What are Affiliate Programs? Tips & Tricks

Introduction

Everyone these days talks about making money on the internet, about secret online techniques, adsense buzz and other realted stuff. Not only having a website or business makes someone a pro and remember that if you just received your first $100 through Google's AdSense, doesn't mean you should already have started a website, or more of them, explaining about how success is made over the internet those days and give advice like "pros" do etc. Nowadays, having a website on and running is not a matter or "how?" anymore..It's a matter of "who?" and "when?". The first question("who?") might never unfold its real answer, as we might never know who really sits behind that particular website/business. It might be someone just like the average, who had just received his/her first $100 or whatever and already started his "meaningful miraculous advices", OR, it just might be THE one you had always wanted to hear of. But the truth is, we don't actually care who is behind all of that as long as he/she just does or says what we wanted to see or hear about.
For the second question("when?"), the answer is so generic and dim yet so full of sense, you might just not be able to see it : "NOW !!" It all happens now, as you keep reading this article about affiliation and how this works, almost 12000 new websites, regardless of their nature(content, search results, ecommerce or sub-domains) have already been created and hosted somewhere in the world. The truth is, you don't even need to know HTML, XHTML, Java or whatever to create a website, as long as programmers and software companies figured it out already for you. You just simply go to a free hosting service such as GeoCities, Aol, FreeWebs or whatever, which support template designs and boom..in just minutes your fully functional website works, depending on what you do with it(fill it up with some content, images, music a.o). They give you your free sub-domain, something derived from their original of course, slap your page with some ads from Google or whatever and that just works. Talking about the ads, the money goes to their pocket, regardless of the type of website you're promoting, content, appearance or traffic. All the clicks, impressions, CPM and other goes to them and thus, you actually help their services, "paying" not only for what you use, but you may also pay some more without even knowing it..so, nothing to lose for them, just some space on their servers.

Main target

What if you created a content-driven website, or you own(or just got) some online commerce site? Content creator or online merchant, you'd want to generate some revenue off of your pages or, for the second case, bring even more traffic that could be converted in to real customers for buying what you sell. That's the ultimate goal, right? But just how to do that?
Here's how : AFFILIATED PROGRAMS. One of the oldest, yet the most efficient strategy almost everyone could implement in their business or whatever, to generate the traffc/sales they seeked for, without moving a finger(literally). So, here's how affiliates work, how you should or shouldn't use this technique, for your own profit, for enhancing your website or e-business to the almost maximum.

What Are Affiliate Programs

For everyone's understanding, "affiliate programs" represent that way of bringing in associates(usually other websites) for promoting your product/material to their visitors, linking back to you(or not, if using special automated refferal software), thus, finally resulting in generating you sales or traffic. In return, you pay those associates some percent of their sales, motivating them to bring sales or traffic to you, or, in some cases, link exchange(also called "linking back"/"backlinks") is preffered. By using link/banner exchange you actually provide your associate with traffic/sales brought directly from your site to his(when your visitors click on his links) and, likewise, he/she displays your links/banners on their page(s), thus generating you back-links(extremely useful for search engine ranking) and, of course, traffic or sales.
The payment system is made upon an agreement, proitable for both sides of course. You could pay them like presented earlier, by a percentage of the sales they brought in, or, in case you just wanted traffic, you might get some money out of your pocket to pay them on a regular basis, whenever they bring visitors to your site. But this lately statement is to be used only by professionals, because you should posess some advanced piece of software/script that first analyses the nature of each particular visitor(to exclude automated bots or even the associate himself clicking abussively) and only then, logging the amount of money that should be paid back to that particular affiliate.
When initiating an affiliate strategy for your website(s) you should take into account that in such a "transaction", there are usually at least 3 parties involved : The Merchant Site(you in this case), The Affiliate Site(s) and The Final Customer. But not all the time this applies, as you might agree with your affiliates to also display back-links to your affiliate program, thus resulting in level-affiliation and also having to pay them back a small percent for bringing level 2 affiliates and the ideea could go on for an infinite number of levels(somehow like MLM, the same ideea). But, at the end of the day, affiliation might just be a good way of getting the word out about someone's website and/or service, product or material, so, just a good way of selling/getting service without having to do it yourself.

