Crissy Says

5 Tools That Make Affiliate Marketing Easier

Affiliate Marketing can be a great way to earn passive income. Affiliate Marketing is when you promote a product or service from another business, and earn a commission when you refer sales to that business.

Many businesses offer affiliate programs. When you sign up, you get a special link that is customized to you, and then you can start promoting that link to your readers, social media followers, etc. That special link will enable the other business to know if anyone that you referred to them purchased one of their products or services. As a “thank you,” they give you a commission of that sale.

I think everyone can appreciate tools that save time and make tasks easier.

Here are some of the things I use regularly to help with my Affiliate Marketing:

Excel / Google Sheets – As you start joining affiliate programs, I recommend keeping a list of the programs you’ve joined, the login link to that program’  affiliate area, as well as your username and password to login to that program. You can use anything you like to keep track of this – but I personally like a spreadsheet.

Pretty Links – You will notice that your affiliate links are all very long. They are definitely not the most attractive, or easiest to remember. If you use WordPress, I highly recommend the Pretty Links plugin. This will help you shorten your links into something more attractive and easy to remember.

ConvertKit – I recommend ConvertKit to all business owners. It doesn’t matter if you have an online business or a brick and mortar business. ConvertKit is an email service provider. As a business owner, you need a mailing list, and ConvertKit is my tool of choice for sending emails and staying in touch with your email list.

The reason I chose to include it on this list, is that ConvertKit offers a lot of features that make affiliate marketing easier. For example – ConvertKit has some awesome tagging and segmenting functions.that will help you send messages to the readers that are most interested in the affiliate program you’re promoting.

For example – let’s say you are a health coach. Your ideal customer is a mom who wants to get healthy after having a baby. Some of these women work outside the home and some stay home with their children. Some of them love to cook and some of them prefer healthy food that doesn’t take much effort to prepare. By using ConvertKit’s tagging and segmenting features you can send specific messages (that include affiliate links) to all of your different types of clients.

Camtasia – Camtasia is the screen recording and video editing software that I use and recommend. You can use Camtasia for a variety of reasons, not just affiliate marketing. It really does come in handy for demos and how-to videos, though!

Let’s say you’re an affiliate for a software product, a WordPress theme or plugin – you can record a screen share video of show people how to use the software or WordPress theme or plugin. OR – if you are an affiliate for a digital course, you can give people a “tour” of the product, by recording your screen with Camtasia (or another screen recording software).

Social Media Tools – There are sooo many social media tools to choose from, including free tools like HootSuite and Buffer to paid options like Meet Edgar and eClincher.  These tools help you with your affiliate marketing by getting your links in front of more people.

Whether it’s a blog post that includes an affiliate link, or it’s an opt-in page to a freebie that has affiliate links inside of it, these social media tools make writing and posting social media updates easier. That means that you’re able to create more social media posts, and more people will be seeing those posts that lead to your blog posts or freebies.

 

 

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Crissy Says

5 Secrets To Making Money With Affiliate Marketing

I LOVE Affiliate Marketing. But the truth is, I wasn’t always so in love with it.

I had first learned about Affiliate Marketing when I started my online business, back in 2007. It sounded awesome. You sign up for some affiliate programs, and you promote your affiliate link, and you start earning commissions.

Except, I wasn’t earning very much.

I had heard stories about these “super affiliates” who were earning tons of money with Affiliate Marketing. What was my problem? Why couldn’t I do this?!

I’ve changed some things and now I’m making affiliate income on a very regular basis.

Here are my “secrets”…

1) Think About Your Reader

This is one of those things that is obvious – and not so obvious. If you are a health coach and you create content about eating more vegetables and working out, you wouldn’t become an affiliate for a motorcycle parts company. Your readers aren’t coming to you for info on repairing motorcycles. You would be more successful as an affiliate for things that are in line with being healthy – from vitamix blenders  and cook books to digital workshops about health and exercise.

You always want to be thinking about your reader – and what problems they have. You want to help them find solutions. Sometimes it’s easy to think “Oh, my readers will like this or that” … but you always want to be thinking about if the item you’re promoting is something that will help them.

2) Recommend Products You Use

When you are promoting a product as an affiliate, you’re putting your “seal of approval” on that product. Your readers trust you, and if you are promoting shoddy stuff, that trust is going to go out the window. The best way to know if a product is worth the money is to have actually used the product.

Now, there may be some cases where you haven’t actually used the product you’re promoting. For example – I personally use Camtasia to record my videos. But it is on the pricey side. I may find another screen recording software that is more affordable, and I’ll tell people about it. But I will check it out thoroughly to see what kind of reviews it’s getting, and I’ll let people know I haven’t actually used it, but is an option if they don’t want to purchase the software that I do use.

