Website + Conversion+Traffic= $$.

Simple enough… Right?

Yes. You have to worry about 3 things to get income fast in your online business.

1. Your Affiliate website

2. How much conversion you can depend on?

3. Your traffic getting skills?

Let’s start with basics of basics.

1. Always find markets where people are buying – One of my pet peeve about internet marketing guru’s is that they claim about “Write something you love”. This advice in itself is not bad at all but the thing about this is that you spend all your time in a site that you have no idea if it’ll become a hit or a flop.

That’s why I always suggest to go after markets where people already are buying. They can always buy an extra product or two.

The headache in this case is competition. My theory on competition is simple, you spend time and effort to out compete them. Simple as that.

2. NO WordPress – Why, oh why, I am suggesting no wordpress, when even I have a blog on wordpress? It’s simple, it kills conversion. WordPress is overall a good tool for SEO purposes but it kills conversion. Most of the themes for wordpress aren’t created for keeping conversion in mind.

That’s why I recommend you to start with an affiliate site not an affiliate blog. Right? I personally recommend Xsite pro as a tool to build your sites fast and efficiently. They not only help you with SEO but also with design and lot of other stuff.

3. Building traffic -  There’s only one secret to build traffic and that’s call link building. If you are building backlinks to your site, then build lots of them and it’ll get you listed in serps and get traffic. But that’s a long term strategy (that doesn’t mean you should work on it).

Read more on my article about How to get website traffic.

The thing about traffic is all about momentum. You should spend as much time as possible. I am used to this formula

Content Creation + 3 X Traffic Generation = Profit

The above equation is pretty much my idea of building momentum. You do not spend as much time on creating content as you spend on getting traffic.

You can create your content once a week and then promote the heck out of it for next 7 days…

4. List building – You should at least put some kind of mechanism to build your list. Even if you get 4-5 subscriber a day, you’ll have 150 subscriber in 30 days. That’s good enough to start making money.

Think of How to build relationship with your list?

Improve Conversion with your list.

As you can see, it all comes down to converting your traffic to leads to profit. If you are not focused on converting this traffic into profit, you’ll not make money.

Technically you can make decent income with 150-200 visitors per day.  Heck I did when I started out with 80-100 visitors per day.

So in the end you need.

1. A website that converts

2. A list mechanism that converts

3. Regular traffic.

And that’s how’ll profit.

If you want to start and profit in your market then you should check out “Niche Marketing from stephen pierce“.

Building a list and getting them to open your emails and buy the stuff you promote is Basics of Smart affiliate marketing. That’s why in this article, I am going to cover few important things needed to be implemented in any autoresponder series.

1.    How many emails should you prepare for?

When you start writing email series, the first question automatically in your mind should be “how many emails is too many?”.

The answer to this question is pretty darn complicated. So I’ll give you the best option to try out with.

Always start with 7 – or 10 part series (that means you have to write 7/10 emails for the series).

Now that’s lazy way cop out. You should write 7 emails and then let them know, that you’ll be sending them more information on the topic.

2.    What frequency you should mail for?

Again, If it’s possible, you should try out at least once a week for starting. You can always increase/decrease the frequency. There are many marketers who are sending emails on daily basis.

I do not recommend this unless you have specified that you’ll email daily. For example, my email series on my website is a step by step marketing plan for next 30 day. I am sending at least 24 emails in those 30 days. You can get away with more frequent emails if your subscriber know about it.

3. Write your Thank you email first.

You should write your thank you email first. This is going to be most important email as this is like an introduction and a chance to get to know your reader/subscriber.

4    How much content, how much to sell?

The headache comes into play, when people start wondering when to sell, when to tell. Most people are not used to the idea of selling to others. We’ve be told “salesman are slimy and what not”. Right, so when it comes to selling, we do tend to cop out and find the lazy way (too much content).

Don’t be afraid to sell on every single email. You can always write a small PS in the end of an email about the product.

There are many formulas people use like 3 content 1 promotion and what not. I recommend you to start with what’s you are comfortable with.

Then you should send at least 2-4 emails per month that’s have promotion in them.

5. Work on your subject line

It shouldn’t take you more than 20 minutes to 30 minutes per email to write. Even that I think is too much time. Most of your time should be spent on the subject line.

I highly recommend you to not go over 65 characters in subject line.

Make your headline curious, snappy, different, intriguing. It’ll take some time to learn this skill. I spend first few month in learning how to write good email headlines and get over 60% email opening rates consistently.

