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Product Launch: Keep Your Hands Away From That Last Cookie!

by on June 23, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, Product Launch

All the big product launches we get to hear about are done via a network of joint venture partners with large lists.

It is not uncommon for the same subscriber to be on several lists and hence receive emails about the same promotion from several joint venture partners or affiliates at the same time. When a sale happens, the big question becomes, which affiliate is entitled to receive the commission on it: The first one to deliver this offer to the prospect or the last one who sealed the deal and convinced the prospect to take action?

Either approach has positive and negative aspects.

The “first cookie wins” approach allows you to give your major partners an incentive to mail early and to create the momentum for your launch. However, smaller partners who find out about the launch or start promoting it late, will have little if any incentive to participate because a lot of their own subscribers would have been cookied but the larger affiliates. This also invites “black hat” tactics like “cookie stuffing” that some of the less scrupulous affiliates may turn to in order to gain advantage over other partners.

The “last cookie wins” approach seems the most fair. After all, it’s the affiliate that gets the sale who should get paid on it, right? So it is no surprise most affiliate tracking packages work according to this scenario. Obviously, it may be a little harder for you to recruit some of the big list owners as your partners as now they’d have to work harder to make their commission from your launch.

It is also possible to use a combination of the two approaches by using the “last cookie wins” for tracking but recording the affiliate ID along with the contact details for the prospect in your autoresponder. When you send out follow up emails, you can drop in the affiliate code of the original affiliate in the purchase link. In this case it’s the affiliate who generated the lead is the one that ultimately gets paid the commission.

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Product Launch and Affiliate Tracking Software

by on June 22, 2010 in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Product Launch, Referral Marketing

If you plan on launching an information product — be it a course, a membership website, a coaching program, or simply a book — through a network of joint venture partners, one of the more important considerations is the software used for affiliate tracking.

Your most important task is to make sure your affiliates are paid all the commissions they are entitled to. Alas, many software packages are much less than bulletproof when it comes to commission reporting and tracking.

Some shopping carts offer built-in affiliate systems. There are also a number of stand-alone affiliate tracking solutions that are either hosted for you or that you can host yourself.

Here is the list of the most important things to consider when choosing an affiliate solution:

1. Are the referrals tracked only via cookies or are there additional level of assurance like IP tracking?

2. How much control do you have over the way cookies behave? (How soon would they expire? Is it the first cookie or the last cookie that gets the sale?)

3. How many levels of commissions can you pay? (Many launches only pay one level of commissions, however, adding an extra level will allow you to approach joint venture brokers and off-load a lot of JV partner recruiting to them. You may want to stop at two levels as anything more than that and you will be considered a multi-level company with many regulations and restrictions around what you can and cannot do.)

4. Would you be able to set commissions to a different level for individual partners? (You may want to be able to offer some of your key partners a special deal and possibly pay them a higher percentage).

5. Is the reporting function adequate? (Many affiliate programs simply don’t give you much information or the information in the report may be delayed by 24 hours, which is almost eternity in a product launch scenario.)

6. Does it offer you an easy way to host media files (email copy, banners, text links, pre-written tweets, etc) with the affiliate’s link automatically built in?

7. Will it work with your current autoresponder / email marketing system?

8. Will it scale to handle the traffic and the load on the server?

9. Will it allow you to go into the system and manually verify the commissions by matching them to the orders from a particular affiliate? (Blindly trusting the software can be disastrous. Best practices include thorough testing preceding the launch and spot check throughout. Be aware that some affiliate tracking packages will report to you the number but may not give you enough information to know how this number was arrived at, rendering any manual verification impossible.)

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List Building Secrets: Top 10 Easy Ways To Build a “Seed” List – Part 2

by on June 10, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series List Building - Seed List

6. Get Paid Search Traffic (PPC, PPV, Content Network, Banners)

Buying search traffic is one of the fastest ways to get the clicks.  If you have some cash to burn, then this may be the right way to test the new market you’re about to enter.

What I like about pay-per-click (PPC), pay-per-view (PPV) and other paid traffic methods, is that you can measure the effectiveness of each campaign, each keyword you’re bidding on, and every piece of online ‘real estate’ you advertise on. If you are the analytical type, this may  become your favourite traffic method.

Since you are paying for every click, you need to find a way to immediately monetize this traffic so that you could run a PPC campaign indefinitely at a profit or at least at a break even. This may require a fair bit of fine-tuning, and that’s why you need to have a cash reserve to play this game.

7. Get “Free” Search Traffic (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization is a misnomer. You can’t optimize search engine. You can, however, optimize your web pages in a way that search engines will find it and start suggesting it to the people who type in certain search words or phrases in Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

SEO is something that takes time to see the results of. If this is new territory for you, then pick another — faster — method of acquiring a seed list.

On the other hand, if you are an SEO expert and have websites that search engines send a lot of traffic to, all you need to do is offer all these people a chance to subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for a special report or other valuable gift.

8. Use Safe Lists and Viral List Builders

A safe list is a special email “club” where each member can send emails to other members. When you join a safe list, you give permission to other members to send you their ads. Don’t expect the leads that you get from a safe list to be quite as responsive as, say SEO traffic. However, you can still successfully market your squeeze page in safe lists.

