Are You Ready for the Busy Season?
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006 at 2:21 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer
Labor Day is over (for those in the U.S.) and the new holiday season is not far off. So, it’s time to make sure that your affiliate business is up and running properly to take advantage of the upcoming busy season.
If you have a gift-related business, this will be even more important. Here are a few things you will want to make sure are working well.
Are your Auto Responder messages profitable? If you have had your auto responder messages set up for some time, it’s time to review them. Perhaps you have come across new products to promote or higher ticket items that just never made it into the AR. Some people think that once you set up your AR messages you can forget about them, but that shouldn’t be the case.
You should review them every now and then and put your most profitable messages at the front. While you still have the attention of the subscriber (and before they unsubscribe). It could pay handsomely to rearrange your AR’s with the new products you have found.
Links – Are all of your links working? I was horrified to find out recently that one of my better paying promotions, set up in the AR, had a broken link. I had coded the link with some software, and when a new version was installed, my files were moved. You can’t make money if a subscriber can’t open your link. I don’t know how long this link was invalid, but I am glad I did a check of my messages and found it.
Web Software – Now might be the time to get all your content online and begin to look at Content Management Systems (CMS). A CMS based system will allow your visitors to easily find your information. Your readers can pull up articles from several issues at a time on one topic if they want. If they stay at your site and read, you’ve got a good “sticky” site. The user may even bookmark it!
Subscribers – Are you treating your subscribers right? Do you send them good, interesting information, or just constant ads for products? It’s a good idea to reward your subscribers with valuable freebies every now and then, to keep them opening your emails.
A little housecleaning now could go a long way during the next few months.
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Hi Evelyn
I realise we should all be keeping our web sites up to date, but there are so many aspects which need attention it is difficult to know where to start.
Recently I have found it useful to prepare a page in Word with two main headings, Aims and Achievements. There can be corresponding sub-headings under the two main categories for Marketing, Site Maintenance, List Updating, etc.
In the top Aims section put a list of all the things you need to do, allocated to the appropriate sub-heading. There might be 20, 30 or even more.
Then over the coming weeks, one by one, make a point of doing tasks. When it has been completed, physically move it down the page from the Aims section to the corresponding sub-category in Achieved. It is satisfying to see the number of outstanding items in Aims steadily reduced, while the Achieved section becomes bigger and bigger.
Well .. it works for me anyway
Geoffrey Ponder
www.SeeHearLearn.com
Teach yourself with Online Multimedia