You should spend next weekend on creating your autoresponder series, if you are serious in affiliate marketing.

How you prepare yourself to succeed with largely ends up showing up in your success results.

Kind of odd isn’t it. Well, we aren’t here to discuss any philosophy of mine.

So far, you’ve create a website. Now all you have to do is think about how to get traffic and voila… But unfortunately, things doesn’t happen this way.

That’s one of the major reason, I told you to spend at least 1 hr per day for next 6 months.

Why? Because I want you to have a full chance at succeeding.

Unless you spend some time learning how to build traffic, you won’t succeed. If you expect, that you’ll use few secret SEO techniques and tons of people will come rushing to your website, you are agonizingly wrong.

You need some time to learn few of traffic building resources. You can just enter “traffic generation” in the search box in this blog and you’ll read tons of material on how you can do that. I

 highly recommend you to master at least couple of ways to generate traffic. Otherwise, your website will look like dried up cactus.

Some simple techniques you can use are Article marketing Video marketing Blog commenting Forum posting Social bookmarking Link building Joint Ventures As you can see there are many free ways to build traffic. You should target them and try to get the results.

Only after you get traffic, you’ll be able to promote affiliate products and make some cash. Recommended Sources – How to Succeed In Niche Marketing. Article Marketing – how to use articles to build traffic.

When I asked this question, I decided to create a simple roadmap for affiliates.

You need a very simple formula (not much skill).

1. Buy a domain name
2. Buy a hosting.
3. Create a website.
4. Build Traffic.
5. Promote the heck out of the products through your affiliate link.
6. Rinse and Repeat.

Now this is 6 step formula, you should keep in mind. As I go along this article series, I’ll show you what to do with each step.

Before you go ahead and buy a domain and hosting. You should try to create a time table of sorts and find out how much time you can spend daily.

I highly recommend something like 1 hour per day for first 6 months.

Step 1/2/ – Buy a domain and Hosting.

Before you buy domain, you have to find out which niche you are going to target.

Read this article – Niche Research(opens in new window) – Why your success largely depends on this step.

1. How to choose a Hot, rabid niche – I

2. How to choose a Hot, rabid niche – II

Read those articles and think what kind of website would you like to create?

When you are finished with these articles and found a good market to target. you are ready to buy your first domain/hosting.

Step 3 :  Create a Website.

You can go through this in 2 ways.

1. Buy a template and edit it manually (it’s easier to edit a template than to create a web design from scratch).

2. Use some kind of software (like Xsite Pro) to create a website.

It doesn’t matter what option you chose, you shouldn’t spend more than a day or two in this.

Of course, you can always buy a custom design (but it takes too much time, time which you can spend building traffic and making money).

If I am spending more than an hour in web design, I know I am doing something wrong.

Well, we just finished first 3 steps, I’ll discuss the rest in next article.

Recommended Sources -

How to Succeed In Niche Marketing.

Article Marketing – how to use articles to build traffic.

How in the world are you going to make profit?

As you can guess, I am one of those who believe everyone should have a product of their own to sell. When you create a product you automatically become an expert. You only need about 1% conversion with a $30 product with a traffic of 100 unique visitors to get decent income per month (about $900). It’s hard to achieve that kind of figures with adsense or with affiliate marketing.

But we are not talking about products. We are talking about how you can make money without products.

2^nd best thing you can do is jump into affiliate marketing band wagon.

Frankly speaking, it’s little harder to sell affiliate product rather than your own. On plus side, you have no inventory, no customer hassles, no worry about credit card processing. In this article I am going to show you how you can succeed as an affiliate marketer.

The secret behind successful affiliate marketer.

Focus – errr… really?

Can you remember the first time you’ve heard about affiliate marketing and what was your first reaction?

I remember mine. I read about it from another top marketer’s website. My first reaction was to become his affiliate and start promoting his products. Bad idea that.

I made only 6$ in first 3 months. Ouch. It still hurts.

So how can you use focus and succeed?

First thing you have to worry about is finding a good product. If you are promoting a good product, it’ll go a long way.

Second thing you need to do is write a pre-sell page. That’s it. One pre-sell page. Don’t try to copy the sales letter of the product. Write your own.

If you own the product, then you can see and discuss the quality of material and other stuff.

Now Last thing you have to do is, promote the heck out of this single page. You can use any number of traffic building techniques. Wherever you go, promote it.

