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Merchants and AffiliatesWe've all seen the ads on all of our favorite web sites, right? If you're like me, you mostly ignore them. I used to do that. Update: March 7, 2003 I spent months working to increase traffic to my site and that's the key to affiliate programs. In the last several months, I've been earning regular checks from a variety of affiliate programs. I've decided that I will only represent companies that I'd purchase from and I won't try to send anyone to a casino, or other site that I'd never go to, myself. I've tried several hundred affiliate programs and some of them work well and others don't. Two things you'll have to know for sure: (1) You have to have traffic to your site. If not, forget affiliate programs. (2) It takes a lot of work. Don't expect to just put up a few banners or links and make a fortune. It just won't happen. However, if you consistently work your site, doing your best to make it better, more useful to your visitors, and more accessible, then -- over time -- you can start earning from it. I'm earning enough from my sites now to allow me to be available full-time for helping to care for my mother, who has been recovering from cancer surgery since April, 2001. Without the income from the affiliate programs I've joined, I would not have been able to do this. This means, of course, that it is you -- the kind person sitting right there and reading this -- who has purchased through this site and helped me to be able to help Mom. I really appreciate that. Thank you. Update: October 6, 2001 I've done a lot of thinking about affiliate programs over the summer and I think I know why I had so little success with affiliate marketing last winter and spring. I think the main problems were lack of traffic to my site and the way I presented the offers. Like many things, marketing is a numbers game. I hate to think of people as just a number, but it's a fact that out of any given number of visitors to a site, only a few will be interested in what you're offering, and an even smaller number will bother to look at the offers on your page. That's the first step: getting the click. In order to put the customer into a receptive frame of mind, it is necessary for the publisher to be in a positive frame of mind. And that's my second problem. I don't trust advertisers, yet, I purchase from them. Why? I think most advertising is needlessly hyped and, therefore, I spend a lot of time looking past the advertising and comparing offers and features. I'm a careful shopper. In the past, I've tried to bend over backwards so that I don't come across as a hypester. I made a decision a long time ago that I would never promote something just for the money. If it is a product I won't use, I won't try to market it. Well, the fact is that I'm not an average person. I have a very different perspective on the world and life than most of the people I know. This was getting in the way. Now, I'm trying affiliate marketing again with a different attitude. I still won't recommend a company if I don't trust them, or if there is any hint of a scam or poor customer support. However, I'll try to be more open to not always warning you away from buying. I'll research the companies and their products as well as I can, and I'll pick the best I can find. Then I'll try to offer them to you as an honest recommendation with the knowledge that you're probably a careful shopper, too, and you're perfectly capable of making up your own mind without me looking over your shoulder. The method of presenting a product in this manner is called 'Pre-selling' by Ken Evoy. I'll leave the selling up to the merchant, and the caution up to you. In November, 2005, Ken released a new ebook called Make Your Contents PREsell! and he distills several years of experience in helping thousands of people build profitable websites into about 130 pages or so. It costs only $10 USD and there is a lot of knowledge in that book. Getting back to numbers. When a visitor to your site decides to click on the link, then it becomes the merchant's responsibility to sell the product. My job is to find the company or product, decide if it's worth recommending, and -- if so -- to present it to you for your consideration. That's all I should be doing. So, I'm going to try that. And, of course, for every hundred people who decide to click on a link, a small percentage will decide to purchase. So, it boils down to traffic. Not just visitors, but visitors who are interested in the product, service, or information you are willing and able to provide. If your site gets a dozen visitors a day, you probably won't do well with affiliate marketing. I'm sure it takes several thousand visitors per month before this will work reliably, and those visitors must be the folks who are interested in what you're offering. I've been working on building traffic through more and better submissions to a variety of search engines and I've been researching key word phrases that I'll be bidding on with several pay-per-click search engines. I've spent over a month researching which terms will work for me. Ken Evoy explains this process very well in his free Affiliate Masters course. If you're not willing to work to succeed, this probably isn't something you should consider doing. For a free, no obligation, course on choosing proper keywords, getting listed in search engines, building traffic to your site, and building a website that sells, download the Affiliate Masters course. I feel I know a great deal more about this than I did in the summer of 2000, and a lot more about traffic building and key word researching than I did back in June, 2001. I'm going to give this a real try over the next several months, and I'll let you know if I succeeded or failed. Stay tuned. ...And feel free to visit some of my sponsors.
