Pride: Your Quality Online Affiliate Business

Affiliate marketing is often mentioned as a great way to make money online. Many times the suggestion is that this is a way to make money with no effort. Not so! Like anything worth doing, your success in building sales will need some concerted effort from you! So make it something of which you can be proud.


Articles are a great way to enhance and improve your affiliate business. To do this, you should be submitting articles to article directories. Many times visitors become buyers through the article links. When using article submission you need to regularly submit articles to websites – article directories, ideally, two or three articles every week.

Write good copy for your affiliate website. If you are not good at writing, consider using professional article and content writers. Professional writers can deliver you good quality articles that are optimized with proper keywords, and this should let you in turn get more traffic to your website. Quality articles rank better and get you much more traffic compared to only keywords and poor quality articles. Hiring help is one way to get top quality web content for your website. Consider hiring a Virtual Assistant. A VA can do many of the repetitive tasks in your marketing and offer help with submissions of your site. This can save a lot of your time while ensuring that more articles are being submitted.

Make use of forum marketing – Discussion boards are a great place to promote your website. However, you must earn credibility so act in an ethical manner and add value to the forum. Make sure that you post about affiliate website in relevant forums that are in some way related to your program. The links that you provide in forum postings help in a great way to produce you more leads. For this method to be productive you need to make sure that you regularly post answers in forums, as many times a day as possible. NEVER spam your host network.

Use of Social Bookmarking and Social Networking sites –Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube and the many other social networks out there are a great way to become noticed and ways to promote your business and affiliate site thoughtfully, is simply limitless. With social networking your efforts are multiplied, but you must be very careful and definitely No spamming! If you think something you are going to post might be spam it probably is! Rethink your method.

Blogging – Writing a good blog increases the opportunity for you to selectively promote your affiliate products. Remember that blogging successfully means you need to be providing quality content and good information. That’s how you can increase the traffic to your affiliate website, your blog and make additional sales.

Search Engine Submissions – Submit your website links to search engines. Remember to submit your website not only to the search engines, but to quality directories such as Yahoo! Directory, Google Local etc. Such directories will provide high quality backlinks to your website and increase your chances of ranking in the search engines. That provides you with a good traffic flow to your website.

Press Letters and Releases – Research writing Press Releases and learn how to write good content to submit for publication.

If you want to earn money online, become a learning monster for all things Affiliate. Do your homework. Use quality products and be proud of the business that you build. Despite the terrible examples you might have seen online, an affiliate business need not be a venture offering products of low quality and low value.

Now take pride in your work.











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Lindy Asimus
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Forgiveness. Letting Go.

Forgiveness is an interesting topic.




A year or two back we had a thread on a Facebook group about this
that cemented my relationship with one of the members who had
been Pro-Forgiveness. A remarkable young man he posted about
his abusive relationship with his father and how he had been he felt,
forced to deal with forgiving his father for his own peace of mind, and
to make good his life and focus on positive things that were within
his control to do. He wrote of how he had looked at himself in the
mirror one day and said "Enough!". And he forgave. For himself, he
forgave those who had caused him pain. Which is not to say that he
condoned what they did... but he forgave them anyway.

This young man passed away just a few months after he posted this
story.

The notion of Forgiving can be very emotive for many of us,
simply because it does not happen in isolation. Our regard for others
with whom forgiveness may be an issue can be complex. It can
harbour identity issues about

who they are
who we are
what it would mean if we forgave them
what it would mean if we stopped feeling bad
what it would mean if we 'let them get away with it'
what it would mean if we forgot our grievance
what it would mean if we did not have that experience
what life would be like now if we started over without that pain

Essentially, forgiveness is the often just the first step.
After forgiveness, what then?

What will we do differently?
How will we view life now?
What actions will we take now?

One of the presuppositions of NLP, is this.
"People are doing the best they can with the resources available"

What this speaks to, is that we have resources that we need to do
whatever it is that we need to do. Sometimes we have trouble
believing that, because we are overwhelmed or just plain don't know how
to access those inner resources.

Sometimes we have to forgive ourselves first, in order to gain the
use of our own resources, that we need to consider forgiving others.


An interesting topic for sure.






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Lindy Asimus
Design Business Engineering
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How To Hire A Virtual Assistant

Best Results Working With Your VA

Whenever someone in business thinks about hiring some help, it often follows a process something like this:


1 They don't get stuff done that needs to be done. (This can continue for a LONG time!)

2 They are pushed to a point of hiring someone and can't avoid it any longer

3 Obsess for a long time, wondering how they will pay for it

4 End up putting on the first person that turns up to help (even if they have no appropriate skills)

5 Discover the surprise that things get done which used to be left undone

6 Wonder how they got along without help

7 Continue like that not knowing how good (or how bad) it's really working (no way to measure)

In every case I've seen, getting help has resulted in the ability to do more and scale the business in a way that doing everything oneself, just doesn't allow. It doesn't matter what business you are in, it works just the same.

So what does the other side of this look like?

It happens that I've quite a few Virtual Assistants (VAs) in my network and
so I know that while they are willing to do what they do and help where they
can, making that happen with the people who really need what they do, isn't always that straightforward.

Really, what the clients often need, is a coaching session first - to determine what, out of that mess of ideas they have spinning around their head - it is they need help to do.

