Boost the sales of your products using Affiliates
If you’re looking for a fantastic way to boost revenue selling your products or services, you should highly consider setting up an affiliate program. A lot of people have amazing success doing this. An affiliate program is designed to help others to sell your products for you. They earn a commission each time they make a sale.
What’s in it for you? You gain exposure to potential sales that you might never have on your own. Your affiliates advertise your products on their websites, blogs, and newsletters.
What’s in it for them? A commission check of course. There are thousands of people out there that make more than a decent living selling other peoples products. This works well for the affiliate because they don’t have to spend time developing their own product or service to make money. They can dedicate their time to selling yours.
If you’re not sure how to do this, there are many resources available online that will help you set up your affiliate program. You can do it in just one day. I use 1shoppingcart.com for my affiliate program. They pretty much do everything for you except develop your product. They’ll help you with banner and URL codes as well as track your affiliates and make it easy to pay them.
After setting up your program, you’ll need to spend a little bit of time promoting it to affiliates. You will need a page dedicated to your affiliates. Some sample text ads as well as text they can use in an email message. Provide them with banners. You may want to offer several articles that they can incorporate their affiliate code into. Affiliate also benefit from regular messages from you reminding them to promote your service (these could be in the form of an autoresponder); they will also want to know about any sales or promotions you have upcoming.
The more successful they are, the more successful you are!
Things that make my work life easier
I thought I would share with you a few products and tools that I absolutely love. They make my life so much easier. In fact, I honestly don’t know what I would do without them now that I found them! They save me much needed time and energy. Check them out! I’m sure you’ll find they just might make your life easier too!
Blue Host – I’ve used several hosting services in the last few years and find that BlueHost is the most affordable and reliable. The value Blue Host offers for the price is flat out stunning. You can host an unlimited number of domains and you get unlimited bandwidth. That’s important in today’s online business environment as video and audio become more important.
Word Press – If you are searching for a blogging platform that really delivers, there is no comparison. WordPress installs quickly and painlessly, works well right out of the box and is massively extensible with themes and plugins for a truly unique blog. I’ve never met anyone who regretted moving their blogging to the WordPress platform.
Studio Press– If you’re in the market for a spectacular WordPress theme you have to check out StudioPress. The themes at StudioPress are all search engine optimized and easily customizable from the WordPress dashboard without having to learn any PHP or HTML at all. Whether you’re just getting started as a blogger or you’ve been at it for a while, StudioPress will give you the professional advantage, making your blog the best it can be.
Thesis - Another very poplar theme. I’ve worked with both and find them easy to customize and the support is second to none.
My Dropbox – Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer and they’ll be instantly available on any other computer where you’ve installed the Dropbox. You can even create links to share your files with others, and your files are securely backed up if anything goes wrong with your computer. It’s free for up to 2 gigs. I was thrilled when I discovered this.
Roboform – Do you struggle with managing all of your logins and associated passwords? Roboform is a tool that manages your logins and passwords while maintaining strict security protocols through encryption. You can also use it to create profiles for filling out any kind of online form that you use frequently such as comment forms, article and directory submission forms as well as social bookmarking sites. There’s also a synch tool that allows you to securely store your passwords on the Roboform server so you’ll never lose another password or login again. It is an indispensable tool that keeps me organized and running efficiently. Check it out!
1ShoppingCart – This is the premiere site for all your eCommerce needs. 1ShoppingCart solves the challenges faced by many online business owners including: order processing, autoresponders, email marketing, affiliate program creation and maintenance and more. It really handles every ecommerce application you’ll ever need in one reliable, secure and easy solution.
Learn About Online Business- Learnaboutonlinebusiness.com offers a variety of services and products to help online businesses make the most of their web presence. I attended the Blog Design Bootcamp and learned tricks and techniques that made my site more effective even though I had been using WordPress for a while.
Tungle – Accelerate your calendar! Tungle handles everything from time zones to double bookings. Great for online scheduling. You can even integrate Tungle with LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, Ning and your blog allowing people to see when you are free and schedule meetings with you.
Smooth sailing…
How Many Emails are in Your Inbox?
How I feel each day is directly related to the amount of email in my inbox. A perfect day ends in an empty inbox. For me, Eudora works great. It’s strictly an email client, I use ‘it’ for email and Outlook for contacts, calendar, etc.
I have a lot of folders set up in Eudora to organize my email. Each client has a minimum of two folders - Misc. and Completed. I set up a filter so if a client sends me an email it goes directly into their Misc folder. When an email arrives each folder in Eudora opens its own tab.
Why is this so important to me? Having the tab open tells me that I have a task to complete for that particular client. Once the task is completed I move the email to the Completed folder and close the Misc tab. This not only keeps me on track, but keeps my Inbox empty.
When reading my friend Stacy’s blog this morning (which prompted this post), I was reminded that not all people work the same way as I do. She has a completely different way of handling her emails. Read how she tamed her Inbox.
I hope one of these solutions will help you when tackling your email overload.
Make Sure You Snag your User Name
I read an article yesterday that came through my Facebook or Twitter about social networking squatters. Today I’m not able to find it. If you posted about this yesterday, please let me know and I will give you the kudos for this one.
Maybe you’re on LinkedIn or Facebook, maybe more. But have you considered or even know about all of the other networking sites out there? Even if you aren’t doing the social networking thing right now, you’ll want to register your name on the various social networking sites. Why? Because if you don’t someone else will!
Imagine your potential or current customers looking for you and finding someone else using your name or your business name. You have no control over the content coming out with your name on it.
Quickly check the availability of your name or your business name using KnowEm.
You can’t buy this type of publicity
I watched a video yesterday that Ashton Kutcher tweeted. It’s a great video, see it below. When I watched there had been about 5000 views. This morning I get up and Good Morning America is promoting a story about this couple and their video. I check the views and it has gotten more than a million views since last night. Say ‘Thank you Ashton.’
It’s not easy getting Ashton’s attention. He has almost 3 million followers on Twitter, but follows less than 200 people. So you can’t count on him to get your message out there. So, how can entrepreneurs and small business owners get this type of hype? Piggy back off of a hot or popular story is a great way to drive traffic to your blog (this post).
Blogging and social networking are more important than ever. If you’re not spending some time each and every day working your network, you’re missing out.
Don’t have the time? Hire a virtual assistant to help you out.
Check out the video…
