KitwanaAkil.com

By Jimmy D. Brown, SalesArmySecrets.com

What if there was a magic bottle that you could rub and a
traffic genie would pop out to beckon to your every
internet marketing command?

After the initial shock wore off, you’d be quite happy to
have it in your possession, right?

Well, in a manner of speaking, such a genie exists. She
exists in the form of an “affiliate manager”.

An “affiliate manager” is someone who oversees the
operations of an affiliate program in exchange for
compensation.

And, out of all the traffic “tools” on the market, the
affiliate manager is the one that you should be using daily
in your business if you own your own product.

Why?

The bottom line is: more traffic, which results in more
revenue for you.

But, specifically, there are 3 reasons why you need an
affiliate manager…

1. Recruiting.

Your affiliate manager can recruit new affiliates into your
program for you. Instead of you spending time trying to
find (and then convince!) affiliates to join your program,
your “affman” can do this for you while you focus on other
things.

2. Rewarding.

Everyone knows that simply getting people to join your
affiliate program is not enough. It takes a lot of effort
to get passive affiliates to become (and stay!) active. An
affiliate manager is responsible for motivating your team
to remain involved in your promotions.

3. Running.

Beyond getting affiliates into your program and making sure
they stay active, your affiliate manager can “run” as much
of your operations as you want her to. Here are just a few
things my affiliate manager (props to Nicole!) does…

* Creates training materials
* Write follow-up mailings
* Communicates with affiliates
* Answer affiliate support questions
* Monitors contests and incentive programs
* Posts to our blog
* Clerical stuff (creates rebrandable files, etc.)
* Circulates content (article directories, etc.)

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Perhaps the best part of hiring an affiliate manager is the
fact that it doesn’t have to cost you a penny in out of
pocket expenses. That is, you can setup your agreement to
be performance-based: you pay the affiliate manager a
percentage of the overall revenue generated through her
efforts … the more revenue she brings in through the
affiliate program, the more she earns.

Now, the question is –

** Where do I find an affiliate manager? **

There are actually quite a few ways to find quality
(emphasis needs to be on “QUALITY!”) affiliate managers for
your program. Let me share just one…

One of the easiest ways to find an affiliate manager is to
visit your favorite affiliate marketing (or internet
marketing) forum and post a request asking for
recommendations or responses for your needs.

You can do this in two ways -

1. Post a PUBLIC Request.

That is, you post a message for everyone to see, with brief
details on the position you have available and that you are
seeking recommendations or interest to explore further.

2. Post a PRIVATE Request.

The other option is to identify those participants at the
forum who appear to have experience and/or knowledge in
affiliate marketing who might be good affiliate manager
material. Then, you would simply contact them privately to
see if there is interest in discussing your needs.

Running your own affiliate program is a tremendous traffic
generation tool, but it has a lot of parts. There are many
different activities that are involved in successfully
running an affiliate program, and hiring an affiliate
manager to oversee your operations is a great way to free
up your time to work on creating additional products and
other “creative” work.

A good affiliate manager can bring in affiliates, train and
motivate them, and run your operations for you. Her efforts
bring in the traffic; your efforts turn the traffic into
orders.

It’s the closest thing to a traffic genie in a bottle that
you’ll find. Rubbing is optional. Using this strategy
isn’t.

———–
Jimmy D. Brown is the author of Sales Army Secrets, full of
meaty details on ways to find affiliate managers, how to
structure your agreement with them and tasks to have them
handle. Details at SalesArmySecrets.com

By Jimmy D. Brown

You make a $97.00 sale and you say an emphatic “Yes!” as a smile breaks out on your face. This selling online thing is cool and it feels good to be getting sales.

Then, a few days later you get a refund request. The $97.00 is gone. And so is your smile.

Or, worse still, a month and a half later (after you’ve spent the $97.00) a chargeback hits you. Not only is the $97.00 gone, but you’ve also been zapped $20.00 in service fees.

Instead of making money, you’re losing money.

Now, to be sure, that doesn’t happen on EVERY single sale. If it did, we’d all be out of business. But, it does happen frequently, from 2-10% of the time depending upon your offer.

Regardless of how often it occurs, when it does, it takes money out of your pocket.

So much emphasis is placed on ways to “make money” that many people forget to focus on how to KEEP the money that you make.