Maintaining an Affiliate Program

Not much is to be done(in concept), affiliate programs being quite simple at the first glance, but there is much to be done in behind-the-scenes processes, for making an affiliate program to work properly. So, like stated earlier, somehow you/they must keep track of the exact data being sent/received. That means : how many people clicked their/your link, how many of those ended up actually buying your product/service or simply doing what it was intended to do by clicking that link, who-is-who meaning that the visitors must be real visitors and not bots or the actual associate and finally how many visitors actually see the merchant's link or banner on an associate site.
Also, someone has to assure that the affiliates get paid or whatever promised to them and that the payment is received as promised, instantly or at least, in time. This means, a true affiliate program must be risk-free for both sides. The merchant assures their earlier statement and promisses made to their associate, thus, an affiliate can not possibly lose something(e.g. money), but also, the merchant must think his/her affiliate program wisely, not to turn in debt himself by scams or simply errors.
This kind of job is a terrific way for companies, even web-service providers to ensure their influx of customers or, simply, visitors, but on the other hand, most "solo" webmasters these days consider this method time consuming, resource consuming and exhaustive. You make the pick..either make money, or just wish to make that money.

How Payment Works

There are usually three basic types of affiliate payment :

Pay-Per-Click or Cost-Per-Click(PPC or CPC) : When the merchant/webmaster pays his/her associates only when a visitor clicks on the merchant's link/banner being displayed on the associates webpage(s). This type of action usually requires only that a user clicks(if interested) on the merchant's link and not concerning on whether that particular visitor actually buys or not that merchant's product/service(s). This is the simplest of'em all, actually the most wide-spread advertising model on ad-networks, such as Google AdWords/AdSense themselves(works on the same principles of PPC/CPC).

Pay-Per-Sale(or Cost-Per-Sale) : The name tell it all about it. The merchant only pays its associates whenever a customer(that originated from that associate's page(s)) actually buys that particular product being promoted or, anything included in the affiliate program.

Pay-Per-Lead(or Cost-Per-Lead) : Viewed as behind-the-scenes stuff, this method only pays its associates when one made a visitor actually sign-up on or for that merchant's services or products or simply for that merchant's newsletters. After that, the merchant can use that "lead"(its information, usually name,e-mail,addresse) to send back newsletters, salesletters or whatever, or, even make up a list of leads and then, sell that list to some other merchant seeking for that. And the list of actions can continue here, but, the ideea is, you may already be on some merchant's list of leads, thus resulting in your bulk email folder being "spammed". So, if using this technique, avoid spamming your visitors.

Additionally, there are many other payment and affiliate administration plans, many derived from those above, like Pay-Per-Impressions, also called Pay-Per-View etc. Also, as stated above, many merchants "amplified" these methods, resulting in Two-Tier programs(the level structured kind, with affiliates of affiliates etc), similar to MLM kind of structures and, Residual-Programs, when an associate keeps receiving money whenever a visitor they earlier sent to a merchant's site keeps buying products/services from that merchant, thus, an associate getting back a percent of each of what that visitor bought.

