The Importance of Building a List

Out of all the possible approaches to affiliate marketing, lead capture and list building represents the smartest and most effective option. Why?

A lost visitor is a lost sale. A lost visitor is the loss of potential repeat sales. Think of it this way: you’re putting time and money into your advertising. If you aren’t capturing your visitor’s email addresses, you’re basically throwing all of that traffic right down the drain.

When you capture your visitors to your list, you open a whole new world of profit opportunities – not just for the short term, but for the long term as well. The Benefits of List Marketing

You can educate your prospects. This will increase your conversion rate by giving you the opportunity to turn hesitant prospects into enthusiastic customers.

You can market to your prospects over and over again. Your long term profit potential exists in repeat sales. Never work for “just one sale”.

You can double your return on investment while lowering your advertising costs. Once you’ve got a list in place, you don’t have to limit your offerings to just affiliate product. You can bring in any additional, related products of interest to your list and make sales immediately without going through the same advertising process all over again. Can you see the benefits yet? Why spend money over and over again sending people to the same page and “hoping for a sale”, when you can capture them to your list and have full control over the conversion process?

Any other approach leaves you at the mercy of the merchant’s web copy and the customer’s mindset at first contact. You’ve got to lure your prospects in and expose them your message multiple times. This will save you so much time and money you’ll wonder why you ever did it any other way.

It'll also put you in the top 5% of affiliates that actually do this. . .

Haha - And Yes list building is one of the main components of out

Affiliate Enhancer software - it makes it super easy to create your

capture pages in less than 3 minutes: AffiliateEnhancer.com

Link Theft

Today we’re going to talk about the dark side of affiliate marketing: Link Theft. It’s not ethical, but it happens. You should know that there are people out there who, for whatever reason, absolutely hate the idea of someone earning a commission off their purchase. These are the cranky, paranoid customers of the online world. There are also fellow affiliate marketers who would deny you your hard earned commission as well.

The term “link theft” isn’t entirely accurate, though it’s what you’ll see used to refer to this phenomenon. The accurate term, in a nuts and bolts sense, is “link altering”.

Quite simply, the link thief does one of two things :

1. Erases your affiliate link from his browser window, deletes any cookies set by the link, and then proceeds to the merchant’s site via the main www url.
2. Erases your affiliate I.D. and replaces it with his. He then purchases through his own link and takes his commission as a rebate.

The solution to link theft is “link cloaking”. Essentially, you turn an obvious affiliate link such as www.clickbank.com/hop?=affiliate, into an encrypted link or you mask it behind a short domain name.

There are pros and cons with each method. Link cloaking software such as Affiliate Defender and others use javascript to encapsulate your URL into an indecipherable scramble of characters. This prevents anyone from seeing the real affiliate link at the bottom of their browser window when they mouse over

it. The only problem is that your link can still end up exposed once the user clicks on to the main site. The link often “unscrambles” and appears naked yet again in the address bar.

Domain masking, when done properly, allows you to use your own short url which redirects to the merchant site while keeping your url in the address bar. You can use domain masking with any address you choose. For example, you could register one domain name to devote to your affiliate redirects.

You can use subdomains (subdomainname.mysite.com) and also directories (www.mysite.com/product).

The downside to domain masking: the technique involves what’s called an “invisible frame”. The frame pulls in the affiliate site within the main window. Imagine your site has a set of navigation links down the left-hand side, and clicking those links causes the main window to pull up content, while leaving the left column unchanged. This is the basis of the technique – it’s just set up on one link and hidden from the surfer’s view. Unfortunately, sites like Clickbank frown upon this practice.

There’s a good chance that your redirect link will break frames and wind up exposing your affiliate URL anyways. Nothing wrong with that other than the fact that you went through a lot of work for nothing!

A greater concern: frames have a bad habit of confusing affiliate tracking applications. Your referral ID might not be recorded and you wind up losing the sale.

Obviously, you are free to test out any of these “solutions”. Just keep in mind that they aren’t fool proof. Ultimately, the link theft problem occurs much more frequently in the Internet Marketing niche than it does anywhere else due to the large number of fellow

We’ve come to the last day of the course, and it’s time to tie up the loose ends and cover some advanced topics. As you know by now, affiliate marketing can be incredibly rewarding when done properly. There are also a lot of pitfalls you need to watch out for as well. One of these is merchant fraud. Merchant fraud, unfortunately, does happen. Merchants can use any number of clever tactics to cheat you out of your commission. One of these methods is to offer multiple payment options to customers without linking each one to their affiliate tracking software. For example, let’s say that a merchant offers credit payments, payment via Paypal and payment via check to the customer.

The merchant tracks your affiliate ID up to the point of sale and credits you if the customer chooses to pay via credit card through the merchant’s main payment gateway. However, if the customer chooses Paypal or check, your affiliate ID is immediately tossed.

The only way around this clever trick is an exercise of caution on your part. When you evaluate a potential affiliate program, check to see how many payment methods the merchant offers. Secondly, after you sign up for an account, examine you referral links.

In fact, if you have the budget to spare, follow your own link and choose one of the alternate payment options and purchase a product.

Did you get credit for that sale? Great! If you didn’t receive credit, though, it’s time to can that merchant and move on to more ethical waters.

Here’s another ‘advanced’ tip to consider: use affiliate networks like Commission Junction to evaluate potential merchants. Joining programs via a network is often a better choice than signing up at individual, non-networked sites. The reason is simple: membership in an affiliate network imposes stricter standards on merchant behavior.

