Category: Marketing

Why I never volunteer for bacon!

Paul

"Please Enter A Valid Email Address" Image by pjsherman via Flickr

All Dogs love bacon!

If your wondering what I am talking about.   I will explain it to you in ways that you probably never considered.    If you have ever signed up to websites and they ask you if they could share your email address and name to 3rd parties.   3rd parties are like Epsilon Marketing and they make there money by selling products to people who have volunteered to receive bacon advertisements.

Security is nothing to Epsilon!

I won’t go into detail about why because if I did you would probably agree with me just because of what happened.   Most likely Epsilon will loss a lot of customers and businesses due to the security breaches.    It just depends on how people feel about this company and why anyone should trust them after this breach.   I always tell anyone who signs up for a service to always makes sure to opt out of those emails.   I don’t know about you but I know right now Epsilon has Egg on their faces and wouldn’t mind sticking their heads in the sand.

Don’t Get Caught Spear Phishing!

Now since the hackers have your name and your Email address, you probably are wondering what can I do not to get fooled.   I thought it would be a good idea to give some good guidance for those who might want to prevent this from happening in the first place.   You don’t want them to get your sensitive information.    I don’t want anyone to know my passwords or even my credit card numbers.   They will try to fool into giving out this information because there is some kind of urgent response about some kind of problem with your account.

Some stuff to consider:

  • No Company will call you asking for personal information

  • Nothing is so important as to go to the website directly

  • If they don’t sound professional then tell them you will go visit the local bank or institution

  • Just because they know your name doesn’t mean they are real

  • Don’t click links in emails that you don’t trust, always go the sites that you trust by typing it in your browser

These are just a few ways to help prevent yourself from being phished but nothing can prevent it but yourself. So remember to think before you click and think before you give out any information to unknown emails or people.

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Misconceptions of Affiliate Marketing

Paul

Earlier today I was chatting with Mike Smith, from Miketechshow.com. Mike was saying how unreliable it is to have links being displayed on his site. He also talked about how he wasn’t making a lot from those links. He also talked about wanting a sponsor and not affiliates.  I say if he could affiliate market on his podcast he’d start earning money.   So I figured I would offer some great tips to get the Click through conversion rates that work for me:

  • Cater to Your Nich market — If you don’t know you audience how can you know what they are looking for.   Having a site for famous Gossip could cater to Clothes and Jewerly.  This is the first thing you ned to do to start making some kind of money from affiliate marketing.

  • Keep reminding your Audience about your Market — Like Me I keep reminding people about all those good [intlink id=”2205″ type=”page”]Anti-virus software[/intlink] that can be valuable.  To get people to click on your link you sometimes have to remind them that it is there.   This helps get a residue income from your niche audience.

  • Recommendations do create sales —  if you recommend a product that creates click through and creating a trust between the writer and the Readers.  This gives the readers a reason to come back and stay a while.   If they start trusting you that means they will may click on other recommendations.

  • Create a affiliate sneeze page —  This sounds nasty but having affiliate links on specials in your niche market helps drive traffic to your links.   Like I have a page for [intlink id=”2740″ type=”page”]Cricket Specials[/intlink], it helps keep people coming back and buying through you because it makes it easy to find what they want.

These are just a few that have worked for me there are vast number of websites talking about Affiliates and why they will not work or they talk about making millions.   There are truths in everything you read weather you read comments that affiliate don’t work but that is a misconception because those who say that are people who don’t really understand it or grasp it.    If you aren’t seeing the big picture or thinking a few years down the road then you will never make any substantial amount of money from Affiliate marketing.

There are a lot of techneaks that people use to get more affiliate sales or commision but it is something you have to do and consider the reprocutions of some of these actions.   I talk about email spam, although, 12 percent of people  have opened this is bad practice for affiliates because this create a bad taste in consumers mouth.  This also hurts other people who are trying to get clicks because of the bad taste that prevents those consumers from clicking and maybe create a negative public relations.

Do it right and you could create a great market place for your audience and also create income that keeps coming every month.