What Can You Expect from an Email List?

Let’s start with the basics: an email list is only useful if those people on the list are interested in what you have to say. Engagement is the real marker of success, not the amount of subscribers you have.

Let me put this into perspective by giving you a real life example. My email list subscribers is arguably as powerful as an “average” email list that is 2.5X bigger. Why? Because I enjoy an open rate of nearly 50%, which compares very favourably to an overall average of 19.7% (across all industries) Furthermore, links in my emails are clicked nearly seven times more often than the average.

It is not the purpose of this article to get into the specifics of expected open/click through rates, but the above should demonstrate that I appear to be doing something right in the world of email marketing. Now I want to share my strategy with you.

Build a Brand and a Personality

If you want people to open your emails then I think the most important thing is to offer them more than information. Offer them a brand and a personality – give them something to get attached to.

That may sound rather ambiguous, and in a sense it is. I am not talking about how good your content is — I am talking about creating a persona that people can like. You want to create a kind of emotional connection that will compel them to open your email as if it were from a friend.

Personally, I have built my brand on honesty and openness. In my emails and on my blog I reveal everything about the successes and failures I have experienced in my path to quitting my job and building a successful online business. I don’t hold back. I show a human side that is missing all too often in the world of internet marketing. People recognize and enjoy that.

How you choose to reveal your personality is of course individual to your business and yourself, but make sure that you do.

Create Compelling Content

This should go without saying, but you’re far more likely to enjoy high open rates if you create compelling content for your email list. However, can you say that you have spent as much time on your email autoresponders and broadcasts as you have your best blog posts? Because that is what you need to do.

Why? Because email is a very intimate form of communication (relative to the web) and you have to earn your spot in your subscribers’ inboxes. If you do not respect that spot, you will soon lose it.

I think that some of your best content should be in your email autoresponder. Ideally your emails should be relatively short and highly actionable — especially the first couple. If you get off on the right foot with a subscriber by giving them something they’ll really appreciate up front, they’re likely to be more forgiving down the line.

So give it your best straight off the bat and look to sustain quality content throughout the life of your autoresponder. People can (rightfully so) be quite fickle and kiss your list goodbye if the quality of your content begins to slip, so don’t let that happen.

Don’t Sell (Much)

The “traditional” approach email marketing is to sell, sell, sell. I’m not saying this approach is wrong (as I am sure it has worked very well for many people) but it doesn’t align with my style. Instead, I took the opposite approach with my list and decided to sell as little as possible.

The vast majority of my emails do involve any kind of selling. I do not promote affiliate products or my own products in 90%+ of the emails that I send out. I believe that results in three things:

1. Trust: subscribers realize that I do not have an agenda.
2. Higher Open Rates: subscribers are happy to open because they know they’re not going to be sold to.
3. Engagement When It Counts: when I do choose to sell, subscribers will pay attention.

Obviously I’m not making money of every email. But when I do throw a sales pitch into the occasional email, my subscribers don’t mind. On the contrary, they will generally sit up and take note.

I should add that my “sales pitches” are very unaggressive and might not even be considered sales pitches by some people’s standards. I like to take the approach of a friend offering advice more than a stranger trying to sell.

Be Yourself

There’s a lot more to building a successful email list than I have mentioned above, but these are the foundations upon which I would personally build any list. They are the golden rules that I will probably always abide by.

How you choose to go about building your own list will be very individual to you, but I feel that the above standards should apply. Above everything else, be yourself and offer the subscriber something to hang on to. Not just words, but a real human being behind them.

The Out Of Stock Tracker

When you run an online store, it can be very frustrating when a customer lands on your website, finds exactly what they are looking for, but then can’t complete their order because you don’t have enough stock of their item.

As a neurotic and anal retentive shop owner, I often like to observe (or “stalk” as my wife puts it) the shopping behavior of my customers in real time. And 70-80% of the time when a customer finds that an item is out of stock, they simply leave and move on.

Quick Note: Out of stock in this context means that there isn’t enough stock to fulfill a customer’s entire requirement, not the fact that I have 0 quantity. For example, event planners who shop at our store often need many pieces of our linens and it’s usually all or nothing.

Needless to say, this is not what you want happening. Ideally, you should contact the customer and suggest a similar product. You should get more information about their deadline in order to take a back order.

As a shop that caters to the wedding industry, the best possible scenario is to get the customer on the phone and/or to establish contact via email. But unfortunately, there’s no easy way to correlate out of stock products to specific customers with most shopping carts.

So after watching countless customers abandon our shop this way, I finally decided to make a few changes. The first thing I did was to start tracking all out of stock products added to the shopping cart and correlate them with a specific customer.

Since I already track customers who abandon their shopping carts during the first steps of checkout, adding this new feature was fairly trivial. But I found that it wasn’t good enough. Even though I knew which products were in demand, I needed this information in real time so that I could react.

So finally, I decided to modify my shopping cart to automatically send me an email whenever a customer tried to buy an item that we didn’t have enough stock on. And if they were logged in, the email would also contain the customer’s full contact information.

