Any affiliate marketer out there would have heard of the Amazon Associates program where you can promote Amazon products and get paid for it. Their program is hugely popular because their core brand is well known and the prices offered across many different product ranges are competitive. However, if you are to have a lot of success with promoting Amazon products then you must understand the basics of selecting which ones are worth promoting.

Why Promote When the Commissions Are Small?

If you are one of those affiliate marketers that are used to enjoying commissions of around 50-75% then you will be in for a surprise when you sign up to the Amazon Associates program as the commissions there are in the range of 2-10% depending on your performance and the type of product you are promoting. Even though the commissions are small it is still worth promoting their products because it’s about volume of sales that will get you a lot of money. Think about it: selling a $500 product with a 5% commission might not sound too exciting, but if you can sell 100 of them then that is $5,000 in the bank, not bad right?

Find Bigger Ticket Items

When selling on Amazon there are two main options that you can go with which is to sell a lot of low priced products or a small amount of ones that are highly priced. Most affiliate marketers are under the misguided impression that lower priced products are more likely to sell and therefore are worthier of promotion. However, that isn’t the case if you select a niche where the average customer spends over $100 then you can sell products over that price point and make a lot of sales. A writer from Income With Scotty explains that higher priced items are the way to go:

The trick here is to find bigger ticket items ($100+) and build your website around that. If you are relying on search engines for traffic, you’ll find there are plenty of bigger ticket items that have decent search volume and fairly low competition.

The Bestseller Section

Each category has a bestsellers section on Amazon that you just cannot ignore if you want to find great products. Bestsellers are on that list for a reason, and that is because they sell at higher volumes than other products. What is great about these popular products is that you don’t need to do much selling, all you need to do is simply show the product to your customers and they will most likely know what the products already are.

Just a word of caution – a lot of the other affiliate stores in your niche will also be promoting the same product. This means you will need to come up with a unique strategy to get an edge, or simply opt for selling non-bestsellers.

The Product Feedback

Customers when buying Amazon products get to leave some feedback on the products that they have bought. This is great because it allows other customers to see which products are worth buying, and which ones aren’t. You can use this feedback system to your advantage by only selecting products to promote that have a feedback rating of 4-5 stars or higher. An article written by Saad Naeem at SEO Allrounder explains the importance of choosing a product to promote that has great feedback:

If you promote a product with low star review, you will have difficult time promoting the product because people will view the product as low quality and not worth buying. At least, most of them. Product with good affiliate review has better perceived value for the potential customers.

Furthermore, if you are looking for an angle to promote the chosen products you can visit the customer feedback section. There you might be able to find lengthy points about the positive aspects of the product. You can use these points to use as the basis of your advertising efforts.

Another thing to consider is the amount of people that have left the feedback. If you find a 5 star product, but it only has 4 reviews to its name then that isn’t giving you a large enough sample size to make a determination about the quality of the product. Try finding a product with 20 or even 30 reviews. Moreover, do take care to not discard a product with only a few reviews or no reviews at all, because it might be new on the market. Advertising new products before anybody else has spotted them gives you an advantage that you just can’t pass up.

Don’t Put All Your Eggs Into One Basket

All clever affiliate marketers know the importance of not sticking to one niche. The more revenue generating streams you are involved in the better. Therefore, pick as many different niches as you can without spreading yourself too thinly. You could set up a review website for one niche then as you begin to get traction think about setting up another review website in a completely unrelated niche. An expert from AFFSTOP explains the importance of picking several niches:

Spread the actual love around. Don’t create only one product niche site and stop. Keep putting up much more sites, but keep just about every site specific to its niche. One niche each website. Don’t sell TV’s and baby toys on the same website.

When promoting your products you need to think about your consumer demographics. For example, if you are promoting computer games then you wouldn’t also promote women’s shirts on the same website, but you might promote television sets.

These are just some of the Amazon product selection tips that you need to keep in mind. There are plenty more that you will discover for yourself as you get into the process of promoting them. The key with this business model is to constantly test to see what works and what doesn’t. As a result, you will develop your own set of criteria for selecting a product.

YouTube marketing is a very good way to get your business in front of your customers; however, the hard sell strategy will not work there because such videos will get removed for being too promotional. You need to come up with a strategy for marketing your business that will not only meet the terms and conditions of YouTube, but will also pull in your potential customers by the thousands. Read on for some tips on how to do this.

