"How to promote your own business online with little to no costs."

by Duncan Elliott

Today, we interviewed Duncan Elliott, eBusiness Manager from www.2u.co.uk to find out his secrets for a successful affiliate. What makes a successful affiliate? And is there any proven formula to effectively running an affiliate business from home? We spoke with Duncan to give us an inside view to how he runs an affiliate-friendly affiliate network.TB: Can you give us a brief outline of your company?Duncan: www.2u.co.uk is a mobile phone related 2-tier affiliate network, where affiliates can get a free website, which is a subdomain name of .2u.co.uk, selling mobile phone related products. For example, an affiliate could have a free subdomain Mobilesfast.2u.co.uk. Then, for anyone who signs up from the Mobilesfast.2u.co.uk site, Mobilesfast would earn a commission on their sales.We offer ...Mobile phones (£30 per connection)Mobile phone ringtones and logos, Mobile phone accessories, andMobile phone insurance (great for affiliates at £15 to £20 per sale.)TB: If our readers could take away nothing else, what would you say is the key to being a successful affiliateDuncan: These are the 5 key points to affiliate success 1. Be passionate about what you are doing - It's the old adage ... "Do what you love, love what you do"...2. Keep educating yourself in your field, and in online marketing.3. Select your affiliate merchant wisely. They must be reliable and helpful.4. Automate absolutely everything you can about your business.5. Maximise your search engine position.Actually, I would give a bonus 6th as Niche. This is actually very important. Go for a niche market that has a paying audience that have a need, that is you can find.TB: Could you expand on that for us?Duncan: Sure. 1. Be passionate. Obvious really. If it bores you or doesn't inspire you, dont touch it. Your lack of enthusiasm will come across in your sales copy, and what's the point anyway? You've got to have some fun with what you do. For example, I work in the affiliate and mobile phone industry, have done for the last 5 years, and it still fascinates me - there is always something new happening. I absolutely love it.2. Keep educating yourself in your field, and in online marketing.I can't help you with the 'learn about your field' part, but I can help with the online marketing tips part. Some great sources for online marketing help are all in the Affiliate Training Centre. You can find it by typing help.2u.co.uk in your browser. It is admittedly with a 2U slant, but anyone can use it (in fact, in you type "affiliate training" in google, we are listed very highly). You are welcome to use it to help you promote any affiliate system and to learn about online marketing on all levels. There are some good step-by-step tutorials on Search Engine Optimisation. It's pretty much all free.2 key sources of brilliant help and expertise are Secrets of Their Success private newsletter, which frankly is worth every penny (great for picking the brains of the big-earning successful yet ordinary affiliates), and Allan Gardyne's excellent free Associate Programs newsletter at www.AssociatePrograms.com 3. Select your affiliate merchant wisely.You need to select an affiliate merchant that is going to give you maximum return on investment, and not let you down. The following is a 7-Point criteria list for you, written by Declan Dunn, an Internet marketing leader, that you will hear of often. Make sure you choose a merchant that fulfils all these points.1. Get paid well for whatever you do! 10 Commission or more.2. Select your affiliate program based on your target audience and your ability to contact them.3. Make sure the sign up procedure is easy to fill out.4. Take time to find the products you would like to offer.5. Check the way the affiliate program tracks and records your orders.6. Do they give you the marketing tools to help you sell more?7. Make sure that you have some way to generate long-term revenue.You will find a helpful article at http://www.associateprograms.com/search/guide.shtml4. Automate absolutely everything you can about your business.The more you can automate, the less you physically have to do.Newsletter sign-ups and unsubscribes - automate it. Topica is good, and so is Corey Rudl's new "Mailloop"Follow up emails - automate it. Use Aweber's sequential autoresponder (very powerful).Sending out personalised email in bulk - automate it. Use Mailloop, or better still, have such a system integrated into your server, so you server is automatically sending our the emails for you.Taking orders (if your going down that route) - automate it with an eCommerce solution, which doesn't have to be too expensive. We have an in-house team, but you can get an off-the-shelf package to create a shopping cart system, and get a merchant account for taking money online. We use Barclaycard's ePDQ system, which has proved effective, (and great for its anti-fraud measures - important in the phone industry!). Protx.com is another great payment provider solution.Search engine optimisation - automate it by building your site based on a database, then showing the keywords from that database on strategic places (as outlined in the Affiliate Training Centre). That means, rather than constantly tweaking and updating your site, if it is feeding from a database, which is automatically updated for you, then all the correct words and details go on your site automatically. This is particularly relevant for our ringtones and the phones, because the products are constantly updating. 