Affiliate Classroom Blog

The Autoresponder Lucky Number 7

Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 2:27 am by Kathy Jackson

Your autoresponder can put your income on autopilot but only if you use it to its fullest advantage. If a visitor comes to your website and opts in so they can get whatever freebie you offering, and then they never hear from you again, it is like a fish stealing bait.

 The visitor took the bait and you got nothing for it.

It has been proven over and over and over again that you will very rarely sell anything at all on the first visit that is made to your website.

 

Your main objective of that first visit is to garner the name and email address of the visitor so that you will have an opportunity to sell to him in the future.

You go to a great deal of trouble and expense to convince the visitor to supply his name and email address to you; it isn’t very smart not to make use of that information.

The lucky autoresponder number is 7. Seven is the number of contacts that you will most likely have to make with a potential customer before they become a paying customer. So the question is what kind of messages should you send in order to maximize your contacts and achieve that magic number of 7?

Actually, the solution is fairly simple. Include a subscription to your newsletter with the freebie that you are using as an opt-in incentive. If you send your newsletter (which always includes links to products for which you are an affiliate marketer) twice a month, you should convert that bait-grabbing visitor into a paying customer in about three month’s time.

You should send an automatic welcoming email first (that’s one) and two a month for the next three months…that makes seven. By then you should have been able to convince that visitor to buy from you.

Seven has always been considered a ‘lucky’ number and 7 is certainly a lucky number for affiliate marketer’s autoresponders! 

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Is Santa Really an Affiliate Marketer?

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 4:02 pm by Kathy Jackson

It’s just a rumor of course. We can’t be sure if there is any truth to the story but rumor has it that Santa is, in fact, an affiliate marketer. If it is true, the guy is really good! You have to give him that!

He has an entire season devoted to his business and the season gets longer every single year. There was a time when the Santa buying season only lasted from the day after Thanksgiving through December 24th. That was it.

Now, the season seems to start well before Halloween and I have even seen ‘Christmas in July’ marketing. There was also a time when all of the Santa buying season was done in brick and mortar stores on Main Street but now Santa has a huge online presence.

Talk about a customer base! Wow! Practically every man, woman and child in the civilized world is eager to spend money on Santa’s buying season! Now, THAT has got to be the result of some very, very effective advertising.

Santa must be a very generous fellow. He left the door open for the rest of us affiliate marketers to get in on his buying season. He might sell most of the gifts but even he can’t sell all of them and the customer base is huge. He’s doing most of the advertising for us, too!

We can all get in on the Santa buying season as a joint venture with the ‘jolly old elf’ who, if the rumors are right, is the greatest affiliate marketer in the history of affiliate marketing!

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Affiliate Classroom November 2007 Issue – Affiliate Business Models

Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 3:19 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

Do Affiliates Really Need Business Models? Of course they do, but affiliates often find themselves confused with the various business models available. That’s why the November 2007 issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine focuses on choosing an affiliate business model, testing the new Web 2.0 models, and structuring your business correctly right from the start.

“Five Questions to Consider When Choosing Your Affiliate Business Model,” by Katalin Torok makes it easy with an exercise that helps you align your business model with your personal situation and financial goals.

You’ll find plenty of ideas to help you choose or improve your current business model in this first article..

Mark Thompson then shows you “A Simple Affiliate Business Model Using Web 2.0.” By now you’ve all heard about Web 2.0 and how it’s a great way to help you get search engine presence and traffic, but it can still be a little confusing. That’s why Mark shows you a few simple steps, and follows them with diagrams so you can copy a tested model for building a Web 2.0 site that’s designed to earn affiliate commissions, without extreme advertising costs.

“Becoming A Super Affiliate Corporation,” by Kathy Jackson shows you how to structure and manage your corporation for maximum profit and growth. Here, you’ll find a workable plan for setting yourself up as a corporation, thinking through your long-term business goals, and growing your business by using outsourced help.

Whether you’re a top earner or a part-time affiliate, the November issue of Affiliate Classroom Magazine has plenty of ideas to help you improve your affiliate business. It’s a Free PDF publication, so just go here to download it directly (no email address required):

Download November 2007 Affiliate Classroom Magazine Here!

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Awesome Holiday PLR Package

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 6:04 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

Have you noticed that a lot of affiliate marketers fall off the face of the earth around this time of the year? Maybe you used to get a weekly email, and now there’s nothing.

