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Archive for the ‘affiliate marketing’ Category

How I sold $100,000 worth of accommodation online in one month, while I slept.

Friday, August 6th, 2010

If you are new to online marketing and want to make money fast, one of he easiest products to sell is hotel accommodation.

The online accommodation booking market is growing at a staggering 400% each year, with more people now starting to choose online bookings for accommodation than walking into a travel agent.

The beauty of online accommodation is that you have the option to easily compare the best rates at your own leisure, which is great if you already know the location you want to holiday at.
the other advantage of online accommodation websites is that you can read reviews of other people that have visited the same hotels or resorts and get some feedback. This feedback is a general overview but gives you a good idea that your travel agent might not be able to.
Often travel agents are paid incentives to try and get you into a particular hotel, so the advantage of choosing yourself online is great.

If you are looking at an online venture to make money while you literally sleep, hotel accommodation marketing online is great as the returns are high, so if you set your website up correctly you really don’t have to work to hard to market the website. You literally make money while you sleep.

Here is my story on how I turned a day’s work into $100,000 worth of sales in a single month with a simple, small, accommodation website.

A few years back as I was already designing and building accommodation websites for other people, I thought I’d try my hand at creating my own online accommodation website, more as a hobby website than anything else.
I chose the Whitsunday Islands as my niche as I am a regular visitor to the Whitsundays and Airlie Beach, so know the local area.
Yes, it’s a small niche, which was probably a mistake on my behalf as the internet is global. Since creating my Whitsundays website I now have 4 International hotel accommodation websites as well. So, before diving in, think big!

Step 1:Find your niche, and your niche market.

Find your accommodation niche. It might be schoolies accommodation, romantic holidays, luxury holidays (pays better, but sales are usually less than budget accommodation), or choose a particular location or country you would like to focus on.

The website design should also suit the location and your target audience. Don’t use dark black colours if you are promoting a luxury beachside resort. Take into consideration the age of the market you want to target. If they are younger you can make the website design a little more fun and funky, if they are older think about making the text larger, and with simple navigation.

Step 2:
Choose the right domain name

You will have greater success on the search engines if your domain name is specifically related to what you are selling. For instance, I chose www.WhitsundayApartments.com.au as I was selling Whitsunday Apartments, resorts and hotel accommodation. (I also registered WhitsundayHotels.com.au to cover more search terms).
By having your main website with a good domain and some simple but good search engine optimisation, you are almost guaranteed to be on the first page of Google, if not the #1 spot for at least this search term. If you can achieve this there is really no need to spend money on paid advertising to get a good sale rate.

Step 3:
Set up a website
Purchase a hosting account and create a website. I usually choose Hostgator.com web hosting for international accommodation websites because Hostgator are based in the United States, which means international visitors will have a faster viewing rate than if I host locally here in Australia. If the website audience was purely targeting Australians I would choose a local web provider in Australia, like Webcrowd.

Hostgator allows you to purchase one account and split it into multiple accounts, so if you want to build multiple websites there is no extra costs for hosting. You simply purchase additional domain names, split your initial hosting account and hook up the domain name to the newly split account, so it acts like a totally independent hosted website. Nice and cheap!

Step 4:
Building your website.
Believe it or not, this is actually the easy part of the process!
You don’t have to actually know anything about hotel accommodation bookings, or spend thousands on creating an expensive accommodation marketing system, you can start with one single webpage.
The hotel accommodation booking system itself is actually provided by an affiliated company, so you simply build a simple webpage and link to their system for free, and you generate income for each sale that is created through your website.

Obviously, you want to look professional, so for the return you will be getting it is worth hiring the services of a web designer for a day to create and set your website up for you. Make sure they also offer search engine optimisation services as part of the deal.