It is very easy to get what you want when you know what it is.

Knowing precisely What You Want, on the other hand, can be devilishly difficult!

Knowing what you need, will depend on the outcomes that you want to achieve.


These desired outcomes we want, have to fit within a broader context and that means understanding:


Where you are now.

Where you want to be.

How to get there.

Again, it seems simple. And it is.

It just isn't necessarily easy.

Well, it can be easy... if you know how.


So here it is -


If you think you need help, you probably do.

If you think you don't need help... you probably do.

Of course, that depends if you really are growing a business.  If you are just playing at it, you probably don't need help.

So if you are looking to hire help, be very clear on what it is that you
want to achieve as a result, then work backwards from there.


Tips For Starting With Your Virtual Assistant

Be clear on what you want done.

Don't expect your VA to tell you what you need done.
That sets up a bad dynamic and puts you in a passive position
and that's NOT what you want to be as you run your business.
Be Active and take responsibility for your results.

Be clear on what skills the VA possesses

Don't hire a bookkeeper to do your multi media presentations.
And please don't hire your web designer to do your books!

Since you are only paying for what gets done, then think about what roles you need help in.

Some category example:

BackOffice: Accounting and book work, typing, transcription

Front Office: Customer relationship management, social media

Scheduling Concierge: Calendar management, travel arrangements, co-ordinating personal stuff.

Events management: Setting up conferences and the like

Marcom Production: Marketing and communications production. Brochures, presentations, advertisements etc


Web: design, blogs, affiliate programs, shopping carts set up and the like.

Make your VA an integral part of your action plan.

Organize your business and your marketing efficiently,
and ensure that your VA's work adds to your efficacy
and your ability to meet your business goals.

Write down your Action Plan and your VA's Duties

Get those ideas out of your head and onto paper. While the
ideas live only inside your head, they are worthless!
Be clear with them what you expect Your VA to do, and
if you need to, how you want them to do it. Make sure they
have the competencies to be able to fulfill that requirement.
Make sure you have been SPECIFIC with them!


Communicate!

Give clear instructions. Give good respectful feedback.

Have a process for managing performance of the VA and
be accessible when you are meant to be accessible.
Don't hide and withdraw if they do something not to your
satisfaction. Get the communication channels open and
be honest. Expect honesty from them. But don't tolerate
over familiarity or disrespect.

Do What You Say You Will Do.

Return calls or emails. Your VA is not your mother!
It isn't the job of a VA to run after you, so don't
act like a kid who needs a wet-nurse!

If you tell the VA that you will do something in
preparation for what they need from you to go on with a task,
DO IT!.

Budget For Your VA

This is an essential part of your business. Make sure
you have budgeted the funds for your Virtual Assistant.
This is your responsibility so attend to it and don't make
your VA wait for payment, you will get no loyalty that way.
Don't end up being the deadbeat client on the next Twitter message you see.

Monitor Your Progress

Make sure you measure just how far you have come since you
started using your VA. If you have been using them for some
months, you should be able to see how your business has
benefited and be able to track the capacity you have in
your business now as a direct result of that activity. Check
this every week and every month and review formally at regular
intervals. Don't let this just coast, make every week count.

There are some ideas to get you started. Simple, and if you need help to do it right... Get it!


Lindy Asimus
Website


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Creativity It's Good For YOU

I found this rather nice presentation on Creativity (Yes, Creativity is available to everyone! - even YOU) and thought I'd share it here.

Maybe it is something in the air. I was loaned a copy of The Artist's Way last week by a good friend and colleague (as it happens a very creative woman who is doing some remarkable work on producing products for business buyers and sellers, but more on that later!) The subtitle of The Artist's Way is - A Course In Discovering And Recovering Your Creative Self.

Must be that time of the year...

Visual Creative Thinking

View more presentations from homehelper.

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Lindy Asimus
Design Business Engineering
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Your Selection Criteria. What's Most Important?

Did you know, we all have a Selection Criteria. In other words, a list of elements that we either consciously, or mostly without realising it, work through when we make a selection, or a decison. We choose this - but not that - based on what meets the satisfaction of the criterion against which we are checking.

This is a handy thing to know, as it allows us to learn to know our own mind better and to have an understanding of why we do what we do, and make the choices we make, and moreover, it allows us, if our usual strategy is yielding results not in line with those we would prefer, to find a better strategy and use that. Copy the strategy of someone we know makes good decisions that we admire, or work out a strategy that is more in line with our own core values. (Here's the sticky part: You need to know what they are!).

For some people, a priority in making a purchase might be overwhelmingly a visual criteria - it must look 'right' in respect to style, colour, shape, etc. Yet others may need to know that it is nice to touch, or has a texture or finish that is as desired, or it may (as in my case), need to fit a range of things, revolving form, function, and technical specifications. For others, they don't know but it just Feels Like The Right Thing.

For yet other people it is nothing to do with the object for purchase, so much as The Thrill Of The Bargain! Here's a demonstration, of an individual who is well understanding of what his primary selection driver is: Price.

Is price alone a good basis for selection? It is certainly a popular one! Many people will make all kinds of decisions based on price alone. You be the judge.






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Thinking Of Getting A Business Coach?
Lindy Asimus
Design Business Engineering


Download your free 24 Page Action Plan Marketing Workbook!