In today’s article (with part 2 coming later) we’re going to talk about increasing your profit through the “backdoor” by identifying 10 ways to reduce refunds and chargebacks so you can make the most money possible from your internet business.

The best part is this: most of them take just a few minutes to implement and most of them don’t cost a penny.

1. Be Accurate In Describing Your Product.

Probably the most common “legitimate” reason for a refund is when the product or service doesn’t deliver what was described during the sales process. When you create advertisements and salesletters, it’s important that you be accurate in describing your product.

This involves both…

* “Avoiding hype” which creates unrealistic expectations that ultimately lead to disappointment with the order. Your advertising sets the tone for what “results” the customer feels they can accomplish. If your claims are found to be unreasonable (or downright false) then refunds will often follow.

* “Correctly Define” the components of your product including its type (I.E. digital goods vs physical goods), its size (I.E. 20 pages vs 200 pages) its delivery (I.E. Immediately after order vs within 7 days) its required skills or knowledge (I.E. For beginners vs experienced) its exclusivity (I.E. Common knowledge vs your unique offering) its compabibility (I.E. PC only vs Mac users welcome) and its freshness (I.E. Updated for 2006 vs last year’s news) to name a few.

Perhaps the easiest way to turn back refund requests is to be clear in what your product or service offers without raising false expectations.

2. Offer Several Unadvertised Bonuses.

After the sale has been completed, let the customer know that you’ll be sending them 4 or 5 “unadvertised” bonuses over the next several weeks via email. You can even list what those bonuses are and their delivery schedule.

Example: In exactly 7 days you’ll receive unadvertised bonus one, an 18-page report entitled “27 Ways to Attract Butterflies Year Round”.

These unadvertised bonuses can be extra reports, articles, audio/video, interviews, tools, etc. The important thing to remember is that they should be related to the original purchase (I.E. an extension of the base product or service being offered) and should be desirable enough to add real value to the order.

I recommend that at least one of your bonuses be a “list” report with more than 20 entries (I.E. “27 Ways to Attract Butterflies Year Round”, “Top 20 Shortcuts For Starting A Christian Bookstore” or “The 21 Best Homeschooling Time Savers”). When it’s over twenty entries, it has a tremendous perceived value.

And that’s the point here: add more value to the existing purchase. The more bang your customers get for their buck, the more likely they’ll be satisfied and NOT request a refund.

3. Clearly State The Billing Name.

For most people selling goods online, their name or company name WILL NOT be the one listed on a customer’s credit card invoice or checking account log. Generally, it will be a third party company such as CLICKBANK. Unfortunately, many vendors forget to tell the customer what the charge will appear listed as in their records.

What happens is this: A customer buys a product from Paula J. Brown. In a month or so, that customer gets their credit card statement in and sees “Clickbank / Keynetics” listed. They don’t recall doing business with Clickbank / Keynetics and instead of investigating to see what it is, they either refute the charge to their credit card (resulting in a chargeback - ouch!) or they contact Clickbank and say “I don’t recall ordering this - refund it now.”

Either way, you’re out of a sale.

Always make sure you clearly state what name the transaction will be listed under when the customer receives their statement. Do this on both your “thank you” page AND in your initial email message to your customer.

4. Be Specific In Your Guarantee.

There is a great debate on how to use guarantees. Some people argue that given a lengthy guarantee (I.E. 12 months or even lifetime) is the best option because it shows that you stand by your product and instills greater buying confidence in the customer. Bad news is, in six months when Christmas comes along and the customer needs some extra money to buy gifts, your guarantee comes to mind.

Other people argue that a shorter, limited guarantee (I.E. 30 days or “show that you’ve tried to use the product”) is the preferred way to go simply because it gives less time for refund requests and generally attracts a more quality customer who is less likely to want their money back. Bad news is, if the customer isn’t completely “wowed” with your product or service, they’ll likely ask for a refund very quickly after their purchase to avoid missing out on the guarantee period. And if you attach too many strings to your guarantee (I.E. You must PROVE you’ve tried to use the product without success), you’ll likely lose some sales.

Truth is, there is some truth to both options. And I’m not going to tell you which one is best for you. (Although, if you use someone like Clickbank, it takes the debate out - they REQUIRE a limited, 30-day guarantee period. If you process orders via a third-party, check for their specific terms on this).