To get started, you will need to find an accommodation affiliate partner, such as HotelsCombined.com or HotelClub.com There are plenty to choose from, as well as Airlines, Car Hire, Tours and more holiday related products.
Many of the best online hotel brands will offer an affiliate program. You can find them by either scrolling to the footer of their website and look for Affiliate Program, or simply type in ‘Hotel Affiliate Programs’ into Google.
You usually need to have a basic website setup before they will approve you, so build a simple page first, and you can change it once you are approved.
Affiliate programs are usually free to join and on average pay around 6% to 10% per sale on the booking price. So on average if someone books say a week of accommodation for $2100 you would make $189 in commission from a single sale.
Thats not bad from one single booking! If you can get 10 bookings a day you will be doing nicely.

Most affiliate programs will provide you with an affiliate coded piece of script which you simple customise and then past into your webpage, which created the booking form on your page, allowing people to search through the hotel affiliate’s accommodation database. When they find and book, you make money! It really is that simple!

Step 5:
Optimising your website for the search engines
the major misconception with many web developers is they believe you need to flood a page with search engine specific keywords in order to achieve a good ranking. This is totally untrue. I can show you a number of examples I have created myself that have only 3 lines of text on the entire single page website and they achieve a #1 Google listing.
Choose the keywords that relate you your domain name, the target location and add them in a short paragraph or two at the most, and try and leave out as many non-specific words as possible, without the sentence sounding like it is written for the search engines to your visitors.

Run your website through a good SEO software package such as Web CEO before uploading and submitting your website to ensure it has a good keyword ranking. Web CEO will also let you submit your website for free to all the major search engines, usually with great results within days.


SEO software by Web CEO

And that is the step finished! Sit back and wait for the search engines to do their thing and the booking to flood in.
There is nothing better than waking up and finding you have earned your days’ pay before you were even awake!

$100,000 sales in a month for one day’s work isn’t bad, and the money keeps coming in each month for doing almost nothing.

Step 6: Marketing your website
If you want to really give your new website the extra push, you can use paid marketing such as Google Adwords to attract visitors, or include a Subscribe/VIP club newsletter form allowing people to sign up and be added to your mailing list for future marketing. This helps generate potential sales to people that have already visited your website.
Check out Aweber email marketing system which is perfect for this type of online marketing and promotions.

Of course, you can always book your own holidays through your own website, saving you on the full price of accommodation! You’ll never pay full price for your holiday again!

Happy online earnings!

About the Author:
Chris Bourke from Devision.com.au and WebSEOCoach.com
Chris is a web designer and online marketer, specialising in holiday accommodation website development for clients throughout Australia.

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The real price of a website?

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

When it comes to web development it is always interesting to see the reaction of the potential client when I produce a quote.

Smart business owners who know the importance of a good website usually think I am too cheap, the rest usually choke on the price.

See, most people don’t see past that dollar sign on the quote and understand the real potential and power of the internet, and the fact that there are ‘websites’ and then there are online marketing websites.

Every time I build a website I try to encourage the client to think past using their website as an online poster, but create a website that works as a powerful marketing tool.

Sure adding in value might mean paying a little more, but in the long term, or even as little as a week, you will see the returns pay for themselves.

I’d like to share a recent example…I had a potential client who owns a motorcycle shop ask me for a quote on the rebuild of an existing website. The website looked ‘okay’ at first glance, but it wasn’t working as a marketing tool, it was more like a roadside hoarding online, and probably not directly making him any money.
After a quick review I found at least 20 things that could be improved on the website to most likely double his profits, yet when I presented the quote, (which was less than one of his average motorcycles!) he balked at it.

Now, I’m not giving this chap a hard time…I get this reaction a lot from people that don’t understand the power of the internet.

If I were to put it into simple terms for him it would be easier to compare a website to a motorcycle..
Firstly, the difference between a motorcycle and a website would most likely be that you pay a big price for a motorcycle with maybe around 35% of the total price probably going to the dealer, another 20% going to shipping/export costs, another 5% going to the manufacturers big marketing campaigns, which leaves you with a 40% value, which then depreciates each time you ride it. Then of course you have registration, insurance, fashion accessories, etc. Unless you run a postal or courier service, that motorcycle probably isn’t going to provide a return worth way more than what you purchased it for.
(These figures may be incorrect – I build profitable websites, not sell motorcycles, so I am approximating the breakdown of costs.)

