Five-Part Series on Affiliate Marketing: Your Online Presence

The second step in developing effective affiliate relationships is having a website, blog, or online presence. 

E-newsletters are nice, but you’re not going to get everyone to opt into receiving your e-newsletter. So if you don’t have some other online presence — and most often that is a website or blog — you’re missing out on the opportunity to talk to non-clients — or prospective clients — about your services — but also your affiliate marketing services.

The same content-to-advertising ratio used in e-newsletters applies to your website and blog. Make sure you’re providing useful content in both of these forums — and don’t­ let it overshadow your primary marketing focus — whether that’s resume writing or career coaching.

And make sure you disclose your affiliate marketing relationships. (But that's a whole other blog post!)

Next up in the series: What you shouldn't be promoting with your affiliate marketing.

Five-Part Series on Affiliate Marketing: Your List

This is the first in a five-part series on Affiliate Marketing, building on our "Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Resume Writers" post last week. The first post focuses on your list.

Those in the affiliate marketing world believe the list is the Holy Grail. But it’s not just the size of your list that matters. Frankly, the quality is more important. If I gave you a phone book, you’d have a list. But it wouldn’t necessarily guarantee you any sales, whether for resume writing or affiliate marketing products. Sure, you could probably get 1% of the folks you contacted to buy, but the return on the time and money you’d have to invest to make that happen probably wouldn’t justify the effort.

On the other hand, what if you could get 20% of your existing resume clients to purchase a resume distribution service or recruiter targeting service?

A few years ago, I conducted an interview with Steve Shellist, of ResumeSpider, which bills itself as the “E-Harmony” of job search. He gave this example of the kind of revenue that a resume writer could expect promoting ResumeSpider:

If you write 5-7 resumes per week, and convert 5-6 of them each month to become ResumeSpider clients, you will earn $100 to $120 per month (based on a $65 average sale price, resulting in a $20 commission per order). But remember, they don’t have to be one of your clients to be a client of ResumeSpider — meaning, every visitor to your website is a potential sale. You can easily double your affiliate profits if you have a web site that gets decent traffic and you promote ResumeSpider visibly to visitors.

If you’re the type of writer that generates a resume each day (and/or you get 5-10 job seekers looking at your website each day), you could conceivably convert 20% of them into affiliate marketing product users … and you’d make that $100 per month goal.

Next up in the series: Establishing your online presence.

Finding Strategic Partners and Referral Relationships

Have you considered cultivating referral relationships with other service providers? These can be providers who write resumes, provide career or interview coaching, career testing services, or life coaches.

When choosing possible partners, look for individuals or companies that share a similar work style. Get to know enough about them that you would feel confident in recommending them to your clients.

In this blog post, I’m going to focus on how this process applies to selecting resume writers to partner with, but the process is the same for whichever type of provider you’re interested in working with.

The two most important factors when selecting a referral partner are whether they can do a good job and whether they can handle your clients well.

The process starts with identifying likely candidates. There are lots of options -- local providers, regional or national providers; direct competitors; colleagues.

The obvious choice is to look in the Yellow Pages or online listings. But don’t stop there -- you can also find possible candidates through networking in local professional associations -- Society of Human Resource Management chapters (for example, mine is the Human Resource Association of the Midlands). Depending on where you live, you may also have local associations of resume writers — for example, the Resume Writer’s Council of Arizona.

The advantage of working with existing résumé writers or career coaches in your local areas is that you can meet them personally and observe their operations firsthand.

Most of the service providers you consider will probably already be in business. They should have existing business structures — phone, computer skills, recordkeeping systems — to handle referrals you send their way. If they’ve been around a while, they probably don’t need much hand-holding either — which means you could set up a partnership agreement pretty quickly.

On the negative side, these are usually your competitors — meaning your prospective client may have already contacted this person or company and decided not to work with them, for whatever reason. So then you’re put in the position of “selling” your competitor to the prospective client, which may or may not work.

Are you interested in pursuing a strategic partnership or referral relationship? Purchase the "Developing Strategic Alliances and Partnerships with Recruiters" special report from Resume Writers' Digest.

Lent Special: Best of the Conferences Special Report

During Lent, I'm offering a special bonus for any Resume Writers' Digest purchases made. You'll receive a free copy of my "Best of the Conferences: 2000 to 2002" special report.

Here's the description of the report:
60-page report; delivered electronically. Contains summaries of the sessions from the 2000 PARW Conference in Toronto, the 2001 NRWA Conference in San Antonio, the 2001 PARW Conference in St. Petersburg, the 2002 CMI Conference in San Diego, and two career-related sessions from the 2002 AJST conference in Orlando. Great information on marketing, pricing your services, add-on services, sales techqniues, and great resume writing tips from Jan Melnik, Louise Kursmark, Wendy Enelow, Susan Britton Whitcomb, and more.

See below for a half-dozen screen shots of the great (and timeless!) information included in the report:

This special offer is valid only until Saturday, April 23 at midnight. When the Easter Bunny arrives, this offer disappears.

Within 48 hours of your purchase, you'll receive a separate e-mail from Resume Writers' Digest with your gift.

You can view actual article samples in this 12-page "Best of the Conferences Preview" issue I had put together as a special bonus in 2008. 

Just want to buy the report, you can do that too! Here's the link.

It's on sale during Lent too -- just $8 for immediate electronic download.

Questions? E-mail editor(at)rwdigest.com.