2U provides databafeeds for such products.5. Maximise your search engine position.This is a complex subject, although not as complex as the professionals will make out! You could learn all you need to know to be successful and profitable in 2 weeks, but I would definitely recommend starting at our Affiliate Training centre by simply going to http://help.2u.co.uk.You will find a good Search Engine Optimisation article hereQuick pointers for optimisation on the cheap.Own and host your own domain. There are now a number of good cheap optionsFollow the details on how to change your on-site elements as outlined in the Search Engine Tutorial at the Affiliate Training Centre build you off-site elemtents, principally your incoming links to your site. How to do this is also outlined in the Affiliate Training Centre TB: So, tell me how this all applies to your company, and how our readers could apply this.Duncan: Well, I try to come at the site from the point of view of the affiliate AND the customer at the same time. Is that price competitive? Will the customer buy? Is it worth the affiliate's while to promote?The hardest part of running an affiliate network is creating deals that are great for affiliate's profit margins and are good value for the customer. The only way you can do that is to meet the 7-point criteria for selecting a good affiliate merchant, as Declan Dunn laid out.For example, we are launched our pay-monthly mobile phone promotion, that affiliates earn on. We opted to make it the best deal available on the market for the affiliate, so they can make the most money possible, promoting the most profitable products, earning a simple but high commission of £30 per sale (more on volume of 100 ). We also have to factor into this, how good a deal this offers the customer. There is no point in having an awesome affiliate commission structure, if the customer is simply not going to buy. So, it is important for home workers to look at how good this is to the customer. Would they buy it themselves? You need to do the research that a fastidious customer would do, and offer the results from that research, for them.We try to offer affiliates all the help they need, and it was quite rewarding for one of our affiliates to recently thank us, saying how impressed he was that we actually responded to his emails! You would be amazed at how many affiliate merchants fails dismally to respond to affiliates queries. We try to respond to all affiliate queries within 1 hour, and / or point them to the right point of reference. We also try to make sure that we regularly update our F.A.Q. page of frequently asked questions.TB: So what could affiliates do to help themselves?Duncan: Follow the advice I have given, and use whatever free advice is available, whether that is offered by the merchant (such as the Affiliate Training Centre - make sure you use a merchant that offers similar help) or free advice such as the numerous free newsletters available (personally I would recommend Allan Gardyne's www.AssociatePrograms.com.There is so much 'advice' out there, it is hard to know who to pay attention to. There are so many "Internet Marketing Guru's", and false gods, on a sliding scale from excellent to a complete waste of time. MarketingTips.com, Allan Gardyne and Peter Thompson are my top 3, that get straight to the point and deliver what you need - good advice.TB: Thats great. Specifically, what are your top 3 affiliates doing to be that successful?Duncan: In short, Search Engine Optimisation - or SEO. You can't get away from it. This is THE best, most cost effective means of promotion and business development you can do. For example, I also run the online marketing for our sister company, www.Mobile-Secrets.com. Last year, we focused on optimising our pages for the search engines, using the advice as laid out in the Affitilate Training Centre, and building the incoming links.Now we get 20,000 unique visitors and 80,000 page views each month.How much did this cost? Apart from our own time, absolutely nothing!We have a free tutorial on SEO in the Affiliate Training Centre, and there are plenty of other tutorials around. Optimising for search engines is such a no-brainer. Its free, its not hard, and it brings in a huge amount of traffic.We also have some top affiliates who are using pay-per-click search engines to promote their site. I have been giving them advice on this as well. Initially, some were bidding on keyphrases (search terms used by the potential customer) that were too vague such as "mobile phone". When you are paying for every visitor, you want to make sure that every one counts, even if that means you only get 50 visitors a day. If those 50 are buying customers, they are worth far more than 1,000 'surf-only' visitors. So make sure you bid on very specific keywords and phrases. In our case, this might be "nokia mobile phone insurance uk" - we might only get 20 people a day, but you know that those people WANT that product. If it is too vague, they may click (and you pay) when they want to just surf, or want something that doesn't have a profit margin that can support the cost of the click. I would recommend www.payperclicksearchengines.com as a good source if information for anyone who wants to start a pay-per-click campaign.The bottom line is, you need to know how much you profit per visitor. This means looking at your average profit per sale, and how many visitors it took you to get that sale. For example, lets say you have 100 visitors, and one buys. Lets say that sale had a profit of £20 per sale. So, for each 100 visitors, you earned £20, or that each visitor earns you £20 / 100 = £0.20. That tells you that you cant pay more than 20p per click, or you will make a loss. In this example, if you bid 5p per click, then you will make a profit of 15p per visitor.TB: OK. On a more general level, how should a home-marketer approach their online business, whether with www.2u.co.uk or any affiliate merchant?Duncan: 2 key thing - focus, and automate. Take your self and your business seriously and there is nothing to stop you making serious money - we have many affilaites making good money as a side line - as well as some doing it full time! Focus on your target audience and on what THEY want, not what you want to sell them, then automate the process. Then, the largest part of your day should be writing good sales copy, and marketing literature. And enjoy yourself.TB: Duncan, thank you for your time, and for this information.

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