Posted by Sean Cohen

The future of customer service is here. Technology has made seeking out support faster and easier than ever. But, has your digital age company sacrificed true service in the name of automation?

Today, finding customer support is as simple as writing an e-mail or picking up the phone. But, even though you’re not face-to-face with your customers, you still leave a lasting impression. Do you come across as caring and competent, or menacing and mechanical?

Offering stand-out service on the Internet isn’t as hard as it is rare. Take these simple steps towards old-style service in the digital age:

1. Be Clear, But Sincere
2. Offer Live Customer Support
3. Make Sure Your Support Reps Have All the Answers

Give Each Customer a Personal Response

 When a customer sits down to e-mail your company, it’s because he needs help. He chooses e-mail because it’s quick, but his request still warrants a satisfying and personal response!

Companies eager to save time and money often take automation too far in their customer support. Each customer has a unique question, and deserves a unique answer. Even if you save time by copying and pasting stock replies, change the opening and closing to make the message sound less robotic.

Be Clear, But Sincere

When responding to customers’ e-mail, be sincere and to the point. Before sending a message, try turning the tables. Ask yourself, “Would this answer satisfy me if I were the customer?”

Take that extra moment to give your customer the help he deserves. It might mean the difference between a satisfied customer and a credit card chargeback!

Offer Live Customer Support

E-mail has become an acceptable form of communication. But, live customer support is still necessary. The plethora of information available online can be overwhelming to customers, especially those new to the Internet!

Single your company out from the crowd by providing customers with a real person to talk to. Live phone support is an invaluable way to foster trust. When your customer has reached the end of his Internet rope, and just needs help, your toll free number is the answer he’s looking for.

Make Sure Your Support Reps Have All The Answers

The presence of phone support will do no good if your staff doesn’t know your product! Customer support reps should be warm and friendly, and willing to help with any aspect of your product.

What a good feeling it is to talk to someone who feels confident in his product. It’s even better if he’s knowledgeable enough to solve your problem without transferring you all around the company!

Provide Stand-Out Service; Gain Lifelong Customers

Too many e-businesses skimp on customer service, hiding behind web sites and message boards. Customer support is an integral part of every company, even those operating solely online. Be one of the few to offer stellar service, and gain customers for life! To give your business the edge in top quality customer support check out this great tool now!

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Affiliate programs are one of the quickest and easiest ways of making profits online. But if you don’t market effectively, they can also prove to be the black hole that sucks away all your money and effort.

Affiliate programs work in two ways to make you money: they can be used as a full-time career option or can be used as a supplement to beef up your main income. Your aim should be to start slow and then make your way to bigger bucks.

Affiliate marketing is a source of multiple streams of income. You can choose to be a product producer with an affiliate program or you can take the easier route and just become an affiliate yourself.

You can promote as many products as you want. You can choose a single-tier program or a multiple-tier program.

All of these factors decide the amount of money you make. Most of the affiliate programs you see are single-tier. You sell a product and you earn a commission on it. End of story.

In two-tier programs, you earn a commission when you refer someone else to your website. When that person sells the product, you will earn a smaller commission on that too. So, you earn every time the people below you make a sale. These programs are comparatively rarer.

What should you do to become a top affiliate marketer?

• Do build a base: Your first step as an affiliate is to set up shop. That means you have to set up a website or a blog. This is the place where your customers come to find you and your affiliate ads. The easiest way for you to kick-start your program is to set up a blog through a reliable free blogging service. You can have several websites or blogs recommending your products.
• Do select your product carefully: Select a product through one of the clearinghouses like ClickBank.
• Do track your efforts: Ideally, you should not have to spend all your time tweaking your affiliate links or strategies. You must invest some time in tracking your efforts and maintaining links.
• Do choose a catchy name: The name of your blog should be short and catchy, so people can internalize it quickly and remember it at will.
• Do put up your affiliate links carefully: Remember, these links are the lifeblood of your income. Get them wrong and you’ll be throwing good money out of the window, literally. Copy and paste the text of your links carefully.
• Do drive in traffic: Being a super-affiliate is all about being able to drive in hordes of traffic. You can use multiple websites or blogs to drive traffic your way. Increase your web presence by starting an eZine through popular eZine creation websites. Feed your websites with fresh content using RSS feeds.
• Do use social networking: Social networking is the hottest item online, as of today. With a nice profile in sites like MySpace, TagWorld and others, you can drive traffic to your blog. Use search engines effectively to build up your web presence.
• Do use viral marketing to improve sales.