On the other hand, a website designed as a marketing tool will most likely pay for itself within months and then continue to make money for you, in some cases while you sleep, depending on what type of business you have. Keep the website for a few years and I usually see a 800% or more return on investment.

So while a motorcycle is fun to ride, I’d love to have someone get me an 800% return on my purchase after a few years.
I’d jump at the chance to purchase one if that were the case!

Yet, explained so simply, people still don’t get it.

So how do you add value to a website to get an 800% return?

Let’s look at just a few of the basics…

Always make sure your website is well branded.
If you have a logo you use for your business/business cards/stationery/press ads, use the same logo and colour scheme on your website so your brand is strong and consistent. Branding is everything!

Make contact simple.
I see so many websites (including the motorcycle site mentioned) that don’t have a phone number visible, or they have it way down in the footer of a long scrolling page. Thats perfect, if you DON’T want people to call you!
always try and keep the phone number near the top of the website, and reinforce it on every page of your site, in the same location, and even throughout your web content.
Add a contact form on your website so people can contact you outside of business hours, and add clearly defined links in your main text that link to the contact form (eg CLICK HERE TO CONTACT US).
And make sure the links actually click through to the page! It’s amazing how many people forget to add a live click through link or forget to test it.

Create a marketing list of potential clients
It doesn’t take much to set up an automated email marketing system with a simple form on your homepage to entice people to join your mailing list. Adding a mailing list to your website is one of the most important marketing tools a website can have, and you will find on average your potential client database will grow around 400% every week!
Using an email marketing system such as Aweber allows you to easily add a contact form into your website, and the contact details of each person that signs up is saved to a database for future email marketing, which is fully trackable for each campaign.

Online Brochure
When people are visiting your website looking for a particular product, odds are they are also going to look at your competitors websites as well. If they visit a bunch of competitors sites there is always a good chance they will forget your web address. Add a downloadable PDF flyer of your latest products to your website, so they have something to keep after they leave your website. Ideally kill two birds with one stone and add the downloadable brochure into the Mailing List subscribe form, so you collect their data each time someone wants a copy of your PDF brochure. Your marketing database will grow fast!

If you are marketing a product (such as motorcycles), they look much better when they are moving rather than a static photo. Adding a Youtube clip into your website is quick and easy and adds another dimension to your website, plus it creates additional online marketing for you through Youtube. Youtube videos allow you to create a live link from the videoclip to your website, producing much more potential traffic for your website.

Online Social Networking
‘Tweeting’ new products through Twitter, and adding the Facebook ‘Like’ button to your website allow visitors to share your product marketing with their friends, who usually share similar interests. This creates a great deal of website traffic for you and potentially a lot more new business. Social Network marketing is a must of the modern age of online marketing.

Search Engine Optimisation
We all know the importance of being on the first page of Google, yet a lot of people struggle to get their website up there.
google is not as complex as many people make out, and a few simple steps can see you reach a page one spot on Google, and retain it. Always ask your web developer to include search engine optimisation when they build your website, and ask them to integrate Google Analytics into your website so you can monitor the results of where your visitors are coming from and how they found you online.

Ask for feedback
Unless you ask your website visitors for feedback you won’t really know how you are performing online. Website visitors’ feedback can really help you create a successful online marketing tool and most people are happy to give feedback if you ask. Add a Feedback form on your website in the footer, or simply ask through Twitter occasionally and review the responses. It’s always good to look at your business from the other side of the window!


Author: Chris Bourke of Devision Design and Web SEO Coach.

Chris is a graphic designer, web developer, internet marketing and SEO expert based in Australia

Follow Chris on Twitter @webseocoach

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Choosing an Email Marketing System

Friday, July 9th, 2010

When you’re considering email marketing to help your business flourish, you should look into a few important aspects before making a firm decision on which way to go.