Affiliate Networks

Affiliate networks, also known as "affiliate brokers" do the hard job(although automated) both for "associates" or for those who wish to become an associate and for the merchant site, on the other side. To sum up, affiliate networks actually act as mediators between the two parties : Merchant sites which seek exposure or sales and thus, offering an affiliation program and Affiliates(associates), usually people seeking just the right percent of the transation. Webmasters don't actually need to already have their own affiliate program, because that's what most Affiliate Networks do : Offer a "back-office" for merchant sites, from where, with easy steps, a webmaster can start an affiliation program, that will be hosted and promoted, under some Terms and Policies, on that Affiliate Network's directory.
Affiliate Networks are basically advertising networks, only that they don't advertise just for traffic or exposure of some members, but they assure exposure for their members' needs, in order to assure business success. This being provided, we don't actually know which derived from which..Affiliate Networks from Ad-Networks or vice-versa?!
But one thing we know for sure : One of the pioneers of affiliation(or even maybe the "firestarter") is Amazon.com, back in 1996, when founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, started developing this ideea as an internet marketing strategy. Their affiliate program still works today, while they would pay anyone displaying a little ad on his/her webpage(s), a percent of each sale of that particular book or whatever, being promoted on one's site. That's quite a good starting point for beginners, although the system hasn't got that flair anymore, as many affiliate networks made it up, the most visited and used being ClickBank, which most of you heard of. If not, go and see what's all about inside. Again, a great starting point, as some "premium" users make their living(or part of it) from promoting ClickBank members' products. Oh..forgot to mention : join for FREE.
As stated above, considerable features of affiliate networks are that : users wishing to be affiliates just have to do a search for material(products/service) they think they could best promote, there's no limit in how many products could one promote, merchants don't have to bother about sourcing and hard tracking their stats, affiliate networks offer aditional features such as tracking your orders,your affiliates,affiliate codes,landing pages,thankyou pages,affiliate-recruiting pages,number of hits and many other features. Merchants usually have to pay though, one-time fees to join and start selling. After that, the affiliate network also cuts a percent(usually up to 20%) of each sale a merchant makes. So if you try selling a $40 ebook for example, recruit a few affiliates..after an affiliate sells let's say one copy of the book(using his special code, that's linked to your merchant account), the network system first cuts the network's percent(20%), then the associate's percent(that's up to you, although nobody would promote for under 30%) and only after that, you get the remaining part of the sum. So, if we do the maths, with a network's 20% and an affiliate's 30%, that's 50%..What remains is your 50%(and that's the best you could get) of the deal.
You could try implementing different strategies, although the most respected is to give the affiliate a good slice, big marketers these days offering up to 70% or even go to extreme, just for the selling..but that's another behind-the-scenes sales technique that we'll later reveal, as those last marketers have greater wisely implemented material or services/links inside their ebooks or whatever they sell, offering them a greater return in the end.
To sum up, affiliate networks don't reffer just to those passionate about promoting or those professional merchants with great marketing techniques, but to WWW(WorldWideWeb). You should read their Terms first though, as many affiliate networks claim they don't promote illegal, adult or such other kind of material.

How to Promote

For obtaining best results both as a merchant, but mostly as a promoter(affiliate), you should well plan a number of ways of how to best promote your(their) products everywhere you go. First of all, stop thinking about this as a hobby or just a get rich scheme. It is none of them. Like most do with AdSense or other advertising networks, they see this more as an apportunity or hobby rather than a business..and believe it or not, IT IS A REAL BUSINESS in action, maybe even better that the average internet business.
After deciding if you really want to create yourself a stream of income and earn some good money or just lose your time, play around and make mom and dad pay the electricity bills, you should either consider the following advertising techniques or leave this blog(at least tell others about it if you do so).
This is the part when advertising and affiliation "colide"..or at least interract. You should consider following some of the well-known promotion techniques presented here, that we see and interact with everyday, but we never knew how effective those little tricks were until now.
To name it all-in-one, it is called linking(to the merchant's sales page of course), but several means of linking are available. Which one you'd best promote with, is a choice of yours, but we sugest you try them all, or at least those which you saw giving best results(this is why you need rigurously planing your affiliate BUSINESS step-by-step, day by day in your special, personal BUSINESS Schedule).

