyes will be drawn to the bulleted text which if written well will keep them reading.

Make Navigating Easy

A professional, organized and easy to navigate site will reduce confusion and help build credibility. Keeping your visitors from getting lost will ensure they don’t click away.

Add Your Photo and Signature

Adding a photo of yourself and your handwritten signature creates realism and trust. Your visitors will feel like they are doing business with a real person instead of just a computer.

Include Testimonials

Testimonials provide further credibility. When someone offers feedback on your product, ask for permission to publish their statement on your site. Also, see if they will provide a photo of themselves to include with it. If your visitors see that real people, just like them, are satisfied; they will be more likely to purchase from you.

Have More Than One Payment Option

Although you may use PayPal for most of your purchases, not everyone has a PayPal account. Giving your visitors more than one payment option will only help increase your sales.

Further Resources

My easy to follow Copywriting Sweetie course teaches you how to write sales-producing copy or grab this website conversion guide.

How To Track Your Affiliate Programs

Q. I�ve joined several affiliate programs but I�m having problems tracking everything.

[Read more]

More about Portal Feeder

Yesterday, I posted a rags to nearing-riches story of Jamie Mintum who credited a lot of her success to Portal Feeder.

I also mentioned that I was going to get on the phone with Jason Katzenback who gave me a tour of the whole back end of this pretty impressive system. I’ve also spent much of today, playing around and getting myself set up with Portal Feeder as well.

Usually when I write about a product, it’s easy to write some bullet points, give some of the positives and potential drawbacks and then be done with it. But it’s pretty much impossible to keep things “simple” when talking about Portal Feeder. So bare with me…this blog entry is probably going to be on the long side. I’ll share what’s included in a Portal Feeder membership and what thing you may want to consider before taking the plunge.

Let’s Start by Clearing up a Few Misconceptions:

• Portal Feeder is not some kind of unsavory website generation software. With the Portal Feeder software, you create real websites with real content.
• Portal Feeder is not just site building software. It is a complete learning tool, software and more.

Let Me Try to Summarize:

Portal Feeder is a complete software system, with valuable extras, that allows you to easily create content-rich monetized sites. The whole system sets you up to rank your websites on search engines by keeping content fresh, using sound optimization techniques and through the use of the various promotion tools.

In addition to the software element, you get complete step-by-step instruction. If you’re a total beginner and don’t know HTML from a domain, the training documentation explains everything fully. But don’t worry, if you’re an intermediate or advanced Internet marketer, you can choose your own learning path without being bogged down in the unnecessary details.

In addition to a complete set of self-guided training materials, the folks at Portal Feeder have a very active discussion area and have a growing collection of recorded training calls. I’ll give more details on those in just a bit, so keep reading.

What’s Included in Portal Feeder:

• Build Unlimited Websites: You can build and publish as many sites with the software as you want without any extra charges.
• Scheduling Your Content, So It’s Always Fresh: Fresh content is great for your visitors and the search engines love to see a site that is continuously updated. The software doesn’t allow you to specify publishing dates, like WordPress does, but you can specify intervals at which to publish specific content.
• Import PLR, Reprints and Original Content Easily: You can edit content within the software and place it into “article packs” for specified future publishing. The folks at Portal Feeder have a HUGE database of reprint articles and provide 125 PLR articles to members each month.
• Easy Addition of Datafeeds: If you’re a tech-moron like me, you may have looked at putting product datafeeds into your website, but quit when it seemed so complicated. The PF Datafeed makes it easy to import datafeeds from different affiliate programs, so you can easily increase your commissions.
• Innovative Blog Functioning: Set up a blog that automatically posts new snippets of your content as it is automatically published on your website according to your specifications.
• Member’s Only Interactive Forum: This is a busy forum that is adequately staffed with experienced Portal Feeder users to help answer your questions and help you keep you going.
• Audio Training: I mentioned this earlier and members will find a growing collection of podcast downloads with various strategies, success stories, etc. The library already includes interviews with Perry Marshall, Yanik Silver, Keith Baxter, Joel Comm, Dr. Woo Ming & more.
• HTML Templates: Choose from the W3C compliant templates to make your site building much easier.

Other Software & Tools Included:

• Domain Check Tool: Check your backlinks, pages indexed, PR, Alex ranking (data from DMOZ, Google, Yahoo, MSN & Alexa).
• Directory Submission Tool: Streamline the process of submitting your sites to various directories.
• PF Web Page Analyzer: This tool gives you plenty of data to help you analyze your page for search engine rankings. Personally, I think it has too much detail than is usually necessary for ranking well for lower competition keyword phrases…but the accompanying user guides show you exactly how to use the data.
• Easy-to-Install Poll & Comment Scripts: Add some interactivity to your websites with these cool features.
• PF Comment Feeder: This handy piece of software helps you find blogs related to various keywords so you can post your own comments. You can read through the blogs right in the software and post your comments. It saves your results, so you can easily go back and check your comments are approved. The training guide is an educated piece about making good comments and not using it for a lame excuse to spam. It also gives some solid pointers on how to make valuable comments, instead of lame excuse to get your link into a blog.

What I Like:

• Portal Feeder is very community-oriented. I’ve already mentioned the fully-staffed and active message board, but there are also other components that help members work together. It includes a service called Portal Blog Feeder, where users can submit articles to the Portal Feeder blog network. There is organized opportunities to exchange links, share articles and even share keyword lists if you so wish. I think that’s very cool!
• It Makes a Lot of Things Really Easy: I love the ability to incorporate datafeeds, schedule content and automatically add to your blogs.

What Could Be a Drawback:

• There is a lot going on. If you want to just build a site and run with it, this probably isn’t the best tool to do that. Even though there is a learning curve and training stuff to go through, I do like that you can choose your own path through the materials, so if you’re beginner, you can take it slow. If you’re advanced, you can go a little faster.
• There is a monthly fee. Everything you make with Portal Feeder is yours to take with you if you decide to leave and continue to build your site elsewhere, but to continue with everything and to receive ongoing training, you do have to pay a monthly fee. Still, just looking at what is provided and the support you receive, it can definitely be worth it.

Final Thoughts:

This really is an impressive program and if you decide to venture in when they open the doors again tomorrow, (EDITED: Doors are now officially open) be prepared to take some time to learn and absorb before you jump right in. But don’t worry, the learning will not be wasted…it’s all about learning solid online marketing techniques, building traffic and really getting your online business going. And the software that is provided to help you build that online business includes what you need to create highly-monetized websites designed to bring in plenty of search engine traffic.

Portal Feeder first opened in 2006 and has been closed for membership for some time. They will be reopening their doors again on Thursday, April 26, 2007 to allow a smaller group in. (EDITED: It’s open now, go check it out)

NOTE TO ALL PRIVATE LABEL CONTENT MONTHLY MEMBERSHIP MEMBERS: There’s going to be a really cool perk available to you if you decide to try Portal Feeder, so stay-tuned to your email inbox for details tomorrow.

Happy Small Business Week to My Buddies to the South

I was browsing over at Lynn Terry’s ClickNewz.com and came upon her post about this week being National Small Business Week in the U.S.

According to Lynn’s post, April 22nd through the 28th has been celebrated as National Small Business Week in the US since 1963. It was designed to celebrate the small business owner and what they have brought to the economy over the years.

In Canada, the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) celebrates Small Business Week in October and has for the past 28 years. This year it’s October 14-20th and the BDC puts on many different events throughout Canada. They also set a theme each year and the theme for 2007 is “A World Without Boundaries.”

So to all my American entrepreneur pals, Happy Small Business Week! Keep up the great work and here’s wishing you the best for the rest of 2007.

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