In my next article, I will be discussing something that is rarely talked about. Nevertheless, it is one of the most powerful tools available to affiliates to attract volumes of traffic - a well-written sales copy.

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As a first step, identify what you are interested in, because this will help you find the right products to promote. When you are enthusiastic about the products you sign up with, it shows in the way you promote them and it doesn’t seem like work at all. Your eagerness to share the product comes through in a genuine manner and it becomes much easier to convince others. See what we mean? So identify what you are passionate about. In fact, make a list of all the things you love. If you love music, go a little further and identify a ‘niche’ in that broad topic.

After you’ve zeroed in on a few music related topics you are passionate about, you can use ClickBank, the affiliate networking site to find sites you can broker for. When you go to the “promote products’ sections and click on the marketplace link, you will land on the ’search the ClickBank marketplace’ page. Here you can choose a category from the dropdown list.

Check out the ‘money and employment’ category for a huge database of niche market ideas in that category. Now all you need to do is find the niche market that interests you. You can check out the links to know more about the sites. See, right now your motive is to find ideas of the markets you can broker for and finding the specific sites is the next step. So shortlist the niche markets that grab your attention.

Probably the most intricate step is to find the sites to broker for, but once done with this, you would have set up a system that will earn you money for years and years to come for just a couple of hours of focused work. Let Google help you with this. Type in the search phrase with your niche market name followed by two tier affiliate program. You’ll get your search results. See the number of results? Look through it to find a site that suit the parameters we talked about in part two of our training series, namely provide promotional material, dependable tracking and a percentage from the sales of the affiliates you recruit.

With the steps outlined above, you can find a niche you love, a two tier commission structure, a commission of $10 or more from the sales of marketers with whom you broker the deal, promo material, and tracking system. Go for it.

Notice that you don’t even need a website to get started with JV brokering. But suppose your two-tier affiliate program asks you for your website URL? In most cases, you can continue signing up by mentioning ‘coming soon’ or not available. You can also find niche two tier programs from affiliate directories.

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In my last two articles, “Is Click Bank A Scam?” and “Do You Know The Adwords Secret?“, I covered the basics of how ClickBank works, some of the strategies affiliate marketers use to drive traffic and why some of those methods don’t always work. Today, I’m going to get right down to the nitty-gritty of bringing in that ClickBank cash - choosing the right kind of product. If you were to assess the biggest losers in the ClickBank game, you’ll find that they all have one thing in common. They are promoting the wrong kind of products.

Yes, it’s true that with some products, the market is simply too competitive to even hope to get noticed. Other products are just things that very few people even think about buying. The secret is to find that spot between these two extremes- ideally, the products you promote should fill two important criteria. There should be a demand that exceeds existing supply. Secondly, the market shouldn’t be saturated yet.

Right now, you’re probably thinking, well all I have to do is promote new products then, right? Not necessarily- the first thing to do is check out the ClickBank Marketplace. Choose a category that you like and then select New Products. Now sort these results in order of gravity or popularity- right now, this is your most important factor. But the most popular product doesn’t necessarily mean it will bring you the most money.

The Whole Equation

There are a series of figures that you need to consider when selecting a product. When you select one, you’ll notice that it comes with a list of symbols.

• $/sale is the amount you can earn per sale.
• %/sale is the percentage that the affiliate will receive.
• %/refd is the sales generated by that vendor solely from its ClickBank affiliates
• grav is the gravity or popularity of the product

A promising product should pay you more than $20 and have a minimum percentage of 50%. The ideal gravity threshold is 10- 60. Over 60 means the product is already doing well and the market might be saturated already. However, there have been instances of products ranking higher than 60 while having low market saturation. Less than 10 is a risk, because it says that the product hasn’t been able to prove itself as a seller yet.

