Posts Tagged ‘3 Years’

Social Bookmarking Word Of Mouth And SEO Marketing On Steroids

Friday, October 30th, 2009

Social bookmarking has finally got a foothold. Social bookmarking is being seen by many marketing experts as a cost effective method of augmenting distribution of content, branding and image building and marketing. According to a survey, it has been seen that almost 28% of users on the Internet on a normal day have been tagging online content while 7% of users on the Internet have been either tagging or categorizing content. This method is being seen as a highly successful idea and this can be seen with the amount of success achieved by http://Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us had acquired their first million visitors in 3 years but they acquired the next 2 million visitors within a span of 6 months. So what is social bookmarking? Social bookmarking can be compared to linking. Social bookmarks are basically links that help an internet user to classify, share, store and even search for content using a process called tagging. Tags just make it easier for internet users to find the content they are looking for. You can apply social bookmarks to content or information in different formats like PDF, video, blogs, websites, images etc.

Some of the top social bookmarking websites include StumbleUpon, http://del.icio.us, Google Bookmarks and Furl. Reddit and Dig are two social news websites, which are also considered as social bookmarking sites. The idea is to create positive content about your services, products or overall business and then optimizing the content on these social bookmarking websites.

Social bookmarking is an interesting concept that can be used for enhancing the process of marketing and promotions. What marketers can really do is allow sharing of content by the visitors. As a result, the bookmarks encourage a kind of functionality that is most often referred to as forward-to-a-friend process. Apart from this, marketers can also post their own content on different social bookmarking websites, which will initiate movement of traffic to their sites. In a sense, this is an online version word of mouth advertising where surfers share their bookmarks.

But for social bookmarking to be a real success, you need to have engaging or interactive content, which users will find useful, interesting and entertaining. It should be the kind of content that most users can recommend to others or forward it. The content should attract users and this is where creativity plays an important role. You will have to look from the perspective of an internet user to gauge what he or she might be looking for and then provide it. There are certain tips you can follow to make social bookmarking a marketing success for your online business and they are:

Understand the requirement of your audience and try to focus on topics that will interest your readers, audience or users.

Content should be interesting and yet easy to read. The more heavy words and sentences you use, the more difficult and unfriendly it will be for the reader. Look at the blogs ? most blogs have reader friendly and more personalized content. Apart from this, you can also add bold and colored or highlighted fonts to assist in increasing readability.

The title should be interesting and hint at what the article is all about. If you want to provide information only on Pay-per-click then there is no point having a title like ?The best internet marketing tools.? Readers will think that this article encompasses all the methods and it will be useless for a reader who wants specialized information about Pay-per-click. On the other hand if you have a title like ?Less money, more traffic using Pay-per-click? This title will attract the attention of readers looking for specialized information on Pay-per-click and other readers who want information on internet marketing methods.

Keywords are extremely important in bringing traffic to your website. Use of keywords is a key factor that drives search engine optimization. If you don?t use the required amount of keywords then internet users or readers might not be able to find your article using the Google or Yahoo search engines.

Using a content format that will ensure readability is important. If the size of your font is too small then it might be difficult for most of the readers to appreciate the content however important the information provided by you may be. If you want users to tag your content then it is important that you place buttons at the top or the bottom of your article. You can also avoid clutter by including bookmark option of only those social bookmarking communities that are best linked to your business.

These are some of the ways by which, you can use social bookmarking to your advantage.

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Download Sites And Affiliate Programs

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

I have been running shareware download sites in one form or another for over 3 years and during that time I have become intimately familiar with many of the various shareware affiliate programs out there. Also in those 3 years I have also been able to formulate an opinion related to most of these programs and some, by no means all, of the vendors that choose to “participate” in these programs.