Update: June 3, 2001 After researching and trying affiliate marketing for nearly a year, I'm sure it's mostly not for me. I've spent over 1000 hours over the last year learning about this subject and attempting to put it to work for me. I've earned less than I could have from working less than a week at a minimum-wage job. Your mileage may vary considerably. As a result, I'm stripping most of the affiliate marketing from my site. I'm staying with Ken Evoy's SiteSell products because they're top of the line and I always get great value when I purchase anything. I just bought his Make Your Net Auctions Sell! and I'm learning how to get started auctioning my crafts this summer. I continue to recommend Ken and his products with no reservations. I can't say the same for lots of other programs. I'll continue participating in the Newbie Club's program because they're trying to help computer newbies learn to get the most from their computers. I'll continue to participate with Amazon.com and Powell's Books, not because I'm earning much, but because I like researching and recommending books. If I earn something, it's a nice bonus. I found that it made the pages on my site load much more slowly and it detracted from what I've been trying to say and how I present the informaton I'm trying to prevent. So, I made the decision to move away from it and devote more time to my real business: metalsmithing. The rest of this page was written about a year ago, in the summer of 2000, and I don't necessarily feel the same way, except, as I said, that I still have great feelings about Ken Evoy and his products. I've never felt like I didn't get a great bargain from anything I've bought from him or any of the free email courses I took. His company is a top-notch business. Well, no longer! I've discovered affiliate programs. I've spent months searching for products and companies that I would be proud to represent on my site, and I've joined a number of those companies to bring you products and information that will help you build your arts and crafts business, get more for your money, bring a little entertainment and relaxation, and maybe even pay me a little to maintain this site that is growing ever-more-complex by the hour. Whether you're selling the work you produce, providing information, or simply wanting to earn some additional money while others do most of the work (what a novel concept!), affiliate programs offer lots of possibilities if you have the imagination to see how it all fits together. However, don't kid yourself. This is a business, like any other business and involves work. You won't just put up a few links and rake in lots of money, unless you already have lots of traffic to your site. Like all marketing, this is a numbers game in the sense that only a tiny percentage of your visitors will be interested in what you're offering through your affiliate links. For every 1,000 visitors to your site, only a small percentage will click on a link, and of those who "click through," only another small percentage will purchase or otherwise follow through on the offer. So, you have several challenges ahead of you. You must build a site that appeals to your target segment, provide links that are of interest to them, and link to sites that are capable of selling to their newly referred visitors. It won't happen overnight. At the risk of sounding like a worn-out record, I'm going to again stress what I think is the best source of information that I've found for making your site sell. And, they have the best affiliate program and the best support, too! Do this first!If you are the least bit interested in the possibility of perhaps one day being interested in affiliate programs as an extra source of income... ... do this before you do anything else! Below, I'm going to tell you a little about Ken Evoy and his Five Pillar Club, which I think is the best affiliate program of all the ones I've looked into (several hundred). Not only is it the best affiliate program, his products are widely recognized as the best-in-category and they sell for substantially less than the competition. His goal is to overdeliver and underprice in every category in which he competes, and I think he's doing a wonderful job of it. I've read all of his affiliate information (well over 1,000 pages) and have studied his best-selling book, Make Your Site Sell! I recommend Ken, his products, and his affiliate program without reservation, and I can't say that for many. If you think you might want to ever work an affiliate program, do yourself a favor and download his free, no-obligation, Affiliate Masters course. Before you waste any time or money -- and time is money -- download and take this course. The first version was great, and he's recently expanded the course greatly, making it even more valuable. For a free, no obligation, course on choosing proper keywords, getting listed in search engines, building traffic to your site, and building a website that sells, download the Affiliate Masters course. I've been on the Internet for over a decade, and seriously for the last five years or more, and I've discovered things in this course that I had no idea existed. If you like what you'll learn in the course, then follow his suggestion to become one of his affiliates before he closes the program. It's FREE, and you will be able to download his affiliate program manual (over 200 pages!) at no cost. I'd gladly have paid money for what's in that manual! Then, it's up to you whether you decide to work his program or not, but I can't imagine why you wouldn't. I've learned a great deal from Ken and his products over the last three months, and I bet you will, too. Feed your brain first with what he offers, decide upon and implement your particular strategies, build your