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One of the problems that small businesses run into on a frequent basis is how to increase their monthly sales without stepping outside of their marketing budget.  This is due to the fact that most small businesses have either a very small marketing budget or no budget for marketing at all.  If you are in the situation where there is no money for advertising even though you desperately need to spread the word about your company you may want to consider using affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a win-win marketing tool since it is a great way to spread the word about your business and help show your customers that you care about them and reward them for their efforts. The way that affiliate marketing works is simple and much less complicated than the term may appear to be.  At its core affiliate marketing is simply the task of getting your customers to advertise for your company in whatever way they fit and rewarding them for each sale they make as a result of their efforts. Most of the time affiliate marketing is used online by spreading a link for your website around the web along with recommendations.  It is your affiliate’s job to speak about your business and promote your products, and in return each time that someone makes a purchase from your website using their link you agree to pay them a commission on the sale or offer them a discount or reward certificate.  This is turn will increase your sales and offer you new business that in turn may decide to be affiliates bringing in more long term business. The best part of offering an affiliate service outside of gaining new customers, is that since it works based on the word of mouth principle is the customers that you gain tend to be long lasting.  Since customers trust their friends opinions they will not only make one small purchase, but may in fact purchase several items or services in one go which will make them even more valuable to your company.

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Affiliate marketing: How to earn a lot without spending a lot

As more and more people realize the advantages of Affiliate marketing it is gaining immense amounts of popularity. Everyone out there is looking to make more profits and Affiliate marketing is certainly helping them do so. The key to Affiliate marketing is to drive more traffic and hence to make more profit. The main things that will make you successful in the Affiliate marketing arena are hard work and the ability to remain focused at all times. You might think that most of the niches have been already taken. Yes they are. But still there are several niches that you can tap into to get Affiliate marketing working for you. With Affiliate marketing your main aim is to come up top on the heap of other websites. The content that you have along with worthy information will get you customers who will come repeatedly and start spending more time at the website. All of this will ultimately culminate into great sales and a larger customer base. Affiliate marketing must also include product reviews. Lots of people online are looking for product reviews that might not be found anywhere else. These should be so worded as to ensure that they will provide the customer the right kind of service if bought. In Affiliate marketing you also need to follow your visitors. You must find out what they are buying and from whom. This will enable you to give them the right kind of product. The moment you start promoting the best products and showcase them well enough, you would have got yourself enough constructive traffic. Affiliate marketing will also help you to make your customers tie up with you. The moment you offer them something free they are sure to bite the bait. Try to make them sign up for a newsletter or a free gift of downloading some valuable information. Try and get yourself traffic that is targeted and not just plain old traffic. Do not just get embroiled in numbers. You might have a lot of visitors but they might not be buying from you. On the other hand you have niche customers stopping by and buying. Try and post articles and content in all the article submission directories. This will ensure that you get the right amount of publicity as well as you are able to get enough back links to your website. The moment you start adopting these techniques it can generate huge amounts of revenue for you. The more engaging is your reading material or images the more reader’s will you have which will change into revenue. The content must almost force your reader to take immediate action of buying.

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Affiliate marketing makes great business sense:

There’s a growing interest in online reputation management. Over at Wildfire Marketing, I answered some reputation management questions for their Thought Leader Thursday series. Here’s a taster… What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen people make when it comes to responding to a reputation management crisis, and how someone salvage the situation if they’ve already made one of these mistakes? The biggest mistake is simply not having official channels in place to allow your customers to complain. Most disgruntled customers post to blogs and Twitter because they feel like they are not being heard by your company. They get frustrated with your lack of customer service and they think to themselves, “I’ll show them, I’ll post a negative review on Yelp/Twitter/Blog.” If companies would simply look at how they’re listening to their customers, and how they escalate and resolve customer service complaints, many of the reputation problems you see would never make it to the web. Perhaps the second biggest mistake is not apologizing soon enough. We tend to get too defensive, when we screw-up. We want to try and resolve the problem without accepting blame and without putting our hands in our pockets. When your business faces a legitimate complaint, move quickly to resolve it. Don’t think about the few dollars in refund demanded by the customer, instead think about the thousands of dollars in lost revenue, if the customer creates a reputation headache for your business! Head on over there for the full interview .

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You’re Facing a Reputation Crisis, Now What?

This is the classic social media case study that finally someone has put a real face on. I read MG Siegler’s account of Comcast’s CEO Brian Roberts speaking with John Batelle of Federated Media and was getting lulled into the same Comcast story we have been reading for months now. While it is a nice piece of PR there is still an underlying reality that is not mentioned by many. TechCrunch’s Siegler starts the coverage innocuously Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts spoke on stage with Federated Media’s John Battelle . For the first part of the discussion, they talked about the usual stuff: the state of the industry, competition, and the like. The answers were pretty PR-friendly, as you’d expect. But a bit of a surprise came with Battelle asked about the role Twitter is playing with the company. “It has changed the culture of our company,” Roberts said. Comcast has for a while now been using Twitter to scan for complaints and engage with customers. The idea was not his, but rather rose organically when someone in the company realized that a lot of public complaints were being sent over Twitter. That’s the nice side of the story. Big company has customer service issues and the use of Twitter has made a huge difference in how they do business. Enter the platitudes for the poster-child of customer service Twittering, Frank Eliason. He says Roberts went on to note that “Famous Frank,” also known as Frank Eliason (Comcastcares on Twitter), now has 11 people working under him simply to respond to information about Comcast being broadcast on Twitter. Roberts says that it’s an entirely different kind of dialogue coming in then the usual phone complaints, and he seems very pleased about the work the team has done with the customers on Twitter. Now we hit the meat of the matter. Despite all of the positive vibe around using Twitter to change Comcast and the ability for a company to create a better customer facing effort, Siegler tells the real story that is the personal side of this whole thing. In other words, there may be more hype than reality to this whole story (shocking huh?) As a very unhappy Comcast customer, I’ve had a number of interactions with Comcast’s Twitter team. There’s no doubt, they are very responsive, and are trying to be helpful. The real problem Comcast has is that their product and all other forms of service are simply not up to par, to put it nicely (I often put it much less nicely on Twitter). Bingo! So is what Comcast doing with Twitter a more elaborate cover up for their apparent inability to bring their service in line with their new image as a customer caring organization or is it TRULY affecting the culture of the company? Cultural change would imply that the products get better and less fussing is required by their customers. Maybe C –level understanding of this kind of customer engagement and the ensuing publicity should go a little deeper than “Hey this makes us look good”. Maybe it would be smart for Comcast to address the issues that create the need for 11 people to handle complaints regarding their service? So this feel good Twitter story may just be another marketing / PR tall tale . That’s too bad. At least Frank responded in the comment section to Siegler’s dissatisfaction. MG, could you keep us up to date if the product eventually catches up with the customer service effort?

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Comcast and Twitter: Can Words Overcome Products?