This Feature In Practice

Within 3 days of this feature going live, we had a well known event planner shop for napkins on our website. In fact, she was in charge of planning a wedding for a famous celebrity who just got married recently. Anyways, this customer tried to insert 100 dozen of one our napkin styles into her shopping cart.

But here’s the thing. Even though we actually had more than 100 dozen in our warehouse, there was an inventory mismatch in our system so our shopping cart said that we didn’t have enough quantity to meet her needs.

Fortunately, this customer was in our database so when my shopping cart sent out an email alerting us of the situation, my wife was able to take immediate action. Within minutes, my wife had the event planner on the phone and salvaged a $2500+ order.

Without this alert, we would have been completely oblivious and might have lost this fairly sizable order.

The Big Fish Alert

In any case, all it took was this one example to set my brain in motion. How many other large orders have we lost as a result of simply not paying attention at the right time? Unlike a brick and mortar store where there’s actual customer interaction, with an online store all information is lost unless it is specifically tracked.

So I had another epiphany. A good portion of the yearly revenues for our online store come through large bulk purchases from event planners. Why not send out an email alert whenever there’s a potential large order in the store?

It’s a very trivial change and it would allow someone to pay specific attention to the customer list whenever a large transaction was in play.

So within 20 minutes, I added another feature to my shop which I dubbed “the big fish” alert. Whenever a customer added goods totaling over $500, an email alert would be sent out along with customer information (if in the system), the products in their cart and their IP address.

By physically monitoring the shop when large customers were in the store (most likely event planners), we could be extra vigilant in case there were any hiccups or questions with the transaction.

Further Enhancements

Thus far, one of the big disadvantages of my new alert features is that there’s no way of contacting customers unless I already have their information in my database. In the case of the “out of stock” alert, this issue could be solved by allowing a customer to checkout regardless of inventory levels and then contacting them later but that solution seems a bit sleazy to me.

In my mind, the best way to solve this problem is to have some way of communicating with stuck customers in real time without requiring their contact info. So on my list of to-dos is to implement a feature to selectively pop up a live chat window only to specific customers.

For example, let’s say a big fish is stuck in a specific step during the checkout process. I could have a very subtle chat window popup in the lower right corner of the screen asking if they need any assistance with their order.

This chat window would not be visible all the time but could be selectively used to interact with specific customers in the store. After all, sometimes a customer just has a simple question but is reluctant to make a phone call. Sometimes a customer just wants to know the approximate delivery time.

The sooner you can answer their questions, the more likely you’ll be able to close the sale. In any case, I’m still in the process of researching software packages to implement this feature so I’ll keep you posted on my progress. I also want to implement it in such a way that the customer is not creeped out either:)

Blurring The Lines Between Online And Brick and Mortar

One of the main disadvantages of an online store over a brick and mortar store is the lack of customer interaction. As a result, you could be shedding customers in your online store and have absolutely no idea that it is happening.

Especially with some of the larger purchases in my shop, I’ve found that it’s always best to interact with a customer on the phone or via email in order to facilitate larger sales. In my mind, the features that I’ve added make an attempt to make my online store more like a traditional brick and mortar store.

The sooner you realize when a customer requires some assistance the better you’ll be able to close the sale. What do you think?

photo credit: 401(K) 2013 selva Vippman

1. Confusing Broad/Phrase/Exact Match Search Figures

Most keyword research tools will offer you search figures based upon three “match types:”

1. Broad
2. Phrase
3. Exact

A broad match will include search figures from any keyword that include your keyword(s) (in any order). For instance, if you were searching for broad match figures for the keyword “blue widgets,” you would receive combined search figures for “the best blue widgets,” “where can I buy blue widgets,” “I need a widget because I’m feeling blue,” and so on.

A phrase match keyword will include search figures from any keyword that include your keyword(s) in order. The first two example keywords mentioned above would qualify as phrase match keywords.

Finally, exact match keywords include search figures for your keyword only.

Therefore, when researching a keyword (and considering the cost/benefit of attempting to rank for it), considering broad and/or phrase match search figures will skew your expectations of how many visitors you would actually receive when ranking for the exact match keyword.

Personally, I recommend that you always base any estimates upon exact match figures.

2. Confusing National and Global Search Figures

This can be a major issue if your site targets a specific country and was a mistake that I got very close to making.

I was planning on creating a niche site and was in search of a viable keyword. I thought I had found an absolute beauty in “driving instructors” — the search volume was pretty high and the competition was low.

However, I was looking at global searches and viewing competition on the Google US site. I didn’t realise that “driving instructors” was a redundant term in the US (hence the lack of competition) and that the bulk of searches was coming from Google.co.uk. When I checked the competition on Google.co.uk I found that it was very high.

So, if you are targeting a keyword specific to a particular country, make sure that you are looking at figures and adjudging competition from that specific country.

