Welcome back to the Affiliate Marketing Guide. We have now set the foundations in place for your online business and you are ready to go out into the big bad world! But, you still have a couple of things to consider and have a strategy around. You need clarity in order to maximise the opportunity. So, where to next?

1. Build a list. Stating the obvious but you need to build a list in order to have people that you communicate with and promote products to! So, you will need to set up a squeeze page, which is simply a one page site, which has as its sole objective to collect as many email addresses as it can. You will need to decide on what you are going to offer as a free giveaway in order to entice those who land on your site to give you their personal email address. One word of warning and advice – please respect those who give you their email addresses and never abuse it in any shape or form. They have trusted you with something personal to them and if you break that trust, you are not likely to get it back!
2. Produce valuable content. Set out your program of activities that ensures you have a continuous stream of content that is valuable to potential subscribers. These activities will include article writing, producing videos, commenting on blogs, social media etc. I know I keep on harping about it in this Affiliate Marketing Guide, and I make no apologies for that, but make sure your content is of value. Put yourself in their position – what advice, information, research or reports would they find of value? When you have answered those questions, then go about pulling them together.
3. Frequency and content of contact. Now you must decide how often you are going to communicate with your list and how you are going to mix promotional material with pure information giving. There is no magic formula for this, but my view is that it should be around 50/50 for content and about ¾ times a week for frequency. You want your subscribers to open your emails and they will only do that if they know that what you send is of value. They also know that you will be trying to sell them something but they do not want to feel that that is the only reason you send emails out. So, intersperse your promotional material with good content and then you will be perceived of value.

That’s the 3 point advice for today! Come back to the Affiliate Marketing Guide soon for the next 3 points to set you on your way.

Twitter, when originally started was basically considered as a social networking site. Twitter is very popular for its vast base of subscribers spread all across the globe. Things have changed in the recent past & people are now considering twitter as a very powerful medium of social marketing.

To begin earning with twitter you should follow step by step approach. Remember one thing twitter is not for you if you are looking for an opportunity to get rich over night.

The first step to start is to build a good number of followers. Here popular misconception is that you should have very huge number of followers to earn maximum. This is although not completely wrong but not completely true also.

The number of followers is one of the factors that determine your earning potential but the most important test your followers should pass is that they should be interested in what you are promoting. Suppose you are promoting a product which is completely unrelated to what your followers are looking for they would not bother to even click your links. To be most effective your followers should share the same interest with you or should be from the same niche which you are promoting. Having thousands of followers without any common interest would hardly pay.

Once you have built up the list of followers now you should build a solid confidence & trust in the minds of your followers. You can share useful information that is really a value addition for them. It is not always prudent to bombard your followers with offers & other useless stuff. People usually would not like to receive spam & they would simply un follow you.

You can recommend some products which you have already tried & tested. Good product recommendation would create a good impression about you in their minds & people would love to read your tweets & in fact they would wait eagerly for your tweets. Product recommendations could earn you a good amount of money if you are promoting the product as an affiliate.

Promoting your own product would also be profitable if the product is really very good & the customers see a great value for money. If you have built a good relation with your followers then you would get your sales doubled or even tripled due to the social viral nature of twitter. People tend to recommend good things to their followers & if they like your product they would recommend the same to their friends & followers. There is no limit to how much you would earn with the word of the mouth publicity.

In summary I would like to say that you should use the social networking tools like twitter very carefully & responsibly & should not directly jump to promote something. Imagine yourself in the place of your followers. Would you like to receive promotions & offers from a person whom you hardly know or whom you don’t know at all. On the other hand you would definitely give a try to a product which your one of friend recommended. You should remember that you are dealing with human beings & should respect their emotions. The main reason why social marketing is popular is the human touch to it & you should use it in a proper way.

Using social media marketing is a very beneficial way to spread the word about your business or promotions that you are running through your business. If done correctly, you will see a major boost in your traffic. Read the following article to learn the best methods of using social media marketing for your business.

Get some exposure by organizing a competition on Facebook. You could select a winner randomly among your friends, post trivia questions or have a photo contest related to your products. Make sure you advertise your contest on your website and newsletter: the goal is to get more people to find you on Facebook.

The velocity of the social media marketing campaigns can be frustrating. Successful campaigns do not happen overnight and their results are hard to measure. It is nothing like placing an advertisement on television with immediate results. The slow, steady approach is the only way to have successful marketing on social media.

When using social media marketing know your audience. This is true for any marketing strategy, but especially important here to ensure your message is reaching the right people. Consider who could use your product or service and seek them out using the specifications available when placing your ad on a social media site.

Before beginning a social media marketing campaign you should consider purchasing guides to lead you in the right direction. A guide includes information about the leading social media sites. It will give you all that you need to know from the basics of setting up a page to strategies to increasing traffic.

Add relevant tags to your YouTube videos. They will be more likely to come up in searches linked to your products. You could use keyword tools to find out which keywords are popular among your target audience. Remember that your audience will be more likely to share something if they find it relevant to what they were looking for.

Make sure you make your profiles public. LinkedIn and Facebook both have privacy settings you can customize: remember that you are creating these profiles to advertise your products, and that you want as many people as possible to see your pages. You can block individual users if you are having issues.

Get the competitive edge in social media marketing by using it to listen to your customers. Most businesses are bad at this, so if you truly listen to your customers and work to make change accordingly, you will be highly respected by those that matter most. Allow your customers to make suggestions and work to understand their concerns to increase your business.

You can have your LinkedIn updates include what you post on Twitter by adding the Twitter application to your profile. Even if Twitter posts are generally shorter than LinkedIn updates, you will be able to reach out to a larger number of people and encourage your LinkedIn friends to find you on Twitter.

Now that you have some basic information about making social media marketing work for you, put that information to work for you. Keep each tip in mind as you begin to develop your marketing plan to be sure that you are going to see the best results possible from your efforts.