But, at the bottom of the page, here’s the conclusion that I’ve come to based on my own numbers: a longer, liberal guarantee works best overall. That is, while you will have a few boneheads that ask for a refund three years after they’ve purchased it, generally you have MORE sales (because they have greater “trust” in you based on your guarantee) and actually have LESS refunds (because people forget all about you and your product after a few weeks).

5. Create A Frequently Asked Questions Page.

Setup a special page with the 10-15 most frequently asked questions (along with detailed answers, of course and make note of this page in your initial follow-up message with your customer (You know, “Hey, thanks for your order…”) AND on the order fulfillment page (I.E. “Download page”).

Just a few of the things you’ll want to include on this page are…

* How to retrieve passwords
* Tips for overcoming common errors
* How to download materials
* When “unadvertised” bonuses will arrive
* How to track orders (If applicable)
* Best way to contact you

How does this reduce refunds?

In a variety of ways, actually. Just one would be: considering the reliability (or lack thereof!) of email these days, you could miss a question from a customer altogether, resulting in frustration or a feeling of getting “scammed” which will result in a refund.

Not only will you reduce your refunds, but you’ll also dramatically reduce your customer support. A surefire winner.
Of course, there are MANY other ways to increase your profit! Check out “The Upsell Report: 24 Ways To Get Your Customers To Spend More Money” by clicking here . You’ll learn an amazing 24 different ideas for getting your customers to spend more money (sometimes 300-400 or 500% more!) Studies show as many as 1 in every 2 customers will automatically buy if you just offer one of these items.

By Jimmy D. Brown

If I had only known, I wouldn’t have made these mistakes. But I did.

For such a small word, “if” sure does cause a lot of problems, doesn’t it?

“If I had not turned off the alarm clock, I wouldn’t have overslept.”

“If I had paid attention to what my wife said, I would have not shrunk my 100% cotton shirt three sizes too small.”

“If I would have taken the time to fuel up, my car wouldn’t have run out of gas out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“If I had charged up the battery on my mobile phone, then I would be able to call AAA to bring me some gas out here in the middle of nowhere!”

See what I mean?

“If” is such a tiny word.

But it’s like dynamite. It packs a lot of punch.

For me, as I teach (and learn myself!) about viral eBooks, the phrase is this:

“If I had only known, I wouldn’t have made these mistakes.”

You see, I made MANY costly mistakes in my early viral eBooks. Mistakes that are *literally* costing me thousands of dollars in profits right now.

And there is nothing I can do to change them.

Once you set a viral eBook into motion, it’s impossible to get it back and make corrections to things ya screwed up on.

Man, if I could go back into time and change some things.

I have learned the hard way some things you DON’T want to do with viral ebooks.

That’s what we’re going to take a look at here.

I’ve made ‘em all.

You don’t have to.

Don’t do this…

1. Never use any link inside the content that you can’t control.

I learned the hard way that you should always use redirect links from your own domain when putting any kind of link inside your ebook.

For example: most people insert their affiliate link for an affiliate offer inside the ebook that they have put together. The one that was given to them by the affiliate program owner.

Instead, you want to link to a page at your site that refreshes and redirects the visitor to your assigned affiliate link. Something like this… http://www.yourdomain.com/brainstorm.html
This is important so you can CHANGE the link anytime you want to in the future.

For example: If I decided to no longer use ClickBank to handle my affiliate program and went with a different affiliate tracking link, what happens to the thousands of copies of your viral eBook that are in place with that old affiliate link in there?

They become obsolete, unusable and unprofitable.

Or, suppose you are linking to a dating service that goes out of business? What now?
Your links are toast. They are worthless to you.

With a redirect link you can easily adjust the target page and send the traffic to a different dating service, or to a page at your site. With a redirect link the changes are made at YOUR SITE, which you remain in control of regardless of what happens with the products and services that you linked to.

Even if you change hosts or servers, you still remain in control.

You don’t have to make changes to all of those eBooks — which would be impossible to do — you simply make a 2 minute change at your site.

I can’t tell you how many dead links are in some of my earlier ebooks that continue to give me headaches as people email me saying, “Jimmy, you’ve got a dead link here … can you give the correct link?”

It creates a lot of extra work in answering emails and certainly is throwing away potential profit for the countless people who never bother to ask for an updated link.
So, never use any link inside the content that you can’t control.

Always use redirect links.

2. Another thing is you want to avoid using dated information by providing too specific details.

Affiliate program A may not be offering that free 30 day trial offer very much longer.

