Internet Mastery Center Blog

Running your own free newsletter or e-zine can bring massive benefits to your website and profits. Did you know that newsletters are one of the most important components for you to drive traffic to your website and build your online business?

The popularity of newsletters is based on the thirst for information by information-hungry Internet surfers. The main reason people are online is because they want and need information and that is exactly what newsletters provide.

There are 3 major advantages of starting your own newsletter, no matter what product or service that you are offering. They are:

- Being able to maintain regular contact
- Being able to build a relationship with your subscribers
- Being able to offer new products and services

A newsletter allows you to keep the connection with your site visitors reminding them of how your product is suited for them.

The other, often overlooked, advantage of having a newsletter, is the income it can generate, not from selling your products and services or links to affiliate programs, but from selling advertising space in it.

You do need a medium to large subscriber base before other businesses will be interested in advertising, but this is not that hard to achieve, especially if it is regularly full of quality content. You can earn a few hundred, even thousands of dollars, every month just from ads if you play your cards rights.

Your online customers will eventually become your offline customers if they trust the information you regularly send them. Put simply, a newsletter is your way of helping people. If you help people online, eventually they will buy from you.

However, running your own newsletter involves a considerable amount of work. It is vital that you regularly write a lot of quality content before your next release. Ideally a newsletter should be sent out every week or at least every fortnight. This is not always easy. It definitely takes consistency and a keen eye for content.

You see, just as it is on your website...content is KING in your newsletters.

You need to offer valuable information, products, services, and more to keep your subscribers clicking on every newsletter that you send out.

In conclusion, running your own newsletter can have a very positive impact on your website and online business. If you dedicate yourself to keeping it up, you will find it well worth the effort. We have seen incredible success on the Internet that is most encouraging as we integrate work, play and home into a lifestyle, one that we're sure you have a desire for too. I wish the same for you.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

If you have a product that you want to sell, whether it's an e-book, audio or video, it's usually a very wise idea to create an affiliate program around it.

If you have an affiliate program for your product, you will get a ton of traffic that you would not normally have received.

The reason is because a lot of people will promote your product for you when you're paying them a commission to do it!

Would you rather have 100 people buy your product from you? Or would you rather have 100 affiliates when each has a hundred people buying your product from them?

It's a no-brainer when there can be a better way to boost your income by leveraging on the combined efforts of hundreds of affiliates to sell for you. This demand for a better way creates a market for affiliate management software which makes the whole process of setting up, recording and releasing commissions so much more...well, manageable.

Without such a software, you would never have been able to get the amount of traffic and sales multiple promoters could give you, compared to achieving it all by yourself. It would have been impossible to 'promote' every customer into an affiliate automatically. Talk about missing out on an exponential effect on your financial bottomline!

Let's begin with explaining what an affiliate program is.

An affiliate program is a way to offer partners who are interested in promoting your product or service a share of the profits generated after they make a sale. Your affiliate partners are "commissioned salespeople" who will take your marketing message to their audience, convince them to buy from you, and then get paid a proportion of the profit they create for your business.

The advantages of having affiliates (or associates) build your business and help you with marketing is that you have no upfront expense to cover. Apart from setting up an infrastructure to manage affiliates and create marketing material for them to use, you pay nothing until after a sale has been made. Contrast this with conventional advertising where you pay first, and then hope you make enough sales to make back your investment. Another benefit is you can reach an audience through your affiliates which you otherwise wouldn't be able to by yourself. This multiplies your reach and can explode your sales and profits.

Unfortunately, despite the benefits, running an affiliate program is not as easy as it seems because the symbiosis or synergistic relationship between affiliates and merchants is not always and fully understood. The most successful programs are based on mutual respect, open dialogue, and proper recognition and reward for success.

The affiliate management software can only go so far with proper reporting of up-to-date statistics like number of impressions, click-throughs, leads, sales, 2nd-tier affiliates and others on a monthly and daily basis. But of course it wouldn't be called an affiliate management software if it can't process these data, so there are features that affiliate managers must look out for and diligently evaluate before they prepares to invest in a software. Affiliates would want to know what statistics are available so that they can determine how well they are succeeding.

