NyFalcon.com

I often get asked about Email and how to get better results.

It’s simple: Give your readers what they want. Helpful advice in your emails builds trust. That trust goes a long way to increasing your conversions when you do have a product to sell. That’s right I said when you have a product to sell. Every email should not be promoting a product.

One site of mine is a site about cars, If I sent out emails saying “Buy this for your car” it would get old and people will unsubcribe from my list. Of course that is the last thing that I want to happen.

I offer some helpful tips on saving gas, cleaning the car, saving on insurance etc. I became a friend that actually care about their cars. Most people that subscribe to a list about their car are really proud of their car. Most want to keep up the value in case they want to sell it someday.

Most stores when sending out an email do it so wrong. I get ones from like JC Penney and Macy’s that are constantly offering me free shipping. They should be telling me tips on how to keep my clothes smelling fresh and stuff. That would be so much better in the long run if they did that.

How do you know what your readers want? Ask them, if you send out an email asking for tips to share with other readers you will get it. People by nature want to help out others, it makes them feel good. If you can get a emotional response from a reader that is like having gold.  I got an email resposne from a guy named Ray and some wax he was using. I went an found an affiliate program that sold that wax and sent it out in my next email. In that email I told them how much another reader “Raymond in California” just loves using he threw away the other waxes he had. Since I have my readers trust and a little real life testimonial it sells very well over and over again. The affiliate link is on my feedback page.

After I send out my car site email I get 10 responses. It only takes ten responses to see what your readers want. You can also make a feedback page and use those “exact words” on a feedback page. It will do wonders for your rankings since it is naturally flowing content. 

You will be surprised at the direction your site and email newsletters will go. You may think you know your readers/future customers but you really don’t.

Someone asked me a few weeks ago what I look at when choosing an affiliate program. I have a little list that I go off of but by the time I get to the list I pretty much know what direction I am heading in. Lets take a quick look at some important factors when choosing to work with an affiliate program.

1) It has to fit one of my sites, It makes no sense to put window treatments up on a sports site, they will never sell even if they are Notre Dame window treatments. This is a usual newbie mistake, build it and they will come and shop doesn’t work and never will.

2) The merchants landing pages have to make me want to buy something. If I wouldn’t buy from the site neither will the people reading my website. I add something to the cart and see how many steps it takes to check out. If it is too much my shoppers won’t do it either.

3) Affiliate Tracking - If they are using an outdated rinky dink system for tracking I pass. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 sales there a day it still isn’t tracking right. I take a pass as it is hard enough to make money without it tracking.

4) Affiliate Management - This is a huge thing for me, I need to get them on the phone so we can discuss my percentage. There are many affiliate managers I wont work with regardless of the program they manage. If a program moves from an affiliate manager to another one I drop the program, especially if its an affiliate manager that likes to steal other affiliate managers programs. They are out there and I know who they are. If you can’t build up trust among other affiliate managers how in the world would I trust them. There are times when the program steps up to a better affiliate manager but thats rare. Google the merchants name with “affiliate program” and if you see they have had 2 or 3 affiliate managers recently you know the merchant isn’t paying the affiliate manager, what makes you think they are going to pay you.

5) Affiliate Network - I don’t use the so called big Affiliate Networks, with all the parasitic affiliates in these networks the only thing the big networks want is more money for the network by letting bad guys into these programs they are not looking out for me. I use Shareasale and Avantlink more then the average affiliate, it’s a trust thing. 

That is my quick list I am sure I could go on all day but I think you are getting the message.

Last week I started to make a website right in front of everyone on my forum. I am posting exactly what I am doing step by step and it is scary. I am amazed at how much I take for granted when I make a site. Sometimes I am leaving out steps without even thinking. I don’t know of any so-called Guru and I use that term loosely that has built a site and shows what they do.

You can follow the description on the forum.  http://www.nyfalcon.com/forum/general_discussion/just_registered_two_domains-t152.0.html

Affiliate Summit Pictures

Here are the pictures from affiliate summit. I am only in 3 or 4 which means I did a better job of hiding or I was off doing private meetings. It probably was a combination of both.

As you can see from the pictures there are plenty of affiliate managers that will show you all about their programs. I am still sorting through business cards and choosing which ones to work with.

A couple of affiliate managers have sent me a few products to try and see if I like them before I even join their program. One current program that I am already working with sent me something nice too, along with a personal note. This is the reason to go to Affiliate Summit to build relationships.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/affsum/sets/72157604143561153/ 

Shawn Collins has posted a ton of pictures in his Flicker account that were taken at Affiliate Summit. For those that could not make it here is a small reason on why you should make the next one.

I am posting this and sending it out to all the people on my list,but that is not a big thing. The big thing is I am doing this while I am on an airplane jetting to the west coast for Affiliate Summit. Right now I am probably over Nebraska.