3) Adjust Your Expectations

Oh, those stories about Super Affiliates. They make it seem like you become an affiliate for one product and you can earn your living on the commissions from that product alone. But, in reality, you need to diversify, diversify, diversify.

You may be a business coach. And your customers and readers may want to start online businesses. You may become an affiliate for a web hosting company, but that doesn’t mean it will be a guaranteed “super affiliate success.” There are lots of web hosting companies. Some of your readers may take your recommendation and purchase their hosting from the company you’re an affiliate for, but some of your other readers and customers may purchase elsewhere.

This doesn’t mean you should stop promoting the web hosting company. IF you are genuinely a fan of the company, and you know some of your readers can benefit from what they offer, keep promoting them. But keep looking for other things to promote, too. For example, an email service provider, software, etc.

This is one of the biggest lessons I learned … When I first started promoting things as an affiliate, I didn’t earn the “super affiliate” income I thought I would, so I stopped promoting stuff. I had to re-adjust my expectations (big time!)

4) It Should Sound & Feel Natural, Not Sales-y

This is a big lesson. If you are promoting something, and if feels like you’re selling something, you want to re-think it. When you are promoting something, it should feel like you’re recommending a product to help your reader with one of their problems.

For example: If you and your friend were talking, and she mentioned that she was looking for a peanut butter alternative because her son was allergic to peanuts, and you told her about Sun Butter, which is made with sunflower seeds, you wouldn’t try to sell it to her, like a 1970s used car salesman.

It would be a normal conversation, where you are listening to your friend, you hear the problem she’s having, and you suggest that she try this other product.

That’s exactly what affiliate marketing is. (Except you don’t get commissions when you are telling your friends about the movie you just watched, the restaurant you just ate at, etc)

5) Be Consistent

This was another big lesson for me. As I mentioned earlier – when I started promoting a few things, and didn’t see huge commissions rolling in, I thought ‘Affiliate marketing doesn’t work!’ and I stopped promoting stuff, altogether. For years!

This was a huge mistake.

Once I started promoting several different products as an affiliate, and started promoting them on a regular basis, I saw a big difference.

Smaller commissions, that you earn on a regular basis, do add up!

 

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Crissy Says

Oprah’s Golden Globes Speech – How To Give An Awesome Speech


Oprah was awarded with the Cecil B. de Mille Award at the 2018 Golden Globes, and her acceptance speech immediately turned into a viral video, being shared on social media.

It really is a wonderful speech, and Oprah is a fantastic speaker.

Here are a few takeaways on what makes this speech

Oprah knows how to tell a story – this entire speech is under 10 minutes, but Oprah tells several stories within it. She talks about how, as a young girl, she watched Sidney Poitier accept the same award that she was being presented, and how that left an impact on her.

“In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for Best Actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history: “The winner is Sidney Poitier.” Up to the stage came the most elegant man I had ever seen. I remember his tie was white, and of course his skin was black—and I’d never seen a black man being celebrated like that. And I tried have tried many, many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone tired from cleaning other people’s houses. But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation in Sidney’s performance in Lilies of the Field: “Amen, amen, amen, amen.”’

The message was timely – The Golden Globes celebrates film making, and this year’s ceremony was held shortly after the wake of women (and some men) in the film industry coming forward to tell their stories of being sexually harassed and assaulted by powerful producers, directors, and actors.

This evolved in the #metoo movement, where women from all walks of life shared their stories of being sexually harassed or assaulted.

Oprah incorporated the #metoo and the #timesup movements into her speech, but she didn’t just talk about the film industry’s recent headlines. She incorporated ALL women who have had this experience.

“But it’s not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It’s one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics, or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they’re in academia and engineering and medicine and science. They’re part of the world of tech and politics and business. They’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military.”

Oprah also told a story about Recy Taylor, an African American woman from Alabama who, in 1944, on her way home from church, was raped by 6 white men. Even though the men confessed, charges were never brought against them.

As Oprah brought her speech to a close, she made people feel encouraged, uplifted, and left them with a sense of hope for a better tomorrow.

“I want all the girls watching here and now to know that a new day is on the horizon! And when that new day finally dawns, it will be because of a lot of magnificent women, many of whom are right here in this room tonight, and some pretty phenomenal men, fighting hard to make sure that they become the leaders who take us to the time when nobody ever has to say “me too” again.”

This was truly an awesome speech.

 

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