What makes a website good are the features and content that keep your visitors coming back for more. There is always a purpose behind every website creation. Though some are created for personal use, like a portfolio that simply aims to gain an audience to have its contents viewed, majority are created for companies and online businesses that aim to provide product information in the goal of making sales, or basically just providing service over the internet to earn. It is often observed that some visitors are captivated by visual designs, but it in reality; visitors are generally looking for their needs to be fulfilled. Think of it this way: if you are the website visitor, how would you react to it?

Navigation

As previously discussed, a web designer must learn how to think the way your visitors think.

Scenario A: Website with good navigation (2-3 hyperlinks to target page)- well planned in terms of placement and design.

Scenario B: Website with poor navigation (takes forever for the visitor to reach his/her target page) – hard-to-read navigation fonts and poor placement of the navigation buttons/bar.

In Scenario A, a visitor will always want to be able to access his/her target page. For example, the individual comes across your website, and is interested in the product sold, but wants to find more information. He/she will simply click on the product photo or product name and get to the detailed product information page. He instantly finds the navigation with no trouble, and enters the particular product information page.

As for Scenario B, a visitor stumbles into the website, and would also like to find out more information about the product. Unfortunately, due to bad placement and fanciful font-types, the visitor takes forever to find the right link to click to, or worse, he/she even fails to find the navigation bar. Even when he/she eventually does so, links to the product information are nowhere to be found.

Example: Home > About > Products > Product image > Etc… [A few more clicks] > Product information

In both scenarios, we clearly see that a website with characteristics similar to that of Scenario A is definitely more navigation friendly, therefore more rewarding, and in other words unquestionably better!

Affiliate marketing is not a magic formula that is readily available for everyone who is always looking for the successful market that gives the biggest paycheck. In reality, it is a lot more complicated than that. It is good marketing practices that have been used and proven over years of hard work and dedication.

There are tactics that have worked before with online marketing that may not be applicable today, but there are also tactics that work effectively in the online affiliate marketing world of today. With these top three marketing tips, you will be able to able to increase your sales and survive in the affiliate marketing game.

What are these three tactics?

1. Using unique web pages to promote each separate product you are marketing. Do not lump all of it together just to save some money on web hosting. It is best to have a site focusing on each and every product and nothing more.

Always include product reviews on the website so visitors will have an initial understanding on what the product can do to those who buy them. Including testimonials from users who have already tried the product will also come in handy. Just be sure that these customers are more than willing to allow you to use their names and photos on the site of the specific product you are marketing.

You can also write articles highlighting the uses of the product and include them on the website as an additional page. Make the pages attractive compelling and include calls to act on the information. Each headline should attract the readers to try and read more, even contact you. Highlight your special points. This will help your readers to learn what the page is about and will want to find out more.

2. Offer free reports to your readers. Whenever possible, position them at the very top side of your page so they simply cannot be missed. Create auto responder messages that will be mailed to those who input their personal information into your sign up box. This will make your subscribers feel they are acknowledged and valued. According to research, a sale is closed usually on the seventh contact with a prospect.

Only two things can possibly happen with the web page alone: closed sale or the prospect leaving the page and never return again. By placing useful information into their inboxes at certain specified period, you will remind them of the product they thought they want later and will find out that the sale is closed. Be sure that the content is directed toward specific reasons to buy the product. Do not make it sound like a sales pitch.

Focus on important points like how your product can make life and things easier and more enjoyable. Include compelling subject lines in the email. As much as possible, avoid using the word “free” because there are still older spam filters that dumps those kind of contents into the junk before even anyone reading them first. Convince those who signed up for your free reports that they will be missing something big if they do not avail of your products and services.

3. Get the kind of traffic that is targeted to your product. Think of a person who visiting your website that has no interest whatsoever in what you are offering. They will be among those who move on and never come back. Write articles for publication in e-zines and e-reports. This way you can locate publications that are focusing on your target customers and what you have put up might just grab their interest.

Try to write a minimum of 2 articles per week, with at least 300-600 words in length. By continuously writing and maintaining these articles you can generate as many as 100 targeted readers to your site in a day.

Always remember that only 1 out of 100 people are likely to buy your product or avail of your services. If you can generate as much as 1,000 targeted hits for your website in a day, it means you may have just made 10 sales based on the average statistic.

The tactics given above does not really sound very difficult to do, if you think about it. It just requires a little time and an action plan on your part.

