She works for a successful online marketer who is doing all the right things with her affiliate program. She has great products, affiliates who are already successful and lots of great promotional tools.

In order to boost the program’s success and get more sales this affiliate manager was looking at adding more affiliates to her program (a common goal for most affiliate managers). So she did what many people do to find new affiliates and started emailing potential partners who would be a great fit. The response just wasn’t good.

I’m not surprised. Working as an affiliate manager myself for a few years I’ve never had great response with this method and others who I’ve talked to haven’t either.

One of the ways I recommend for attracting affiliates who are excited about your program is to produce an:
Enticing Event

What do I mean by an Enticing Event?

Think about it this way. If you were a potential affiliate which of the following ‘pitches’ would you rather hear:

1. “Hi potential super affiliate. I want you to sell my product for me. I’ll pay you a commission (after you do the promoting). My products are really good and you should partner with me.”

2. “Hi potential super affiliate. I have something of high value to offer your subscribers, it will give them a taste of my product. If you partner with me and let your people know (I’ll do all the setup of course) you can earn nice commissions for giving your list a bonus.”

When you come to the table empty handed then you are at an automatic disadvantage because you are asking for something and people automatically want to say no.

When you bring something unique and special you are now offering something and are now giving yourself a much better opportunity at being considered.

The enticing event is one way to attract new affiliates but there are many others. A recent survey completed by Shawn Collins from Affiliate Summit gives some interesting results on where affiliates find programs promote. Among the top sources were Affiliate Directories, Google, Contact from Affiliate Managers and Affiliate Managers on who are active on relevant Forums. Check out the full report for free at AffStat.com

Here’s another idea:
Before heading outside your affiliate program to find new affiliates, have you made sure you can’t re-activate some inactive affiliates already signed up? Sometimes affiliates who’ve promoted successfully before get too busy to check back in. An email reminder of what’s coming up or a phone call might just get them back on board.

Attracting new affiliates isn’t always about actively asking. Sometimes the best way to attract affiliates is to get in front of them in other ways so they can make the decision to contact you themselves.

What about you? As an affiliate or an affiliate manager, how do you find new affiliate programs or affiliates?

p.s. For more tips on running an affiliate program make sure to grab the 7 Days to Affiliate Program Profits ecourse at AffiliateCommotion.com

p.s. Coming in September I’ve got something that will help encourage you to continuously give yourself the affirmation and support you deserve.

One of the biggest stalling points for many a new affiliate marketer is getting the actual affiliate website up and running.

As an affiliate marketer, you want a content management system (aka website) that makes it easy for you to add new information and promote new products. You also don’t want to spend forever trying to figure out what that is.

My solution for you – Wordpress.

What is Wordpress?

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

That’s the definition straight from Wordpress.org.

Want to see what you can do with it?

Here’s a new blog I’m playing around with as a potential affiliate site, it’s one of a few niche sites I own and run on Wordpress:

This website right here is built on Wordpress as well. My professional speaker’s website, SpeakerSuccessOnline.com is another one. Here are a couple more:
AngelaWills.com
AffiliatesMojo.com

And of course I’ve also built dozens of sites for clients through my service available at BlogSiteMojo.com.

So, yea, I like Wordpress. I use it on almost every single website I create and will continue to do so because it’s easy, fast, intuitive and always getting better. That means I can focus on creating quality content, products and resources that serve my market rather than trying to get the darned stuff out there.

How Do You Start Your Own Wordpress Affiliate Site?

Here’s a brief description of what you need to do:

1. Get website hosting with Fantastico or Simple Scripts for click and go easy Wordpress installation – I promise it’s easy to install if you get hosting with one of these! I recommend Bluehost for hosting which has easy installation and a handy control panel.

2. Install & Customize Wordpress. Wordpress straight out of the box does need a little tweaking. If you’re not comfortable with this you can hire a Virtual Assistant to help you or hire a blogsite service to set it all up for you.