Text-Linking(or backlinks) : The most wide spread "technique"(if we may call it so), that survived until today, from the begining of the HyperTextMarkupLanguage(HTML). You can use text links by using a HTML hyperlink, simply stated as those "a href" structures(use a HTML tutorial by doing a web-search), by implementing such simple text structures(usually coloured in blue, that redirects you to another webpage) on your site(content is best), or on other sites, such as forums or even blogs. A neat technique of implementing such stuff on others' forums or blogs is that you might try finding business forums or business blogs(must be in your niche right?) and give them comments to their posts, including your link. But try not to look as advertising your stuff..nobody likes it and you'll risk being banned from there. Nowadays, when commenting on blogs, they offer you to input Your Name, WEBSITE, mail and then to comment, but thet'll automatically block any HTML structures in the body of your comment. But cry no more..look back and READ THE LAST SENTENCE again, please.
By requesting your website address, your name being displayed above the body of the post at the "posted by" statement will be highlited in blue, linking back to your site if clicked by anyone. Boom!! This way you're not just offered the chance that someone might just click on your name(although there are small chances), but you're offered another great thing, that helps tremendously in search engine ranking(Google, Yahoo etc.) : BACKLINKS from other sites, covering same niche, to your, or your merchant's site, but through your affiliate code. So you could just shoot 2 birds at the same time. Cool huh?!

Banner-Linking : What is there to say? We see banners everyday, all over the place, on every site, for promoting other's products or websites. Animated or just static, banner are a great visual way of advertising, although most visitors(including you) these days, get distracted by banners(not in the good way) and leave those sites or report them as spam-sites, if their banners are too big, too many or if you SPAM through pop-ups, pop-unders and other kind of framing for implementing banners. The best way is displaying a static banner with good design, not too large, somewhere at the top of your site,or, on one side on it. But if you do not own a site, no problem. You could display your banner or Text-Link, pointing to your affiliate "http" address, by joining an advertising network, such as Google AdWords(paid) or Autohits(earn credits by opening a separate page in your browser and start viewing other's pages or again, buy credits) a.o. .

ScreenSaver-Linking ; Although not as complicated as it may seem and not actual direct linking, scrensaver linking is not new to the market. Some marketers created automated screensavers that you can download(after creating your own account with them, to start advertisng too) and after installing it as a normal screensaver, each time your computer enters "pause state", instead of an image-driven or animated screensaver, on your screen will appear other members' websites. By automatically viewing their sites, you earn credits, thus providing you throotle to start displaying your site(affiliate or personal) on others' screensavers, that signed-up just like you.

Advertising Campaigns : The best resource to use if you want to drive quality traffic to your site or to your affiliate site. By signing-up with a good network, such as Google AdWords, you can not fail. You can expect low interest in your product if you just had bad lucks, but this rarely happens. You see Google ads being displayed on more than 85% of the entire WorldWideWeb, stated inside those borders named "Ads by Google". But that is an entire industry, with advertisers paying to display their ads(such as you in this position) and, publishers receiving money every time a visitor clicks on an ad placed in such a "Ads by Google" table placed on publishers' websites. As a publisher, how you choose to advertise is a very risky business, as you have to place a bid and attentively choose your KEYWORDS. For this process, we sugest you first learn the basics of advertising campaigns(especially on Google), get a keyword-suggestion software(best use Good Keywords) and first get a list of the best targetting, yet highest paying keywords and, only after that start your advertising campaign, that again, is not a kids play, it's REAL BUSINESS.

How do Affiliate Networks Know?

