Learning Affiliate marketing #4

It may not seem or sound like a lot, but this entire week was devoted to my online advertising campaign. In a nutshell, I completed my press release, completed the formatting of my opt-in Email, and submitted an article regarding my website for distribution.
Press Release
Believe it or not, the press release took me a long time to write. If you haven't noticed, I am not a writer. The head line part and header were easy, basically describing your site and its name and location. The body is where I ran into a wall, so I went searching for press releases. My first mistake was I went to Google Press Releases, thinking it would be regular business type press releases. Wrong, it was press releases from Google on new things that they were involved with, no help at all, I wanted to see regular business press release to give me ideas on how and what to put in the body of my press release. I searched through 24 pages of press releases before finding one that was somewhat similar to what I wanted. The problem was most of it was a technical thing, so I decided to write one the same way I write this blog. I'll let you know how it worked out.
Opt-in Email
This was easier, but no walk in the park. I had to come up with a subject line for the email. It has to be short, to the point, something that would attract the readers attention, and something that did not look like a typical advertisement thing. It's harder than you think, especially when you want to be honest and not just try to trick someone into opening it, I hate that on my email. I decided to be honest and just wrote,"The consumer electronics you want to have".
The next part was the body, again it has to be short, to the point and informational.I thought about it for awhile and again decided to just be straight forward, and gave a short list of specific items, and the save money time and gas thing, shop at my website. I don't know how well of if it will work, but I will be able to sleep nights, not feeling like I lied or tricked someone. I know, I have to be able to get-a-way from that type of thinking and look at it like I am helping people make up their minds.
The Article
This was the easiest of the three, as I had already written several articles. I just edited them abit, made some changes and added some things and it was done. I sent everything to the marketing company I am using, and now I wait for several days and see what happens.
I am not referring anyone to the marketing company I am using due to two reasons. First, I want to see exactly what kind of job they do for me. I have to feel good about them before I will recommend them to anyone, or at least be able to give the positive or negatives. So far, I am impressed with them, they answer my emails quickly are helpful and supportive. The second reason is, I am trying to get into their affiliate program.
To end this, I am currently just waiting to see how the advertisement goes and am kicking around idea's for another website. I am leaning towards some kind of E-book type thing, just not sure of exactly what. To be an affiliate again, or to set up my own E-book's and promote myself. If you have any ideas on which is better,or easier, let me know.
As always, any comments, suggestions, or just hate mail, let me know. However, anything that is in really bad taste, I will delete it, but everything else good or bad goes up.

TBD Associates Electronic Stores

Thanks again,
Terry

Learning Affiliate marketing #3

I am a little bit late on this update, I have been really busy working on my wesite, TBD Associates Electronic Stores.. I decided to try and make it a little bit better, by rating each one of the company's just above their banner. I went into everyone as if I was shopping for a specific item. I rated each one from 1, being the lowest and 10, being the highest. Before I started working on my site I set up guide lines. These guide lines included over all apperance, did I like the way the site looked, was it neat and clean, or cluttered with all kinds of ads or banners and things like that. Next I navigated around the site to see if it was easy, or if I had to do a lot of searching and/or reading to find what i was looking for. I checked for free information on the products I was looking at such as what is an HDTV or LCD, which is different and why, which one is best. I checked the description of the item to see if it was there, and if it was to see if it was detailed or not. I found that some sites give you a lot of information on electronic items that is good to know. I checked into the site's payment system, to see if it was a secure site and what information I would have to give out to purchase the item. I looked for an escape button, where if I changed my mind I could get out of the shopping cart and either leave the site or continue shopping. I checked for the prices and the shipping costs. With Christmas just around the corner, a lot of the sites offer free shipping, free shipping after spending X amount of money, or reduced shipping fees. After completing the site survey, I went into the managers login on my site and began entering the rating I had made and general comments about the site. I will wait a little while and monitor the results of my rating idea. It may be a little too much, so I will have to wait and see.

After the 16 or so hours I spent putting a rating schem, and due to my type A personality. I decided to start working on articles for EZINE and for my Blogs, just to see if i could do it and what would happen. I already had several ideas of areas I thought would have a good market, so I dusted off those articles I had been saving in my microsoft word program, updated them and saved them. I went to clickbank and began looking for programs to affiliate with. Normally I look at several things, the amount of money I could make per sale, what percentage percentage would be for that items, the percentage of affiliate marketing brought revenue to the site, and the gravity scale. I would then go to the site and check it out, go to the pay section and see what it was actually being sold for. I could then figure out the return rate, how easy it would be to market and if I liked the site, felt comfortable with it, and believed that they had a good product at a resonable. If i decided i would try it. I went back to clickbank, copied the links to my google documents, and then went to blogspot.com. I figured out a site name and URL address that would convey my site, applied for the URL, and if approved, continued to build the blog. If it was not approved I would try differnt words, rearranging the order, and putting in dashes between the words. Once approved I was ready to build the blogs.

BUILDING THE BLOGS

Since I had praticed building bloggs on Hubpages, Blogger, and Mylot, this part was really easy and a lot faster than when I first started, pratice, pratice, pratice. When i got to the posting phase, I went to my word document, copied and pasted it return to the blog and entered it. I opened my google notebood and copied and pasted the links I had gotten from clickbank, and I was done. It took me about 2 1/2 hours to complete all three of them, a lot better than when I first started. Then I decided to cross link those sites to this one and to my website for Electronics, you can view them in the box on the left side of this page.

Thank you again and please visit my sites and give me your feed back on them. Oh, and feel free to purchase any of the programs if you can benifit from them.