3. Start Promoting Your Affiliate Programs. The beauty of wordpress is that it is set up in such a way that it helps you get found easier by the search engines and it is very easy to use once you get the hang of it. You won’t have to wait for a website designer to do updates and you won’t have to buy a crazy expensive program like Dreamweaver to do it yourself.

You can grab a copy of my completely free ecourse on How to Create a Wordpress Website in 7 Days or Less and you can also learn and awful lot from Wordpress.org.

How did I learn?

I have to admit that even though I had built websites for many years before using Wordpress, the thought of this CMS (content management system) on a blogging platform was intimidating to me. That’s why I choose to learn by having someone walk me through the whole process. Having someone walk you through or even do it for you takes all the pressure off, saves time hunting around (and potentially grabbing the wrong information) and gets it accomplished fast so you can move on to making money through affiliate programs.

So if you’re ready to get moving forward on your own affiliate marketing my recommendation to you is choose your system (I recommend Wordpress ) and then just dive into it. Once you’ve got a website you can quickly and easily update you’ll have no more barriers to making a great income as an affiliate marketer.

p.s. If you learn best through video then I recommend you check out the Blogging Starter Pack by Lynette Chandler. Lynette has been a friend, mentor and colleague for years now and when it comes to Wordpress she also knows her stuff.

This past February I hosted the Marketer’s Mojo Virtual Conference with 22 amazing speakers over five days.

It was a great way to build relationships with other speakers, to bring high value to my market and to gain new experience with event hosting without the risk involved in running a conference offline.

Paying attention to all the details to running an online event can be tricky. There is a lot of work involved and a lot of planning to do. So with that in mind I wanted to share with you some of the things I learned through hosting my own event. Here is my advice to you if you plan on hosting an online virtual event:

So I’ve learned a few things along the way and I hope my post can help you avoid some little pitfalls you may run into while running your own virtual event.

Audio Version of Article

If you have a website, or even read any information on creating a website, you’ve most likely heard that you should use keywords on your site. Keywords are so much more than just words. Let me give you my definition:

- Keywords or keyword terms are specific terms or phrases that people use in the search engines to find what they are looking for online.

Most of the time people are looking for information. So they type in the keywords relating to what it is they want to find.

What does this mean to you?

It means keywords are a goldmine of information telling you exactly what people want when they are coming to the search engines. It means it’s just silly for you to pick out two or three keywords, slap them on your website and call it a day.

You need to integrate keywords and keyword research into your business and respond to what people are calling out for. Sure you can write about whatever you want, whenever you want online but if no one is looking for that information you’re wasting your effort.

Where do I find MY keywords?

There are plenty of great places to do keyword research. Start educating yourself on what the numbers mean and what the google competition is.

Do a google search for any of the following and you’ll find some great keyword tools:
- SEO Book keyword tool
- Adwords Keyword tool
- Wordtracker free keyword tool
- Wordtracker
- Market Samuri

So, here’s your homework:
- Go find a list of about 100 keywords relating to your market and use them. Use them in your website copy, to create newsletters, to create new products, to write blog posts and anything else that you do for the market those keywords serve.

It’s a valid concern and it’s constantly getting harder to get your completely legitimate emails delivered to your subscribers inbox. We can thank the lovely spammers for the difficulties in email deliverability!

There are some things you can do to protect yourself and get your emails delivered to your opt-in list and read.

Getting Permission

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed, double or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

Of course you can’t control what email you are given but often just making the suggestion will help to receive their most active email address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.

Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber.com (which, by the way, I also highly recommend as an email service provider) shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:

Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.
Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

* http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
* http://www.bondedsender.com
* http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

Want to know the email service provider I trust for my email delivery? It’s Aweber all the way!

Audio Version of Article

If you have a website, or even read any information on creating a website, you’ve most likely heard that you should use keywords on your site. Keywords are so much more than just words. Let me give you my definition:

- Keywords or keyword terms are specific terms or phrases that people use in the search engines to find what they are looking for online.

Most of the time people are looking for information. So they type in the keywords relating to what it is they want to find.

What does this mean to you?

It means keywords are a goldmine of information telling you exactly what people want when they are coming to the search engines. It means it’s just silly for you to pick out two or three keywords, slap them on your website and call it a day.

