Archive for April, 2010
AC Certified Provides Business with Trained and Certified Affiliate Managers
Posted by Jeff Greer in Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs Tuesday, 27 April 2010 11:18 1 Comment
Do you need a trained and certified affiliate manager? We can help!
If you’re an online retailer or service provider with an affiliate program, are you getting the results you expect from it? Or if you don’t have a program, do you know how to establish one?
We know it can be challenging to establish and maintain an effective affiliate program. Hiring a full time employee to do the job is often expensive. But finding someone who’s working on your marketing team with the right expertise can be a challenge.
Fortunately, Lurn has a solution for companies looking to increase sales and expand their business through Affiliate Marketing.
Graduates of our AC Certified program, which provides training and certification for affiliate managers, can help you get the results you need from your company’s affiliate program. When you hire an AC Certified graduate to run your affiliate program, you’re getting an expert who’s been trained in the following areas:
- Start up of new affiliate programs
- Selecting and managing tracking solutions
- Recruiting and managing affiliates
- Negotiating favorable terms with networks
- Improving sales through promotions and contests
- Day-to-day program management
In addition, AC Certified is the first and only certification program endorsed by leading affiliate industry professionals such as Shawn Collins. When asked to comment on AC Certified, Shawn said, “It’s like a college course on Affiliate Marketing … it’s obvious that you had true, experienced, veteran affiliate managers working on this.”
If your business needs trained and certified affiliate management, Lurn can help you find it. Email Sarah Holland (sarah at lurn.com) and she’ll put you in touch with one of our AC Certified graduates.
Search – What’s Working and What’s Not
Posted by Jeff Greer in Affiliate Marketing Tuesday, 27 April 2010 09:00 No Comments
Marketing Sherpa did an interesting survey recently, asking a group of search engine marketers to rate various search strategies that positively affected their PPC (Pay Per Click) as well as their SEO (search engine optimization) efforts.
The gold line represents the responses for 2009, and the blue line represents the responses for 2008. On the 1-10 scale, 1 is the least effective and 10 is the most effective.
You’ll notice that almost every category lost ground. The one and only exception is “Social/Community Based” search. And that category continues to gain.
Copywriting Tips for Blogs: Learn to Strike the Right Tone
Posted by krosenblatt in Copywriting Monday, 26 April 2010 12:00 3 Comments
Strike the right tone
People expect blogs to be less formal than more official publications, but that doesn’t mean that you should be totally informal. Just as your blog style should reflect your brand, your tone needs to carry those notes as well.
Having a blog is a great way to share information and your opinion. To get repeat visitors and regular readers, your content needs to be fresh … and informational or entertaining. It also needs to be professional and show your expertise.
Creating posts can be time consuming and coming up with topics can be tough. But setting and sticking to a regular posting schedule is important. Blogs are a great way to promote products or services and draw a larger audience, but if you’re over-scheduled, your posts can reflect it. Spelling mistakes, broken links, run-on sentences and bad punctuation are not the right tone for any blog. That’s not informal, it’s unprofessional. While you have to polish and edit a post as you would any article you would submit, you don’t want to force a voice.
Add Images to Your Sitemap – Why?
Posted by Kathy Jackson in Affiliate Marketing Friday, 23 April 2010 09:00 No Comments
When you first built your site, Google told you that you needed a sitemap. You (like most of us) carefully followed the instructions, built or had built a sitemap, and uploaded it on your server per Google’s directions.
And, like most of us, you haven’t given your sitemap another thought since.
Maybe you should.
Sitemaps act much like a “table of contents” or a “directory” of your website for the spiders (or bots) when they crawl your site.
It’s now possible (and easy) to add images to your existing site maps. Google has provided a “Sitemap Extension” that makes it possible.
According to Google:
“For each URL you list in your Sitemap, you can add additional information about important images that exist on that page. You don’t need to create a new Sitemap, you can just add information on images to the Sitemap you already use.”
For complete instructions see “Adding image information to a Sitemap” on the Google website.
In case you are one of those who actually understands HTML code and are comfortable using it, you can find the coding on Google’s “Adding image information to a Sitemap”
Google indexes billions of images and sees hundreds of millions of image-related searches every single day. By adding images to your sitemap, you can take advantage of this enormous search volume and perhaps generate more website traffic.
Your Blog Can Sweeten Your Email Marketing Efforts
Posted by Kathy Jackson in Affiliate Marketing Thursday, 22 April 2010 09:38 23 Comments
As an affiliate who promotes products to a list via email, it’s possible you are overlooking or at least under-utilizing a major asset: your blog.
It’s likely you put a great deal of time, effort, thought, and even money into building the list you market to. It’s also likely that you spend a great deal of all the above to generate email content. Your blog may be a secret weapon that can use to both increase opt-ins AND generate email content – for FREE!
You have blog readers who are not on your opt-in list, and you have members of your opt-in list who do not read your blog.
The idea here is to integrate your blog and your opt-in list. You want to use your blog and your existing email list to aid and grow one another.
