Offline Marketing Strategies For Affiliate Marketing

This is a guest post from AffiliateTips.com, a great place to find affiliate programs and read articles on affiliate marketing.

The Internet offers plenty of marketing ideas, but not all affiliate marketing tactics occur exclusively on the web. Unfortunately, many business owners limit themselves to online marketing methods. While you may have an online business, adding a few offline marketing strategies can generate amazing results for your affiliate marketing business.

What are some possible offline marketing strategies that you can use in affiliate marketing? The following are just a few of the cost-effective solutions that offer tremendous potential to drive new customers to your website. Consider how you can utilize these techniques to give your sales a boost.

Word Of Mouth Offline Marketing

Word of mouth can be a powerful marketing tool on the web, but it can be just as effective in the offline world as well. Since word of mouth is completely free, this can be one of the best tools for small businesses. Every person who hears about your website represents a potential customer, but the key is to get people talking about what you have to offer.

Start with your existing networks, then begin branching out. Join your local Chamber of Commerce, volunteer to speak and industry events and always be prepared to discuss your affiliate marketing business whenever possible.

Start A Mailing List Or Newsletter

In addition to your online mailing list, it is also a great idea to branch out into offline mail marketing as well. Compile your own contact list, then begin creating newsletters, sales flyers or postcards to distribute to potential customers offline. Another great idea is to post information on public bulletin boards in your community. For example, if your affiliate marketing business sells children’s toys or clothing, it would be a good idea to post a sales letter at local daycares, libraries or community recreation centers.

Advertise In Your Local Newspaper Classifieds and Trade Publications

Another affordable way to take advantage of offline marketing strategies for affiliate marketing is to advertise in the classifieds section of your local newspaper. Most newspapers and trade publications have a special section devoted to home-based businesses, which is a great place to highlight your website and let readers know about what you have to offer.

While many people overlook this simple offline marketing tool, these publications generally garner the attention of thousands of interested readers. Write a clean, concise and appealing ad that showcases your business and includes a prominent link to your website.

Become A Guest Speaker For A Radio Or Television Station

Radio and television stations are always on the lookout for articulate experts who can offer valuable information to listeners and viewers. Take advantage of this by contacting area broadcasters to offer your services as a free guest speaker. During your segment, highlight your affiliate marketing business and what you have to offer. These broadcasts have the potential to reach out to a broad audience, which can dramatically increase offline brand awareness and direct more traffic to your website.

While online promotional techniques are still important, never overlook the potential of offline marketing strategies for affiliate marketing. These techniques are often very affordable or even completely free. However, it does require some effort and creativity on your part to discover the best and most effective offline marketing tactics. Start looking for offline marketing opportunities today to start driving more customers to your site and begin increasing your affiliate sales.

Monetizing your RSS feeds

Over the last year of working with a variety of blogs it occurred to me that a large number of readers of any given blog may rarely, if ever, visit the actual website. With feed readers becoming an
increasingly popular method for keeping up with blog reading it seems reasonable that bloggers might wish to monetize their blog in more ways than simply using ads on the regular website. After searching fairly extensively I discovered two readily available options for bloggers to insert adverting into their RSS feeds.

The first of these is Bidvertiser.  This network is better known for their contextual text ads, similar
to Adsense ads. They also have an open beta program for inserting a block of text ads into RSS feed items.

Another option is the Pheedo Advertising network. Unlike Bidvertiser, Pheedo specializes specifically in advertising in RSS feeds. Instead of several text ads, Pheedo inserts a single ad. Also, where Bidvertiser is strictly a CPC (pay per click) service, Pheedo also sometimes displays CPM (pay per impression) ads so it is possible to earn even if no ads are clicked on.

Both the Bidvertiser and the Pheedoprograms allow you to utilize their programs and still use FeedBurner for all the services that they provide. This is accomplished by entering the original feed provided by your blogging platform into the advertising network’s(Pheedo or Bidvertiser) system and then taking the new feed
URL provided by Pheedo or Bidvertier and entering it into the Feed URL field on the FeedBurner website.

Additionally, if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you may use the plugin provided by Bidvertiser to insert your ads without sending the feed through an additional burning process. For Pheedo, I have
released a WordPress pluginto make it easy to add the Pheedo code into the WordPress
feed. This plugin is in beta so there are no guarantees that it will work in every situation. Be sure to report problems by leaving a comment on the pluginpage.

Each of these services provide statistics to let you keep tabs on how many ads are being displayed, how many clicks, and how much you have earned. They also provide detailed directions for the various options
for getting the ads into your feed.

