• You can use your own unique voice that your subscribers love and have grown accustomed to.
• You can include the benefits/information that your list will be most interested in.
• You can tie in your offer to other things you may have been talking to your list about.

A Few Rules

Actually, there aren’t really any rules. There are no guidelines about length, where to place links, etc. The important thing is to create an interesting offer that your readers will want to click on. It may be short or long – whatever it takes.

The Components

Subject line:

The only job of your subject line is to create curiosity and get your subscriber to open the email. Let’s face it, people are busy and scan subject lines. You don’t want yours to be missed.

You also have very limited space with a subject line, so use it wisely. Create curiosity with your subject lines that makes your readers want to open them.

Greeting:

Greet your reader at the beginning of the email. Write as you would to a friend, for example:

“Hey [NAME]”

…or…

“Hiya”

Personalization can work well, but don’t overdo it in the entire email. Be natural and write the way you would to a friend.

Body:

This is where you really get into it. Relate to a problem/challenge your readers may be facing and highlight it. Then introduce the product and tell them your thoughts about it and why they should go check it out. You can be excited about the product, but be authentic. Your readers will see through hype.

Offer & Link:

Make sure you include a strong call-to-action. Be definite about what you want your reader to do. Avoid saying things like, “You might want to check this out,” – it’s too wishy-washy. Instead, say something like, “Visit the link for all the details and to get yours while they’re still available”.

Final Thoughts:

Give your readers one last thought and reason why they should be clicking the link above. Just a sentence or two that highlights the benefit of the product.

Sign It:

Sign your email…it’s polite and gives you an opportunity to add the next component below…

P.S.:

Add a P.S. with one more final push and reason to click your link. Include the link in your P.S.

Finishing Tips

Read through your email to ensure it flows, is compelling and is hopefully error-free. Try reading it out loud as you’ll likely notice things you wouldn’t if you read quickly in your head.

• Giving a full-page review to your product (or dedicating an email broadcast a review) commands your reader’s full attention. It’s not like a graphic or other random ad on a page.
• Detailed and honest reviews can help build your credibility as a trusted source of product information in your market.
• Allows you to target specific product keyword phrases in order to rank well in search engines or to purchase pay-per-click ads.
• Helps you warm up your readers to the product before sending them to the website for a sales pitch.
• People hate to make decisions – especially with their money and they often prefer to follow the crowd. If you’ve shown them your results…they are more likely to take your recommendation.

What to Include in Your Review:

As with many things in marketing, there are no hard and fast rules on what must be in a product review, but here are some suggestions:

• Name of the product.
• Pertinent details: For example the author, format, etc. where applicable.
• Purpose of the product: What does it do and why would someone want it?
• Features of the product: Give an easy-to-read bulleted list.
• Highlight what you think are the best features/benefits of the product.
• Potential drawbacks: No product is perfect or suitable for every single buyer. You can highlight these drawbacks in a positive way:

• Mention the drawback and give a solution. For example, “There is no drink holder in the stroller, but you can purchase an attachable one at ____.
• You can also qualify readers by saying things like, “This product is not for beginners,” or “This product is best suited for those who can dedicate at least 20 minutes per day to make the methods work.”
• If this is a low-cost alternative to a higher-priced but better product – you can say the trade-off is the money you save (and still link to the other higher priced product for those who want it)

• Your personal experience: Offer your own thoughts on the product and remember to include as many details as possible about how you use the product and the results you got. Also provide as much proof of your results as you can.
• Experiences of Others: You can also ask for feedback from your subscribers and visitors and add that to your review. Or simply let them post their own comments to your review.

How to Use Your Full Page Review:

• Optimize your page for search engine visitors. Do your keyword research. (http://www.wordtracker.com) to see what people are looking for and optimize your page for that (ex. “XXXXX Product Review”). Include your chosen keyword phrase(s) in your title tag, description tag, page content, links pointing to your review, etc.
• Link to your full page recommendation from various areas of your website, include the review in your autoresponders, pay-per-click campaigns and article bylines where appropriate.
• Make your review into a PDF document that people can print out and send to their friends.
• Register a separate domain and create a review site with all of your product reviews.