You also have access to a wealth of data on the overall performance of other affiliates in that merchant’s program. Last but not least, you need to focus on building trust among potential customers. If your merchant site doesn’t do a very good job of this, then send your visitors to your web site. Make it clear what products and/or information you have to offer. Again the easy way to do this is with Affiliate Enhancer

http://www.affiliateenhancer.com/

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The New Way to Achieve All Your Dreams

By Stuart Lichtman

Name something you want. It can be a weight-loss goal, a money goal, a sales quota, a new house, a relationship, etc. It’s entirely up to you. Since this book is about money, think about your money goals. How much more money are your seeking, anyway? A hundred dollars? Thousands? A million?

Now let me ask you a blunt question: Why don’t you have it yet?

Why don’t you have the thinner body, or more money, or whatever it is you said you wanted? Well?

Now let me tell you something shocking: The fault isn’t with the economy, your parents, your spouse, your neighbors, your mayor, the president or anyone or anything outside of you. There is only one answer to my question of, “Why don’t you have it yet?” And I’ll tell you what it is in a minute.

Have you ever wondered why so many people have so much trouble getting what they truly want? Have you considered that there could be an easier way though life? Have you ever felt that life was just too much of a struggle? Most of us have, at one time or another, just felt that life was a royal pain. But the liberating truth is this - life doesn’t have to be that way.

What’s the secret to making life a joy? What’s the secret to creating more money now? And what’s the answer to why you haven’t achieved your goals yet? It’s in your own mind.

No, not in your thoughts. Not in your conscious mind. The roadblock is deeper. It’s where you rarely look. It’s in your unconscious. In short, if there is something you are trying to achieve - you name it - and you aren’t achieving it, chances are your unconscious holds some contradictory intentions for you. Said another way, you want something and it doesn’t. If you are typical, you are constantly giving yourself contradictory instructions - like “I want to lose weight” and “I want that luscious piece of pie.” Notice anything odd about

them? Those statements are going in different directions. After years of such frustrating and contradictory messages, your unconscious gives up and starts to disregard what you consciously want.

In other words, you canceled out your own request. You said, “I want money,” but right after that you said (or thought), “I don’t deserve it” or “Money never comes to me” or some other similar limiting belief. As a result, you usually didn’t get what you said you wanted! But I have good news for you. All that is about to end.

An Introduction To Cybernetic Transposition

I define “Cybernetic Transposition” as: Putting yourself consciously in charge by creating effective communication between your conscious and unconscious minds, by consciously transposing successes from any part of your life into other ones where you consciously want to produce success, resolving self-defeating unconscious habit patterns into ones that support you and by creating effective conscious communication with the part of your that knows what’s right for you.

Where did I get the two words that make up the term?

Cybernetics is a term created by the incredibly brilliant Norbert Wiener who developed the discipline and who I used to see wandering the halls of MIT. Cybernetics derives from the Greek word for “steersman” or the person in control. In a very real sense, our unconscious mind acts as our massively powerful, massively parallel computer comprised of about 100 billion tiny computers called neurons. Usually, our conscious minds are pretty much irrelevant to the functioning of our unconscious. 52

I’ll be teaching you to change that, to bring your conscious mind into the loop so it, in a sense, becomes the steersman. So the first part of the definition is helping people to be more human rather than acting like machines that operate almost totally unconsciously, out of conscious control. Transposition is defined as the process of interchanging. In our case, we are taking a memory of success in one aspect of life or in the same aspect at a different time in life and transposing it to create success in a different aspect and/or time.

Now that you have been introduced to the name of the process, let’s move on to discovering how to use it to manifest your highest dreams. Ready?

Three Steps To More Cash

You’re about to learn how a tried and tested three step process can transform your world and bring you all the riches you’ve ever imagined. I’ve proven this method will work by testing it on 50,000 people. Now you’re going to prove it will work for you. First, let me introduce you to the basic three steps:

1. Create a Target that defines what you want, one that is clearly understood by all aspects of your un-conscious mind. Think of the bull’s eye of an archery target with its concentric circles enclosing a central red circle. Your unconscious mind needs something as clear as that circle, a target that indicates exactly what you want.
2. Prioritize your Target: Flag it so that you will remain unconsciously focused on it while you get on with your normal activities. Imagine a large crows of people, all dressed alike in gray. Now picture one of them holding up your highly graphic bulls’ eye target with the bright red center. Chances are, the target is what will catch your eye. That’s what happens in your unconscious mind when you have appropriately prioritized your target.
3. Resolve any self-defeating un-conscious habit patterns that can prevent you from achieving your target. Your unconscious habits govern what you normally do in a situation. The most efficient way to go through life is to do a lot of things on automatic - except when those automatic habit patterns get in the way. In other words, most people have unconscious mechanisms that sabotage their desire to hit the target. When you clear those, you are free to hit the mark.

One Last Thing

You don’t have to believe this is going to work. You probably have your doubts. You probably want to raise a ton of money fast but are highly suspicious that this method will work for you. Well, I’ve taught my seminar to 50,000 people. Even the ones who didn’t believe this would work still got results.

The truth is this :

1. If you have a modest goal or target, you can use the Basic three steps we’ve been talking about to achieve it.
2. If you have what feels like an “Impossible” desire, you can use the Super Achievement process to achieve it. Either way, your results are just waiting for you!

Excerpted from the ebook “How to Make Lots of Money for Anything - Fast!” copyright 2002 by Stuart Lichtman. All rights reserved. Get the entire program at www.mindpowernews.com/AnythingFast.htm

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