3. Confusing the Number of Searches With Potential Visitors

100% of searchers will not visit your site, even if you are ranked number one in Google. Estimates vary but personal experience tells me that you can’t expect more than 40% of exact match search visitors to click through to your site when you’re on the top spot. Furthermore, that percentage drops off sharply as you go down the rankings.

I have a rule of thumb where if I think I can’t rank within the top three spots for a keyword, I won’t bother targeting it. Why? Consider this: a keyword with 25,000 searches per month will typically be very difficult to rank for. And despite those 25,000 searches, if you manage to get to fourth spot you will only receive ~2,000 visitors. In my humble opinion, it’s simply not worth the effort when compared to targeting long tail keywords.

Editor’s Note: This number really depends on what kind of site you are starting. For online stores, you can get by with far less searches because you can make a much higher profit per conversion. The number of searches you need depends on what your income goals are.

4. Not Taking Searcher Intent Into Account

Any seasoned keyword researcher has been through it — they’ve found a keyword that they think is absolutely golden. Maybe it is, in a sense that they will be able to rank for it. But ranking for a keyword is not the be all and end all — you have to consider the intent of the searcher.

What do I mean by intent? Well, exactly that — what the intent of their search is. Consider two extreme cases: one in which a searcher is searching for a product that they intend to buy, and another in which the searcher is only in search of information and has no intention of spending any money. Which visitor is likely to be of more value to you?

What a lot of keyword researchers don’t appreciate is that 1,000 targeted visitors can be more beneficial than tens as many of visitors with no commercial intent. That’s why news and gossip sites have to generate an enormous amount of traffic in order to earn any kind of money. Targeting relatively low-volume keywords that indicate good search intent can be a far better strategy than blindly targeting any remotely relevant keyword.

5. Choosing Keywords That Rely Upon Context

Finally (and on a similar note), one can get drawn into a seemingly perfect keyword only to discover that many of the searches have nothing to do with whatever your website covers.

A great example of this can be found in Pat Flynn’s infamous Niche Site Duel that was run a couple of years ago. Pat thought he had found a great keyword in “cop training,” only to discover that many of the searches were a phrase match for “mirko cro cop training” — something else entirely.

Understanding the context of your search and any potential alternative meanings is extremely important when researching keywords and is another reason why you should resort to researching on the basis of exact match keywords only.

What Mistakes Can You Think Of?

Above are five common keyword research mistakes that can really set you back. However (and unfortunately), there are plenty more. Have you made any or can you think of any? Let us know in the comments section below!

photo credit: Leo Reynolds

My Recent SEO Debacle

One thing I love about running an online business is that everything is in a constant state of flux. Technology and the way we shop online changes everyday so you have to keep up in order to stay ahead.

I’ve always felt that one of my core strengths is my ability to adapt to new technology so I tend to embrace change. My belief is that if I can act faster and more decisively, then I can have a leg up on the competition. And as a result, I’m always changing around my pages, adding new features, and fiddling around with my shopping cart.

Recently, I decided to add some extra graphics and tables to reinforce my unique value proposition on all of my category landing pages in order to improve the conversion rate of my online store.

My change was actually very trivial and was only meant to enhance the aesthetics of my site. But it ended up indirectly messing things up how my site appeared in search. Below is an example of one of these changes.



One day as I was randomly checking up on my search rankings, I noticed the following search result for one of my keywords.



Can you spot the error? My title tag was completely screwed up. Instead of reading “Personalized and Monogrammed Handkerchiefs”, the link read “personalized or monogrammed handkerchief!” in all lower case letters with an exclamation point.

Needless to say, the link looked unprofessional which probably had a negative effect on the click through rate. Now what was strange was that the change I made to my content had absolutely nothing to do with the title and meta tags for my site so I could not explain why Google was messing up my search results.

But upon closer examination, I discovered that the culprit had to do with a shortcut I made to my site a long time ago. Back when I first launched my shop in 2007, I wrote some code to auto-populate the meta descriptions of my site with the first 2 lines of content on the page when no meta description was explicitly specified (Note: Certain WordPress plugins do this as well).

So when I started adding graphics and tables to the top of my landing pages, I inadvertently injected HTML code into the first few lines of every page which ended up in the meta tag descriptions.

Obviously, Google didn’t know what to do with these funny meta descriptions so it ended up messing up the title tags for many of my key money pages. It’s hard to quantify the damage that was done as a result of my change but thankfully, I caught the issue before it started affecting my rankings.

My Mobile Site Debacle

When I first developed the mobile version of my online store, I made a very difficult and conscious decision to maintain 2 completely different code bases for the desktop and mobile versions of my site.

Why did I do this? It’s because I wanted an extremely customized and mobile optimized experience for cell phone users that would have been very difficult to achieve by modifying my existing desktop site.

You can read about my entire decision making process behind the development of my mobile site here, but essentially I committed myself to maintaining the 2 sites separately while sharing a common database.

One of our goals this year was to starting shipping internationally, so when I made the appropriate changes to the desktop site to handle this new functionality, I inadvertently forgot to make similar changes to the mobile site.

