In order to be able to conduct a decent targeting and marketing campaign, you must first understand the fundamentals of finding out who they are. The only way to do this is to follow a specific guideline. Check out the guideline below.
1. Your Objective to the Research
• Explain in one paragraph why the research is being done, what you hope
to learn and for what purpose the information that you attain may be used
2. Description of the Market
This should be general, like one paragraph
Who is your Target Market(s)
• Why you chose this particular market
• Get a complete profile of your market (i.e., demographics, psychographics,
behaviors)
• What benefits does your market seek (i.e., what points-of-pain or problems
are being solved)
• What factors can affect their decision to purchase or use your product/service
• What attitudes do they have about the products/services that are currently not
on the market
• How is the product used
• Products and Services that appeal to the target market
• In general terms, what is currently so appealing to this market
• If there are no current providers, what types of products/services may appeal
to this market in the future (i.e., what is used now to solve the problem).
3. Market Metrics
Get many Size estimates (current and future) for all of the following:
• Overall market
• Current size as it stands
• Potential size for the future
• Actual penetration of current products/service within the entire market
Individual market segments
• Current size
• Potential size
• Actual penetration of current products/service within the total market
• Usage rates
• Frequency of product purchases
• Growth estimates (current and in the future) for:
o Overall market
o Individual market segments
Competitive Analysis
You must include a Summary of who your Current Competitors are
Listing the competition by market share ranking (by each target market if
possible) is a good way to size them up. You can also be more specific by
searching for individual points listed below.
Current Competitors - full analysis of top competitors including:
• Products & Services (i.e., description, uniqueness, pricing, etc.)
• Their Market share at current
• Current customers (targeted audience)
• Positioning and promotion strategies
• Partnerships/Alliances/Distributors
• Recent news
Friday, March 16, 2018
Friday, March 9, 2018
Looking for the best affiliate programs
The best way to try to explain this to you is to give you some of my personal experiences when looking for an affiliation program.
“When I first started searching for and implementing affiliations with various companies, it was one of the largest parts of time wasted during my day when it came to managing my website. I spent a disgusting amount of hours searching for suitable affiliate programs, implementing the links, and then keeping track of what they did”.
If you are hoping that marketing a website affiliation is going to get you rich quickly, forget about it. You will have to spend a lot of time in your project if you want to make it work for you. Then again, all money-making ventures do, just ask Donald Trump.
“Of course, the income that was generated from each program was actually pretty low at that time because at that time the number of visitors to my site was not high either. With this in mind, it was not particularly uncommon for companies to disappear on me without warning me about it and since most affiliate programs only pay out at around the $25 mark, I would lose a lot of revenue in the end. The other part of affiliation that I was not happy with was the idea of another company’s banner being plastered all over my site, if you place too many of them on any given page it only serves to confuse and irritate your visitors. Think about it. How do you like it when you visit a site? Any more than one animated element on a web page can be very distracting which leaves you with nothing gained at all, and many affiliate programs insist upon this type of bargain when signing on. By now, you must realize that I learned a lot just by trial and error.
Affiliate tracking can also be a problem. After you have successfully applied to become an affiliate for a company, they will usually supply you with some personalized code or link. It is very important that this code is implemented correctly into your page, because otherwise you may be sending the company visitors without being reimbursed. Most snippets of code contain a unique user id, which is used by the company to distinguish which site sent traffic. Even if you do implement this code in the right way, it has been my experience, on occasion, for it not to function correctly”.
Having heard of my experiences, you can see why I would not really recommend that you hunt around and sign up without much research and thought first when finding a good affiliate program. Your time is too valuable and could be betterspent creating content and updating your site. But there are some excellent individual companies offering affiliate programs out there.
What I have discovered to be very successful is to take advantage of companies like Offers Quest or Google for text link advertising. Text links are a great resource as they are bandwidth friendly, and, when they are implemented properly, add valuable content to your site that can also assist in search engine rankings.
When it comes to website affiliation, you will also need to know how to conduct a market study because this is how you will find your target audience. Without a targeted audience your marketing campaign will not be effective. Below I have begun to give you an outline of what you should include in your market study. It is best to write it down, especially if you are hoping to entice someone else into investing in your marketing venture. That, and it is a good way to keep track of your objective, and provides a good guideline of what needs to be done.
“When I first started searching for and implementing affiliations with various companies, it was one of the largest parts of time wasted during my day when it came to managing my website. I spent a disgusting amount of hours searching for suitable affiliate programs, implementing the links, and then keeping track of what they did”.