You may be asking "How do they know when a visitor clicks on my link? How do they know the visitor accesses my affiliate site? How do they know all of that??". Well, the visitor doesn't directly see the merchant site, but a landing page that's stored on the affiliate network server instead. Speaking for ClickBank for example, users obtain a URL like xxxxx.merchant_site.hop.clickbank.net , where xxxxx is your obtained personalized code, merchant_site is the registered member name for the specified merchant you applied for and the rest is the ClickBank affiliate redirection server.
When someone clicks on the link, banner or whatever pointing to that URL, the server machine records a hit to your database, thus telling them what affiliate sent a visitor to the merchant's site. Then, the visitor is redirected to the merchant's site, storing cookies on that user's machine, to always know if that visitor the affiliate sent to the merchant converted into a customer or was just a simple visitor. All depends on the terms specified between the merchant and the affiliate again, if the contract enclosed pays for hits, then that's all you need. If the merchant sells something, then hope your visitors convert into customers.
But hoping, wishing or dreaming of customers has nothing to do with real success. Of course..if you stay just waiting visitors to somehow convert into customers, it may work but most of the times it just doesn't. Try to understand the customer's thinking first..how would you think if you ended up on a sales page trying to feed you some book or whatever??
The truth is, there's more than just signing up as an affiliate, and even more than just displaying text-links or banners on your site. Why that? Simple : What if you own a site about animals and you suddenly display a link or banner pointing to a book about "space-shuttle engine repair"??? The point is, at the end of the day, CONTENT IS KING !! If you have a low rating site or even a well visited one about something and suddenly try to sell something that has nothing to do with it, you just blew everything up. So, never make different niches interract..THEY WON'T !!
Instead, if you don't have a site related to what you sell, limit yourself to doing a search about what your merchant sells and try the little techniques we talked about earlier, with the forum and blog "masked" posting.
But still, the best results, with less worries and pain about finding niches yourself, remains the targetted advertising, through specialized Ad Networks. Those networks automatically detect what you sell by semantically and lexically analizing your text-ad and only then, display it along others, only on related sites. So the conversion rate would increase tremendously from the beginning to the very end, as your ad(s) would be shown only to users interested for the material you are selling.

Whether you choose to sell as a merchant or wish to earn some good income from the online boom, you now know how affiliate programs work.

Big Marketers' Search Engine. Big Marketers' Blog. Think BIG

The Big Secrets Behind MLM

Multi-Level-Marketing or simply MLM as you may like to call it, has developed throughout centuries or at least decades of 'smart' marketing practices and over-planned miraculous strategies that at least 90% of those, finally, all failed. This type of both offline and nowadays online self-called 'hype' has actually failed to succeed in really promoting and providing the type of financial-freedom it's been always talked about. The truth is, this type of business, if we may call it so, has rather created financial-dependence most of the times for those who attended such 'infamous seminars and/or webminars(the new culture)' and seldom succeeded in providing solid-base knowledge about what you are really doing by joining such a venture, about what the profits are both for you and most important for your menthor and/or refferer.

Maybe you`ve noticed we called it a 'venture'. Yes, because that's what it`s really all about. Actually it is even a `joint venture` if you like to call it this way, you have all the rights. Let's get a little bit further into detail and start digging on what MLM really is about by its definition. Well, it is actually self-explanatory : Multi(points to multiple users in a refferenced downline and thus resulting in multiple x multiple potential sources of income, the buyers) - Level(it points to the fact that all this `business` is about is creating promoter levels which depend on one another. Somehow trying to establsh order in the chaos and thus `organizing` marketers in a pyramid kind of hierarchy, but finally, resulting more in chaosed organising and anarchy) -Marketing(well, what could be said more about this term that is 100% self-explanatory?! That this pseudo-business model uses the most wide-spreaded type of generating revenue, known since ancestral times, to create a source of income, resulting upwards the stream, following levels one by one, reverse, from bottom to top).

To sum up, the MLM type of business is actually some sort of degenerated ilussion of creating yourself a solid source of income by actually promoting others and those themselves promoting others and such. You got the idea : there is no stop, you actually never know who the top refferer was, you are never provided with solid information on how the internal scheme works, just the external `beauty` of the system and of course, when puzzled with how the external system works, you hardly get the idea and never try to track it all up and find out how it actually started and what that system is really based upon. What is it that its base consists of? What is it that makes it work? How come some extremely talented `guru` fellow-marketers just spilled out those highly valued secrets? How come they are such good people and how come that, at the end of the day, it's them who are the most grateful, thank to you, the average nobody?! How???