About the Author:

Daisy Olsen loves all things WordPress and can be found tweaking several blogs simultaneously at any given time. She enjoys working as a Blog Consultant and as a freelancer creating Microsoft Office
templates. Sometimes she manages to find time do some blogging herself. You can find her at DaisyOlsen.com or on Twitter

Pagerank Importance 4 Reasons

I’ve been learning about SEO much more lately and I have found this is a BIG reason why pagerank is important.  Many will tell you that PR doesn’t matter, screw Google, etc, but the fact is it does matter if you’re a serious blogger trying to make money without a “paid post” blog.   Here are 4 reasons why I think PR matters.

1. The higher pagerank you have, the more likely Google will rank you higher in the search engine results pages.  In other words, how many of you actually go past page 3 when you do a search for something at Google??  Frankly, I don’t even go past 2 unless I’m desperate for a piece of information.  If you want people to find you, you need to have your site show up on the first 2 pages.  Remember, Google ranks each page, not your site as a whole. 
2. Having a high pagerank shows others that you have a large number of quality incoming links, therefore encouraging others to click on those links to get to your site!  Google likes that;)
3. A higher pagerank also creates a “comfort zone” with readers.  I mean that when someone see that you have a high pr, they feel like they can trust what you say  and find the most relevant answers to their questions on your site. 
4. Having a higher pagerank encourages others to link to you, therefore driving traffic to you.  You will gain exposure from this but I highly recommend that you offer a reciprocal link.  Do unto others as you would have them to do you!

I really would focus on gaining traffic more than anything but keep in mind that having good pagerank can make this happen.  They have to be able to find you in the search engines, right?!  Also, you can make a great deal of money from advertisers when you have a nice pagerank so keep that in mind as well. 

Focus on high quality incoming links, quality content, and good keywords and your blog will generate traffic on it’s own!

Creating a Call to Action in Blog Posts

The best blog posts entice visitors to do something with your post. Your goal is ensure that they’re doing the right thing once they have read the post.

This is your call to action.

Few bloggers get the opportunity to direct their visitors to the next action based on the words in their blog post. But the trick is that every blogger has the key to create action points if you’re formatting your posts correctly.

Not everyone is going to take action. But you need to appeal to people who will by making your post worth doing something with.

So, what exactly do you want them to do? The answer lies within the content of your post. Here are some common action points and how you can get your visitors to take action.

Affiliate Marketing

Your links for affiliate sites should be both hidden and obvious. Visitors should trust that you’re going to lead them to places that are trustworthy and worthy of their time. Taking up your visitor’s time with useless links will harm your reputation.

Make your affiliate links obvious by the anchor text that you use and hidden by using an affiliate link plug-in that makes links appear to go to a different place.

Remember, your visitors are at your blog because they enjoy your writing style, you provide useful information, and they trust your words are on target. Ensuring that your links follow those same rules will produce more clicks and help you gain more trust from your visitors.

Deep Linking

Every niche blogger can write a post today and reference at least one previous post within their blog. This is the act of deep linking. If more bloggers would take the time to research their own blog and remember their posts, fewer people would need the “related posts” plug-in to keep visitors on their blog.

The added benefit to deep linking is that you’re supplying anchor text for search engines to associate your blog posts with. This is a major help with search engine traffic and again, like affiliate marking, helps your visitors to know where they’re going to land once they have clicked.

Social Bookmarking

Vital for a lot of bloggers for good traffic, bookmarking posts should be easy for your visitors and be part of every single post you write. For bloggers this is super easy to do. From the Add Me widget to the various plug-ins for WordPress users.

Ensure that you’re ending all of your posts with links to bookmark the post to networking site of your visitor’s choice. While I’d be more than happy to have all my readers bookmark my posts to StumbleUpon, not all of them will because it’s not their preference. By creating the ability to bookmark to several social networking websites, you’re expanding your reach by just one single visitor.

Ask Questions

Nothing will prompt your visitors to comment on your post faster than asking a question. Pertain to the various interests and styles of your readers in a single blog post. Haven’t you ever found that asking questions will capture attention?

So your comments may become a new topic on their own because you asked a question. Isn’t this a great thing?

Creating a comment community and visitors that actually speak to each other and not just you, the blogger, is interesting and draws in a lot of attention. Ensure that you’re holding that attention by being part of the comments that are taking place on your posts. Even if your visitors love to talk to each other, it is you that they come to the blog for. Make sure you remain present, even in your comments.

Final Thoughts

With the next post you format for your blog, think of different ways that you can create a call to action with your visitor. Whether it be to visit another area of your site, click on an affiliate link, bookmark your post, or just comment. You can have the blog visitors, traffic, and income revenue that you want if every single post internally focuses on your goals.

Have you tried a call to action on your blog posts? What was the outcome from your visitors?

Katy Castro blogs at I’m Blogging That with topics that include social networking, blog rankings, search engine news, and becoming a better blogger.