If you are hoping that marketing a website affiliation is going to get you rich quickly, forget about it. You will have to spend a lot of time in your project if you want to make it work for you. Then again, all money-making ventures do, just ask Donald Trump.
“Of course, the income that was generated from each program was actually pretty low at that time because at that time the number of visitors to my site was not high either. With this in mind, it was not particularly uncommon for companies to disappear on me without warning me about it and since most affiliate programs only pay out at around the $25 mark, I would lose a lot of revenue in the end. The other part of affiliation that I was not happy with was the idea of another company’s banner being plastered all over my site, if you place too many of them on any given page it only serves to confuse and irritate your visitors. Think about it. How do you like it when you visit a site? Any more than one animated element on a web page can be very distracting which leaves you with nothing gained at all, and many affiliate programs insist upon this type of bargain when signing on. By now, you must realize that I learned a lot just by trial and error.
Affiliate tracking can also be a problem. After you have successfully applied to become an affiliate for a company, they will usually supply you with some personalized code or link. It is very important that this code is implemented correctly into your page, because otherwise you may be sending the company visitors without being reimbursed. Most snippets of code contain a unique user id, which is used by the company to distinguish which site sent traffic. Even if you do implement this code in the right way, it has been my experience, on occasion, for it not to function correctly”.
Having heard of my experiences, you can see why I would not really recommend that you hunt around and sign up without much research and thought first when finding a good affiliate program. Your time is too valuable and could be betterspent creating content and updating your site. But there are some excellent individual companies offering affiliate programs out there.
What I have discovered to be very successful is to take advantage of companies like Offers Quest or Google for text link advertising. Text links are a great resource as they are bandwidth friendly, and, when they are implemented properly, add valuable content to your site that can also assist in search engine rankings.
When it comes to website affiliation, you will also need to know how to conduct a market study because this is how you will find your target audience. Without a targeted audience your marketing campaign will not be effective. Below I have begun to give you an outline of what you should include in your market study. It is best to write it down, especially if you are hoping to entice someone else into investing in your marketing venture. That, and it is a good way to keep track of your objective, and provides a good guideline of what needs to be done.
The Fundamentals of Website Affiliation
As you can imagine from the above section that spends a great deal of time focusing on the basics of internet marketing, you must realize that it was all just an informed lead into the affiliation, which is the whole reason that we are here. The first thing that you have to think about when getting into the affiliation game is how to go about it. In order to understand this, you will need to know exactly what it is and get basic knowledge about it.
Affiliate programs are an excellent way to generate income for your site or someone else’s, and it is a pretty good introduction into ecommerce. However, it's a numbers game. Basically, the more people who visit your site, the greater your chances become for creating a good income, especially if the programs you participate in are related to your site topic. Chances are you have probably come across many commercial sites that claim to offer the best affiliate program. What you will often learn is that this is simply not true.
So what exactly is an affiliate program, you might ask? An affiliate program is where a company offers to pay you a certain amount of money for either a click through from your site, or a fixed amount for a lead (where the visitor signs up for a newsletter, etc.) or a percentage of a purchase made by a visitor as a result of a click through. Even if the visitor does not make a purchase on the advertiser’s site right away, most programs will offer “cookie duration” of usually around 30-90 days.
What this really means is that as long as the visitor has the cookie in their cache, even if they return to the advertisers site one month later, you will still receive the commission from the sale. However, as in all things that are business related, cookie duration is not a guarantee when you sign up for an affiliation program and is something that you need to check for before signing on.
Affiliate programs are an excellent way to generate income for your site or someone else’s, and it is a pretty good introduction into ecommerce. However, it's a numbers game. Basically, the more people who visit your site, the greater your chances become for creating a good income, especially if the programs you participate in are related to your site topic. Chances are you have probably come across many commercial sites that claim to offer the best affiliate program. What you will often learn is that this is simply not true.
So what exactly is an affiliate program, you might ask? An affiliate program is where a company offers to pay you a certain amount of money for either a click through from your site, or a fixed amount for a lead (where the visitor signs up for a newsletter, etc.) or a percentage of a purchase made by a visitor as a result of a click through. Even if the visitor does not make a purchase on the advertiser’s site right away, most programs will offer “cookie duration” of usually around 30-90 days.
What this really means is that as long as the visitor has the cookie in their cache, even if they return to the advertisers site one month later, you will still receive the commission from the sale. However, as in all things that are business related, cookie duration is not a guarantee when you sign up for an affiliation program and is something that you need to check for before signing on.
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