Good question. And the answer is : YOU..Your unawareness..Your first slight, yet huge mistake to take them for belief in the first place. The million dollar answer is that the `system` never actually existed at all !! The `miraculous MLM scheme` couldn't even start at all or see the daylight if people such as you didn't exist. The true scheme and strategy behind the system is that the is no system nor proof that it could work in the first place. It is all well planned way before by such `gurus` that may already have some knowledge and experience in the field(of compromising unaware people such as you for their downline). They already have a solid base consisting of leads or level-nods as you may like to call it, true-believers that go way beyond of your thinking and that never ask themselves "Why?". Such people, true advocates, believe in their `gurus` like we believe in God, just because they never had the chance to make some true money for themselves. Thus, becoming known in their field, such `gurus` don't even think about how are they going to make people take in on their new, overnight ideas that they make up every day, sometimes just for the fun, but most of the times for their own income.

That's right. The only ones wich really generate automated sources of income, the ones which really win in this business are of course its initiators, its creators, its `gurus`. All they have to lose is their time(infinte amounts) and maybe some little money for putting it all together, money that..oh..by the way, it's not really theirs, it's the revenue generated by their downlines of course. Prety fun huh? Not at all. The truth is, they all claim that when joining their venture(which by the way is always presented by the terms "New", "The Best", "Ground Floor Opportunities" a.o. but never, NEVER presented as "MLM") you get so many opportunities, you'll need to spend actually more time that money and you'll have the chance to chose from thousands of `FREE` resources that they give you `Royalty FREE` only if you join. Now there's the catch!! This is when you're so euphoric about it, you're actually puzzled about the amount of information you just can't understand for the moment but you THINK you will anyway because let's face it : it's all about the money right?? ...WRONG !!

This is actually the `distract it to well interact with it` part. It's the compromise part, when they already have your attention, presenting you not only the greatest opportunities of all, that, by joining you will take part and act with each one of them(e.g. Large amounts of money that tend to grow exponentially by the number of refferers below your level and through other `secret` yet `legal` means), but you actually get, like presented above, a ton of `Royalty FREE` content and services that's worth...hundreds..thousands..my God..hundreds of thousands of dollars. But hey..you get it all `FREE`. Now, ain't that some action huh? NOT AT ALL!! The truth behind this `Royalties` is in fact a simple one, that, most of that garbage(after all) material comes from their own `illuminated` minds or not even, but from their `guru`-also friends, from `guru`-also friends of `guru` friends of friends. Hmm..In the end, the trick is a quite simple one : Either they wrote it(wich I really doubt it), either(the most common) they have paid ghost-writers to edit `miraculous` e-books, `super-intelligent` content creation software and other such related material. ALL GARBAGE !! Now, ask yourself : "Who in the world would give tons of `secret`, `miraculous` material for `FREE`, but not only that..that's the easiest of all..they give you first of all, the big opportunity to start a `home-based` business that in a couple of months/weeks helps you tremendously increase your income and just `Fire your boss cause you are the big-shot now!!` - WRONG AGAIN !!

Like said before, most of that material comes from paid ghost-writers(for a few bucks of course), from friends that know a bit programming and create some overnight `miraculous` content-creation or article-creation software that, in the end, is no better than grandma's old kitchen blender : open the cup, throw in some ripped files from old books of yours that you found in your mom's library, add some coloured paper-cuts, spill a little milk over it and start blending...The result? Uhmm..A `great` mix..OR NOT !! It's like giving that garbage to someone else to drink it, telling him/her it'll cure deseases and wait for miracles to start happen. It didn't?! Oh well..Failed again with our childish, no good, zero-proof `coloured-paper-milkshake' method. Back to the drawing board..let's start dreaming of some awesome traffic-generator for `suckers` that would believe it generates zillions of hits per month. Ha-ha..isn't being a `guru` fun?? Hmm..


