Five-Part Series on Affiliate Marketing: Promotion

This is the last post in a five-part series on affiliate marketing. The fifth thing you need to make affiliate relationships work is a promotional plan. 

Banner ads and text links are the two most common ways to promote your affiliate relationships. You can use these in a variety of formats. Using an e-mail list to sell the product is also a great way to promote your affiliate links (see the first post in the series, on list-building). Less common are print pieces.

As I talked about with steps 1 and 2 — building your list and developing additional online venues to showcase your affiliate relationships, you’re likely to generate little or no affiliate income if you don’t have a promotional plan in place.

For example, if you have a website, blog, and e-newsletter, you want to develop a schedule for when you will promote which affiliate relationships, and in which medium. You might have a banner ad on your website, which stays pretty constant over time. You might decide to run an ad in your e-newsletter every issue. But you should also plan your content. For example, writing an article on using the product or service for your blog and then excerpting pieces of that article in a couple of issues of the newsletter. If you don’t plan this out ahead of time, when it’s time to put your newsletter together, you might forget to include the ad and/or excerpt.

You can expect some support from your affiliate marketing partners when rolling out your promotional plan. Many of them offer pre-developed “creative” -- which is basically the “artwork” you’ll put on your blog or website. This is often in the form of customized code that you can copy-and-paste into your website code or onto your blog. Some offer affiliate newsletters, which alert you to new offers they are promoting, or provide you with articles that you can customize for your customers.

Some affiliate programs offer contests and other special bonuses. For example, last year, Ellen Britt, of Marketing Qi (pronounced “CHI”), who offers information products for social marketing, had a promotion for her affiliates called a “Ice Cream Social Media Sale.” She put together a package of information products from herself as well as a couple of other social media gurus and offered it over a multi-day promotion. You could purchase it for as little as $57 the first day, and it went up each day, until on the last day, you could purchase the same package for $197. She mobilized her affiliates to promote the program, offering them 50 percent commission on the sale … but also offered a couple of additional prizes. The affiliate that sold the most packages received one day of hands-on training with Ellen in Atlanta (it included one night’s lodging at a resort, but the winner had to pay his or her own transportation), and the second prize was an ice cream maker. You can see this promotion at http://icecreamsocialmediasale.com/.

You might also get ideas on how to market your products and services from the affiliate advertiser. Some will provide you with case studies of their most successful affiliates. Others offer tutorials or videos.

Generating Rapid Cash Flow in Your Resume Writing Business

I spent a couple of hours over the past four days listening to the great information shared in Ellen Britt's Rapid Cash Flow Secrets telesummit calls. There were four sessions each day, with each presenter sharing their best ideas for generating quick cash flow as well as developing a sustainable business income for the long haul as well. There were several big-name presenters, including Jessica Swanson, Michelle PW, and Christine Gallagher.

Many years ago, I had the idea that resume writers needed to create some sort of program to complement the resume writing services offered. My original idea was something like a pre-paid legal services model -- where folks would pay a small fee per month (like $12 or $20) and receive access to resume services on an ongoing basis (like one resume update each year).

After listening to the programs, I got some new ideas for resume writers -- like the idea of a membership site (which is kind of like the legal services model), with resources for resume clients. It can be provided as a bonus with the purchase of the resume on a free trial basis, and then as an ongoing subscription revenue source after that. While the average membership site only keeps clients for 3-5 months, I think a resume writer's membership site might attract clients for 6- to 12-months (and certainly selling it in time chunks like that would lessen the attrition rate).

Are you interested in learning more about these kinds of principles? You can purchase the audio files and transcripts for all 16 Rapid Cash Flow Secrets sessions using this link for just $97. I'll also be writing and/or speaking about how you can apply some of these principles in your resume writing business for short-term and long-term income generation in future blog posts and in the Resume Writers' Digest newsletter.

Is this a topic you're interested in learning more about? Let me know...