The price for admission to that special site may not always be $29.95.

That site that was “just released last week” may have become an all-time classic by the time Bob reads your viral ebook two years after it was released.

You want to make certain that you stay away from information that is too specific that can easily become irrelevant.

Again, I get emails all the time griping about inconsistent prices because I put a price for the Profits Vault membership into one of my early viral ebooks and that price is no longer valid.

Hasn’t been for almost two years.

I’ve even gotten ugly emails accusing me of fraud and false advertising, with threats to turn me in to the attorney general and all kinds of nonsense.

So, be careful that you don’t date your viral ebook if you can avoid it.

3. Another no-no is to never put any information into your ebook that you don’t want all over the world.

These things travel folks and they can be global in a matter of days and certainly over time you can easily have a worldwide audience.

I made the mistake of putting my cell phone number in one of my earlier ebooks because everyone claimed that if I didn’t have my contact information in there, no one would buy from me… which is nonsense I might add.

Anyway, I started getting all kinds of calls at all hours of the day.

What was 3:00 in the afternoon in the Philippines was 3:00 in the morning where I live.

So, it was a nuisance.

Kind of a funny story came out of it.

I disconnected that number, of course, and got a new one. That was almost 2 years ago.

Well, about a month or so ago I had a lady email me and she was hopping mad.

Apparently, she had ordered a cellular phone and got my old number… and folks were still calling!

She told me that she was getting calls from England and all over looking for me and they were running her cellular bill up with charges.

She wanted me to do something about it and all I could do was tell her “I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do”

With viral marketing, it’s pretty much unstoppable, which is why it is so effective. It keeps spreading and it’s hard to stop the growth once it gets going.

So, never put anything into your ebook that you don’t want the world to know and use.

4. Another thing is this … always have your carriers do the branding.

You want to automate the process as much as possible.

Again, I learned the hard way.

Early on, before there were all of these branding tools available, I hand customized each ebook.

And as they began to spread, the customization requests grew to be way too much for me to handle. I was spending most of my day putting together these customized viral ebooks for each new person that requested a copy.

That had to change and so now I use branding tools and branding instructions. I give them to anyone who wants to customize the ebook and I let THEM do the work.

Keeps me out of the loop completely.
So, unless you have some specific reason to do it yourself, place that responsibility onto the ones who want to distribute the viral ebooks.

5. One more thing I want to share. Always launch new browser windows with your links in your ebooks.

Whenever you link to a site within your viral eBook content, always remember to code that link to launch a new browser window when the reader clicks on it. I learned this the hard way. There are many scripts involved in the order-taking process at online credit card processing sites.

And many of those have caused glitches in the eBook due to the software the eBook was created with and it crashes the eBook, making it impossible to order.

So, what happens is this.

You do your job well. The content is great. You’ve got a hungry customer waiting to buy.
They click on a recommended product link. They arrive at the site still inside your eBook window. They click on the order link and the entire thing shuts down. I mean completely shuts down the ebook and website altogether.

And, in some cases, it even crashes the computer. You just lost a customer because two sets of code didn’t like each other.

That has happened to me on MANY different occasions in some of my early ebooks.

Now, all of my links launch new browser windows OUTSIDE of the ebook if you click on a link inside the ebook. All you need to do is insert a simple line of code into your links inside the eBook. The code looks like this…

Target=”Resource Window”

Now when someone clicks on your link, a new browser window will launch outside of the eBook itself before taking them to the website. Now, you’re safe. EVERY link in your eBook should have this code. You can thank me later.

(NOTE: IF you are using a PDF maker for your ebooks, you should be fine with your links.)

Viral eBooks are tremendous tools. But, there are also some pitfalls associated with them.

I’ve just shared five of the mistakes that I have made.

There is just no way of measuring how much profit I have lost over the years due to those errors.

There wasn’t a manual available to tell me how to do it. History hadn’t really been recorded at that time to tell me what to stay away from and what to make sure I did in order to protect myself from problems.

So, you’re getting something that I didn’t have.

Aren’t ya happy?

In all seriousness, don’t make the mistakes that I made.

History doesn’t need to repeat itself on this one.

Want to learn a NEW viral ebook strategy that isn’t outdated and overused? Check out “How To Get Free Traffic With PLR Reports “ by clicking here . You’ll learn a great way to get free traffic to any site you choose with free “private label rights” reports.

photo credit: mitmall

September 2008

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