Firstly, somethingI have to advise against…DON”T use Outlook or any other email app running directly from your own personal computer!

Why not? Personal computers are for personal emails. If you want to use emails for promotional marketing, you need to be able to track your readers, allow them to unsubscribe, and most importantly subscribe to your email database as well as send the email to a friend.

The best way to do all this is to choose a professional online email marketing solution.
Yes, there is a cost involved to do this, but we are talking as little as around $15 per month. If your email marketing campaign is good you will make this money back without a doubt.

Making sure you choose the right provider for your email marketing needs is a bigger decision than you might think, because if you find you are unhappy with the service once you have started growing your email marketing database it can be a huge setback to change over to another provider. You see, most professional email marketing systems will ensure that each person that subscribes has clicked and given permission to add them to your database list. If you then go and move to another provider, you will them need to ask each person to re-subscribe to your list, which usually leads to a 40% drop in your subscribers. This can take a long time to build up again, equating to the loss of a lot of revenue through email marketing campaigns.

So choose your email marketing provider wisely.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN A GOOD EMAIL MARKETING SYSTEM

Firstly, you want a system that is easy to use.
Creating emails needs to be easy, sending and monitoring the success of the emails needs to be even easier.

SETTING UP TEMPLATES FOR YOUR EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
Most good email marketing systems provide both these options, and even allow you to create your own Subscribe forms, response forms and auto reply email templates. Aweber allows all this, but even goes the next step and lets you set up timed auto response follow up emails, which is ideal for online marketing. Sending out additional emails for the following weeks can ensure a sale before they forget who you are.

EMAIL RESPONSE TRACKING
Tracking the response of each campaign can help you determine who is reading your emails, which products they clicked on in your email, who they forwarded the email to, and even how long and how many times they read it. This sort of marketing information is very important. My 3 favourite email marketing systems, Aweber, iContact and Constant Contact all provide these type of services, though I find Aweber the easiest to read. They provide simple graphs that you can review quickly.


iContact.com - Email Marketing Service

iContact is a close second, though a big plus for iContact that Aweber is yet to develop is the free iContact iPhone App, which allows you to check your campaign success anytime, anywhere from your iphone! Brilliant for the busy marketer, especially when you are running multiple campaigns at the same time.

Constant Contact and MailChimp also offers iPhone Apps, though being a graphic/web designer I just tend to like the iContact App and website much better. It’s fresh, simple and both the website and iPhone App are easy to learn and use.

MANAGING AND IMPORTING CONTACTS
whatever system you use, make sure you have the ability to be able to easily add or download your mailing list database of clients. You don’t want to sign up and then find you have to individually add one person at a time! Make sure you can quickly and easily upload a CSV or EXCEL file so you can get started on your emailing success faster

SETTING UP FORMS ON YOUR WEBSITE
This is usually where the systems let me down the most…setting up a Subscribe form on your website.
Mailchimp seems a little awkward if you aren’t too web-savvy, and I haven’t had too much luck with getting the contact form layout just right when I have used Constant Contact.

Icontact and Aweber are both fairly straight forward and easy to do, even for a novice, allowing you to fully customize your Subscribe form as well as providing you some great templates to get you up and running quickly, though I did have a few issues with Aweber not totally liking the fact that I was doing it from a Mac, though it runs fine on a PC.

PRICING
The pricing to use an online email marketing package various a little from business to business. Most start at $15 a month for around 500 subscribers and then allow you to send 3000 emails a month. Aweber lets you sign up for the first month for just a single $1! So you get a good try out of their system and if you don’t like it you can change before you get too attached to it. Aweber works out a couple of dollars more expensive than some of the other leading packages such as iContact, but in the long run the tools they provide for professional email marketing will probably provide a higher return to your campaigns, which is why most email marketers usually choose Aweber.