Apart from these figures, it’s also important to take a good look at the product and the vendor’s selling page. Deciphering sales letters does take a little practice but soon you’ll be able to spot the winners and the ones you can ignore. Testimonials, benefits and time sensitive offers are all positive aspects you should look out for. Make sure the page is designed well- this doesn’t mean it has to be fancy, just clean and pleasing to the eye. A good, attractive headline is also a good sign.

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Testimonials are a great strategy to pull traffic to your website and in list building. What makes them special? Testimonials come from the actual users, which gives them their authentic feel.

Buyers write testimonials when they are happy about using your product or service. They like to highly precisely what they liked about your product and how it benefited them specifically.

Testimonials from your customer help you increase sales. On the other hand, when you write a testimonial for another site and let them publish it, it becomes a good linking strategy as well. When you write a testimonial and have it published by a website that receives tremendous amounts of traffic consistently, your link is going to be exposed to all that traffic. You also gain link popularity.

Testimonials need not be confined to merchant sites. You can also write testimonials and have them published in ezines with your link.

By their sheer simplicity, testimonials make an effective marketing strategy and a list builder when used in the right manner. How do you go about it?

You can let your existing customers know you care about how they perceive your product or service by asking for feedback in the form of testimonials. Have a separate testimonial page linking to your products pages.

Every affiliate marketer can greatly benefit from unbiased testimonials. Here’s how you do it:

• The testimonials you use must produce measurable results. Its not enough to publish a testimonial that just rambles on about feelings. The testimonial must be specific about the benefits and results. This could be in the form of saving money (how much in what time); testimonials could also highlight your responsiveness to your customer, good presentation of product, promise of quality kept, etc. The exact info would be based on what your product is.
• Testimonials must be short and well worded. Long lengths of text are usually quickly browsed through without actually reading them.
• Ensure that you include information about the writer of the testimonial instead of a couple of initials. This will establish credibility. So, first and last name, city/state, website url if there is one, occupation, plus any other info that the customer feels comfortable about disclosing in public.

The thing about testimonials is that most people wont volunteer one. You’ve got to ask for them. And watch your list grow as you feature them on your website and elsewhere.

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A lot of Internet marketers ask this vital question - which should we find first - the market or the product? So lets get this cleared right away. It is not only easy, but also sensible to find your market first. Only then, understand what they want, look for those products and offer it to them. if you find the product first and find that there’s no hungry market for it, then you have just wasted time and effort that you could have effectively spent making a profit.

Here’s how you go about finding well-established products that are profitable:

Focus On Niche Products

A search will reveal the ones that make the largest commissions per sale. But remember, you must also get the products that aren’t so competitive that everyone is trying to make money from it. Did you ask why? Simply because when there is fierce competition you will have to invest in advertising and promotion - which involves time, effort and most of all - cuts into your commission.

Competition is good - but there are plenty of products and markets you can focus soon. So look for hungry markets niche products with high demand and lesser competition. Niche marketing is the way to go, because you can cater to a specific need.

Find Good Quality Products

The advertisements and sales letters must be accurate in their claims of the product. Can you imagine great promotion - the product turns out to be bad - and you end up getting involved in refunds? The market will just dry up. One way to figure out the quality of the product is to check it out for yourself. The easier way is to read reviews online. Marketplaces like Clickbank where you can find hot niche products will also rank affiliate products, which in turn, will tell you about their quality.

Pick Products You Like

Choose it -

• If you loved it and experienced it
• if you see a lot of repeat sales

It means its good, there’s a hot market and the sales material works.

Bottomline - High Margins?

Is the money you will earn worth the effort you put in? Personally I recommend products that offer you a high margin. The more you make per sale, the better your profits. So look for an average commission of at least $35 per sale.

Does The Product Have A Great Sales Page?

The job of a sales page is to convert the visitor into a customer with accurate information. It should grab the visitor’s eyeballs, get them excited, feature testimonials and offer a refund, among other things. Look at the sales page - does it grab you? if it doesn’t, it is likely that it wont pull in customers.

The Affiliate Program For The Product Must Be Reliable

Prompt service, good products, regular payouts and good reviews are the hallmarks of good affiliate programs. Look for them. One of the best sources is Clickbank, an affiliate network.

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In this article, I’m going to show you the best techniques to make money online that have little or no cost and produce fast results. So first off, here’s one that does not involve any cost at all.