If you at least put an effort in trying to use these tips for several affiliate marketing programs. You might be surprised that it can end-up maintaining a good source of income. You might just be able to survive in this business where other marketers fail.

Moreover, think of the income that will come your way.

Earn From Your Mailing List By Way of Affiliate Marketing!

Building your own mailing list is a good way to start if you are an affiliate marketer who wants to make good earnings from referring your prospects to other people’s product or service for decent commissions.

Your mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on. When you strike on a Joint Venture and have a new product or service to endorse, you can look no further than your own mailing list.

It is not uncommon to hear about most affiliates not making money from affiliate programs, in fact there is more than 90 percent of them, but this often results from the same amount of effort focused on least effective methods.

While having your own mailing list, by a long mile, is not the only effective affiliate marketing method, you can make affiliate sales very quickly even in the next few hours after sending a sales message, provided that your mailing list is huge and responsive.

This is often true, because owning your own mailing list for you to endorse products and services to is one of the fastest-producing results, beating other affiliate marketing methods imaginable.

If you look closer, the flourishing affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who successfully built a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.

The usability of your website does not rely on how brilliant your website design is. If there is difficulty in grasping the content of your site, then your site is as useful as an empty shell. What’s the purpose of your website and is it filled with real content? Here are some tips to maximize the usefulness of your website to ensure it functions are served most favorably:

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, it is best to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. While having 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font like what most sites prefer to use as they look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can navigate your site with ease, and make sure they find what they are looking for.

Ensuring that your site loads fast keeps you from losing your visitors. Most internet users leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last but certainly not the least, it pays to test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in upholding your professional image than making sure there is absolutely no broken links, so be very mindful about that.

Any business being done online will have a hard time fighting for existence if not for mailing lists. It is the lifeblood of any online business. There’s an old saying “the money is in the list” and which had been proven true time and again. For each time you have a new product or some new features to launch, imagine how easy it would be if you had a targeted list of prospects. It will save you a lot of time and effort if you have a list of prospects waiting to hear about it.

You can actually build up a targeted list of prospects that are interested in your products by offering a relevant download on your website. For example, let’s take a look at a very good example — Apple.com. When you download the free iTunes and Quicktime software from their site, they will ask you to fill in an optional name and email form so that they can send you offers on songs that you can purchase via — guess where — iTunes!

In reality, it does not require a “heavyweight” download like a a full-feature software like iTunes. You can attract prospects equally well with some quality freebies such as a simple report, free wallpaper, letter templates, preformatted greeting cards, desktop themes and so on. The important thing is that your download offers enough value for the prospect to be willing to give away his/her own email address to get it.

On the other hand, putting together a simple download with a link on your website won’t be enough to attract qualified prospects. You will have to do some homework in order for your lead-generating mechanism to work well for you.

Firstly, placing your download form prominently on your website will have a big impact. Dedicating a page to it even better! This way, you can put link to that page from every other page of your website. There is no way your visitors cannot find the download page, and every time they do, you’ll get some of them converted into your prospects!

Don’t just stop with putting up that download page, squeeze in some effort in promoting your download. Explain and elaborate on the values of the download, and letting your visitors know why they should download it and why they should download it from you. Although freebies are not easy to pass up, quite a number of your visitors don’t actually put an effort to download it. Aside from reasons of sheer laziness, most of their previous downloads could be sitting on their hard drive collecting virtual dust. It is hence important to offer good quality download and to show your visitors why they should not pass up on the freebie that you’re offering.

Increase your sales with better marketing techniques using new and improved autoresponders. Here are ways to get started:

1. Publish free reports to send via your autoresponder. The reports should be related to your business or website, and contain information, ads and links to your sites. People love getting freebies. I bet even you do.

2. Collect vital customer satisfaction information by publishing a survey to send via auto responder to those who sign up on your site in exchange for a free eBook, software or trial period at your membership site. This type of information will help you understand their needs, preferences and dislikes better.

3. Instead of answering each customer question that is e-mailed to you, publish “Frequently Asked Questions” of FAQs, and make them available via autoresponder to those who sign up. This will definitely save time and spare “support” headaches.

4. Instead of publishing all of your customer testimonials or endorsements on your website, publish only a few, and then set up an autoresponder form that invites visitors to receive a complete list. Give them a power-packed list including some video testimonials. This proves to be more effective than including all of them in your website all at once.

Learn the art of mixing and matching. Changing your autoresponder strategies will definitely change your auto responder results!