But have a look at them all, try them all out for a test run and see what you think yourself before making a decision.

Article by Chris Bourke of Web SEO Coach and Devision Design Australia
Chris is a full time web designer and developer as well as an internet affiliate marketer.

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5 Survival Tactics for Affiliate Marketing

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

When it comes to online affiliate marketing, there is no secret formula to ensure huge profits, just good marketing practices.

Through my own trial and error over the past few years, these next 5 marketing tactics I’ll share with you have proven to increase my sales dramatically against the tough online competition in the world of affiliate marketing.

Give these following techniques a try yourself and you should also see amazing results:


1. Uniquely design your websites for each product you promote.
Some marketers tend to bundle all their different products together onto one site to lessen the cost of web hosting, but this cheap-ass technique usually doesn’t pay off as the domain name will confuse the customer, and also confuse the search engines if you are marketing products that don’t relate to the domain name.
It’s always best to put up one site for a specific product.
And it won’t actually cost you that much extra; A $10 domain name from Godaddy.com and if you are with a good web hosting service such as Web Crowd, you can split your hosting account into multiple accounts for free, so your hosting is still free but you have a unique domain name for that product you are marketing

2. Create articles and pages that will highlight the product and present it in a way that people would actually want to read the entire article. Keep it interesting, light hearted and give it personality.
Emphasize how their daily life could change if they were using your product.
Bullet-point the compelling points. People love bullet-points!
Ask your customers to provide a testimonial about the product that you can then add to your product’s squeeze page.

3 Offering the free reports mentioned always works well to get subscribers.
People always love something that is free!
Include only the necessary information and specific points on why they should purchase your product.

4. Place a box or button for subscribers to request free reports.
This helps build your marketing database. The best position for this is the topmost side of your page.

You can set up a mailing list and autoresponder system with iContact that will instantly add those people to your mailing list, and send them back an autoresponder thanking them for signing up, with a link to the download.
If possible, prevent using the word ‘FREE’ in your autoresponder message, as there are spam filters that may perceive this as junk mail, and your email may never reach it’s target.

5. Create traffic to your site that directly related to your product.
One of the best ways to do this is create your website in WordPress blog software. WordPress is not only easy to add new articles to, but also the search engines love it, and you can set it to ping a bunch of other blogs, sites and online services each time you post a new article, driving huge amounts of targeted traffic.
Write new articles regularly to keep existing readers interested, and new readers (and potential customers) coming in.
You can make life easier by adding free pre-written articles for your particular subject matter from EzineArticles, or ArticleCity.com

When you keep these articles coming it is pretty easy to get around 100 new targeted readers each day. As this number builds you will see your product selling like hotcakes!

You can also drive additional traffic to your site or product pages using Traffic generation lists such as ts25.com.
Sign up for a free account and either surf for credits or pay a small fee and reach thousands of customers every day.

About the Author:
Chris Bourke of WebSEOCoach.com and Devision Design Australia
Chris Bourke is an online marketer, professional web development and graphic designer, and all round nice guy who enjoys showing people how to make money online.

attraction-marketing.jpg

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Achieving the Millionaires Lifestyle Online

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Achieving the Millionaires Lifestyle Online

We have all encountered those days of waking up not wanting to go to work…The rush to get ready for work, then traffic chaos or trying to catch a train to get there, only to spend the day with a bunch of ‘team mates’ that you don’t really enjoy and a boss that stresses you out and doesn’t appreciate your hard work which is only really making him wealthy.

Then you go home, fighting the traffic chaos once again, have a few hours of personal time with your family, and then hit the pillow in preparation to do it all again.

I even know people that choose to live in a suburb they don’t really like just because they can be closer to their job. Isn’t that just totally nuts!!!??

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me this doesn’t sound like a ‘MIllionaires Lifestyle‘.

See, a Millionaires Lifestyle is not about BEING a millionaire, it’s about having the lifestyle…the freedom to do what you want, when you want, and still pay all your bills and have plenty of cash left over to enjoy life.