On the managers' part, they are obliged to provide all the sales tools and material affiliates need to sell their products as effectively as possible. This is not easily done because:

1) they become lazy :)

2) they presume affiliates know what to do.

Affiliates must feel they are well equipped to sell the merchants' products because even if they have not reviewed the products themselves, only the merchants know their stuff best and how to present them to the audience in the best possible light.

Besides the standard affiliate link, the tools for online promotion include banner graphics, e-mail messages, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, a giveaway viral report, a review article, PLR articles, testimonials, one-time offer (OTO) page, forum signatures, press releases, popup HTML codings etc.

The truly successful affiliate managers are the ones who can respond and better still, pre-empt the kind of help affiliates typically ask for, thus providing an optimal level of support affiliates require, leading to every possible sales conversion whenever the opportunity arises.

Successful affiliate programs have dedicated personnel that work with the affiliates to ensure that they have the tools that they need, the reporting that is required, and to ensure that they are compensated fairly and in a timely fashion. Again these services are either provided to the affiliates by an individual or team that works directly for the merchant, or by an independent affiliate management company. Either solution is acceptable to affiliates providing that they receive the level of support that they require.

Providing that the affiliates are successful in delivering prospects to a merchant-customers that convert into paying customers-and they earn money, they will continue to promote them, and the more that they earn, the better the promotion is likely to be. Online affiliates have a set amount of "real estate" on their sites for promotion-they of course have to provide content to their visitors-and this is allocated to those merchants from whom they earn the best return. In return, the manager can reward better-performing affiliates according to the results they have achieved.

But bear in mind the reality is that 80%-90% of your affiliates will be inactive under normal circumstances. The Pareto principle also applies that 20% of your affiliates are likely to be responsible for 80% of the total sales.

To keep affiliates motivated, merchants should work with them to create incentive programs and special events that will provide them with opportunities for increased recognition and revenue; for example, increase affiliate commission for a certain time period. They should also take the time to communicate with them whenever possible to help them with their promotions. One method is to publish regular affiliates-only newsletters that contain their statistics for the week/month, affiliate marketing tips, product and promotion updates, interviews with successful affiliates etc. Your affiliates will never forget they joined your program.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

When you want to take control and are thinking of starting your own affiliate program, there are certain things you will need to offer. You need to make it easy for affiliates to get on board and get started right away. To do this, you will need to offer them certain things to work with. You should immediately tell them everything they need to know in the first e-mail you send to them. You don't have to go into great detail about it but you can touch on certain things and give more detail on your site. Take a look at some of the tools you can offer affiliates to keep them interested and functioning.

Advertisements

If you want your own affiliate program to work you need ads that are effective. You should make sure they are effective before you start handing them out to affiliates. You don't have to offer a ton of ads to affiliates at first. Start with a few and change them as you can. You can choose to allow affiliates to write ads as well for a better result. Remember, if your ads are no good, there is no point in having an affiliate program in the first place.

Graphics

You really need to make your available graphics easier than ever for affiliates to use. If you try to get complicated, they will not be effective. Set up your website so all the affiliate has to do is cut and past the HTML code into their own web page editor. When you do this, they will be more likely to use your graphics effectively. In addition, you need to be sure to display a small set of instructions for those who don't know what they are doing.

Content

One thing you shouldn't forget when you want to start your own affiliate program is content. You should offer your affiliates content they can use. They can paste the article onto their site and get more traffic. In addition, you can encourage them to write their own as well and update them regularly. The more updates they make to their content, the more people they will draw in and the more money everyone will make overall.

