Harness the Power of Offering Freebies to Your Affiliate Site's Visitors

By , December 24, 2009

Who in his right mind would refuse a freebie? Out of 10 people you ask, only about one or two will forego a freebie for some strange reason. The rest will gladly accept it. It’s simply a part of human nature to be appreciative of gifts, particularly useful ones. This is also something that advertisers and business owners understand fully well and thus use to their advantage.

In affiliate marketing, the use of freebies can be especially beneficial, provided of course, that you understand how to deploy them strategically. Find out how to use the power of offering freebies to your affiliate site’s visitors and reap the rewards:

Freebies should be integrated into your marketing campaign

Freebies can be quite powerful as marketing tools for affiliate marketing. If visitors to your website find that free stuff is available, they will stick around and be more willing to come back for more but only if they find it relevant to their needs ? the very reason they came to visit your website in the first place.

Consider each affiliate marketing campaign you perform and find out how to use freebies strategically. Just because something is free doesn’t automatically mean that people will visit your affiliate website and grab what you offer. There has to be a relevance between the freebie and the main product or service you are promoting.

Let’s say your main product is an e-book that teaches the secrets of the affiliate marketing trade to affiliates. A good freebie to offer with this campaign would be a short report on the top 10 mistakes that affiliates make that cause failure in affiliate marketing. Or you could offer a freebie in the form of a script that could help affiliates track their own stats.

Remember that the power of freebies when offered in affiliate marketing is only limited to its relevance. The free stuff should be something that can supplement the main product or enhance its use. Otherwise, your visitors will simply have no reason to try to obtain it.

Offer something better

Just because you’re offering freebies to your affiliate site’s visitors doesn’t mean you should allow them to completely ignore your premium offers. If you let this happen, forget about earning an income from your affiliate site.

Remember that all those free stuff you offer are part of your strategy to attract more visitors and affiliate prospects to your website. If you find out later that you’re dealing with visitors who are mainly freeloaders, you might want to rethink your career as an affiliate marketer and switch to becoming a charitable foundation instead.

Always offer your affiliate site’s visitors some form of incentive to persuade them to purchase, subscribe or sign up for membership. Offer a product or service that is considerably better than the freebie as an alternative. So instead of just providing a link they can click to download or obtain your free stuff, you could also say something like:

“Get our free version now OR buy the premium/complete package for just $$$. This is a limited offer and will expire soon. ACT NOW!”

By imposing a time restriction, you also impose a sense of urgency and persuade your affiliate site’s visitors that if they want to take advantage of a better offer, they should act immediately.

This is one power that freebies have over other types of promotions, which makes them very effective when used in affiliate sites. Plus, you can even expect a conversion without performing any follow ups.

Find out the best freebies you can afford.
There is no logic at all to giving away freebies if you have nothing to gain from it. When affiliate marketers and business owners offer free gifts to their site’s visitors, it is a carefully crafted strategy and not just some careless act of generosity.

When you do offer freebies, you have to have something in return, if not now then at least later. Learn to harness the use of freebies for your affiliate site’s visitors carefully. It’s a proven strategy and can be a very valuable component of your affiliate marketing arsenal.

Web Hosting Affiliate Programs:

By , December 20, 2009

Another Way to Boost Your Online Income

If one of your goals of being online is to earn an income, still one of the best methods to consider is signing up for one or two affiliate programs. Experienced affiliates are some of the Web’s highest earners and with enough training, support and willingness on your part, becoming involved in an affiliate program may just be one of the best decisions you’ll ever make. And now, here’s another way to boost your income online: web hosting affiliate programs.

What are web hosting affiliate programs?

These are programs that sell web hosting services through members, called affiliates. The market for website hosting is one of the fastest growing industries today, thanks to a robust Web economy and the continuous appearance of numerous websites, both corporate and personal.

How do web hosting affiliate programs work?

They pretty much work in a similar manner to the average affiliate program with the exception that the products they are promoting are web hosting plans. An affiliate earns when his referral purchases a plan from the program.

A good step for a web hosting affiliate would be to create a standalone site or blog that promotes web hosting and attract traffic to that site. However, posting affiliate links consisting of banner ads and text links from an unrelated website could also work.

Who can benefit from web hosting affiliate programs?