The main reason is that for many affiliates, their commissions follow a very similar trend to the retail world. So, 4th quarter, specifically these next couple of months, are the largest in sales for most marketers.

How about you?  Are your affiliate holiday campaigns all set up and your ads ready to go? Or could you use some help getting content ready for Holiday Sales?

If content is the problem, then we have the solution:

A package has been created that consists of 250 product reviews for the PERFECT gift items. You can take these product reviews and INSTANTLY start driving traffic to them and keep 100% of the commission!

 

All you need to do is personalize them a little, add YOUR affiliate link, and you have an instant selling product review.

These are the BEST gift ideas - split into actual age groups. You can either specifically target just one or you can run with all of them. There are 25 different “holiday” sub-niches and you get 10 product reviews in each.

For more information on the niches covered, and sample of the banner graphics that are also included in the package go here now.

It’s worth taking a few moments to check this out - you could EASILY dive into holiday marketing and get your hands on a piece of the money tree.

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Affiliate Elite Reviewed

Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 1:23 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

This year seems to have been the year for using software that spy’s on Google and other PPC engines. But what about finding top affiliates to market YOUR products, or finding out what products are the hot sellers at any given moment.  This is becoming harder every day.

As many of you know, Brad Callen launched Affiliate Elite recently and many of our students have been asking us for our opinion on the software. So we decided to get a copy and do a quick review for you.  Here’s what we found:

This software has a TON of features - including a neat “ad spying” tool that watches Google Adwords. But, better yet, this tool has Clickbank” spying ability.

Note:  If you like videos better than reading, you can see ALL the features in action.  Click Here to watch the first 4 videos.

We came up with two creative strategies to show you how this tool could work for you.  The first strategy assumes you have a product of your own to sell; the second is using the tool in more of an affiliate marketing capacity to find the most profitable niche products.
Creative Strategy #1

Let’s say you want to promote Affiliate Classroom and, because AC is a two-tier program, you also want to expand your affiliate list for it. It’s not sold on on Clickbank, so what good is Affiliate Elite in this case?  Let’s see – You could go to Clickbank and type in “affiliate marketing” and discover all the OTHER merchants selling guides on affiliate marketing on Clickbank.

Then, while sorting through the results – you might find Rosalind Gardner’s book there, and then the light just might go off in your head - any affiliate doing a good job for her would likely be a great affiliate for Affiliate Classroom!”

So, all you do is visit her website and within just MINUTES you’ll have a nice list of an entire ARMY of affiliates that are promoting her eBook. Then just start contacting them.

Creative Strategy #2

Now for affiliates who don’t have their own products…how can AE immediately help you? How about being able to figure out what OTHER affiliates are selling.

Let’s use the same example as above.

Let’s say you go in and look for all the affiliates that are promoting Rosalind’s book. You will get an entire list of her affiliates AND a preview of their website. Simply scroll their site and see what OTHER affiliate marketing related products they are promoting!

This is a great way to gather competitive information and to find new affiliate programs to promote.

Again, both the strategies above use the same ONE feature - imagine what you can  do with all the other features combined.

I highly recommend watching all 4 of the videos on this page:

And, all in all, yes, this software gets a major thumbs up from us. I only hope Brad can add CJ, Linkshare and other networks with future releases (and he’s already said that he’s researching that).

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Affiliate Classroom Welcomes Rachel Honoway

Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 3:12 pm by Evelyn Grazini, AC Student and Staff Writer

We are very excited to announce that the Affiliate Classroom has just hired affiliate marketing veteran
Rachel Honoway as Vice President of Marketing. 

Rachel’s experience in Affiliate Marketing and Interactive Marketing will help AC keep up to date on new developments in the Affiliate Marketing arena - so we can offer you the best training and products in the industry!

Rachael worked with KowaBunga! Technologies as Director of Marketing for 8 years where she held the positions of VP of sales and marketing and general VP. A year after the company’s acquisition in 2005 by Think Partnership Inc., she was promoted to the corporate level and served as the company’s VP of marketing and later as its VP of marketing and client services.

Myself, I’m going to keep an eye on Rachel and try to learn from her.  And you can bet that I’ll probably leak some interesting industry findings into this blog in the future.

So, subscribe to this blog and watch out for all the new information coming your way.  We’ll be happy to pass it on as we grow our Affiliate Classroom readers and students into super affiliate marketers!

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