I can’t harp on the fact enough that newsletters that pertain to a niche are gold. Here I am sending this out on a timer. Pretty cool huh! This is not a big secret among the inner circle people, Did you think that the people that are marketing their get rich scheme to you all the time actually write that stuff and send it at certain times? Nah its all set up on auto pilot.

Some marketers don’t even write their own stuff. They hire a service and set it up to run every three days. I am sure you have a few newsletters from so-called guru’s that you haven’t opened yet. I know I do.

In a few hours I will be basking in the sunshine and getting out of the cold snowy Northeast. If you wake up on saturday, have a cup of hot coffee and you are now reading this it proves the power of newsletters.

It’s very cold and blustery outside and its time to head for the sunny skies of Las Vegas for affiliate summit. If you are planning to attend be sure to look me up and we can discuss what I am up to and what I see happening in the next few months.

As usual I have a packed schedule, if you want to see what I am up to or to schedule a time to meet you can hit me up on twitter http://twitter.com/nyfalcon

I am getting into Las Vegas on Saturday morning and plan on staying a few days after summit.

It is not often that I am going to recommend a tool or anything that will not help you in your quest to build quality sites but I can’t help it here. One reason is the price and the other is because it actually works better than advertised if you spend 10 minutes learning the program.

Since I am all about building quality sites for the long term for making money online and the owner of this program is the same I have no doubts that this tool will help you. I am a big fan of Jason Potash and his program “Content Composer” which I use everyday but this new tool just blew me away. It is called Comment Kahuna and like I said it is free.

All you have to do is go here http://commentkahuna.com/ and watch the video and you can see what this thing does. You sign up for the email to get the unlock code and you install this in minutes. What the program does is find quality backlinks for your search term with their pagerank. You place a quality comment on these blogs and you will have people viewing your site from url where it list your name in the comment field. You have to watch the video as Jason explains the power of this free tool in detail.

I downloaded this tool only two days ago and tested it on one of my new blogs and after the two days the new blog was not only found by the search engines it also made me a few dollars already with contextual ads.

About a month or so ago I found a good way to increase your adsense earnings. It really is common sense if you think about it, it is something I used to go and do all the time but I had forgotten all about it until now. A few months back I found a good forum totally by accident, and I noticed it had something to do with one of my longtailed website keywords.

Someone had asked a really simple question so I joined the forum and posted my answer. I also included a link back to my site exactly where the answer could be found in more detail. About a month later as I was checking my analytics I noticed that a page on my site received a lot more clicks. I had forgotten all about this forum where I posted my answer. I then made up the channel to track the adsense on that particular page, sure enough this page was getting a lot of traffic from the forum that I joined a few weeks earlier.

So my tip is to find other forums that are similar to your niche and joining these places and make a few posts. After a few posts, and reading the rules of the forum there is probably some place to link your website to the forum either in a signature file or maybe in your profile. You should in no way shape or form spam these sites by making unnecessary posts.

Sounds simple, basically it’s too simple to even call a tip. But if I overlooked it odds are other publishes are overlooking it also. My particular niche I doubled my adsense earnings. I only had to join two forums, and neither one was my direct competition. I am sure that most of the readers of this particular forum were happy to see my site, since my site is an authority site on my particular niche. This made me an authority on my given subject. Since my site was well done I sounded like an expert, and build trust among the readers.

You may be saying to yourself, But Vinny how do I find these forums. That is actually pretty simple, all you have to do is search by your site’s keywords and add the word forum after it. After finding a few of these forums you should bookmark a few and visit them. Since you are an expert in your field, you should be able to answer some easy questions that newbies are always posting. Now for my particular niche I visit the top five forums at least once a week and make a post here and there.

Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? Your post will be on this forum for who knows how long and when people find this forum they will visit your site.

So one post here and there can drive traffic to your site. The best part is it will keep driving traffic to your site over and over again with no work from you after the initial post.

You need to have a direction for your pages and a “call to action”. You need to direct the end user where you want them to go. People need a nudge sometimes when they are sitting there with their credit card in hand as they are browsing the internet.

I have just discovered a site that explains it better than I ever could.

http://www.smsmallbiz.com/technology/What_to_Do_With_Online_Customers.html

For years I have been harping on ways to get traffic to your site. I hate to use spammy methods but there is one that works better than any other method especially if you are just starting a website.

I use elance and other places to hire writers but I also use Craiglist. My buddies over at Portalfeeder have made a little video using the exact methods that I use. You can see it on the forum. How to Get Traffic video.

I have used this to hire about 15 writers so far and as you get better at it you will make better ads.

What a great source of information they have there for people that want to make money online. Brad Callen is a smart cookie and he knows how to get traffic to your website without going into black hat methods.

I suggest that you sign up and get a few ebooks on SEO from the good folks over there. If you have an ebook or a product that you want to sell this is also the place for you.

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