It’s been a while since I last wrote on my Blog.
Well… no excuses but I was very busy with a new product that I am launching hopefully this week (I am waiting for ClickBank to approve it).

This brings me back to my last post. I left it with an open question: “How do you find affiliate marketers to promote your product”.

Like with any of my products, this one also has it own affiliate program. I am firmly believed in affiliate marketing. I am promoting others products and on the same time I use this channel to promote my own. It’s a great way to leverage your sales.

So how do you find affiliate marketers?

The first thing that you can do is to participate in related forums link DP (DigitalPoint). There are many of them so just do a search on Google and you will find bunch of them easily. The best is to find the forums dedicated to the network that you are going to publish your product.

Another option is to manage a list of affiliate marketers. This way every time you are launching a product with just a single click you let them know. It takes time to establish this kind of a mailing list but in the long run it’s worth it. You don’t need to put much effort on that because companies like AWeber offing a great way to manage a mailing list.

An immediate mailing list can be found at other publishers!
Find a publisher with a complementary product to yours. Write him an email with your offer. In most cases he will be happy to promote your product to his customers as long you are offering an affiliate program. You get a prefect mailing list and he earns his commission.

Affiliate Elite is a product developed by Brad Callen. Originally this product is for affiliate marketers. However not many are aware to the fact that publishers can use it to find the contact details of affiliate marketers. The idea is simple: you do a search for a product within your niche. Affiliate Elite will check who is promoting it. Once you have the results you can get the affiliate marketers details including their email address. All you have left to do is to send an email to that list with your affiliate program description. Just make sure not to spam them.

In my opinion affiliate marketers are very important to the products success. You should put the right effort to give them their needs and most of all the feeling that you are cherish their work. Do the best that you can for your affiliate marketers. The results will not be late to come.

Let’s get right to the bottom line. In order to make big money you need lots of sales. In order to make lots of sales you need lots of traffic. In order to get lots of traffic you MUST pay for it. But….. you don’t have to pay in advance. You can pay only after a sale was made. Sounds good, well it is. and we call it Affiliate Marketing

With PPC you Pay Per Click. With Affiliate marketing you pay per performance – for every sale the affiliate makes you pay a commission. Most of you already know it.

The big issue in the business is to attract more and more affiliate marketers to promote your product.
There are many ways to do so. On this post I will not cover them all (Yes you will have to visit my Blog again and to read the rest of this posts series )

The goal of affiliate marketers is to make money, the same as you. The offering is almost endless and you have to differentiate your product in a way. Your product and the things around it must support the affiliate marketers with their sales efforts.

Before you are running to develop a complete set of tools for affiliate marketers (which are absolutely important) you have to think about the most important obstacle – the product price, the pay out – How much money the end user need to pay.
Did you know that for a digital product with price tags less than $50 the chances to be sold are higher than a product that cost more than $100. You need measure very carefully what is the added value of your product to the consumer. How much the majority of the potential buyers will be willing to pay?

Suppose your market is estimate with 10,000 people. 10% will buy the product for $37 and only 2% will buy it for 97$. What is the price that you will choose to your product?

Affiliate marketers are well experienced with sales. It’s their professional. If you are not sure about the best price for your product, consult about it with them!
An experienced affiliate marketer can be your best advisor on this filed.

When you set the product price you need to decide about the commission percent – How much an affiliate marketer will get for every sale.
Ask yourself how much effort you need to put on your product on a daily basis. Usually e-Book is not a product that you need to give support in oppose to software. Therefore you will find that in most of the cases the commission for an e-Book is 75% (It’s the highest commission that a publisher can give on ClickBank).

Try to create a WIN WIN situation when you set the product price and the affiliate commission. If everyone can be happy that you can move to the next step – How to find the affiliate marketers to promote your product.
Read about it in my next post on this series.

An article that was published on MarketingSherpa website reveals some information about what affiliate marketers think of affiliate networks and which network is the most popular among affiliate marketers.

