Tapping Oil With Your Own Affiliate Program

You have a great website with a sharp look and many useful interactive tools onsite that assure the credibility of an online professional. You have registered with several search engines and directories and submitted press releases to one and all. You have an interactive Q & A page which your quite proud of and a discussion board with occasional engaging discussions.

The problem is your still getting scarce solid leads. Why? What are you doing wrong?

Respecting the Network

The fact is you're in between offline marketing, processing and closing deals.
You have little time to maintain a seemingly invisible presence on a website. What you really need is just one thing. Internet Focus. If your going to run an online business you must respect it as such. You must learn to interact with all avenues and levels of the e-market place and formulate an e- business plan that not only includes gathering leads online, butprioritises them.

Many are still saying that online business is still in its infant stages. The problem is many are treating it as such. You don't have to. If you treat it as much a part of your business services as your offline services you will reap rich rewards for doing so. To do this lets begin with a checklist of what you've done so far in the way of presenting your business online in true e-business fashion.

Do you have in place...?

1. On site How to articles
2. On-site and e-mail Newsletter
3. On site Press releases
4. Coupon incentives
5. Interactive customer Q-and-A section at your site
6. On site Search engine
7. On site Directory listing

Off site Marketing

1. Monthly Article Submission list
2. Reciprocal Links
3. Newsletter Communications
4. Off site Press Releases
5. Keyword Buys
6. Search Engine Submission
7. Directory listings
8. Targeted opt in e-mailings

If you have expended time and effort to market your services in this way you've done well and are no doubt getting occasional leads. But your job is hardly over. You probably are marketing your website directly to these resources. If so its no wonder your getting meagre solid leads. You have to readjust your view of the Internet.

Harnessing Potential of the Internet Marketplace

You would do well to acknowledge the Internet as an endless line of online marketplaces. Online marketplaces allow participants to reach more consumers, increase transaction volume while significantly lowering customer acquisition costs. It is also something of an electronic cocktail party. What do the most successful entrepreneurs do at such parties? Networking. And when they're not Networking they're Networking! Now you have the idea. As you adjust your concept of online activity, think in terms of tapping several leads rich resources by simply making the right contacts online. Now how does one do this?

The Marketing Trend

Consider this. A popular lending network offers lead bounty hunting to just about anybody smart enough to find leads over the Internet at $10 per lead or completed application. Crumbs! Yet as a result this company has grown to become an Internet based financial mogul bringing in millions of dollars per year using this very method. Lending Tree revenue for first quarter was more than 600% higher than the same quarter in 1999. "Our outstanding performance this quarter was our continued focus on achieving profitability," said Doug Lebda, founder and CEO of LendingTree. "We transmitted more than 134,000 loan requests, significantly beat expectations of customer acquisition costs, successfully facilitated more than a half billion dollars of closed loans, sustained gross margins in excess of 60%, and continued to increase the number of business clients using our Lend-Xsm loan exchange technology." How? Third party online affiliate networking programs which are in essence lead exchange marketing groups. This network is commonly referred to as an affiliate program. Other online financial institutions have increased their bounty from $150 to as much as $2000 per lead payable upon funding of loan.

Tapping the Leads Generation Resource

Large online companies are bursting at the seams with leads generation programs made possible by virtual online cocktail party networking with lenders, brokers, professional webmasters and even work at home moms, hosted and catered if you will, by third party affiliate programs. There are literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of web savvy professionals who want to market your business for you.

The Right Affiliate Program

You want an Affiliate program that acts as a marketing tool chest for merchants and their affiliate members. The next step is knowing which affiliate marketing network to select for your next marketing venture. Do research on Affiliate or Associate Programs discussion boards that address affiliate marketing and you will learn who's in and who's out. Examine the affiliate program site for strong customer service presence, state of the art marketing tools and status reporting.

A good Affiliate/Merchant program should include the following tools:

• Email Marketing Software - Let's your Affiliates help you build your lists.
• Targeted promotional materials - special commission offers, personal messages, direct press releases.
• Timed motivational promotions - automatically change the Affiliates' commission rates back to their original rate give your Affiliate
• Several methods of linking to your site - giving your Affiliate members specially encoded banners and text links to link to your site.
• Leads tracking systems - gives you a report showing each of your banners, the number of click throughs and impressions each has had and the click-through to impression rate of each. You'll easily be able to see which of your banners really works!
• Self Replicating Pages Module - gives your Affiliates their own page on your domain

IMPORTANT: Most webmasters are not interested in non-tiered programs. Find a merchant affiliate network that allows for 2 tier marketing. Establish a mutli-tiered program and your most likely to keep affiliates longer.

Looking at the Internet as a rich leads network you will discover new ways to expand your marketing potential and increase sales and revenue significantly thereby tapping the oil in the online marketplace.