I know of a guy who wrote 3–4 articles a day to promote a single product.

I also know of a guy who spent 4–5 hrs a day in forums promoting it.

I also know of a guy who regularly used Yahoo chat rooms and sold weight loss pills to people (now this was surprising even for me).

When I talked about focus. I wanted you to focus on single product. Do not spread your efforts too soon.

This way you can start making some money in next 30 days. In next 60 days, you’ll get used to regular checks in your mailbox. After that you can implement many strategies to add the leverage.

Follow this 5 step process of Vision – Strategy – Action – Results – Celebration to Succeed in Internet marketing.

Goals – How can affiliate marketers achieve them while reducing their time, effort and money?

There are many tips on increasing productivity, which often talks about “not check emails, your adsense/affiliate accounts every few minutes”.

But I am going to take a different approach to them. If you want to be productive, it’s easy and you can follow the tips (Read Darren’s Blog post on productivity). I am going to tighten some lose ends, strengthen the structure and Marketing process more efficient, and so on.

The way to to efficient your marketing structure is by testing and streamlining. I know testing sounds a LOT complicated to a beginner, but What I am going to do is show you how to use the simplest of testing. I call it self-testing.

Odd name for a testing methodology. As you know, I like to keep things simple. The idea behind self testing is “Find out what is getting you result and do more of it”. Now I know most people are wondering “Isn’t that’s what testing is supposed to do?”

Yes, you are right. But for you to figure out you need to install software and stuff like that. Which is time consuming process. If you remember my earlier blog post on testing advertising concepts, then you know I tested without any script or software. Do you know the basic process of affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing process –> Find the market -> Find a Hot Selling product -> Get Traffic -> Promote The affiliate product.

It’s 4 phase process. And what I am suggesting is going to be implemented in 4th stage. While promoting your stuff you are going to take notice of your results. Find out at what time period, you are making a sale.

For example – If you are promoting a Product X and you make a sale at around 100 Unique targeted traffic, then what does this tells you? It basically give you green light to put all of your efforts to promote this product.

Even if you are making a sale per 200 unique visitors, you are actually doing a lot better than others.

This is what I meant by Self-testing. You notice when you are making a sale. When you start out, chances are you won’t find the kind of results I talked about.

Here’s what to do when you are not satisfied with results?

Let’s take an example where You’ve created a 1 Pre-sell Page and You are bringing traffic to this page to promote a Brand X product.

Now you have brought about 500 unique visitors and still no sale. That’s a bad-bad equation in front of you.

Now Here things get hairy and you have to make an intelligent decision.

Find out why people are not buying it?

1. Bad Traffic – Product Match : This happens more than often you’d imagine. Most of times, the traffic you bring in is not a good match for the product. Now if you are getting traffic to a product called “Make money online” and your traffic is targeted (make money online type). So what’s the big deal here? Can you guess?Now chances are you are bringing crowd that belongs to affiliate marketing niche and your product is all about using your product and stuff like that. This is slight disconnection which goes almost un-noticed between your traffic and Product. And your conversion will DROP significantly. The moment you bring the right crowd (for this example, people who create their own products), you’ll see jump in sales.

   The major difference between you and myself is the experience to judge this kind of situation immediately.

2. A Disconnection between traffic and your pre-sell page : Every market has a Lingo or style or manner of speaking. If you are out of element in this department, it’ll create a HUGE disconnection in your pre sell page. (BTW, If I haven’t said it before, ALWAYS CREATE PRE-SELL PAGES).If you think this is the reason, Find couple of High traffic forums in your product/market and spend some time there lurking. You’ll get a heck a lot about the demographics of your market.
3. Bad Promotion from Brand X product: This stuff happens too. Bad Marketing. Do you know there’s rare breed of marketers who spend most of the time finding this kind of situation and write their own pre-sell page to promote the product from clickbank.
4. Disconnection between Traffic and Product page : Actually this should also comes into 3^rd angle here. But Again this disconnection is pretty much like the disconnection we talk about in 1 and 2^nd point. In this case, Your only option is to create a better pre-sell page or find a better marketed product.

As you can see, just by judging your traffic and sales, you can start making decisions that’ll reduce your time and effort by making it more efficient. I am of belief that you should spend more time doing things that brings you money rather than doing useless stuff Like designing the web page, trying 10 different things.