According to MarketingSherpa the top 5 affiliate networks are:

1. Commission Junction
2. LinkShare
3. Performics
4. ShareASale
5. Pepperjam

I bet that most people when they read this kind of an article sign up with the networks on the list that they don’t already members with.

Before you do so allow me to give you a little advise. It refers to any affiliate marketer but especially to a newbie: Do not follow the networks that on the mainstream.

CJ (commission junction) is the most popular affiliate network with the largest number of affiliate marketers. They have a great system and a great service. However, wouldn’t it be wiser to find a small network with some exclusive offers? On CJ it will be hard for a newbie to earn money (especially with PPC). There are lots of experienced affiliate marketers (like me ) that doing very well on CJ. A newbie will find that it’s not easy to compete with veteran affiliate marketers and most likely he will end up loosing lots of money.

At least every week I find another new affiliate network. There are lots of them. Find a network that has a product that is related to your niche and promote it. Better to find exclusive affiliate offers because a lot of the affiliate programs can be found in several different networks in parallel. An exclusive offer on a non-mainstream network almost for sure grantee less competition with other affiliate marketers. The downside with non-mainstream affiliate networks is that it takes times to find the right products to promote and also you need to carefully read the user agreement and some more documents for each network to make sure that a real company is behind it.

Now it’s a good time to start promoting your e-Book website.

There are few simple things that you can do right away in order to get traffic to your e-Book website (and any other website):

1. Create an eye catching signature in a forum profile. Look for forums within your e-Book niche. Participate in those forums. Don’t talk about your e-Book directly. Help others with their questions. They will notice your signature and will eventually visit your website.
2. Use social bookmarking like Digg and StumbleUpon. Submit your website while choosing the right tags.
3. Search for Blogs within your niche. Post valuable comments on those Blogs. Do not use your website URL in the comment body. It will consider as a spam. Most of the Blogs platforms have a dedicated filed for this purpose.
4. Do Article Marketing. Write few articles with topics that close to your e-Book topic. Write about the problems that your e-Book can solve. While some will say otherwise, in my opinion do not add your e-Book website URL in the article body. I believe it defect the credibility of the article. Use the article resource box to add an eye catching signature. Do not write long articles because this will distance the reader from the resource box literally.

Those free ways are great to start with. You will see results very shortly after you will start take action.

In the long run doing all of the above can be very demanding. Although you can do very well using those methods, but you can do better if you will know how to leverage your efforts correctly. It’s wise to start with those methods to examine how the market reacts to your product without spending lots of effort or money.

In the next post on the series I will talk about one of the most important distribution channels available these days – Affiliate marketing.

You went through the process of writing an e-book: You did the research; you even hired a copywriter that did a great job with your text. You converted it to a PDF and now you are ready for the moment that you waited for – to sell your e-book.

Now you need a website to publish your e-book on. Better to have a dedicated website rather to use a shared one. These days you can get a domain including a hosting plan for less than $10/month. (Like with GoDaddy.com).

You need a polished website, designed correctly, introducing your e-book in the right way. It’s a pure sale page that supposes to direct the visitor to a single conclusion – to purchase your e-book.

I am sure you have seen at least one sale page where webmasters are trying to offer their product. There isn’t one way to develop a good sale page. Actually no one can tell you in advance, what is the best sale page for your e-book.

I would recommend starting with at least two different sale pages.
Try them both in parallel and check which of them convert the best. Don’t jump into conclusions after one sale. Collect enough data to support your conclusion.

Drop the sale page that converts the worst. Make a new sale page based on the sale page that converts the best. Modify it in order to get a better conversion rate. Now that you have a new second sale page, try them both again and check your results. Keep repeating this process. Try to improve your conversion rate as high as possible. It’s not an easy process but remember that a higher conversion rate meaning more sales.

For those of you who feel that they don’t have enough creative ideas or the knowledge to develop a sale page, there are some tools that can help you with this task. One of the tools that you might consider to use called Instant Cash Copy.