I know your time is valuable so I’ll get right to the point.

Product owners and affiliates for the last couple years have lived a happy co-dependent existence. In the beginning, affiliates had limited choices. Today, it’s an ocean of opportunity.

The reason I’m writing you today is because I feel the industry needs a wake up call.

Here are the problems…

1. Affiliate marketers are becoming less dependent on product owners
2. Affiliates have more choices then ever before
3. Affiliates have evolved with the times but product owners have not
4. Product owners are relying too heavily on affiliates

Affiliates Don’t Need You Anymore

In the old days, an affiliate could simply link to a product owner and that … Click to continue »

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of five quick affiliate tips by guest blogger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also posted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
 — Michel Fortin

No product vendor likes potential affiliates to ask for free “review copies.” It reeks of inexperience and penny-pinching. If you want to promote a product and need to see what it looks like on the inside, just bite the bullet and pay for it like everyone else.

As an affiliate, you have two relationships to work: with your buyers, and with the product originator. When you try to go the cheap route, you burn too many … Click to continue »

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of five quick affiliate tips by guest blogger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also posted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
 — Michel Fortin

Affiliate marketing is not a “push button solution”… it’s just a different type of selling than product launch marketing or AdSense marketing.

You are not going to be able to just sign up as an affiliate to some program and expect to make money… you have to DO something with that link!

The big formula for internet marketing is:

List + Traffic = Offers.

When you sign up for something as an affiliate, that affiliate product or service is … Click to continue »

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of five quick affiliate tips by guest blogger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also posted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
 — Michel Fortin

As someone who runs affiliate programs for over 50 of my own products, I can tell you 99% of affiliates are worthless.

They’ll signup and send no traffic, or send traffic and only bring in a couple of sales. What’s the common thread behind all these affiliate failures I see again and again? It comes in two parts: not making an effort, and not bridging their mailing list to your offer.

I would be thrilled if an … Click to continue »

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five quick affiliate tips by guest blogger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also posted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
 — Michel Fortin

Stop being so lazy with affiliate marketing!

An affiliate program is where you can link to someone else’s offer with your special ID and get paid commission every sale you make. This process “seems” really hands-off and easy because there’s no product creation or customer support involved… just send traffic to a proven offer!

Here’s the problem.

Most marketers are lazy and don’t realize that affiliate marketing has its own disadvantages. It’s tougher to build a list … Click to continue »

It ticks me off when people spend too much time on headshots, graphics, and other name recognition devices when they should be focusing more on web sites that actually make money!

Branding is one of the last things you should worry about — so if you really want to get to the point where you’re working on branding to get that extra 5 percent boost in sales, get through these steps first…

The big formula is: List + Traffic = Offers.

Step 1: Choose Your Niche and Skill Level.

A niche is an area of expertise like copywriting, stress relief, PHP, article writing, etc., and a skill level … Click to continue »

Yesterday, Ed Dale posted an article to his blog that kind of struck me. In it, Ed submits that hard-sell marketing is better than soft-sell, even when people are jaded and annoyed with such aggressive approaches.

If you think I’m saying this because I prefer soft-sell approaches, think again.

The reason it struck me is that, and with all due respect to Ed, his post may be a tad misleading.

I agree with the fact that people today are annoyed, jaded, and even frustrated when buying products online — specifically, products in the Internet marketing industry. But I don’t think people are annoyed with hard-sell marketing at all.

They’re annoyed with … Click to continue »

If you checked out my previous post, “Websites That Write Your Salesletter For You,” I recommended Digg.com as one of the sites to help you write better headlines and create better hooks in sales copy.

Specifically, find popular news stories that grab attention, and model your headlines based on them using word-substitution.

For example: when I go to the site Digg.com and choose a random headline…

“The Dangers of Not Drinking”

I can turn that into a headline for myself.

That article title took something considered to be bad (drinking) and found a way to tell you that NOT doing it… is dangerous in some ways. The subject in this … Click to continue »

When you sell anything on the internet… whether you do it using e-mail marketing, forum marketing, blog posting… if you sell e-books, physical products, e-classes, even a newsletter… the best way to sell anything is using direct response sales copy.

But not all of us can be world-class copywriters like Michel Fortin. I consider myself a pretty sloppy copywriter, and althought I can whip up a headline, quick story, bullet point list of benefits, testmonials, feature list, guarantee and a call-to-action… I will never be a great copywriter.  Gary Halbert can’t hold my attention for longer than a few minutes, I’ve never read Scientific Advertising, so how do I … Click to continue »

When you use screen capture software for rapid video creation and record Camtasia videos with PowerPoints or MindMaps, the presentation process becomes super simple.

A video presentation reduces the reading time of a blog post from 5 to 10 minutes, to three minutes or less. That means you get a wider audience, more comments and more exposure.

To get more mileage out of an article, convert into a video using this very easy method that requires less than one minute of preparation per article. It relies on PowerPoint’s ability to import text files.

In just a few seconds, you can take your article, apply a couple of simple search-and-replace actions, import the … Click to continue »