In reality, that’s not exactly true. I didn’t actually forget. My intention was to first roll out international shipping to desktop users first followed by my mobile customers once all of the kinks were ironed out. But it turned out that modifying my desktop site ended up breaking my mobile site in a way that I had not considered.

It took me 3 days of not receiving any mobile orders at all (since I don’t always pay attention to mobile vs desktop) for me to realize that I had grossly screwed things up!

My Server Upgrade Debacle

This final mistake that I want to talk about was easily the worst one of them all because it involved crashing my online store website for nearly half a day. What sucks it that the reason for the crash was pure carelessness and laziness on my part.

One very ordinary day, I received an email from my web host recommending me to upgrade my apache web server installation to the latest and greatest. So I thought to myself…sure…I haven’t upgraded in a long time. I should probably do so to get the latest security patches and vulnerability fixes.

Since I practically do this every 3-4 months with my WordPress installation, I said why not and hit the “upgrade” button without even thinking about it. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

One aspect of the upgrade was that my PHP version was updated to version 5.3 from 5.2. Now you wouldn’t think that a mere “.1″ would make such a huge difference but it had a tremendous impact on my shopping cart code. Yes, it broke everything.

What was particularly bad about the upgrade was that at a casual glance, everything looked to be working perfectly with my site. But if you actually tried to shop and checkout, you would receive catastrophic error messages.

It took me about 4 hours of no orders to realize that something was grossly wrong, so I immediately reverted the change. Ultimately, it ended up taking me about 3 full weeks to upgrade my shopping cart to support PHP version 5.3 and I ended up losing nearly a half day’s worth of revenue for my carelessness.

Putting Things In Perspective

Running an online business is no trivial task. So whenever you read about someone’s unbelievable success story online, make sure you consider the fact that it took a lot of hard work and pain to get there.

There is no such thing as “smooth sailing” in my book. And none of my business ventures have ever gone exactly according to plan. But to be honest, I tend to have short term memory. And if I didn’t document my screw ups online, I’d probably forget about them at some point:)

In any case, this post is my way of telling you that you shouldn’t compare yourself to what you read about online. Blog posts don’t always tell the entire story and chances are that the entrepreneur you are trying to emulate has gone through significant hardship to get where they are today.

photo credit: music2work2 boxchain

Why Design Is Important

You would be forgiven for thinking that I do not consider design an important factor in the long term success of your website, but that is not the case. On the contrary, I believe that design has a vital role to play in a website’s long term success.

Ultimately, design determines (perhaps above all other factors) whether or not a visitor will stick around on your site for more than a few seconds. Derek Halpern argued this in his article: Content is King…Or Is it? He quoted a study in which 94% of partakers cited design problems as the reason they distrusted the websites they came across.

Let’s consider this from an extreme angle. If your site was simply a white screen with no content, people would be bouncing off your site like it was a trampoline. That would be the ultimate in bad design — no design at all. Meanwhile, if your design was beautiful and highly useable but your content was terrible, visitors would probably stick around for a while before realising that the content quality didn’t match the design.

Consider this for yourself — whenever you come across a good-looking website, you are more likely to assume that the content is good. In fairness, this makes logical sense — a website with a big enough budget for a beautiful design probably has a big enough budget for good content.

When Design Isn’t Important

But with that said, I don’t think any startup blogger or business owner should give too much thought to design. I believe that various other factors (such as content and marketing) are far more important. This is not because design is irrelevant but because of two factors that downgrade the importance of design in the preliminary stages of a project:

• Default blog themes (such as WordPress’ Twenty Twelve) serve perfectly well in the beginning
  
• There is no point spending time on design until you have visitors to judge its performance

For the most part I like to be reactive rather than proactive. I like to draw conclusions from data and observation rather than guess what I think my visitors/customers/clients will want. And that in a nutshell is why I believe design should take a backseat when you are starting up a new website. I would much rather wait to see how people react to a design before deciding whether or not to work on it.

Let’s use a direct comparison by means of an example. My blog, Leaving Work Behind, performs pretty well in terms of the usual metrics that one would track:



Now consider a small side project of mine, Piano Journal:



Aside from the obvious difference in visitors, it is interesting to compare the other metrics such as average actions, average time per visit and bounce rate.

Leaving Work Behind is a well established blog with well over 200 published posts. Meanwhile, Piano Journal has just 10 posts. With that in mind, the bounce rate is excellent, as are average actions and average time per visit. To put it plainly, it compares rather well with its much bigger brother.

What’s the big difference? The design.

Leaving Work Behind: a heavily customized version of the premium Canvas framework theme by WooThemes.

Piano Journal: a slightly modified version of the default WordPress theme, Twenty Eleven.

So When Does Design Become Important?

I believe that one should only begin to concentrate heavily on design when it becomes financially viable to do so. By this I mean that major design work should only become a consideration when you can be reasonably certain that the work you put in will have a positive return on your investment. Until that time, any work that you do is for your own satisfaction rather than a bigger bottom line. You may wish to work on design before that point, but make sure that you fully understand the distinction.