You need to integrate keywords and keyword research into your business and respond to what people are calling out for. Sure you can write about whatever you want, whenever you want online but if no one is looking for that information you’re wasting your effort.

Where do I find MY keywords?

There are plenty of great places to do keyword research. Start educating yourself on what the numbers mean and what the google competition is.

Do a google search for any of the following and you’ll find some great keyword tools:
- SEO Book keyword tool
- Adwords Keyword tool
- Wordtracker free keyword tool
- Wordtracker
- Market Samuri

So, here’s your homework:
- Go find a list of about 100 keywords relating to your market and use them. Use them in your website copy, to create newsletters, to create new products, to write blog posts and anything else that you do for the market those keywords serve.

Most of the presentations made nowadays are made with the help of PowerPoint. There are also class teachers and lecturers who use PowerPoint to make the teaching and learning process more interesting. However, it is the professional who makes presentations without the use of PowerPoint, while following some of their age-old beliefs for presentations.

Presentations without PowerPoint prove to be quite boring. This is because the presentation will be monotonous, with no music background or visual aids to help in the presentation. PowerPoint presentations usually provide a change for the audience in the presentation, and also give the crowd some visual explanations to the points that are being told in the presentation. So without PowerPoint in the presentation, it is very important that the presenter use some creativity in the presentation. This is because it is only this creativity that will keep the audience interested and motivated in the presentation!

The most important thing that has to be remembered to give a successful presentation without PowerPoint is to exactly know what you are talking about. If you are well versed with the matter you intend to present, you can very well present it without the help of PowerPoint. However, make sure to make your presentation only after learning about the temperament and nature of your audience. Remember that it is of no use talking to the audience as a group of employees. Instead, make it a point to tailor your presentation to meet the intellectual of the audience you are facing.

When beginning the presentation, you have to present it while keeping the end of the presentation in mind. You have to know what the purpose of your presentation is, as without PowerPoint you might lose the interest of the audience! Make sure you see, hear and feel what exactly it is that you want people to respond to in whatever it is that you say. Make a strong start to your presentation. Without PowerPoint, it is very much important that the first words and your appearance set the right tone for the audience to listen to you throughout the presentation. One of the best ways of making a connection with the audience without the help of PowerPoint is to tell a story, or an anecdote that has universal appeal.

One of the main things that has to be done when giving a presentation is to practice on the speech as much as possible. This is the only way of looking polished while speaking. It is indeed a false notion that using PowerPoint slides in a presentation will make a person a dynamic speaker. The process of becoming a dynamic speaker lies in the hand of the speaker. Only practice can make one a successful speaker, and this is one skill that cannot be delegated to anyone else. One of the best techniques to implement for practice is called bits. Here one practices a short piece of material over and over again till perfect. It is not that you practice it for word for word, one just has to talk one’s way through the presentation! In this way, one can easily continue a presentation, even if there is a distraction while onstage.

If PowerPoint is not used in a presentation, it is important that props be used instead. This is because a prop is basically worth a thousand words. With props, people tend to anchor thoughts in their minds to these props. It is no difference if the prop is large, small, funny or serious, as long as it relates to the point that you are trying to make and that the audience sees it! Another way of making sure that the audience loves you despite the fact that you don’t use PowerPoint in your presentation is to bring solutions to the problems they have. With your research of the audience, you would already have an idea to what their problems are; it is only up to you to bring new ideas to them to try.

Remember that when you are not using PowerPoint, you are the visual aid of the presentation. People will then gain more interest in whatever it is that you say, instead of visuals or fancy slides or overheads. So basically, without PowerPoint, it is important that the speaker be more self-confident and well versed in his speech. Without this, it may be quite impossible to imagine giving a presentation without PowerPoint!

As a professional speaker, everything you do the minute you walk into the room sets the tone for your message. Without even speaking one word, you can determine just how many people you will reach because their engagement to your message depends on you; not on them. You can have a great topic to speak on and great presentation skills, but without communication the passion you have about your topic, none of it really matters!

