Bill McRea

Affiliate marketers often look forward to the many shopping related holidays throughout the year, but do holidays sometimes sneak up on you and find you un-prepared for the rush? Well, if that has ever happened to you we’ve got some tips for you to help you fell better prepared for all of the holiday buying seasons throughout the year.

Create a Marketing calendar

The first step in getting your Affiliate Marketing campaigns in order is to create a marketing calendar at the end of the year for the coming year. Mark down the major holidays that will affect your business, and then fill in other promotional activities that you will be participating in throughout the year.

Plan ahead

Create a game plan for each major holiday season well in advance. It’s never too early to begin preparing holiday sites for the coming year. Get them up and work on the seo tasks to improve their rankings now, so that as the season approaches they will attract all the traffic you want.

Establish holiday shipping deadlines

For each holiday find out what the shipping deadlines are and publish them on your site so that visitors can clearly see them. Decide what special accommodations will you make for those last minute shoppers and publicize those as well.

Decide on holiday promotions now

Map out your holiday promotions in advance. You can always fine tune the details as the holiday approaches.

Offer gift certificates

When it comes down to the last minute, gift certificates are always a good thing to offer. Whether you create digital gift certificate codes, or mail a physical certificate or card, plan out the logistics of that process so that you can offer them on your website year ‘round.

Encourage regular customers to pre-order

For your loyal customers who are repeat buyers, give them an incentive to pre-order their items ahead of the holiday rush.

Create a buying guide

A great way to add value to your customer’s holiday buying experience is to offer them a gift guide that will help them choose just the right gift for every person on your list. Keep in mind the perspective of the buyer. For example, you might create a special buying guide for men who are purchasing gifts for the women in their lives.

Start working on holiday themed emails and newsletters now

Create the templates for your holiday themed emails and newsletters and start laying out the stories and the offers that will go into each one. As the holiday approaches you can add more detail, and then follow your marketing calendar for mailing dates.

Plan your holiday themed website designs

Design those holiday themed pages now so that when the season rolls around you will not be scrambling to throw something together in a rush.

Planning a head and having a strategy for dealing with holiday buying seasons sets you up for success. Never again will you feel like a holiday is creeping up on you when your affiliate marketing websites are prepared in advance.

For more tips and strategies for affiliate marketing and how to grow your online business visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

Let’s face it, the unprecedented popularity of the big social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and now Pinterest, has changed the way businesses market their products and services. It has also changed the way consumers search for and purchase goods and services online and offline.

Since social media Marketing has become an integral part of the marketing strategy of most businesses these days, there are a lot of people who are simply stabbing in the dark when it comes to implementing a social media marketing campaign. Many people who are doing social media marketing are making mistakes, wasting valuable time, and not getting the ROI they’d like to see from their efforts.

In this article we’ll look at three common mistakes that marketers tend to make in social media, and what you can do to avoid making those mistakes yourself.

1. Not setting clear goals

This happens when people feel like they should have a social media presence, but they are not quite sure what to do once they have set up their profiles. They approach posting status updates and random tweets with little or no relationship to their overall marketing goals.

Some of the measurable elements of a social media campaign include:

• Mentions
• Traffic
• Engagement
• Re-Tweets
• Audience or community building

When you are planning a social media campaign, set a measurable goal for what you want to achieve with your efforts, and then set a time frame for checking on progress.

2. Not having a pre-determined strategy and approach for dealing with negative feedback from your audience.

Once you get out there and start engaging with your audience in the social media space, you may encounter some negative feedback. Develop a policy in advance for how you will address negative comments, customer complaints, or random detractors.

You can almost always turn a negative situation around by addressing it calmly and presenting a clear solution. If you have indeed made a mistake and a customer complains furiously and publicly, apologize sincerely and find a way to make things right with the customer. This way, when the public encounters the negative feedback, they will also see how you resolved the issue.

3. Not monitoring your social media presence.

It’s a Good practice to occasionally monitor your social media presence so that you can stay out in front of what is being said about you, your business and your brand. Here are a few free, easy ways to keep track of the buzz about you online.