I acknowledge that the headline of this article is somewhat flippant, but I chose it deliberately to ram my point home — design is not the be all and end all. We are blessed with the opportunity to use high-quality default themes so that design concerns can be relegated below other extremely important considerations such as content and marketing. Take the opportunity that is given to you and use your time wisely.

photo credit: agjimenez

Understanding A Vendor’s Point Of View

The first thing that I always tell my students when sourcing product is to put yourself in the shoes of a vendor or distributor. In the grand scheme of things, vendors are just like online shop owners in that they want to make money by selling products. The only difference is they need to move product in much higher volumes.

As an online store owner that caters to the general consumer, it’s fine for you to sell items individually. But a distributor typically needs to move product in much greater bulk because they have higher overhead and inventory storage costs to deal with.

That is why distributors need to pick their clients extremely carefully. Every store that they work with requires a certain level of time commitment. So it is in their best interests to only work with stores that can consistently bring in revenue and have the best chance of becoming a long term customer.

Distributors come in all shapes and sizes and in order to be successful, you have to find the right vendor that is willing to sell you the right quantity of product. And the first impression you give to your vendor can make all the difference. Here are some common mistakes that I see new entrepreneurs make when contacting vendors for the first time.

Mistake #1: You Lack Confidence And Come Across As A Noob

Remember how I told you that well established vendors tend to pick their clients very carefully? In order to get their attention, you sometimes have to act larger and more confident than you really are.

And to illustrate my point, I would like to show you a letter a reader wrote to their very first vendor/dropshipper.

My name is Vivian and I’m a brand new entrepreneur so please forgive my ignorance. I would like to start an online business selling baby products. Could you send me a price list for your products and describe your dropship fulfillment process? Here are some of my questions…

Can I just send you an order by email and you’ll ship it to my customer?
Is my contact info on the packaging slip?
Can you provide an order summary to confirm the order?
Do you tack on a dropship fee?
Do you provide a discount once I start selling in higher quantities?
Is there a restocking fee and how are returns handled?
How long do I have to return a potential order?
Does a customer contact me or you directly when they want to make a return?
Do I get charged immediately for an order or do I pay later after a set period?
How long does it take for orders to be processed/shipped?
Do you ship via DHL, FEDEX, UPS, and USPS and do you provide tracking numbers?
Do you ship internationally and how do you deal with shipping exceptions where the merchandise is returned to sender?
Do you provide order and shipment confirmations and tracking numbers?

Sorry for all the questions. Thanks in advance.

Not surprisingly, this email received no response. Can you spot the problems? First of all, you should never ever say that you are a “new entrepreneur”.

Think about it this way. If you were a wholesaler, would you want to waste time with someone who has no clue what they were doing? Absolutely not. When you deal with a new vendor, you have to go in with confidence.

Tell them exactly what you are looking for, do your research before hand and don’t ask stupid questions. You don’t have to come across as cocky but you should behave as though you’ve done this before. The key is to be specific, succinct and confident.

Mistake #2: You Talk Too Much In Your First Email

To a certain extent, your initial contact with a vendor is like going on a first date. You don’t want to overwhelm them with questions or seem too desperate or eager. You simply want to get a feel for the vendor and see if they carry what you want to sell. Most distributors are busy so you should be respectful of their time.

In the sample email posted above, this reader asked way too many extraneous questions right off the bat. While the logistics of how business is conducted is important, the key to the initial interaction is simply finding out whether they’ve got what you need.

Here are the typical things I ask for in my first email.

• Information about specific products
• Minimum order quantity
• Pricing
• Shipping and lead times
• Do they offer samples?

Once I’ve gotten an initial response from the vendor, I then start to ask some of the more logistical related questions if I feel they are a potential fit.

Mistake #3: You Have No Clue What You Are Looking For

The more vague you are, the less likely you’ll get a response. In the email above, Vivian mentioned that she was interested in some “baby products” but she was not specific at all.

If I were the vendor, this would be an immediate red flag. What is she looking for exactly? Is she on a fishing expedition to find out everything that we carry? Is she really serious about carrying my products? Does she really know what she wants?

When contacting a vendor for the first time, it helps to clearly specify exactly what you are looking for. By being specific, it demonstrates to the vendor that you did your homework, you know what you want and that you are serious about carrying their products.

On the other hand, if you are vague and/or wishy washy, you will not be considered a serious prospect and your email may go unnoticed.

Putting It All Together

When it comes to finding vendors for your online store, you need to keep in mind that they have the same interests as you do. They want to work with people that will help them make more money.

And if they feel as though you are not worth their time, they will ignore you completely. So even though this might be your first online store and you have no clue what you are doing, you need to throw all of that out the window and proceed with confidence.

Before you contact a vendor, know what you want to carry in your store and do your research. Approach the vendor knowing that you can offer a mutually beneficial money making relationship.

Don’t ramble in your initial email. Instead, be concise and ask them what you need to know about the products you want to sell and the minimum order quantities.

