There was a great post with a video from Shawn Collins today at the Affiliate Tip Blog. Shawn talked about how affiliates can turn themselves from being a simple link page that takes visitors to stores one time (and potentially never get the visitor back) into a real resource that visitors will bookmark and come back to again and again (generating more revenue for the affiliate and their selected merchants alike.)
The key – solve a problem for your audience. Share your wisdom and expertise. Worked all your professional life as a plumber? Awesome! Write a blog on how to accomplish tasks you did all the time – join programs that link sell to the products you mention and link to them. Are you a hardcore scrapbooker? Do the same thing. Are you an expert in home theatre set up? Awesome – share your expertise.
There are great programs out there in pretty much any niche you can think of. If you establish your expertise and regularly solve problems for visitors, they will not only keep coming back to you… they’ll tell their friends about your site and sing your praises on social networks as well.
Here’s the video:
Affiliate Summit Success Tip – Business Cards
One of the things that I hear time after time at Affiliate Summit is “I forgot/ran out/didn’t think I would need business cards”. This is always followed by a frantic search for a pen to write down a name, email and url on something – napkin, paper torn from the show magazine, back of another of my own business cards. Trust me, this does not make a good first impression!
Business cards are incredibly inexpensive to get nowadays, in fact you can get 500 professionally printed business cards printed and shipped for less than $50 from places like PsPrint and Vista Print. At the very least, you can buy business cards at your local office supply store and print them at home.
Don’t be caught empty handed at Affiliate Summit East. Get yourself a nice stack of business cards and represent yourself professionally!
LinkedTube – Awesome tool for affiliates
Thanks to Shawn Collins and Linda Buquet for pointing this one out. It’s a good one.
Have you always wanted to harness the power of video on your site? It’s easy to do now using LinkedTube – you can create video creatives using existing YouTube videos and the links and copy of your choice. Here’s a sample of a Greg Laurie video ad I created using my Shareasale affiliate link and an excerpt from Greg Laurie’s documentary “Lost Boy”
For more info including a sample demo video and a form you can use to create your own LinkedTube video ad – check out LinkedTube.com
Is your site usable? Give it the mom test
In the course of recruiting affiliates for clients and reviewing affiliate applications every day, I see a TON of sites… some good… and a LOT bad.
One of the most common mistakes I see people make is making their site so busy or cluttered that it’s impossible for your user to figure out what your point is and do what you want them to do. Now, I know that some people are going to use the “Leslie Gore Defense” here and say “It’s my site and I’ll design it how I want to,” but if you have that attitude… and you are trying to make money with your site, you need to step back and think this through.
I can’t remember where I saw it, but someone suggested that you give your site the “Mom Test,” meaning that once you have a design you like, call your mom (or other relative web noob) over and ask them to jump on the site and take the action you want… or ask them what they see in front of them that is compelling. If they don’t get it, you need to go back to the drawing board and work to focus the eye (and mind) of the reader on what you are trying to sell, or what action you are trying to generate.
Another suggestion I have seen made is to squint your eyes and look at your page and see what is clearly visible. If it’s not the item you want acted on, you may need to tweak a bit.
The idea in design is to draw the eye to the copy you want read, or the action you want taken. If you are doing anything else, you are setting yourself back.
Happy Selling!