Understanding your target market is perhaps the single most important aspect of any online selling and the first thing you should define for your business. Even you don’t sell any of your own products, your target market is very important. It’s what gives you a handle on what type of products to offer as an affiliate, what content to provide and how to attract the right crow for your offers.

When determining your target market, there are two basic areas to explore: Demographics and psychographics.

• Demographics can include your target market’s age, gender, geographic location, income bracket, and other statistical type of data.
• Psychographics are more vital to truly understanding your target market.  Psychographics define your market’s interests, lifestyles, opinions, values, and so on.

Psychographics can be harder to nail down than demographics, but are significantly more useful to understanding your target market. The more you understand your target market, the easier it will be to sell to them. Understand their point-of-view, the problems they have and what kinds of solutions they’re looking for.

You can learn more about the psychographics of your customers by paying close attention to their behavior, asking them questions, reading their discussions (whether it’s comments on your blogs, their own blogs, forums, etc.), observing other companies that sell to a similar market and continually making an effort to grow your understanding of your target audience.

What Motivates Your Target Market

To help you further understand what makes your target market tick, here are some important human motivators that have been identified by psychologists. They will help you in understanding what motivates your readers to take action:

• Fear
• Exclusivity
• Guilt
• Greed
• Need for approval
• Convenience
• Pleasure

You can use this information to craft your affiliate promotions. Always keep these motivators in mind when choosing a product to sell and when writing promotional text for your unique audience. The individual products you promote won’t likely incorporate all these motivators, but maybe you a few.

Imagine Your Typical Reader Who Buys Products You Recommend

What are her wants and desires? What problems does she need solved? If you don’t already know that, try surveying the readers that you already have. Ask them a few questions about themselves, why they buy certain products, what they like about them and what they don’t like. In return, offer them a coupon or a free report or something, just to get that feedback. This information will be very valuable to you.

Think About the Products You Promote:

What is the single most important reason your target audience would want to buy these products? You need to be able to empathize with your target market, identify their problems and show how your product solves that problem. If you think too generally about your target market, the passion is lost in your promotions and it’s tough to get anyone excited about anything.

For example, if you promote an ebook about getting rid of acne and you simply talk about the embarrassment of acne, you might get some sales. But if you know that your target market for a specific promotion is teenagers, talking about being teased at school, worrying that they won’t find a date and having a case study of a teenager who overcame that – your promos will be much more powerful.

Define Your Target Market:

If you need a hand, here’s a checklist of items to consider in defining your target market. They may or may not all be applicable:

• Gender
• Age
• Geographic Location
• Income
• Marital Status
• Nationality
• Religion
• Education
• Occupation
• Number of Children
• Interests
• Opinions
• Values
• Hobbies and Activities
• Problems They Face
• How Often They Buy
• How Much They Spend
• Motivators for Buying

Keep this information in mind the next time you write an article, blog post or product endorsement. It will do wonders for your results.

Once You’ve Defined Your Target Market – Get Promoting!

Our affiliate programs include plenty of pre-written materials to make it easy for you to get promoting. For even better results, take these materials as a starting point and make any necessary changes to make them appeal even more to your unique target market.

Get your promo tools at [insert location to affiliate tools]

You know your market best…now it’s time to sell to them!

Here are some ways affiliates can use Squidoo Lenses:

- Offer tips on [insert relevant topic]

- Create product reviews

- Help solve problems like [insert common problem of your market]

- Give information on [insert relevant topic]

- Add articles and offer recommendations

Here’s how to get started with Squidoo

Create an account at http://www.squidoo.com/

¨     STEP 1: Set Up Your First Lens (page)

• Enter the topic of your lens
  • Examples: “How to earn more money in less time”
• Go to Step 2

• Select the option that best describes what you want to do with your lens
• Go to Step 3

• Enter a title for your lens
  • What you entered as a topic will be listed in the text box
  • Squidoo suggests that clever titles make great first impressions
• Enter the URL for your lens
  • If you lens is about dachshunds, try adding the word dachshund. Squidoo will inform you if the name has already been taken.