Focus on doing 1 single things and do it effectively. If you are getting only 100 uniques visitors a day, you can find out if you are going to make money in 5 day or less. It’s about making a proper decision.

Now when you go back home, few days later you starts contacting every single one of them and start pitching your products to them.

Can you guess what are your chances of selling your products to them?

Very Low, unless you are master persuader and salesman.

And this is where all of us go wrong. We treat our website visitors and subscribers the same way. We let them subscribe to our list and then starts sending promotions to them.

Can you make sales doing that? Of course yes, many of the marketers are doing it that way.

Do you ever wonder why some Affiliate marketers fail (and others go ga-ga over their massive checks)?

It took me about 7-8 months in general to figure out how to sell products as an affiliate. And I believe most affiliates do not even spend that much time and quit.

Even those who do not quit early, does not succeed as they should have. This question bears a serious thought and a response.

One of the key component I have found in top and successful affiliates is “Relationship”. They share a very cordial relationship with their subscribers. Or Their relationship is based on trust.

The fact is that they spend time in creating a relationship with their prospective customers. And they get paid handsomely for that effort.

But It takes time, who has it?

Now, now, don’t be rash. I am asking you to spend next 30 day to create a relationship with your subscribers, can’t you just spend next 30 days with it? How much effort does it take?

Oh well, let just say you don’t want to spend that much time, then what to do?

Now this here comes into category to seduction or attraction. You have to understand and treat it like real world. You’ll often meet people who are good at connecting with others in instant. Often these people will have others telling their life stories to them in no time.

You have to understand, “Nobody likes to be sold, but they sure like to buy”. If they are not buying it from you, they are buying it from someone else.

Should you use Hard-sell or Soft sell?

I’ve been brought up in hard selling environment. My business experience comes from that background. And I personally despised it for a long time. It wasn’t until I started using soft selling skills. I realized hard selling created a pressure on me which was ultimately non-existent.

If you do not like using typical sales techniques, then go the soft selling route. Understand at one point, you’ll end up using a mixture of both skills and it’s like a circle of life completing itself.

Creating a Relationship is a soft selling skill.

When you start creating this relationship with your subscribers, chances of them buying from you gets really high. And that’s how I get more than 75% click throughs on my email campaigns (notice I didn’t not talk about emails opened, but click throughs)

Every interaction is a time where you should spend some time thinking about “building a relationship”. One of the good examples of this kind of marketing is “David Deangelo in Double Your Dating“.

Eben (or David his pen name) takes his subscribes to the series of emails where he connects with them in many ways. He tries to understand and give them solution that’s best for them. And he does not do it forcefully. He nudges them into the direction.

And he didn’t chanced upon this method by some universe or ‘law of attraction’ magic. He spent time understanding it.

And this is where You have to spend some time ripping apart every single of your own marketing materials.

Remember, In any sales interaction, your main goal is to build a relationship.

Best Regards
Varun Pratap

How to play the leading role in your marketing “movie” – so you always “get the girl”…and the sale!

The best thing is you don’t have to be “the first” in market to be a leader. Often if you are different and people have a different image (of course favorable)), then you can position yourself as an expert. That’s the main reason you see many different companies in same market (i.e. Nike and addidas in footwear).

Let’s use these 4 tips to create a different positioning factor for you.

Presentation – Know How to present the information.

Anyone can find information if they spend some time searching online. But Not anyone will be able to present it in a manner which is favorable to them. Content often matters, but often the delivery system matters most. It’s like telling a joke, you’ll often find people who have knack for telling jokes and few people who always bomb.

That’s how much difference you can make with your presentations.

Keep yourself updated

You’d be surprised how many marketers do not keep themselves updated on the latest news. But when I am talking about updating yourself, I am talking in every perspective of your market. If you have to learn about new softwares, or may be new strategies or may be something completely new. Be ready to be the front of it.

Remember – Leaders Lead, followers follow. You have to show them by doing it.

Don’t publish junk Information.

Do not publish bad information. Internet is already very polluted. This will only be bad for your credibility.

Teach.

Be open to teaching others, be it in classes or via emails or tele-seminars. Be open to teach about your market. Share your knowledge with the world.

Click here For More Strategic Internet Marketing Tips. You’ll get 30 days Internet Business plan plus regular blog updates at http://www.imbasics.com

Varun Pratap

Aim for That Peak Like Mad.
Shadow Such people and Cheer Them On.