From the customer’s side, virtually anyone who has a website or is planning to build one will find web hosting services useful. From the affiliate’s side, it varies greatly ? beginner and experienced affiliates, internet marketers, webmasters, web consultants and bloggers will find this opportunity very promising.

How much commission can I expect from web hosting affiliate programs?

Web hosting affiliate programs offer some of the best wallet-friendly commissions in the industry. Commission rates are great, ranging from around $50 to $100+ per successful business referral. That’s considerably larger than other commissions paid through affiliate programs selling more traditional products.

What’s the success rate for affiliates in web hosting programs?

This is a very competitive segment of the industry, which means that once you sign up, you better have a good strategy to back you up. If your idea of earning from these programs is posting an affiliate link on your website and leaving everything to chance, you won’t earn much. If you have a strong game plan, however, a web hosting affiliate program will work well to your advantage.

Some of the web hosting affiliate programs available today include:

Yahoo!

Yahoo’s web hosting affiliate program rewards you for the volume of referrals you bring in. Earnings can range from $60 to about $70 for every successful web hosting customer you refer, although you can also make as much as $100 for each referral if you bring them in by volume.

And here’s more: Yahoo! will pay about 20 percent out of the total sales generated from every domains customer you refer.

LunarPages

If you have your own website, you can set up an affiliate link to LunarPages’ web hosting program site. You’ll earn $65 each time you refer a new customer. You can earn more by referring advertisers to the program. Each new customer referred by these advertisers will bring in an additional $5 per.

Web.com

Web.com is another excellent web hosting affiliate program, offering $80 in commission. If your sales reach over 25 in one month, you can add 12.5%. Over 50, that increases to 50%.

DreamHost

DreamHost offers you two choices for the type of commission you’ll earn: one-time credit for every referral you bring to their web hosting affiliate program or you could choose to earn recurring credits for payments made by your referrals to DreamHost. One-time payments will earn you up to $97 while recurring payments give you 10% off the payment amount of your referrals.

DreamHost is also one of the web hosting affiliate programs that offers a two-tier payment scheme. If your referral brings in their own referrals, you’ll earn a one-time payment of $5 or 5% of these referrals’ payments to DreamHost.

Women in advertising

By , December 8, 2009

Introduction

Men and women are different. It was designed by nature like this and there is nothing wrong about it as they perfectly supplement each other. There are stable images of men and women roles in the society, which are very difficult to change or overcome. Men are usually regarded as strong and resolute, clever and quick. Female roles are reduced to pretty and sexy objects. Advertising not only reflects the situation on the world market, but also the tendencies of the modern society and thing, which are in requisition. Gender plays in important role in advertising and gender stereotypes very often define the advertising style.

Men generally carry more important social roles, with very few exceptions, and this is reflected in the advertisements. Men play roles of authorities in the advertisements who either give examples of express their professional opinion in the contrast to women, who mainly play submissive roles of users of the products.

Advertisement can be called a measure of social opinion as it expresses the needs of the society but at the same time it also forms it. It plays a vital role in promoting labels and stereotypes. Certain ads are targeted to certain social groups. Ads, which display different female characters, appeal to different social groups.
In my paper I would like to study different approaches to woman in advertising, such as treating women as sex object, housewife, submissive, mother, professional, dumb blonde, in order to analyse social position of women and their perspectives.
Lets focus on each type of advertisements in order to study the social role it gives to women.

Women in advertising
First, and most traditional category of advertisements depicts women as typical housewife, fulfilling the major gender stereotype of the mankind. These characters radiate sweetness, warm-heartedness and passion to house holding. For example, the advertisement of commercially laundry “Bryza”, underlines the laundry to be totally women occupation. In the advertisement man is singing about children and stains and then addresses women with the words “Now You have Bryza”. Such an attitude implies that only women can and must be interested in laundry and other issued connected with house holding. Another bright example of such an attitude is an ad of Virginia Slims. This advertisement states “The sexiest move that a guy can make [in the house] is cleaning up.” Such an attitude presupposes that cleaning is fully women’s occupation and men, who help their women about the house, are doing the heroic deed and should be treated as heroes. Examples are multiple and we can calculate up to a dozen of advertisement, where women act as typical housewives during one commercial block. Such an attitude humiliates female dignity and strengthens social stereotype about the woman as a housewife. There is nothing bad in being a good housewife or taking care about husband and children. It’s bad when all the life is artificially and intentionally centred all around this aspect. In order to understand the accordance of this category to ethical norms, we should define on the ethics first. Ethics, or moral philosophy is defined as a set of regulation, which define right or wrong behaviour. From the ethical point of view, popularising the ideal of house keeping can not be regarded as something wrong. We should look deeper into the root of the problem to see another ethical problem here. Such kind of ads can limit female rights. Voluntary or not, but with the help of these ads socials role of the woman is reduced to the role of typical housewife. All the actions should be agreed with the ethics of the profession.