• Using the drop-down arrow, select a category for your topic
• Choose the rating that is most appropriate for your page.
• Go to Step 4

• Add some key words (tags) related to your topic
  • What words might someone use to search for your topic?

• Enter the captcha word shown on the page and click Done

¨     STEP 2: Add a Bio and Photo

• Click Add Your Bio and Picture or Edit to the right of My Bio

• Write a short bio of yourself
• Check the box next to make this your default bio
• Save

• Click Browse to find a photo on your computer to upload
  • Select the photo
  • Check the box to make it your default photo
• Click Upload Photo

¨     STEP 3: Invite Friends

• Go to My Account

• Click Invite a Friend

• Enter their details
• Click Add Another if you have more friends you wish to invite

• Enter the message to send to your friends  (optional)
• Preview the message (optional)
• Send

¨     STEP 4: Edit/Add a Lens

• Click My Lenses

• Select Edit, Delete or Create a Lens based on what action you want to take.

If you choose to Edit

• Select Edit / Delete next to the section (module) you wish to change or remove.

• Click the up or down arrow to rearrange the order of the modules

¨     STEP 5: Add a Photo to a Page

• Click Edit

• Browse & locate the photo on your computer
• Click Upload Photo

• Click Publish!  To make your Lens live

Here are 7 Quick Ideas for Publishing Reprint Articles:

1. Publish them on Your Blog: Using reprint articles in your blog can be a great way to save time while providing valuable content to your readers. If you’re blog has a scheduling feature, you can load up a bunch of articles at once and have them publish automatically on a chosen schedule.

2. Use them in Email Newsletters: Need extra content for your next newsletter issue? Add an article or two. You can even preload an autoresponder with a bunch of articles.

3. Bundle them into a Special Report: You can bundle a dozen reprint articles into one report and give away the report as a gift or ethical bribe for signing up to your mailing list. Mark each article as a chapter and it’s almost indistinguishable from a report written from front to back.

4. Create a Following: As long as you provide great content on your website, you’ll slowly start to build a following. Having a steady stream of reprint articles is a great way to do that without eating up all your time.

5. Increase Your Search Engine Rankings: Another great way to use reprint articles is to leverage them to increase your search engine rankings. One of the best ways to rank well in search engines is to have high quality content on your website. Simply do some keyword research at Wordtracker.com and optimize the page for your chosen keyword phrase by adding a new title to the page, introductory paragraph and then posting the original article.

6.  Print as an Offline Article: Add articles to a customer newsletter, information packet, etc. and distribute them offline. You might want to register a special domain name to redirect your affiliate link through so that it’s easy for your readers to type into the web browsers.

7. Use them on your Social Networking Page: Social networking sites like Squidoo allows members to publish lenses on different subjects. Enlighten your visitors with interesting content plus provide a link to your website. Or publish the article on your site and send a link out on Twitter.

This means where your affiliate link may look like:

[insert your affiliate e program link format]

You can change it to a link coming from your own website like:

http://www.yourdomain.com/link.html

There are a number of reasons to redirect your link and here are a few:

1. Many affiliate links are long and they can actually break into 2 lines if you’re sending them in an email. Once they break up like that, your readers won’t be able to click through.
2. Sometimes affiliate programs change their links or even shut down. Our programs are going to be here for a long time, but always be safe with your affiliate links as a matter of practice and redirect them. That means if you ever need to make changes to your link, you can simply make the change from your redirected link, instead of trying to find where you placed all those links on your website and in your emails.
3. If a link is showing as coming from your site, your readers might be more likely to click on it than if they see a long strange affiliate link direct from the program. You can even name your file something creative or descriptive (ex. mydomain.com/must-have-toy.html) and your readers might be more likely to click through.
4. If you redirect your links the way we describe in this tutorial, you’ll be able to log into your website statistics and track click throughs for your links. The affiliate program you are involved with may already provide some of these statistics, but you can track multiple links and get all your data from one place.
5. It makes it easy to remember your affiliate links for promotions on the fly. Whenever you want to recommend our products, you’ll know your link right away.