Let’s get back to those keywords I talked about in an earlier article, “This Is How You Spot The Best Affiliate Opportunities“. Remember the information keywords? Here we’ll use the buzz factor to cash in on viral publicity. It is as simple as setting up a blog and putting AdSense ads on it. We’ll then use the information keywords to drive unpaid traffic to it.

The crucial factor here is the keyword’s buzz factor. Is it hot enough for people to spread the word? Usually, celebrity news, politics, sports, etc. are the kind of news bits that will work here.

After you have picked the buzz worthy keywords, set up your blog and add your AdSense code to it. You need to get your adsense ad as much exposure as possible - so that you get a great click through rate on your ads, thereby exploding your income. You must now add a blog post about the keyword you’ve chosen. Don’t worry, you can copy and paste the news item itself for the blog post. Add a small article that is informative, with complete details of the news item.

Now you need traffic - and lots of it. How will you get it? Use the power of social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc. These sites get awesome traffic that you want to cash in and that too without paying a dime. Create an account at these sites and submit your story as per the instructions.

Rather than do this manually, you have the option of using automation tools that can achieve this for you. We are talking about thirty minutes to AdSense income here, remember? Use these tools to submit your news items to plenty of social bookmarking sites and almost right away you will see floods of traffic targeted to your keywords. Make sure you read the site’s policy to avoid getting your item banned.

While you can create a new blog for each news item, it is better to post on one blog as it not only saves time but is also beneficial in terms of search engine optimization. Why lose search engine traffic?

To summarize, you can use high buzz high demand keywords to increase your AdSense income while leveraging the power of social bookmarking sites. You need to do this quickly and on time. If you delay, then you lose the power of the buzz factor of these keywords. Finding these keywords must be a continuous process and thanks to Google’s Hot trends it will be a matter of minutes before you zero in on your list.

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I’m sure you got into the Internet business with only one magic formula in your mind: Internet = Business = Huge profits.

But to fully integrate this formula into a working model, you will need another component: Traffic, and loads of it.

In the competitive business of making money on the internet, timing is essential. You should always be at least one step ahead of your competition. Strategies to improve your traffic should have been done on a war footing, starting yesterday!

So let’s move ahead quickly.

Top 6 methods to build traffic that pays:

1. Build a website: This would be the logical first step. Your website is your identity on the web. Choose a theme, font, colors and functionalities that nicely complement your niche. Build your website using a number of competitive keyword phrases that attract search engines.
2. Invest in ads: Yahoo’s Overture and Google Adwords are great advertising schemes that can truly pull in traffic. A Google Adwords account is cheap and it has a number of great tools like the Traffic Estimator, which helps you analyze the effectiveness of your keywords. While many people shy away from spending money on ads, these are surefire ways to boost incoming traffic. Believe me, every penny you spend on Google and Yahoo ads is worth it.
3. Exchange links with other sites: This two-way process rewards you and your link partner. When one site that specializes in a niche offers links to a supporting site, the efforts are doubly beneficial to both. The more links you trade, the more traffic you generate.
4. Join online communities: This increases your visibility dramatically. It also helps establish you as THE expert in your field. If you contribute material worthy of being read, seen or heard, you can be sure that you will experience an immediate ROI in terms of increased traffic to your site. Put up a Blog and start populating it with thoughtful comments and useful information.
5. Write: Put quality articles in your website. Publish note-worthy pieces in eZines and send your clients some outstanding newsletters or reports. Nothing can beat a piece of intelligent reading when it comes to attracting paying visitors. Your best option would be to write your own articles. However, if putting pen to paper is not your thing, hire ghostwriters to do the work. Or buy a pack of readymade PLR articles. The only thing to look out for, is that your articles need be 100% original and high-quality.
6. Use viral marketing: Viral marketing is a relatively new method of driving focused traffic to your site. It is low in cost but high in returns. Using video, audio and RSS feeds on your website can multiply the volume of people coming to your site.

These are some of the methods in which you can build traffic to your website.

But there is yet another crucial factor that decides the kind of traffic you get. I mean, while your ads can bring you visitors, it need not bring you targeted visitors, the kind of visitors who actually spend money. To do that, you have to concentrate on your keywords.