Twitter search

Visit search.twitter.com and you will find a big search bar where you can search on a Twitter handle, a hash tag, a trending topic, or a keyword.

Google Alerts

Glance at your Google alerts to see what is going on in your industry, who is talking about you, or your brand, what is being published using your chosen keywords. Checking these daily helps you stay abreast of what is happening so that you can respond quickly if a crisis comes up.

When you set clear goals, establish a strategy, and then monitor your progress you will begin to see the time you invest in social media bearing fruit and you will feel less like it’s a waste of your valuable time.

For more tips and strategies for social media marketing and how you can use it to grow your business and expand your brand, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

Email Marketing is still a very effective form of online marketing. The phrase, “The money is in the list,” has become a bit of a cliché because it is mostly true. More to the point, the money is actually in a good relationship with your list, but it can be challenging to come up with non sales oriented copy to send to your subscribers that offers value and will teach them to expect high quality information from you.

The trick is to grab your subscribers’ attention and engage with them as quickly as possible so that they will open your emails and remain on your list. An e-course is an effective tool that can accomplish those objectives, but the nature and deliver of ecourses has changed over the years. In this article, we’re going to look at one thing that you can do to make sure that your subscribers hang in there for the entire course and get all of the great information that you have to offer.

What is an ecourse?

An ecourse is a course that can be taken through email. You can create an ecourse to educate and inform your visitors about your product, or service or whatever the topic of your website might be. The ecourse becomes a ‘freemium’ product, which is designed to offer something of value so that your subscribers will sign up for your email list in exchange for the valuable information you are offering.

How to set up an ecourse

There are a few ways to put an ecourse together. You can write it yourself, hire a freelancer to write it, or you can re-purpose old blog posts or copy from you website on the topic. A method that Internet Marketing expert, Jimmy D. Brown teaches, is to gather articles written by subject matter experts that have been published in article directories (you ask their permission first) so that you do not have to write a word yourself. Another option is that you can re-write a PLR ebook or report so that it captures your voice, personality and brand messaging.

Keep the course short and simple, but be sure to deliver the value that you promise. You can make the course for anywhere from three to seven days long, but beyond that you might be taking on more than you need to in a free course.

Create a lesson for each day, and assign homework for each lesson that requires an action item or two so that they can put what they are learning into practice immediately.

How to keep subscribers engaged in your course

Traditionally, ecourses have been loaded into auto-responders and delivered over the course of however many days the course lasts. These days, however, people’s attention spans are so incredibly short. Everyone is demanding instant gratification, so here’s how to handle that challenge–deliver the ecourse in a single document.

You can still break the content up into lessons, but then package all of it into a single PDF so that they can see the entire course at a glance.

You can then send them little reminders, bonus content and tips related to the course content, and maybe a FAQ document that contains the most common questions and answers that you have received from your visitors.

If you want to develop a friendly rapport with your email list subscribers, an ecourse is an effective way to deliver value and keep your subscribers coming back and staying on your list because you have delivered such incredible value.

Email marketing is a foundational strategy for online marketing. For additional tips on building an online business, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.

Affiliate marketers have a lot to do to keep up with managing their websites and keeping up with all of the changes in such a fast moving industry. It seems like every day there are new tools and strategies for Affiliate Marketing. In this article we’ll take a quick look at three of the newer affiliate Marketing tools that will save you time and money and make it easier to grow your business.

1. Skimlinks

Skimlinks is a program that makes earning affiliate revenues effortless and simple. You create the content and skimlinks will monetize the links you create to various products. It will also create affiliate links from the product references that you write about in your posts (skimwords).

When you install the free plugin you will have access to over 17,000 affiliate programs instantly. So, imagine that affiliate program that you have wanted to get into, but somehow you’ve had trouble getting accepted? That is no longer an issue once you start using skimlinks. You will also have access to centralized reporting and pay outs. You get a single check from the countless number of merchants who might be paying you a commission each month.

skimlinks.com/

2. Shareist.com

As an affiliate marketer you are probably following a fairly standard recipe or procedure for affiliate blogging. You create a blog, create some content, slap some ads and affiliate links on there and hope to get paid while you sleep. But blogging is a lot of hard work. You might dive in with great gusto creating content and trying to drive a decent amount of traffic, but that turns out to be quite a daunting task.