How to make your redirected link:

There are a variety of methods to redirect a link, but we’re going to keep it simple and use what is called a javascript redirect.

Create a new blank page for your website. Name the page whatever you’d like (for example: ibf.html).

Remove any HTML code and paste this instead:

<html>

<head><meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.INSERTAFFILIATELINK.com”>

</head>

<body>

</body>

</html>

Be sure to replace http://www.INSERTAFFILIATELINK.com with your full affiliate link.

Test your link to make sure everything is working. Simply type in the location of your new page into your web browser to ensure it is redirecting (ex. type in yourdomain.com/link.html).

Video can be used to entertain and to inform – and to drive traffic to your website or an affiliate product.

You can demonstrate something on a computer screen using screen capture video software (for example, Camtasia) or you create a live-action video. Perhaps it’s you talking with someone or you speaking directly into the camera. If you don’t have a video camera, you can inexpensively pick up a Flip camera that easily plugs into your computer and makes it a snap to share your videos.

Get an Idea

• Create a screen capture video that shows how [insert product name] works.
• Record an interview or conversation with someone about [insert idea].
• Create a video where you tell the viewer about your experience with the product.
• Make instructional videos. Ex. [how to find recipes online, planning your grocery list, etc.] and make sure to show how [insert product] is an even easier solution.
• Entertain. Some of the most viral videos (videos that are shared and spread the furthest) simply entertain it’s intended target audience.

Load Your Video to the Internet

You can host your own video on the Internet, but publishing to YouTube is the simplest thing. You can even get the copy-and-paste code from YouTube to show the video on your own website.

If you use a Flip camera, all you need to do is open the software on your computer by plugging your Flip camera in and it will take you through the steps to load your video to YouTube.

If you are working with raw files, you will need to follow the following steps:

o Log into your YouTube account.

o Click “Upload” in the upper-right-hand corner of the YouTube page

o Enter Title, Description, Tags, and Category

o Select the broadcast option: Public (everyone can see it) or Private (for sharing with friends and family only)

o Select date and map of when video was recorded (optional)

o Select whether to allow comments, ratings, etc (optional)

o Click  the “Upload A Video” to select a pre-recorded video

o Click the “Use Quick Capture” to live record video with PC Camera

o Click the “Browse” button to browse for the video file on your computer.

o Click the “Upload Video” button.

- Note that it can take up to an hour for your video to upload.

Putting the Code on Your Website

Once your video is loaded to YouTube, you can grab the code for your own site. You’ll see it on the right side of the screen when you view the video.

The text says Embed and the basic code you need is in that box (see next page for visualization). Click the symbol marked with the red checkmark on the next page. It allows you to customize the appearance of your video.

Make sure the box that says “Include related videos” is NOT checked. Then people will only see your video and not get distracted with others. You can also specify the color to match your site and the size to fit appropriately.

Once you have specified the items you want the “Embed” code automatically updates. Copy that and paste it into your web page editor’s HTML tab. Then your video is ready to show on your site.

You can use hub pages in a variety of ways including:

- Offer tips on [insert relevant topic]

- Create product reviews

- Help solve problems like [insert common problem of your market]

- Give information on [insert relevant topic]

- Add articles and offer recommendations

The longer your pages are, the better. You receive a higher page score for original content and length.

Here’s how to get started with HubPages

Sign up for a HubPage account here, www.HubPages.com

STEP 1: Make Money with Google Adsense

• If you want to add Google adsense to your HubPage, you can do so by filling out the form.
• Click the No Thank You option at the top to skip or sign up at a later date.

STEP 2: Create a Hub

• Click the big red Create a Hub button to get started

• Choose a Title: should describe the content of the hub
• Enter a web address on hubpages
• Enter a Main Category and Keyword Tags
• Click Continue when you’re finished

STEP 3: Assemble Your Capsules

Use the tabs at the top of the main capsule area (circled in green below) to include             additional information:

• Settings Tab: Edit your title and ad details
• Summary Text Tab: Enter a summary text describing your hub. This summary will be shown on listings and search results pages only.
• Group Tab: allows you to connected related articles together for easy navigation

• To add text to your hub, click the Edit icon in the text section as shown by the orange arrow and box above.
• Use the green arrows to move the content to a new location on the hub
• Enter the details you wish to add and click Save at the top of the box.