Go before your audience expecting to make an impact! People aren’t interested in what you know. They want your information for themselves and passion is like the “grease” that lubricates that passage of information! Do you expect that your audience will receive what you have to say? Do you communicate that you’re excited to be there and you’re also excited that they are there as well?

Be mindful of the needs of your audience. As a professional speaker, we can get caught up with our message because you know it’s what your audience needs. The problem with that train of thought is that it leaves one key person out of the equation – your audience member. Prepare yourself beforehand to figure out what your audience may want to know or needs to know and then deliver that message.

Change things up for maximum impact! There are going to be times when you can’t stay stuck to your outline. Learn to improvise and adjust to the needs of your audience. Find ways to engage them as you proceed throughout your message. Do you remember in school that one teacher you had that you could never seem to connect with? Students were falling asleep in class and the teacher still plodded on with their message! How effective is that? Change your presentation and tailor it to engage your audience no matter where they might be! Don’t stay stuck in a routine!

Relate to your audience. Relating to your audience goes beyond just speaking to them. It encompasses everything from the greeting you give, the way you dress and your tone of voice you use to address them. Part of relating to your audience means knowing who they are and what appeals to them. You’ll have to research beforehand who your audience members are. If you do this, you’ll be positioning yourself to be more relatable to them.

Passion is the key that opens their hearts and minds to receive what you have to say! If you’re passionate about your topic, that will come across in your speech by default. Conversely, if you lack passion about your topic, that too will also come across. Do you really believe in what you’re talking about? Do you see the value that you and your message have to offer your audience? When you practice your speech, do you motivate yourself? Just about every professional speaker starts off practicing by looking at themselves in the mirror! Try doing that and take a good look at what you see!

You are the key to a successful delivery of your message. If you want to see results, understand that you set the tone in your meeting and it’s up to you to maintain control of that tone!

To make the gathering memorable, guest speakers are selected for a certain reason, some according to their popularity and accomplishments.

As much as possible, the speaker’s profession or line of achievement must be in some way related to the occasion.

Let’s say the occasion is a convention of home developers. The likely guest speaker to grace it could be a famous housing czar well known and respected by the city and state.

To impart a lasting impression to the audience, a speaker must find ways to keep the attention glued to his speech.

If it so happens that you are the invited guest speaker of a gathering, the suggestions below may help to keep your audience listening instead of walking around or doing something else.

1. Speak in a clear, crisp, comprehensible voice with an enthusiastic tone. Avoid mumbling. Try not to eat the words as if there’s a gum in your mouth.

2. Your speech should be in consonance with the aim of the gathering, touching on issues relevant to its objective and applicable to current needs for the benefit of the majority.

3. More speakers prepare a list of the issues they want to touch on instead of a speech prepared and read (or memorized) word for word. A spontaneous speech aligned on the ideas prepared or written on the list is projected more naturally.

4. Inject humor into your speech to keep the audience attentive and waiting for more. Studies reveal that, when humor is involved, audiences find the speaker interesting to listen to. But be aware not to go beyond the line of humor because this may unintentionally embarrass others or be misunderstood by them. This might raise comments that criticize your speech. Try your best to avoid criticism.

5. When you raise an issue, one of the best ways to project it is by citing instances or examples. Correlate the example and the issue clearly.

6. Suppose the gathering was organized to save an industry or boost the morale of those that will be directly and indirectly affected by it. Try your best to deliver an inspiring speech. A speech filled with positive thoughts, like projecting a bright tomorrow, can turn a depressive mood into an enthusiastic one. If you are well versed on the industry with a solution to offer to suppress its downtrend, then say it.

7. Audience participation may seem to turn your speech into a discussion, but it is one way to confirm effectiveness of what you are saying or offering.

8. Image how the industry will look like 5 or 10 years from now on a positive flight. Be specific and realistic in your projection. If hard work is called for, say so.

9. Leave a lasting, meaningful message as you wrap up your speech.

A speech that leaves the audience thinking long after the speech has been made will also leave the audience remembering the speaker for a long time.