The Silent Avatar Speaks

One of the ways to make money online is to become an affiliate and sell products for others and get a commission.

Commissions range in percentage, but you can expect somewhere in the region of fifty to seventy five percent of the cost of the product (less fees), so it can be a lucrative way to make additional income.

If you have a list to sell to then simply sending out a broadcast email to your list advising them of the affiliate product along with a personal testimonial can be all that is required to sell an affiliate product.

The amount of email which comes into my inbox each day is testimony to the number of product launches which continue to bombard the Internet marketing circles on a daily basis.

Along with product launches, it is not uncommon to see “contests” to reward affiliates to actively promote products.

Russell Brunson’s Dot Com Secrets affiliate contest came to my attention this week offering to win a lease of a Corvette for two years.

What jolted me upright was the inclusion of a photo of Mike Filsaime standing in front of an enormous Hummer, with the caption underneath reading:
“Mike Filsaime showing off his brand new Hummer H2 he won thanks to winning one of Russell Brunsons’ affiliate contests!!!”

If you have been in Internet marketing circles, then you would know Mike Filsaime. Mike shot to fame with his Butterfly Marketing Manuscript, and software. He has become a multi-millionaire, launching numerous products including Viral Friend Generator (which I spoke about in my post about viral marketing). He has built a list of over 300,000 subscribers (OMG), so does it surprise you to see that Mike took out line honours in an affiliate contest? Nope.

And what does this mean for people like you and me starting out?

It means this…I’ve got a better chance of winning the Lottery than winning an affiliate contest with Mike Filsaime promoting to his list.

And if you go up against someone with a list of thousands, then what’s your chance of winning such a contest? Not likely.

My question is this… does Mike really need a Hummer? My guess is “nope”.

And what’s this doing to those who are hell bent on making a career of Internet marketing, or those in the loop who keep Internet Marketing alive?

It kills any enthusiasm, stifles the very essence of “fair play”.

A contest open to to the big marketing gurus is like playing with a full hand of aces. How can someone with a list this big not win? (and let’s face it… Mike Filsaime has all the knowledge and resources he needs to make sales happen)

Forget the contests. It’s not even a level playing field.

You’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery, so save your time and effort and go buy a ticket and focus on building the list.

The money is in the list!

Tags: Affiliate Marketing by the silent avatar
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Successful websites depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. The credibility issue just melts away. Hence, keep your visitors coming back to your site with the following methods:

1) Start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox

When you start a forum, chatroom or shoutbox, you are providing your visitors a place to voice their opinions and interact with their peers — all of them are visitors of your site. As conversations build up, a sense of community will also follow and your visitors will come back to your site almost religiously every day.

2) Start a web log (blog)

Keep an online journal, or more commonly known as a blog, on your site and keep it updated with latest news about yourself. Human beings are curious creatures and they will keep their eyes glued to the monitor if you post fresh news frequently. You will also build up your credibility as you are proving to them that there is also a real life person behind the website.

3) Carry out polls or surveys

Polls and surveys are other forms of interaction that you should definitely consider adding to your site. They provide a quick way for visitors to voice their opinions and to get involved in your website. Be sure to publish polls or surveys that are strongly relevant to the target market of your website to keep them interested to find out about the results.

4) Hold puzzles, quizzes and games

Just think about how many office workers procrastinate at work every day, and you will be able to gauge how many people will keep visiting your site if you provide a very interesting or addicting way of entertainment. You can also hold competitions to award the high score winner to keep people trying continuously to earn the prize.

5) Update frequently with fresh content

Update your site frequently with fresh content so that every time your visitors come back, they will have something new to read on your site. Without a doubt this is the most widely known and most effective method of attracting returning visitors, however due to laziness of webmasters this is also the least carried out one. No one will want to browse a site that looks the same over ten years, so keep your site updated with fresh bites!

Tags: Business Tips by the silent avatar
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If you want to be able to say you have achieved your goal/s care must be taken to make firm, workable plans to ensure it happens, and the same goes for website designs.

With a well thought out website design, you will be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because they are not well planned and do not get a single visitor. As a result, the webmaster will loose their motivation to update the site and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

One of the crucial points to planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site.

Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accommodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell advertising space on your pages to those who are interested in your page.

You can also earn revenue from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing when people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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Your website is where your business resides — it’s like the headquarters of an offline company, so it’s important to practice good design principles to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors and sells to as many people as possible.

1. In order to make this happen make sure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The navigation menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion.

2. Reduce the number of images on your website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

3. Keep your text paragraphs at a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

4. Ensure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.

5. Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless it is absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

6.Use CSS to style your page content because they save a lot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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