Cross Reference Your Videos

Customers rarely buy something from an online vendor if they have only come across them once. It is highly beneficial if your customers saw several of your videos, and to make that happen you need to politely nudge people towards your other videos. This can be done via the annotation function or simply state within the video that they should check out more of your videos, or even subscribe to your YouTube channel. If you don’t have a YouTube channel then you must get one as that will increase your following by a significant amount. Douglas Idugboe from Smedio explains the importance of having a YouTube channel:

I’ve come across many businesses that upload tons of videos on YouTube but don’t even create a channel for themselves. Having a dedicated channel gets your business a lot of exposure and provides an innovative medium for you to keep your followers updated on your new offerings.

Furthermore, you would benefit from creating a call to action in your video descriptions and within the videos that tells people to sign up to your YouTube channel. As the popularity of your channel increases then there is a higher chance that your videos will get shared across the social networks.

Use Playlists

In order to organize your videos into separate categories you need to use a playlist. For example, if you have 7 product categories then create 7 playlists where the products of each category will be housed. This improves usability for the users because they won’t need to search for videos all over your channel page in order to find the videos relating to a particular category.

Story Telling

One way that people will really respond to your YouTube videos is if you are able to tell them a story. No matter what product or service you are selling you should be able to come up with a narrative that will not only explain what use your product has, but also a reason to buy it. At times, unscripted storytelling can work as a writer from Convince & Convert explains:

Being a good writer is not as essential to being a good storyteller, which is why some unscripted talking to the webcam videos can work, but it is certainly essential if your story isn’t compelling enough on its own.

Good stories can stay in the mind of the viewer for a long time, and they could potentially come back to buy the product simply because they remembered the story and decided that it was captivating enough to make a case for the quality of what was offered.

A good story that you can convey over a short promotional YouTube video is one that can hook the viewer’s emotionally. For example, if you are selling a weight loss how to guide then you can start off your story of how overweight you used to be (if that were true) and how that affected you emotionally. Then you would tell them how you lost weight against all odds (again, if that were true) and that they too can lose weight if they bought your product.

Knowing how to execute a successful PPC campaign can add a lot of value to your online business. It’s one of the more responsive online marketing forms because you are able to get results within 24 hours of execution, whereas with other marketing methods such as social media and search engine optimization it can take a lot longer. Furthermore, the way to increase your rate of success is to go after the right keywords (KWs). Going after the wrong ones can actually prolong the amount of time it takes for you to see a return. So if you are to get PPC right read on for some tips on how to conduct keyword research.

Think Like Your Potential Buyers

You must put yourself in the shoes of your potential buyers. This will allow you to come up with a list of KWs that you would use if you were looking for the products which you are selling. You need to approach this problem from all possible angles which means you need to cover all the different reasons why people would buy your products. For example, if you are selling a weight loss product then possible angles might be to lose weight for the summer beach season, or another one might be to impress a partner. The more angles of attack you consider the better your coverage of your chosen niche will be. You may even capture the demographics of your niche that your competitors are not even targeting. An expert from PPC Hero explains how different people can call the same products differently:

Not all of them will be thinking or calling your products the exact same things. For example if you sell GPS systems worldwide, you might be interested to know that in the UK we call them ‘Sat Navs’.

To get inside the heads of your potential buyers you could conduct surveys where you find out exactly what it is your users are after when looking for your products. This may uncover some KWs that the KW research tools might not have.

Don’t Ignore The Long Tail Keywords

Bidding on only the most popular keywords in your niche is not going to prove to be a successful strategy, and this is especially true if you are a new business that hasn’t got the funds to compete with the big boys in your niche.

On the other hand, if you concentrate on the long tail KWs then you do have a chance. These are basically KWs that are less frequently searched because they are very long; some might even be a whole sentence. The point here is to go after many keywords at once in order to make it count since most long tail phrases do not get many searches individually. A sound PPC campaign can include as many as over a thousand different long tail KWs. A writer for Word Stream suggests that a significant amount of searches are unique:

According to Udi Manber, Google’s VP of search, 20 to 25% of Google queries are totally unique. This means that roughly a quarter of what people are typing into Google has never been typed by anyone else on the planet, ever.

