Selling During a Recession

In connection with the current recession, moreniche as one of the affiliate program, which currently hold enough to give many new tips in face of the impact of the recession. As we know, as a result of the recession purchasing power of consumers tend to be down consequently the number of sales will be decrease. Among of moreniche tips is “5 Top Tips for Marketing During a recession”.

Here the tips on Marketing During a Recession:

1. Customer discounts/incentives

When people fall upon hard times it is important we justify the cost of any purchase, offering special incentives or discounts can really help customers choose to purchase.

If a customer is undecided between two different products it might just be the discount you give them which could swing them one way or another.

Ensure you use the SG ‘credit crunch’ discount code on your site and look out for the Proactol one coming this week.

2. Push the price benefits over other options

One of the biggest concerns will be the price of the product, it is important that you show why choosing your recommendation will be a cost effective solution.

Compare against other products in the market place or other options. For example: by taking Proactol you will eat less saving you thousands from your shopping bills.

3. Increasing perceived value

It is even more important than ever that you push the extra value services; ideally you really want to promoted time based bonuses, order today and get $50 off. You should also really market the bonuses like “free shipping”. These could make a real difference when people come to order.

4. Selling everyday items

It is very important that your surfers do not look at the item as a luxury, often in difficult times people will stop purchasing more luxury items and stick to the necessities.
It is very important that you pass the message across that this is an everyday item which they cannot do without; this is not the purchase of a lifetime but just something else to add to their basket.

5. It’s quality and will not need replacing / Will last the test of time

Finally it is important that customers feel they are purchasing something of quality, after all this needs to last longer than before as we all have less disposable income. It is important you portray the message that this product is better value for money as it will last twice as long as other products in the market.

Hopefully the tips above will help you to maintain your sales level.

Avoiding Affiliate Scams

Affiliate marketing can be a profitable and fun way to build your business. However, it is very important to be sure that you are choosing the right programs. There are a lot of good programs, but there are an equal number of companies that are outright scams and will never even pay you for your hard efforts. Worse still the company can suddenly close and still owe you your commission.

How to avoid these scams: The best way to avoid these scams is to do your research well. Check out these points before joining:

1. Does the company have good support? Do they answer emails and have valid contact information?
2. Do they have a valid offline address?
3. What % of commission do they pay; 30%-50% is the best.
4. Tracking system - this should be in real time and accurate.
5. Products, should be well targeted for your market and of good quality

Where to research:

1. Forums, related to your industry. There are many savvy people who use the forums and you may be sure they will tell it like it is. There are few programs out there that at least somebody has heard of and can give educated advice on.
2. Discussion lists
3. Look into the program carefully yourself
4. Put the company name, plus the word scam, into the search engines and see what comes up. Use your own judgment, as sometimes these reviews may not be 100% unbiased.

The golden rule to avoid being scammed is to look before you join, and do not be afraid to ask other people’s opinions. If it looks too good to be true it very likely is, so do not get involved with a company that needs to hype up its opportunity or program. When you are alert and use caution before rushing into something you will be able to choose good reliable programs that will help you in reaping profit for many years to come.

Forbidden Techniques in SEO

The Google Blogoscoped blog has an interesting article covering the basics of search engine optimization. There are some basic guidelines for making your blog more search engine friendly, with tips about writing original stuff, making the posts accessible and spreading the word about your site.

The most useful part, however, is the final checklist on SEO techniques that should be avoided, check it out:

• Don’t stuff too many keywords into places where they don’t belong.

• Don’t optimize for search engines at the cost of human visitors; if someone told you adding a dash to the domain name helps your rankings, but you feel that dash might confuse your customers, then don’t add it.

• Don’t trust people who promise you “instant #1 ranking”, “guaranteed top 10 positions” or anything of the sort.

• Don’t link to others from your site just because they promised a link back to you.

• Don’t link to others just because they paid you, unless you know exactly what you’re doing (i.e. you know about “bad neighborhoods” the “nofollow” attribute, PageRank, JavaScript-ads vs text links, what it means to get googleaxed and so on).