Finally, don’t be timid. Remember, they want to work with you as much as you want to work with them. And it’s a matter of finding the right vendor that will suit your needs.

photo credit: Јason I like troycochrane

The Three Principles of Effective Affiliate Marketing

I’ve already said that affiliate marketing is more of an art than a science, and the reality is that you can approach it from a number of angles. My approach to affiliate marketing is perhaps not mainstream, but it aligns very well with my blogging ethos and avoids any potentially moral gray areas. That’s how I like it.

1. Trust

I first launched my blog in June 2011, but I didn’t monetize it (i.e. start using affiliate links) until February 2012. This was a very deliberate move on my part.

My thinking was quite simple — what right did I have to make any money from affiliate sales when I had no established relationship with my readers? Why would they have any reason to trust my opinion when I was brand new to the scene?

So instead of trying to build what would have been a paltry income from affiliate marketing (given my traffic levels), I worked on building trust. Trust is an asset you cannot put a value on and is worth far more than a few affiliate sales.

If people trust you and believe you to be an honest person, they are far more likely to respect your opinion (and as such follow your recommendations).

The power of this approach is not to be underestimated — I occasionally have people specifically ask me how they can purchase a product through my affiliate link as they believe I deserve the commission for recommending it to them.

When someone first launches a blog they make a clear decision as to the approach they are going to take (whether they know it or not). Some plaster their blog with adverts and include affiliate links at every opportunity, while otherwise recognize the huge long-term benefits of building trust and forego an income in the short term.

2. Selectiveness

As I alluded to above, one way to establish trust is to demonstrate that you have no agenda (by not monetizing your blog). But when the time does come for you to monetize your blog, you will need to conduct yourself in a manner that continues to build that trust while allowing you to make an income.

The key to this is to be very selective in terms of what you promote. I only ever promote products that I use and have personally found to be highly useful. If you promote products on the basis of what you think will make you the most money and/or what you think will convert best, you may experience some success but you will not be building a solid foundation.

You certainly won’t be creating a level of trust with your audience that can lead to far better long term results.

The three products/services I have been most successful in promoting are also three products I love and use on an ongoing basis: Westhost, Tweet Adder, and Market Samurai. That’s no coincidence.

3. Optimization

I used to think that affiliate marketing was as straightforward as sticking up a few links and waiting for the cash to roll in, but I soon learned that wasn’t the case. In reality, successful affiliate marketing requires you take very deliberate steps — you need to optimize your blog to optimize your earnings.

There are two steps behind this principle:

1. Almost every link on your site should lead to an opportunity for a sale (directly or indirectly)
2. You should write posts that create value for the reader and serve to boost your affiliate earnings

Step one should be characterized by a relatively minimalistic blog in which most navigation options and links in the sidebar should lead to an affiliate opportunity. Consider for instance the “Recommended Posts” widget in the sidebar on my blog:



Three of those five links lead to posts that directly promote affiliate products/services. That leads directly into the second step — creating value.

For example, my post on how I attracted 10,000 Twitter followers in a year reveals the process I followed to build a considerable Twitter following. My process requires the use of the Tweet Adder product. I offer value by revealing my process, and if the reader wants to try it for themselves they’ll probably buy a copy of Tweet Adder.

It’s not just about publishing a link — it’s about giving people a compelling reason to buy. The difference is huge.

Scratching the Surface

In reality there is a lot more to affiliate marketing than what I have revealed above. However, these are the three main principles I follow — they form the bedrock of my affiliate marketing strategy.

If you’re an affiliate marketer I’d love to get your thoughts. Furthermore, if you have any comments or questions, please feel free to fire away in the comments section!

photo credit: Si1very

This post was written by Tom Ewer, a regular contributor for MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

• T-shirts and common articles of clothing
• Baby clothing and accessories
• Wedding favors and gifts
• Bed and bath products

But what’s wrong with these products? What characteristics do all of these categories have in common?

For one thing, these categories are all extremely broad and vague. The second thing is that most of these products are commodity goods with extremely high levels of competition.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I also get students who want to sell very obscure products, products with little or no competition and absolutely no demand.

So where do you draw the line? What makes a niche attractive from a small business standpoint? Today, I’m going to show you an easy way to estimate demand and competition for an online store niche before you launch.

Keyword Research

By now, you’ve probably heard the term “keyword research” thrown around quite a bit. Keyword research in the context of ecommerce is the process by which you can assess product demand based on what people type in when they use the search engines.

Using my online store as an example, the search engines make up for a decent chunk of my shop’s overall traffic and conversions so analyzing search traffic is a great way to assess the overall demand for a product niche before you begin.

While most people have a tendency to discuss keyword research in the context of building a niche site or an affiliate marketing site, an online store is different because you don’t need as much traffic to make a decent amount of cash because you make more money per conversion with an online store.