--- End of Part One : Stay tuned for Part Two of "The Big Secrets Behind MLM", revealing even more `bullet-proof` techniques that are far from being unbreakable - "The MLM Scams"---

Big Marketers' Search Engine. Big Marketers' Blog. Think BIG

How to Network Efficiently

Networking is the art of making and utilizing contacts. The goal of networking is to create a list of people and information, usually called leads, that can be automated using different auto-responsers a.o. automated software to directly increase the 'look-after' and the quality of your product or service, decrease both customer and product quality attrition, and most importantly, leave your competition wondering how you won a job they never knew was available.

Many small business owners don't want to network properly because they get scared of the unknown and think its about shoving your credit/debt card in someone's pockets and boasting about what you do. In fact, networking is actually about getting to know people whom you can help and who can help you ten times back.

Most business people don't know how to make networking an effective business opportunity and tool, says networking expert Mr. Steven M. Krauser, President of Network Associates, Hicksville, N.Y. : "If the result of your networking is a stack of business cards in your top right hand desk drawer and not a lot of additional business, then it may be time for you to re-evaluate your methods", he notes.

Krauser says small business owners should approach meeting people using two goals: get to know as many people as possible, and get them to know you. He then recommends the following four steps to make your networking work:

Give and get information

Networking is a two-way street. When you meet someone, you want to ask them about their business, if succeeded then how they did it and then tell them about yours. Start with the basics - name, company, affiliation, position, nature of business, etc. You next want to find out if you can benefit each other. Try covering these topics:

• What does your company do?
  
  
• What types of clients do you serve?
  
  
• Who makes the buying decision within a firm for each of your services and/or products?
  
  
• What sets you apart from your competition?

Evaluate the value of the contact

Once you have the preliminary information, you need to decide if this person is worth 'meeting '(even if talking only virtually) again and creating a relationship with. Can you help them and can they help you? The answer should be "yes" to both.

Most marketers out there those days are just hungry for 'leads' and do not care anymore about the quality of their contacts. It's like they have somehow forgotten about the basic principles of quality product marketing, they have forgotten it all and all that those marketers would care is to have 1000 poor, random, sometimes duplicate or incorrect 'leads' in their downline, so they can daily spam all of those with their already-known, over-used and most of the times inefficient products or services, rather than 100 fresh, power-user, wealthy and most of all content/product friendly contacts in their downline.

This is why nowadays, most of the beginners never find their niche(s), always fail in promoting what they intended, fail in maintaining a fresh 'leads' list and thus, finally, wondering why they never succeeded like promissed by their so-called gurus. This is where the 80/20 rule comes in place : like always said, 80% of all succesfull sales comes from that particular 20% of your 'power-users' or how we like to call them 'content/product friendly' contacts or leads. So why having a 1000 or a 10 000 over-used, already 'spam-bored' downline that seldom mimics any interest in your product, content or service and not to forget that, you probably paid for most of those leads and, if not, you probably paid for someone to teach you the 'miraculous' strategies and/or lend you some 'infamous' php or java script(if talking online) that 'converts like crazy?!'. Why not have a decent 100 list of contacts or even more if you are a trustworthy marketer, that really generates most of your sales because they really are interested in what you sell and/or advertise? First of all, try targeting those 20% of your leads that really interest you and without any offence, simply erase the rest. Why keeping unwanted 'garbage', if you mean garbage/spam to them also??

Another point is to look for people who are truly interested in helping others solve a problem, no strings attached. In other words, don't think of yourself as a networker but as a problem solver, and look for those same characteristics in someone you will consider adding to your personal network.

Form a strategic alliance

A network is not a collection of business cards, but of people. Take the time to understand the needs, the 'hot-spots' and finally the long-term target(s) of those in your network. If you've chosen members wisely, this should be a pleasure. And make sure that you educate them completely about what you do and whom you do it with. Give each other updates and encouragement. In effect, you become each others' sales people.

Remember that the purpose of networking is not to get your contact's business; instead, you're trying to get business from everyone this person knows.