Viral list builders take the idea of safe lists to the next level and compensate you with traffic credits for referring other marketers into your “downline”.

When you use either safe lists or viral list builders, remember not to sign up with your main email address. You are likely to receive a large amount of promotional emails there. So create a brand-new gmail account and use that instead.

9. Use Traffic Exchanges

A traffic exchange is a network of marketers who receive traffic credits for looking at other people’s websites. Since the users of traffic exchanges get compensated for looking at your squeeze page, your conversion is likely to be rather low. However, you will still be acquiring leads.

If you have children at home, get them to login into your traffic exchange and click on other people’s ads. That will help you build up your credits, and with more credits in your account, you will receive more traffic.

10. Buy Co-Reg Leads

Coreg (also “co-reg” and co-registration) refers to a service that allows you to place your ad on other people’s thank you pages.

The responsiveness of a co-reg list would depend on a lot of factors. Remember that these leads don’t come free. You should expect to pay anywhere from 25c – 50c per lead of good quality. And just like with any other method, run a test and see if these leads are going to respond to your offer and products.

Most of the major autoresponder providers don’t allow you to import a co-reg list anymore without your subscribers re-confirming their subscription. Give preference to those co-reg services that already come with an autoresponder.

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List Building Secrets: Top 10 Easy Ways To Build a “Seed” List – Part 1

by on June 9, 2010 in Email Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series List Building - Seed List

List building is easy… once you have a list. With a list of your own, you can grow it fast through “joint ventures” or “ad swaps”. (Which I do almost daily.)

The problem is, you need to have a list in the first place to be able to do ad swaps.

The answer to this conundrum is the “seed” list of a few hundred names. It is a starting point in list building. It is your ticket to creating real equity in your Internet Marketing business in the form of a responsive list of email subscribers.

That seed list, however small, will allow you to set up joint ventures with other list owners. You can work with lists of similar size or approach the lists that are 2-3 times bigger than yours, in which case they may send your offer to a segment of their list or ask you to mail multiple times to match the clicks.

So how do you get there if you are starting from complete, utter zero?

The following is a brief (and by no means complete) overview of the methods of building a seed list fast.

1. Get a Friend to Send Out a “Solo” Email For You

Several Internet marketers I know got their start in this profession with the help of their friend or a relative who already had a list. Hey, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being lucky or having the right connections. If this shortcut is available to you, take it.

2. Pay Someone to Send Out a “Solo” Email For You

In lieu of a friend who would send out your stuff to their list for free, you can find someone who would do it for a fee.

If you don’t have the money to pay for this, trade your time. Everything has value in this world. In exchange for having a successful list owner build your list, you could handle their customer support, write some articles for them, build web pages, sit their baby, walk their dog, cut their grass… you get the drift. Now don’t be shy. Go through your Inbox and reply to some of the emails you are getting from various list owners and ask if they could use some free help around their office (in exchange for building your list, of course). Contact those who appear to be doing everything by themselves, with no staff to help them in their daily “grunt” work.

3. Buy an Ezine Ad

This tactic is very similar to #2. Except this time we are going after lists that routinely sell advertising “space” like solo emails and banners.

A couple of places to meet ezine owners and buy email ads would be Rent-A-List and Directory Of Ezines.

4. Create a Product And Offer 100% Commission

Okay, okay, maybe this method isn’t as easy as some. However, if your talent is in creating content, it won’t take you long to put together a special report, an ebook, a set of videos or audios, or a software tool. Most people don’t have either the skill or the confidence to create their own products. Hence they are always looking for new potentially lucrative things to promote.

Now imagine how excited they are going to be when you offer them 100% of the money! They will promote your product like crazy!

On the technical side, you can collect all the money first and then pay it out to your partners. Or you can simply link the Add to Cart button on your sales page to your partner’s PayPal account(s) and have them receive it instantly. They make all the commissions, and you see your list grow rapidly.

Here are some ideas for you to make the most out of this tactic:

a) Run all the leads through a squeeze page. After all, you want to build a list, right?

b) Upsell the leads with a front-end offer as soon as they opt-in (that’s the one that you are paying 100% of commissions on). This offer should be almost irresistible and a high-converting one to make it worth your partners’ time.

c) Come up with a second and bigger upsell or a continuity program that will put money in your bank account. Now you are growing your list and making cash at the same time. You may decide to offer affiliate commissions on your second upsell to make your deal even more appealing to your partners.

5. Enter a JV Giveaway As a Contributor

A JV Giveaway is an online event that allows you to submit a “gift” and receive leads that are interested in downloading your items. You are usually required to promote a JV Giveaway event. You could promote the event to your list if you had one. Otherwise, you ask a few of your friends to join. They’ll thank you for giving them access to dozens and possibly hundreds of great freebies from all the contributors. You can also promote it through Twitter and Facebook (and it doesn’t take much time make some friends there).

Click here for the list of the upcoming JV Giveaway events.

Tomorrow will we review five more ways to create a “seed” list.

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