Keyword Research Video Tutorial

Today’s video is going to provide a systematic and quantitative method of evaluating your online business idea for profitability using the popular software tool Market Samurai

If you would like to follow along with today’s video tutorial, please click here and sign up for the free 12 day trial of Market Samurai. There is absolutely no obligation or info required outside of your email address and it’s free to try.

And later, if you ultimately decide that you want to purchase the tool, you can use coupon code: hza9104 to get 33% off the retail price.

Enjoy the video below!

Key Takeaways

So what did you think of the video? Here’s a brief summary of how to analyze demand and competition of a niche in case you missed some of the details from the video.

• Use the “Generate Keywords” function of Market Samurai to generate all the different permutations of keyword phrases based on your seed keyword
• Use the “Keyword Analysis” function to determine the number of clicks per day that a keyword phrase gets but make sure that “exact match” is selected for your initial research.
• Estimate the potential revenue by multiplying the SEOT parameter by the conversion rate (2-5%), by the estimated revenue per sale and by your profit margins. Is this enough money for you?
• Change the match setting to “phrase match” and “broad match” to get an idea of your potential long tail traffic later on down the line
• Use the “SEO Competition” function to assess the competition from a search standpoint
• Perform research on your competitors to make sure that you can add value and create a better shop than what is out there

In the process of doing your niche research, sometimes it can be difficult to find keywords that receive enough traffic and have a low level of competition in order to make an acceptable level of profit. But keep in mind that search is only a fraction of the overall revenue that you will generate with your store.

For example with our store, word of mouth and direct traffic sales are on par with search engine sales. In addition, we get a lot of referral traffic as well from various related publications and social media which converts as well.

So do the necessary research and run the numbers. But when it comes down to it, sometimes you just have to go for it. Good luck!

photo credit: SalFalko

Step 1: Get the Basics Right

I know it’s not particularly exciting, but in order for you to build a sizeable Twitter account you must first ensure that your profile is set up appropriately. You can boil this down to three things:

1. Your Name
   
2. Your Photo
3. Your Bio (and URL)

First, consider this: generally speaking, people want to connect with other people on Twitter. Sure — there are plenty of branded Twitter accounts around and that is often a good route to go, but when appropriate you should look to represent your blog or business in person. So if you are happy to do so, use your own name on your Twitter profile.

You should follow a similar tack for your photo — a picture of a human face is often a lot more endearing than a logo.

Finally, ensure that your bio is suitably descriptive and clearly conveys the benefit that your business or blog has to offer. You should include your website’s URL both in the bio box and in the URL field (as the latter is not shown in all displays.

Here’s my profile to serve as an example:

Step 2: Give People a Reason to Follow You

A lot of Twitter newbies eager to get followers will make it their first priority to follow people in the hope that they will reciprocate. There’s a problem with this: what reason do those people have to follow you?

While you may already have a great website, you do not have a great Twitter account. And although the end goal may be to funnel people through to your website, your Twitter profile should stand alone as an interesting and engaging outlet.

Therefore, before you start adding followers you should look to start tweeting some interesting stuff. And make no mistake — what you tweet has a hugely influential impact on the success of your Twitter profile in the long run. Your approach may vary depending upon your field but I like a mix of the following:

1. Links to related articles (on other sites)
2. Links to related articles (on my site(s))
3. Tidbits of interesting information

If you want to build a Twitter account you’re probably best off avoiding the “what you had for breakfast” type tweets. You can get away with them if you have built a solid personal brand, but until that day, keep it relevant and engaging.

Step 3: Build a Base of Followers

Next you’ll want to get hold of some “easy” followers, such as:

• Your friends, family and co-workers
• Readers and subscribers from your blog, other social media outlets, etc

Don’t be afraid to openly advertise the launch of your account. Send an email to your list, publish a blog post, and so on — get the message out there!

The purpose of this is two-fold:

1. To give your profile a nice head start to get it up and running
2. To establish a positive following:follower ratio

The second outcome is particularly important because you don’t ever want to be following more people than you have following you — it just doesn’t look good. So if you can start with a nice initial wave of followers that gives you a base from which you can build.

Step 4: Find New Followers

You get new followers by referral or by finding them yourself. Referrals will come in time but while you’re small you will need to do some manual work.

My favorite free tool for doing this is ManageFlitter. Its powerful search features allow you to locate Twitter users whose specific interests match what you have to offer. By following these people and reaching out to them, they are far more likely to follow you back.

The process here is really simple — just search for accounts by particular relevant keywords, select those users you discover that may have a relevant interest, and follow them! All this is possible with just a few clicks from within the ManageFlitter app:



The advanced search functionality allows you to filter the results in various ways (e.g. name, location, number of followers). Just log in periodically (whenever it suits you) and follow more people, but remember to always stay below the number of followers you have.

Step 5: Maintain Your Account

Finally, you need to maintain your account so that it can continue to grow. This essentially means two things:

1. Continuing to publish interesting and informative tweets on a consistent basis
2. Adding and removing followings

Because the number of people you follow should be less than the number of people following you, you must periodically unfollow those people who are not likely to follow you back. For instance, you can use ManageFlitter to remove inactive Twitter users (those who haven’t tweeted in 30+ days) or suspected spam accounts.