Biding On Keywords

Another good reason for selecting long tail KWs is because the prices that you have to pay per click will be considerably lower, and this in turn means you can get leads for a smaller investment. Most popular keywords in your niche will attract the players with the biggest budgets, and competing with them can become unprofitable very quickly. Before you get to a stage where you find a bunch of profitable keywords you will need to take some loses as Brian Basch from Webstarters.co.nz explains:

It does take time to find the correct mix for keywords and bids, as you test and try new things you will probably take some losses. Always remember that conversions are usually only 10% of your clicks and not every one of the clicks.

You may start off with as many as 2000 different keywords that you think can make you a profit, but as you begin to run a test campaign you see that only 50 of them are really providing a profit. This is normal and you shouldn’t feel that it means you are doing something wrong. As with any other part of running an online business testing is extremely important if you are to increase your profits.

Increase Your Arsenal

When conducting your KW research don’t limit yourself to any one KW tool because that limits your ability to come up with great KWs. Most people running an Adwords PPC campaign will only use the built in KW tool, but there are other ones such as Google Trends, Google Insights and the Google Contextual Tool. By combining all of these into one keyword research strategy your approach will be comprehensive enough to spot the profitable KW opportunities that are out there in your niche. A Search Engine Watch writer suggests the importance of KW research:

Keywords are the building blocks of nearly all search-based PPC campaigns. It’s one of the first tasks new PPC professionals learn – without good keyword research skills, one can’t build a good campaign.

However, be careful regarding how to analyze data you come across. You can’t take the data that is given to you at face value since it may not be 100% accurate. Some KW tools are only able to estimate as opposed to giving you accurate figures, even if it looks like you are given accurate figures. Think about it, billions of searches are carried out each day and processing all of that data accurately is a mammoth task no matter how big a company may be. What KW tools allow you to do well is to compare the relative number of searches. By comparing the keywords you will know which ones you should go after, and from there it is all about the testing that you are willing to commit to.

Facebook is increasing its user base every year and currently has as many as 1.23 billion users that are active. The amount of traffic that moves around on that website is colossal and that is why any online business needs to make an effort to attract some of that traffic to their business website. The best way to attract Facebook traffic to your website is to make use of fan pages. Here you can make a public profile that represents your business and you have an opportunity to showcase your products and services.

Don’t Forget the Call To Action

Anytime you decide to make a post you need to remember that a call to action that will attract your readers to your business website. Anytime you miss out on the opportunity to leave a call to action at the end of your posts you are essentially hurting your bottom line. However, don’t make the call to action sound too much like a sales pitch as you will drive away people that may turn into buyers. When getting sold to in a hard manner most people begin to think “if the product is good then why do they need to ram it down my throat for me to buy it?” So make sure that you nudge people in the direction of your products as opposed to forcing them. An expert from Jon Loomer suggests how to add a call to action:

Rather than creating an image full of text about your latest special offer, think about pairing it with a good image or a tip that enhances your message. Then be sure to add a phone number, email address or link depending on how to buy.

The Sign Up Tab

On your business page you can create tabs, and one that is certainly worth doing is a sign up tab. This allows you to capture information about the user such as their e-mail address. And from there you can market to them repeatedly whatever products you have. Just make sure that you keep the format of the messages in your emails the same as on your Facebook page because the continuity needs to be there. Denise Kitt from Media Funnel suggests the type of information that you ask for should reflect what is important for your goals;

The common setup asks visitors to enter their name and e-mail address. Obviously, you can set up your tab to inquire about whatever visitor information you feel will be helpful to your business.

The sign up tab needs to be attractive and should even contain a sales magnet. This is essentially anything that you are offering to the subscriber in return for their email address. The sales magnet needs to be highly professional because it will give the subscribers an indication of how good your products will be.

Do More Than Sell

In order to create a truly engaging business Facebook page you need to entertain and educate your potential customers at the same time. Any funny stories that you can find relating to your business, or any “how to” information that you have, should be made available to your Facebook page followers.

Think of it this way: the more useful your information is the more likely people are going to return regularly, and one of the fundamental aspects of marketing is to get your offer in front of your customers multiple times. This is because people tend not to buy a product until they have bumped into it more than once. If your posts are truly valuable then people will share your posts and an increasing number of people will flock to your business page.