How To Get Your Affiliate Sales Rolling

Posted on Nov 12, 2007 06:24:12 PM

What can Michael Jordan, Ed McMahon and hundreds of other high profile product endorsers teach you about cashing in on Affiliate sales? Tons! In effect, they re “Super Affiliates”.

After all, what is the role of an Affiliate? It s to gain sales by endorsing a product.

Would Nike have sold as many sneakers without Mike? Or, would The Publishers Clearing House have sold all those magazines without Ed? Not a chance.

Why are companies willing to pay their endorsers such big bucks? Simple. They know all too well that “trust and credibility” sells like hotcakes.

Let s put it this way: What if Nike had hired me, Joshua Rose, to endorse their products? Pretty ridiculous, huh? Why in the world would someone buy some Nike s if I told them to? They wouldn t.

It s exactly the same in the online world. Why should someone buy a product you re endorsing as an Affiliate? Who are you? Why should I listen to you? I don t know you. Your endorsement is next to meaningless, sorry.

If you want my business, you must first convince me that you re worth listening to in the first place. But gain my respect and trust, and the opportunities are endless.

The key to Affiliate success is to at first focus your efforts away from your products and towards marketing vehicles that give you the opportunity to win trust. In other words, the first essential step to Affiliate success is TO SELL YOURSELF.

For example:

***** Write a 3-10 part Free Report brimming with insightful and useful information and I ll start paying attention to you.

***** Publish a newsletter with more of the same. And let me get a sense of who you are as a person. I like what I see. Now I ll think more seriously about your endorsements.

***** Write a Free E-book that s going to help me. It can be in your own words or a compilation of the work of others. Help me to learn and you ll gain my respect … and my ear.

***** Let me see your articles in respected newsletters and references from relevant web sites. The more I see your name, the more credibility I ll associate with you. I ll sign-up for your newsletter to learn what else you have to say.

***** Show me that you ve used the products you re suggesting. How, exactly did you benefit? What were the results? Is there any downside at all? (You see? Now you ve got me paying attention and asking for more information).

Get the idea? Affiliate sales are all about building relationships, not promoting products. You can promote until you re green in the face, but if you haven t developed a personal relationship with your prospects, and earned their respect and trust, it s unlikely you ll ever get more than a handful of sales.

And please remember this, Affiliate success does not come overnight. Like anything worthwhile, it takes effort and commitment.

The good news is that once you establish who you are and win the respect of your leads, it does indeed become easier. After successfully crossing the trust and credibility threshold, it s much easier to transfer this influence to additional top-notch products and opportunities.

Joshua Rose shares more affiliate marketing and internet marketing tips at Internet Profit Wizards. His e-commerce site, where he puts his tips into practice, can be seen at Auto Broker Magic.

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Seo Optimization For Your Oscommerce Template

Posted on Nov 12, 2007 06:24:11 PM

First things first, you have downloaded a template for oscommerce and you have either picked categories and uploaded products or are ready to do so. The first thing you need to do to make your oscommerce site search engine friendly is to pick a title that is consistent with the products you will be carrying, also descriptive enough that search engines and people searching for your product are likely to find your site and glad they did. You do not want a page title of “oscommerce” . You will need to change your page title to fit your specific item, a small description of what your page has to offer is what you want in your title. If you are selling “gifts”, do not use gifts as the page title, basic common sense should tell us that there is alot of competition for the keyword “gifts”, and we are probably not going to rank high for that keyword. A good example of someone selling “gifts” page title would be
(gifts at excellent prices - gifts for all occasions) this is a small informative description search engines will recognize and people searching will click on.

The best way to control your page titles and metatags for an oscommerce store is to download and install the header tags controller contribution. this will be the first search engine friendly module that you will want to download and use to start optimizing your site. I found the install to be complicated, confusing, and not work, until I found the full install that already had the modifications performed on each file. All you have to do is replace your old files with the new ones provided, and you will be ready to go.

If you already have categories and products, make a complete backup of your oscommerce template files. The best way to do this is to use your FTP program to download a complete folder to your desktop containing all of your site files. Then go to your oscommerce admin and make a backup of your database and save it on your desktop. Do this every time you are about to make major modifications to your site, and get used to it. The one time that you do not have a current backup of your entire oscommerce store, is the time you will be sorry that you did not.

Header Tags Controller allows for unique Header Tags for:
Title, Keywords, and Description on a per page basis.

Download it, unzip it, and upload it to your oscommerce host with your FTP program making sure to overwrite the corresponding directories with the new ones. Because you are overwriting files, it is best to have none, or only a few categories and/or products at this time, that is why I pick this as the first module install for search engine optimization of your oscommerce website.

Now that you Header Tags Controller installed
you will need to configure it:

1. login to your oscommerce admin
2. Go to header tags controller in the left menu
3. Click on text control

This is where you will enter in the descriptive title you have chosen to be on your index page. Enter it for index.php.

You can also put a description that is a longer version of the title and should also be written in a way that describes the goods or service you are selling.

The keywords box is not necessary to fill in. The 3 major search engines Google, Yahoo, and MSN will ignore this tag and will determine what keywords you are found under.

Save your work.

Next, if you already have products at your site you will want to go to the
fill tags option at the left menu and click button fill all tags for categories and products and press update you will now notice that you have unique page titles for your categories and products pages, based off of the names you gave your categories and products. This may be a good time to evaluate the name you have picked for your categories and products. Once again keep in mind what people will be looking for.

If you have not added products and categories yet, now is a good time to start. Every category and product will now generate the metatags and page title that you give it. This is the first step in optimizing your oscommerce site to make it search engine friendly.

mostwebdesign.com specializes in ecommerce web design and hosting for retail stores.

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