You should also be able to turn to those in your network for management ideas, advice, leads, even vendor recommendations. You will learn from each other and contribute to each other's growth, both in terms of profit and performance.

Maintenance

As your contact base grows, you have to re-evaluate the people in your information loop. Practice effective time management skills and prioritize your contacts. You will want to get in touch most often with those that can be most useful to you. They will become your inner circle.

Be careful never to burn bridges; you never know when someone will be able to help you, or when you will be able to help them. If you feel as though someone is not useful to you right now, you still will want to check in with them now and again, because they may become important down the road. In other words, be nice to everybody because you never know where they'll show up.

Big Marketers' Search Engine. Big Marketers' Blog. Think BIG

Big Marketers' Search Engine

Before getting into real business, we would like to welcome you to the latest in Web 2.0 marketing search engines. BMSE or "Big Marketers' Search Engine" as you may like to call it comprehenses all that internet marketing resources can mean, thus offering you, the end-user, the unique possibility of searching on a specific topic regarding online marketing and not only, enclosing the range of results to a very narrow spectrum. Many other useless such "custom" search engines have been developed lately but without visible results at all.
Nowadays, already surfing through the Web 2.0 era, marketers need a fast, easy yet powerful engine to help them harness the power of the best web resources out there, providing that most of the well-known "get rich quick" techniques or "multi-level" schemes have already been worn out and OUT of the serious search indexes such as Google, Dmoz, Overture a.o.
Therefore, BMSE comes in handy for those serious, opportunist marketers that always look for the best resources and news out there, for those who always like to stay informed, for those who like to always have their stuff tuned-up for the latest demands out there on the Web 2.0 ultimate online business era.
We hope you feel like being one of those, big marketers out there, we hope you think big.

Big Marketers' Search Engine. Big Marketers' Blog. Think BIG

BMSE :: Already a hype

Thinking of online success, the early opening of the new "Big Marketers' Search Engine" couldn't be thought of as different. We initiated the project a little way back, but BMSE finally saw the light on the 25th of March. Nothing went wrong until 3 days after, and if you tried to use BMSE for a search, then you all know what we're talking about.
Google disabled it. Yes, they actually temporarily disabled the displaying of results for anything you tried to search with it, claiming we violated their "Terms of Policy". Well, we didn't do cloacking, we didn't do result forwarding, we didn't display any pop-ups at all, we didn't use any traffic boost technique..then what was it?!
Astonishing as the answer may be, we couldn't believe it too. We actually exceeded the number of standard queries with our new engine. What was that number then, you may think?! Well..think of it as exactly 1768 unique search queries in only 3 days. |WoW| !!
That really is big. That's why we called it this way, although we didn't imagine it would be that big, it seems that BMSE is really proud of its name and already taking over.
So if you're ambiguous about BMSE, our Google-powered, custom search engine..well, think again : We actually search only 200 web sites and entire domains, all hand picked, all carefully reviewed and added to our database, not by some crawlers or bots, but by specialized people.
As you may have seen on our front page, we do not accept volunteers, so everything in our database is entirely updated only by us, by hand and not by anyone who may wish to put their fingerprint over. We do not plan to surpass the number of 200 entries currently in our database, as we want to give you the best results for your searches and not something like a couple of million or even thousand results.
For example, let's try something extremely common..try searching the term "internet" using BMSE. That really should be big right? How common is that? How many results from all over the world should you get at all? A couple of million is still little. But wait..go down the results and click "Search Within Results" at the bottom of the page.. 141 results??! Now that is ACCURATE !!
Not to mention other great options for "Refining" your results to the maximum possible using our tested labels and still other great resources are there to be discovered. We put our faith in the Web 2.0 user, we put our faith in BMSE, we put our faith in your online sucess, we put our faith in you. Use "Big Marketers' Search Engine". More is still to come, read "Big Marketers' Blog".

Big Marketers' Search Engine. Big Marketers' Blog. Think BIG.