• To add a Photo to your hub, click the Edit icon in the photo section.
• Browse your computer to locate the graphic (up to 8 MB).
• Click Load Images

To load additional text, photos, video, links, news, RSS or revenue from Adsense, ebay or Amazon, simply select these from the right sidebar and follow the steps above.

STEP 4: Preview & Save your Hub page

• Click Preview to preview your hub
• Click Publish to make your hub live to the public
• Click Save Unpublished to save but not publish until a later date

We selected Save Unpublished and this is what our hub currently looks like…

You can edit, delete, view stats and start a new hub by clicking the option at the top of the page as shown below.

That’s it for creating your hub.

Other features of HubPages

Using the options at the top of the page, you can:

• Browse Hubs to locate & read those of interest
• Search for Hubbers by name
• Send a request to a Hubber asking them to create a new hub on a particular topic
• Search Hubs by Topics
• Network on the HubPages Forums
• Set up Hubtivity to keep track of what’s happening on your hubs, requests, forum posts and other hubbers that you are a fan of

Have you ever received an email that looked something like this –

——————-

Hello,

We wanted to share with you a new product

that will

revolutionize the way

you operate your business online. Click here

for all the details.

http://www.newbusinessre

volution.com/specialoffer

——————-

The reason the message and link were broken up is because the lines in the email were longer than what the receiving email program allowed.

To ensure all of your subscribers can easily read your mail, you simply need to format your messages so that the text wraps at about 60 characters per line. To do this, you can use a free program called TextPad, http://textpad.com/

Once you download and install TextPad, here’s how you set it up to wrap at 60 characters.

STEP 1: Open TextPad and navigate to Configure à Preferences

From the list on the left, toggle the + sign next to Document Classes so that it opens the tree as shown below. Then select Text from the list.

STEP 2: On the far right, you’ll now see an option to “Save with hard breaks”…select that radio button. Then enter 60 at “Word break at a column number” and make sure that option is checked.

Click Apply then OK and you’re done.

When you use TextPad to write your messages, it will now automatically format your messages to 60 characters per line.

IMPORTANT! If the links in your message are longer than 60 characters, they will break like the example above. To ensure this doesn’t happen, consider redirecting your links as explained here [insert link to your redirect tutorial]

Not using TextPad to write your message?

If you use another program to write your message and only use TextPad to format it, when you paste the message in TextPad, the lines may not wrap.  In this case, highlight the entire text (or click Edit à Select All) and click the Wrap icon (or click Configure à Word Wrap).

Unformatted message – highlight the text (edit à select all) then click the Wrap icon.

Message now formatted to 60 characters per line.

Here are 6 Quick Ideas for Publishing Rebranded Articles:

1. Publish them on Your Blog: Write a quick blog post about the information in the report and the benefits of reading it. Then link to the report you’ve branded and uploaded to your website. It’s a great way to save time coming up with new ideas while providing valuable content to your readers. If you’re blog has a scheduling feature, you can load up a bunch of branded reports at once and have them publish automatically on a chosen schedule.

2. Use them in Email Newsletters: Need extra content for your next newsletter issue? Tell people about the report and give them a link where they can download it on your site. You can even preload an autoresponder with a bunch of reports.

3. Give Them As Gifts to New Subscribers: Build your mailing list and give away the report as a gift or ethical bribe for signing up to your mailing list. Your readers get great content and you can earn commissions.

4.  Bundle up a Few Reports into a Package: Boost the value of your ethical bribe and bundle up a few highly-informative reports into a download package.

5. Create a Following: As long as you provide great content on your website, you’ll slowly start to build a following. Having a steady stream of valuable reports is a great way to do that without eating up all your time.

6. Use them on your Social Networking Page: Social networking sites like Squidoo allows members to publish lenses on different subjects. Enlighten your visitors with interesting content plus provide a link to your website. Or publish the report on your site and send a link out on Twitter.