Shareist is a website platform that can help you with content curation, which is just a stodgy word for someone who sifts and sorts through the massive amounts of content on a particular topic and compile it in one place to meet their audience’s needs.

A content curation platform such as shareist combines the benefits of tools you know like WordPress, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter because it simplifies the process of monetizing your content creation and curation efforts.

Shareist gives you the tools discover, organize and distribute content, and create a community along with analytics and the ability to monetize all of it.

At the time of this writing shareist is still in beta, so if you are interested you can get on their notification list and be the first one on your block to try it when it launches.

shareist.com/

3. SpamFree WordPress

WordPress bloggers know the pain of having to hand sort through 20-60 or more spam comments on their blog each day. Automated spam bots are the bane of many bloggers existence, but now SpamFree works to block spam comments by using anonymous password authentication to block 100% of spam comments without the need for visitors to fill out a CAPTCHA. It can also block spam that is submitted by a real person who leaves offensive comments by creating a local block list with that specific IP address. Visitors from a blocked IP address can read the blog posts, but they will not be able to leave a comment.

Installing this free, WordPress plugin will save you so much time and relieve the headache of having to pore through all of those spam comments so that you do not miss the real ones left by your loyal readers.

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/spam-free-wordpress/

Give these affiliate marketing automation tools a try and see if they do not help save you time which in the end saves you money.

Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative way to make money online. For more tips and strategies for building your online business visit http://mcreasite.com/blog right now.

The world of Affiliate Marketing is full of jargon and industry terms that new comers may not be clear on what they mean. In this article we’ll look at some quick definitions of these terms so that when you see them you will know what they mean.

Affiliate Marketing is just one aspect of Internet Marketing, and these words are fundamental to the business of pre-selling online offers for merchants.

If you’re interested in trying your hand at affiliate marketing, these are terms that you will get to know intimately.

Advertiser: This individual is the merchant or the one offering the product or service for sale. The advertiser pays the affiliate a commission when they send a buyer to their site and a purchase is made.

Affiliate: This individual earns a commission for referring visitors who make a purchase, or just clicks and leads to the merchant’s website.

Affiliate Agreement: This document governs the relationship between merchants and affiliates.

Affiliate Link: The unique URL which contains a link that tracks clicks from the traffic sent from the affiliate site to the merchant site.

Affiliate Manager: This individual runs the affiliate program for the merchant. They pay the affiliates, create reports and incentive programs.

Affiliate Tracking: This is the process by which an affiliate’s unique link is tracked.

Banner Ad: A graphic advertising image, which is often rectangular or square, which contains a hyperlink and advertises websites, products and services.

Charge back: Also referred to as a reversal, this is when the merchant takes back a commission paid to an affiliate due to returns, fraudulent activity, an invalid sale or a declined credit card.

Click-through: The result of a visitor clicks on a link leading to the merchant website.

Click-through ratio (CTR): This represents the percentage of people who view the link and click on it. For example, if an ad was displayed 100 times and got 30 clicks, the CTR would be 30%.

Commission: This is the payment an affiliate received for the sales or leads their traffic has generated for the merchant.

Cookies: A small bit of code stored in a text file and stored on the visitor’s computer when they visit a merchant site. Cookies record and store, for a specific period of time, information which tracks things like which ad they clicked on and when for the purpose of tracking the time between the click and the possible conversion.

We will continue with more definitions for the affiliate marketing jargon that you keep hearing and are never exactly sure what all of it means in part II of this article. For now keep in mind the fact that the affiliate marketing industry moves incredibly fast. You’ll have to master the ability to focus in on mastering the skills that increase your revenues as an affiliate marketer while avoiding all of the distractions that pop up in the fast-paced world of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing represents one business model for making money online. For more information about building and expanding your online business, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog today.