Furthermore, you should consider unfollowing people who haven’t followed you back after a certain time. There is no right and wrong here in terms of when you do it and your actions may be dictated by the growth of your account (i.e. if you are growing faster you can afford to be more lenient on those who do not follow back promptly).

Follow the Process

Once you have repeated the above steps you will want to repeat steps 4 and 5 ad infinitum. And that’s it! Before long your follower account will begin to grow. That growth is likely to be relatively slow at first, but you will find that the pace will pick up as gain more followers.

While there is certainly more you can do to grow your Twitter account, I consider the above steps to be the absolute basics in terms of getting started. Stick to the fundamentals and you won’t go wrong.

Just remember that patience is the name of the game — it took me around six months to get my first 500 followers (when I had no idea what I was doing), and then another twelve to get an additional 10,000 or so. If you persist, your efforts will pay off!

The Wrong Way To Address Showrooming

Here’s a script that Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist at the Times, came up with to prevent customers from showrooming.

I appreciate the value of your dollar, but we are a local retailer bringing vibrancy to this district. If everyone did what you did, we could no longer afford the Main Street rent that those Web retailers do not have to pay, and we’d be out of business. Then this space becomes another chain drugstore or branch of a megabank. Is that what you want?

Now I don’t know about you, but if someone came up to me and used that script in a brick and mortar store, I’d probably never go back. When I go shopping, I need to feel comfortable with the environment.

In general, I don’t like to be accosted by aggressive sales people. I don’t like being hovered over as I walk through a store. And most definitely, I don’t like being shamed or pressured into buying anything.

Being accused of “showrooming” and given a lecture would not only make me want to leave but I’d also tell all of my friends about the experience. Heck, I’d probably even blog about it and make it a permanent fixture on Google search.

If you take away a single thing from my post today, remember that sales are never made by “confronting” or “shaming” a customer into buying from you. Period!

A Better Approach

Now let’s take a look at an alternative way of selling that exploits the inherent advantages that a brick and mortar store has over an online shop. First and foremost, every brick and mortar store has REAL people working the floor.

And the advantage of having real people and a tangible shopping environment is that you can engage a customer much more effectively than a canned ecommerce website. Brick and mortar shopowners need to emphasize this fact and provide a superior shopping experience.

Now you’ve probably heard the terms “superior shopping experience” and “adding value to customers” thrown around quite a bit. But I’d like to give you a real life example of a situation where I gladly paid 30% more to make a purchase at a brick and mortar store.

In fact, I would gladly pay 30% more over and over again. And if you ask, I can easily give you many more examples where price isn't everything.

Taking Advantage Of Reciprocity

But before I tell you my story, I thought I'd mention an important aspect of human nature that brick and mortar stores need to emphasize, reciprocity. If a store goes out of their way to help me or provide me with a great shopping experience, I will most likely buy from them even if their prices are higher.

A while back, I was in the market for a pair of running shoes because I was determined to get into shape. So I shopped online for a bit and read various shoe reviews but I decided that it would be best to try on real running shoes in person to determine the best fit for my feet.

After asking around for brick and mortar store recommendations, I ended up at this small boutique shoe store in a nearby town. Now I must confess. In the back of mind, my plan was to try on some shoes and then go online to find the best possible price.

But something strange happened when I walked into this running shoe store. Since I was a running newbie, I ended up asking a lot of questions about the different types of shoes.

And I was completely blown away by the sales people's level of knowledge and their willingness to help. In fact, I felt like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman as I was helped by 3 different experts who each specialized in different forms of running.

Much to my surprise, every single employee of this boutique was either an ex-collegiate runner or a running enthusiast. Not only did they thoroughly answer my questions but they also had me do what they called a "running fit" test.

Basically, they had me remove my shoes and socks and watched me run on a treadmill for several minutes to determine the mechanics of my running form. Then, they gave me a foot exam to see what my arches were like.

Now I don't know about you, but anyone who is brave enough to touch my stinky feet deserves the sale. In fact, this shop already had me before I hopped on the treadmill.

Long story short, I ended up paying 30% more for a pair of running shoes and I left the store feeling fantastic! I did not even think about the extra money because I had such a great shopping experience.

Price Isn't Everything

When it comes to showrooming, there will always be a small subset of people who will be looking for the best deal no matter what the circumstances. But these are not the customers you want to be targeting for your business.

After all, if your store is competing purely on price then you've got major problems on your hands. Instead of focusing on price, you should instead be focusing on what value you can provide to your customers.

Further Reading: What To Do If A Competing Business Undercuts You In Price

After critiquing many websites over the years as part of my online store course, I've found that the biggest problem for most shops (whether they be online or offline) is that they don't have a well defined unique value proposition.

Once you've discovered what sets your shop apart from the rest, the sales experience should go much smoother whether customers decide to showroom or not.

photo credit: Johan Larsson dhammza Libertinus evoo73