• Don’t create multiple pages with exactly the same content.

• Don’t “litter” your URL on other people’s sites (and don’t let others people “litter” URLs on your site; if you have a web forum, keep it spam-free).

• Don’t invest in a cheap server that won’t be able to cope with your traffic; don’t build your whole site on free website tools only – if you want to have a high-quality site & server, you need to pay for it.

• Don’t worry about a page’s meta descriptions, meta keywords and such; your time is better spent creating content.

• Don’t use tools that automatically submit your site’s URL to directories, search engines and such.

• Don’t present different content to search engines than you present to users; for example, don’t hide your text to visitors and show it to search engines.

• Don’t “over-optimize”; relax, if search engines required webmasters to heavily optimize, they’d be doing a very bad job.

• In general, don’t try to outsmart search engines (unless perhaps you intend to dedicate your life to that task); those maintaining search engines are paid to outsmart webmaster tricks, so in the long run, chances for successful tricks are low.

You can read the full article here.

Diversification in Making Money Online

Diversification is usually describe as a strategy designed to reduce exposure to risk by combining a variety of business, which are unlikely to all move in the same direction. The purpose of diversification is to reduce volatility and improve overall performance. It works if you do diversification correctly.

When making your living with online business it is best to diversify. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, markets can change leading to a decrease in desire for a product. Companies can collapse, leaving their member without an income. Even your hosting company can suddenly win up and throw your website offline. Search engines like Google can suddenly change the rules, algorithms and bring you ranking down to the bottom of the engine and causing you serious loss of traffic. These are just a few reasons to diversify.

The first type of diversification is the one most commonly understood as “don’t put all you eggs in one basket.” If you want to reduce the risk, you have to consider the following ways:

• Join several good programs - there is safety in numbers. If one of your sponsor’s goes out of business you will still have others to earn commissions from.

• Penetrate several markets. If one market gets cold you still have others to rely on.

• Have more than one domain names hosted on two different web hosting companies. Again if one hosting company is down for any reason you will still have back up.

• Lastly always use multiple methods of marketing. There are many ways to market and you should be using as many as possible. Marketing trends change and you need to be able to change with them.

There are a few ways to implement these changes and have a growing business when you diversify. Here are a few points:

• Build a theme content website. This is a website that will have one central theme. For instance Health and Wellness. Join several affiliate programs that cater to this market. This will allow you to diversify the programs you are in.

• You can even carve different niche markets in this large and popular market and build mini sites or different theme websites linking in. This will allow you to penetrate several markets.

• Having 2 hosting companies will of course prevent any complete downtime.

• There are several ways to market and you should explore them all.

When you diversify you will not only expand your business but be able to stay ahead of the competition and ensure your steady and growing income.

Fail in Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing looks easy to do, but in reality it is a little trickier than people realize. One of the main reasons for failure to make profits in Affiliate marketing is lack of dedication and work. Affiliate marketing is like any other business. It takes hard work and dedication to make a successful business.

One of the most common reasons for failure is lack of knowledge about promoting. Affiliate Marketing depends on getting a lot of targeted traffic to your website. Only then can you hope to achieve a substantial click through and sales conversion. Many new affiliates are not aware of the amount of work they will have to put in to drive this traffic to their websites.

The other mistake is not to have your own website. This prevents you from doing your own website promotions and does not allow you to capture the email addresses of your visitors. When you do this you will only be building your sponsor’s business and not your own. You will also be decreasing your sales conversions.

Not knowing how to advertise and where you should be doing your direct marketing is also another mistake. Advertising must be towards your targeted market and not in unrelated publications and websites.

Selling, not pre selling: Too many affiliates try to sell their sponsor’s products instead of getting the click through. If you try to sell to your visitors and then send them through to your sponsor’s sales page they are in effect being double sold and will not be very inclined to buy.

If you pre sell to your visitors and warm them for the sale they will be ready for your sponsor’s sales page and be inclined to buy. This will increase sales conversions and your commission.