Out of the big 3 or 4 programs out there, RegNow, Share-It!, Plimus, and to a lesser extent eSellerate and RegSoft, only one really has a program in place to help affiliates make the most out of the program. That affiliate program is RegNow with their certification program. This program was put in place to help affiliates identify vendors that properly participate in the program by making it possible for affiliates to choose the vendors that use RegNow in a way that allows affiliates to earn commissions for their referrals.

Considering the fact that I have also used other affiliate programs like Commission Junction, Share-A-Sale and Clickbank, the question needs to be asked as to why any kind of certification program would even be necessary. With these programs and most other larger programs, a prospective vendor must provide a way for any of their affiliates to earn commissions for any referrals, if they don’t the affiliate program in question does not allow the vendor to join or stay in the program. In the case of shareware affiliate programs, this isn’t the case.

Even with RegNow’s certification program and in the case with just about all shareware affiliate programs, vendors are not required to, and a large number of them do not, participate in a way that ensures affiliates get credit for referring a sale.

Shareware affiliate programs do work differently than normal programs as they rely on prospective buyers first trying the product first before requiring them to purchase it. What this means is normally an affiliate will refer someone to download the trial version than rely on that visitor later buying the product. In almost all cases this requires that a cookie set when the user downloads the trial to be recalled later when the user returns to the vendor’s site to purchase the program. This is where the fatal flaw is in regards to shareware affiliate programs.

Why is this a problem? Cookies are the basis of most affiliate programs and other than the inherent flaw with cookies in general in regards to some people not allowing cookies to be set or those that regularly delete them, many vendors that participate in shareware affiliate programs choose not to use that program as their payment provider while others use that program along with other providers allowing the visitor to choose among several payment options. What this does is ensure that even with a cookie set, the referring affiliate has little if any chance of earning a commission for their efforts.

Now the question needs to be asked is why do affiliate programs allow this and why do many vendors choose to operate this way? In regards to the affiliate programs, vendors are their bread and butter, the more vendors they have the more opportunity they get to receive fees for their services. Whether or not an affiliate gets a commission or not does not figure into their bottom line as their money comes out of the vendors pocket, so as long as the vendor is happy, they are happy.

That leaves the participating vendors, why do they choose this route? As far as I can tell, there is pretty much only 2 reasons for them not providing an affiliate friendly program. The first would be ignorance, in theory I suppose a vendor could honestly not realize that they are making it impossible for their affiliates to earn a commission. They may not realize that the majority of affiliate commissions come from trial downloads that are later purchased versus a customer purchasing directly from buy links on an affiliate’s site.

The 2nd and far more sinister reason in my mind is that the vendors realize this but think they can get a larger number of sales by duping unsuspecting affiliates. Affiliates that do not know better spend their time and money doing the marketing for a vendor’s product and get nothing in return. They refer customers to the vendor’s site who then use other payment options outside of the affiliate program thus ensuring the vendor doesn’t have to pay the commission to the affiliate.

This tactic has been discussed at great length in the Regnow forum as well as other places and it still amazes me to hear some of the excuses brought forward by some of these vendors. One excuse relates to how these vendors feel that RegNow charges too much to process their payments so they must use other cheaper payment options and still others complain that they feel they shouldn’t have to pay affiliates because they don’t feel they earned a commission. They bring up the fact that many affiliates don’t do much to promote their product and hence shouldn’t be paid for this perceived lack of effort.

Now even looking at this from an affiliates point of view, I understand that many of us do not promote as heavily as we should, or as some vendors would like, but those that don’t will not last long anyway and as far as a vendor is concerned, why would you care? Even if an affiliate brings you nothing as far as sales, you are not losing anything as you only pay for sales, plus if an affiliate happens to bring you a sale, it is 1 more than you would have had.

New affiliates need to be aware of the pitfalls of shareware affiliate programs and if they choose not to spend the time and effort weeding out these vendors, they have no one to blame but themselves. In a perfect world, the affiliate programs would do this for you but that isn’t going to happen. And my question for vendors that join these programs and then choose not to properly participate, what is your excuse?

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