As you can see, as long as you offer simple and helpful tools to affiliates, you can think about starting your own affiliate program with no problems. Try having everything set up before you start signing affiliates up. When you have everything already planned out, you won't get as frazzled with the process. In fact, it should be a very fun and easy process overall. Starting your own affiliate program is beneficial to you and to the affiliates. When the program is so effective for everyone, you will be a huge success.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

In the years I've invested myself in dedication to the business of Internet Marketing, I've observed that though technologies and different fields of expertise appear and recede overtime like any other ever-changing business outlook, only timeless, universal principles remain.

The first and foremost characteristic of Internet Marketing is automation. Alex Mandossian once said that "Internet Marketing is meant to train us as lazy workers but high thinkers." We are constantly thinking of better ways to attain 100% automation, which is near impossible, for thinking itself is already hard work.

Despite this, Internet Marketing may not be simple, but it is definitely very systematic in nature, such that it is really an easy business to do due to the availability of metrics software for performance measurement. By knowing and understanding results-by-the-numbers, Internet marketers can tweak and re-launch sales and marketing campaigns for better returns. This is not something that brick-and-mortar businesses are capable of and ready to embrace as part of their daily business handling activities.

Coming back to principles, here are 10 things you can always bear in mind as you go about doing your business online. Even if you are attempting one niche after another (and that's what some self-employed do these days), following a certain entrepreneurial pattern based on principles can help you get into the thick of action easily and systematically.

1) Provide lots of quality content on your website. The litmus test is: Would you freely publish something that you would otherwise sell?

2) Be tight, comprehensive and cohesive about your site theme. For example, your site may be about dogs rather than dog collars, which is a smaller, more focused niche. Nonetheless, you can design and implement a clear structure with different sections covering dog training, dog hygiene, dog naming, dog psychology, doggy habits, etc. You can aim for a portal or library of information and it can still not be confusing.

3) Setup a blog. You heard this many time: "Search engines love blogs." Well, go and create one, link it up to your main site, publish snippets of information and send out RSS feeds. Search engines will find you fast!

4) Create a plan of using traffic exchanges, safelists, FFA lists etc. to draw traffic to your site. I, like many people, did not believe that you can funnel targeted traffic from these places, until I came across a few experts in this area.

5) Build a lead capture page offering a powerful freebie, an e-course or a reason visitors can't refuse...on condition they must subscribe to you.

6) Create free materials like viral e-books to give away. Write articles and e-courses and submit everywhere you can. Reuse your articles to suit every possible form of online and offline media. Just keep your eyes open. What goes around always comes around. You are bound to be famous on the Internet in 6 months if not a year. Or start an article/free e-book directory service yourself! You can attract more writers and material seekers with the most minimal of effort.

7) Get your visitors and subscribers involved with YOU. Give them a role, a stake or control over the content of your site, forum, chat room, online survey or newsletter etc. You can sustain their interest and effectively build up not only traffic volume but also the quality of customer relationships overtime. The noblest yet most challenging thing to do is finding ways to build up their own monetary value. That's what Jay Abraham, Bob Proctor and many other experts do.

8) Create an affiliate program for your products and services to encourage affiliates bring new referrals to you! It's a great way to get targeted newcomers to your site.

9) Create postcards with your e-zine information and business cards to hand out at events. Also print out articles and hand them around at events (which must be appropriate in context). Your signature at the articles' end leads them to your site. Show them you are the expert here!

10) One great way to multiply subscriber addresses in your list is invite fellow online marketers to swap e-zine ads with you. Many marketers know the benefit of this, and it's free and easy to implement. All it takes is mutual agreement on how often and how many times to publish each other's ads!

Yes, there is a lot of work involved, these 10 points are only general and the devil is in the details. But you see, even though I'm no SEO or link exchange techie, I am carrying out all 10 points in my daily work and with continuous measurement of my results my income has nowhere else to go but up as I optimize the monetary value of my effort. Ultimately I am doing what these 10 points say because they can sustain online longevity.

When you seriously put them into practice, turning your actions into regular habits is only a matter of time. In one year, your situation will be much better than where you are today, and all you need to do is create a system of productive action based on these 10 points. This is my encouragement to you.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com