The role of submissive mother originally arises from the role of housewife. Motherhood is one of main destinations of all women. We all know about this from the childhood. Unfortunately, fatherhood isn’t considered to be one of the main social roles of the man. Rising children is considered to be mainly female prerogative. Such an attitude is reflected in the advertisements, where all children are accompanied by their caring and submissive mothers. These are mothers, who make the children ready to school, cook them breakfast, take care about their health, appearance, toys, etc. The chances to see a man in the role of loving father is very small or equals zero. These stereotypes about the role of woman as submissive mother are reflected in ad of Chewi-Quaker. Small girl is worried about new surrounding after moving to another school, but becomes popular when finds Chewis and messages from her loving mother in her lunch box. Another very bright example is a Cheetos advertisement, where the mother of four children is driving a family van around the city. These are typical ad when loving and caring mother helps her kids. It’s hard for us to imagine any man on the place of the woman in the ads about children. These ads are light and touching, but they serve a bad service persuading the society that taking care about the children is fully feminine responsibility. The social role of woman is changed nowadays and the range of her responsibilities goes much further than housework or raising children. In many families women work on a par with men or even more, but old social stereotypes are still alive and still give the perverted idea about the female role in the society. Same as the first category, the ads which include the patters of the submissive mothers don’t contradict any ethical norms directly as they don’t include any lies or violence, but the result can break the ethical norm, breaking the balance between social and personal life of the women.

Problems in article marketing

By , December 2, 2009

When you click on search engines, your three keywords will literally result to a thousand of websites. You can thank article marketing for that bit of fact.

Article marketing is the use of well-written articles to supply information on a topic that is closely related to a product. For instance, if you are selling a medicine on diabetes, a great way to promote the product and to catch the eye of people with diabetes is to write an article about diabetes! That way, your target market will be caught.

Articles used for this type of marketing will often include a bio box that will list down the company, the product and the contact details. Some will even have pictures of the product beside it. Quality articles that are used in this field are often informative and short. After all, you want to keep them interested and not bored them to death!

It is not surprising that in recent years, the world wide web has caught on to its effectiveness. Article marketing now has become an online phenomenon. More and more articles about a variety of subject areas are being uploaded everyday over the internet. People who have websites have turned to articles to increase their page views.

In turn, they are supported by online advertisers who rely on their page views for advertisement views and consumer awareness. Search engines also rely on the articles submitted to their directories to rank websites during a search. The more articles in the directory, the better the rank.

But the use of online article marketing has lowered the quality of the materials that are being posted over the internet. Instead of the well-written articles that inform consumers about a relevant topic, websites post materials that are haphazardly written. Check some of the websites that come out from the search engines and you will see just how much the quality of the Internet articles have lessened.

Some articles on the Internet are copied from another website. Even though they have different first paragraphs and introduction, the essence of the article or even the body will be the same exact same thing. Some rephrase the original article but when you read it, you will see that the concept and the principles being discussed are often the same. This is why there are a lot of duplication when you research over the Internet. Some will even present an entirely different topic after the second paragraph.

Another problem is the structure and grammar of the articles posted. Most of the articles nowadays have really atrocious grammar and several wrong spellings. Typos are also pretty common in websites. The structure of the articles is also not well-done, leading people to think that the people who wrote them are non-writers.

Reliability is also another problem that has cropped up with article marketing. Since articles are written primarily for the search engine rank and the page views for advertisers, most articles will no longer contain any authors. This is considered unreliable sources especially for people who are researching technical pieces. Only a couple of websites have articles that carry bylines.

This has affected the reliability of the information that are gotten from the Internet. Some in fact cannot be trusted at all especially the sites that are not so well-known.

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