It’s very easily achievable, yet so many people choose the option I mentioned above instead.

After doing the daily 1.5 hour drive battling traffic to drive to the city every day, on top of working a 10 hour day for someone else, I decided to choose to have the what I consider the ‘millionaires lifestyle’.
I work from my home office in a nice residential island community, drive a nice european car, go for a swim in my pool during ‘work hours’, and go for a stroll along the waterfront or beach during the day. I can even wear boardshorts rather than a suit to work! But best of all, I am my own boss, I set my own financial income, and I love my ‘job’.

I don’t really call it a job, because it is more like a hobby I get rewarded financially to do.

After being on the ‘dark side’ in an office job for two long I decided it was time to choose the ‘Millionaires Lifestyle‘ option.

How is the Millionaires Lifestyle achievable?
We have all heard the stories that the internet can make some serious money, but yet many people don’t understand the internet’s full potential to harness the financial rewards. Online business can be extremely rewarding if done properly. You can achieve the Millionaires Lifestyle if you really want to, and by only spending a few hours or so each day. How does a 14 hour working week sound?!
This is achievable through online affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is the process of selling another persons products through your own webpage or blog and you make a commission on each sale. The commissions usually range from around 5% to a whopping 85% depending on what you are selling and the affiliate program you belong to. Setting up an affiliate plan actually costs nothing!
Your only real costs are your annual hosting and domain name, which is around $104 per year for both hosting and domain if you sign up with Webcrowd – www.Webcrowd.com.au.

Once you have your hosting you can either set up a webpage or a blog and with a little know-how on affiliate marketing you have created an online business. The beauty of an online business is your online ‘store’ is open 24 hours a day with worldwide exposure, which equals a lot of potential visitors, and more importantly , a lot of sales…most likely more than you could ever achieve in a normal business.

There are four basic rules to achieving the Millionaires Lifestyle:

1. You must have the right attitude
If you are planning on doing it just for the money, forget it! While the money is the target goal, internet marketing can be dull if you do not enjoy marketing, and unless your heart is in it you will tire quickly of it before it really blossoms for you.

2. Set an achievable goal, both financially and for the lifestyle you want.
Before starting your online venture jot down on a piece of paper why you are doing it, and the outcome you want from it.
The reasons to start it are easy..you may be sick of your job, want more income, want to work less, have more time with the kids, etc. But also plan the bigger picture…set the financial goal you want, and make it realistic. If you want to earn $100,000 a year than you need to make $277.72 per day, which is very achievable online. If you want to make 5 times that, it is also very achievable. Once you build the first system you simple duplicate it 5 times! Obviously more than a couple of hours a day is required though. You set a limit that suits your lifestyle plan.

3. You need to plan your marketing approach
Where most new online marketers go wrong is they have the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality. This is not the case.
If you really want to achieve success, like any online business, you need to market your business. Free online marketing tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Blogspot blogs, plus email marketing are a great way to attract new visitors and grow your database. Also it is recommended spending a little money on Google Adwords to get started. A $5 a day campaign is usually enough to generate a good response, and as your business grows spend a little more each day. The profits could surprise you!

4. You need to be patient and persistent!
Going back to Rule 1, you need to enjoy what you are doing as starting up can take a little while to really see initial results. Online Marketing is like fishing..you have to tempt them with the right bait and unless you keep throwing that line back out there and prepare to wait, you want get the fish. Patience brings home the big catch.

So if you are stuck in a job you don’t like, or would rather be by your swimming pool right now rather than stuck in the office ‘fish tank’, have a think about the ‘Millionaires Lifestyle’ you are missing out on.

Contact Devision Web Design and Online Marketing and we can help you get started to the lifestyle you deserve.

About the Author:
Chris Bourke is senior designer and SEO expert at Devision Design Australia, and founder of the Web SEO Coach website.

Follow Devision on Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/devision

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