business, and eventually, you'll earn an income from it. Remember, this course, joining his affiliate program, and the manual are all free, and there's absolutely no obligation! How can you lose? Ken Evoy and his Five Pillar ClubI've been searching for a long time for a way to make my site sell. While I've been comfortable with the technical aspects of building this site, the marketing was a total, baffling mystery. I've been reading marketing materials, including books, articles, and other documents for nearly three decades, now, and every year I realize how little I know about it. Some people are natural marketers and others, like me, have to work at learning how to do it well. Ken Evoy is a natural marketer and he works at being better all the time. Fortunately for me, and you, if you choose to just go and get it, he's willing to share what he knows. At least for now. He's promised to close his affiliate program in the near future and then to work with those who took advantage of his offer to build a real business for himself and his affiliates. I checked around the web and the advice I was getting was inconsistent to say the least. It took a concentrated dose from Ken's book, and the nearly 1,000 pages of training through his affiliate program newsletters, program manual, and other aids to start to "get it." In about a month of serious study, I worked through his book and other materials, and now the shroud of mystery is lifted and I know how to do this. Now, all I need to do is practice and get better with time and effort. Ken Evoy, a medical doctor in Canada, wrote a book that told me just what I needed to get started. And it's not theory. After a varied group of careers, and learning as he went, Ken started selling a product that was very hard to sell, and he's documented many of the things he did right, and some he didn't, to lead us by his example. I'm too much of an independent, stubborn ol' geezer to look for a formula and then blindly follow it, so that's not what I'm talking about. I insist on knowing both what to do and why it works. I'm not interested in following a guru, I want to learn from a teacher. I'm not a person to fall for hype--at least not for long. I want something that has real value at a reasonable price. I found this value in his book, Make Your Site Sell! It's obvious that Ken put his ideas to work on his own site. He is an enthusiastic, persistent promoter of his products -- with good reason. His book is priced low to ensure market penetration, but don't let the low price fool you. See for yourself. Ken Evoy's SiteSell website offers valuable information at more than reasonable prices. His Make Your Site Sell! book has some of the most informative materials I've yet to find. Not only that, his pricing is right. When I first started looking at his site, I expected the book to sell for at least a hundred dollars, but was surprised to learn that he sells it for only $24.95 in order to over-deliver on content at a reasonable price. Then I realized that it was $24.95 Canadian dollars which translates into less than US$18.00, depending on the daily exchange rate of the two currencies. I paid US$16.90 when I bought it. There's no delivery costs because it is a downloadable multi-volume electronic book. Less than 45 minutes after purchasing it, I was reading it. (A paperback version is also available, at higher cost and slower delivery, and the shipping from Canada is higher than I would have expected.) I'm going to recommend that you take some time, whether you're interested in selling your products or information over the Internet, or whether you're interested in helping other folks sell their products by affiliating with them, to purchase and study this book. Make Your Site Sell! is full of useful information, and you can get a free education from his site without buying anything. Plus, he offers a money-back, no-questions-asked, satisfaction guarantee. Will he try to sell you something when you get to his site? You bet he will, and that's another education in itself. Reading his presentation convinced me he knew about consistent promotion, without being pushy. Then, in his books and newsletters, he teaches you, using his sites and experiences as examples, how and why he builds websites as he does. What? Oh! You're right! I almost forgot to tell you how to get Make Your Site Sell! We can't have that, can we? It's right here. Click on the link and enjoy the ride.
I've also realized that it's the words, and not the graphics, that sells on a web site. If you want your site to sell -- or any of your advertising, for that matter -- you must learn how to present your offer in the terms that will entice and motivate your visitor. Ken partnered with a veteran advertising copywriter, Joe Robson, on their book, Make Your Words Sell!. For more information on making your words sell, check out Make Your Words Sell! and learn about writing compelling ad copy that persuades and sells. Or, you can download and take the FREE Netwriting Master Course. What can you lose by working through this free course? What can you gain if you learn to sell more effectively? For a free, no obligation, course on learning to write to persuade, download and take the Netwriting Masters course. It will take some work to succeed at this, but you can do it. Joe Robson has partnered with Tom Glander to build a great website for folks who want to learn more about using their computers. After all, you're a newbie, not a dummy. He also offers a two-tier affiliate program at the Newbie Club. They offer several free tutorials, a newsletter, and a free affiliate program, as well as a great discussion group community that can help you learn how to use your PC. Check it out!
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