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In this article, I’m going to look at the best sites to broker for. After all, this will be the basis of your earnings. As a JV broker, here’s what you do:

• Find someone who wants to sell products
• Find a marketer to sell these products
• Broker a deal between them
• Earn profits

You’ll remember in my last article, “Taking The First Step Towards Profits“ that I talked about how two-tier affiliate programs are the best ones to sign up for. To get a little deeper into this, here’s what you should look for.

Sites That Pay A Minimum Second Tier Commission Of $10

We are looking at a minimum commission of $ 10 per second tier sale. This is not tough to do. Even if the marketer you broker a deal with makes ten sales, you earn $100. If the marketer has a huge list of subscribers, just by sending them a simple email, you are looking at a high conversion rate that can earn you thousands in commission. See how powerful this method is? So even with a product that doesn’t cost much, you can still make a lot of earnings by identifying and leveraging marketers with huge lists.

Sites That Give Your Marketer Promotional Material That’s Ready To Use

The marketer you are brokering the deal with will love it when he can earn without doing a thing. If you outline even a couple of simple jobs like sending out an email or setting up a banner ad, chances are that they’ll never get around to doing it. Instead, if the product site you are brokering for provides all the promotional material in a ready to use form, you can tell your marketer that all he needs to do is copy paste it into his email software and send. Don’t forget to tell him that he’ll see money within the hour of doing this. It’s a lot easier to send out an email campaign that has already been written for you than go through the process of writing them and then sending them. So you simply need to find a site owner who is smart enough to provide the promotional material to sell his products.

Sites That Give Your Marketer Promotional Material That’s Ready To Use

In fact, this is your first priority as the success of your JV brokering depends on this. What if the marketer doesn’t sign up right away through your link? There is every chance of them signing up even a couple of months later. How do you keep track? More importantly, how do you ensure your commission on the sales generated by them?

Here’s where you need to ensure that your site owner has a cookie tracking system in place. Sign up with sites that offer you a two tier program as well as track everything through cookies valid for several months. No matter when your marketer signs up through your link you will get a commission on the sales they make.

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I am thrilled to share with you some information on how to maximize profits from your membership websites because I’m sure these keys will help you multiply your membership income.

In the last couple of years, membership websites have literally taken the internet by storm. Today, paying for online information is the norm rather than the exception. More and more ‘infopreneurs’ are making money with membership websites because this business:

• Guarantees steady, recurring income.
• Has high profit margins.
• Requires negligible to low startup and ongoing cost.
• Can be expanded easily as your business grows.
• Allows you to make a supplemental  income doing something you love and know.
• Allows you to earn extra money through affiliate marketing and cross selling.

In this era of super-specialization, a membership website is the easiest way to get paid for what’s in your head. What’s more, if done correctly, you can develop several highly paying streams of income from a single website.

So let’s get started straight away and look at Key #1: The Internet’s Best Paying Niches.

Obviously, the very first step towards creating a highly profitable membership website is to figure out the products that sell. Notice, I am not talking about finding a niche market. I’m talking about finding a niche market that sells. There is a difference.

These days, you can easily find a niche using tools such as ClickAdEqualizer. But just because you’ve identified a popular keyword phrase does not mean that people are willing to spend their hard-earned cash on it. The trick is to find topics that people are willing to spend money on, and develop them.

Here are some of the most popular moneymaking categories on the internet today:

1. Business research, information and content sites: Includes business news, business research, corporate information for investment purposes and investment advice.
2. Community sites: Subscription based member-only websites that have been formed by a close-knit community of users.
3. Personal growth and self help sites: Information on self-improvement in specific areas like goal setting, building self-confidence, parent-child relationships and educational counseling etc.
4. Health and fitness: Concise guidance on proper eating, diet and exercise regimes are very popular with thousands of people. In fact, the term ‘losing weight’ is one of the most researched key phrases on the internet.
5. Games: Online games are opening up in a big way.
6. Home business: Nearly everybody wants to know how to make money from home. The market is huge and growing at a tremendous pace.
7. Sports: Sports news and news on sporting personalities and avenues.

How do you spot your niche?

Well, what are your hobbies? What do you do on a regular basis? Is there anything there of value to others? Zero in on a topic that you feel passionate about and start building up your knowledge base. Become the expert. How? Go to Membership Riches to find out now.

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