Find
an ezine or a non-competing web site that reaches your target market
in big numbers Contact
the ezine's publisher or the web site's owner, and offer to send them
your product for their evaluation
Offer
to pay them for marketing your product to their audience
If
you have an Affiliate Program, offer them to join as an affiliate,
and receive commissions for people that sign under them
There
are a couple of things you need to make endorsement marketing really
work
Your
endorsement marketing partner must really like your product
It
must have access to a large number of your target market
They
must write an article about your product that includes:
All
the benefits you can offer
Testimonies
from your partner and other people
A
special offer for their customers that they won't find anywhere
else
A
rock solid guarantee
That
person must have a very good rapport with their customers. If people
love and trust him, they will accept his advice and buy your product
If
they have it, their advice will be ten times more convincing than
an ad or an article written by you.
You
can't even come close to the credibility they will have with their
audience.
HOW
TO FIND YOUR ENDORSEMENT MARKETING PARTNERS?
The
more endorsers or supper affiliates you get, the more quickly your sales
will sky rocket, but how can you find them?
The
first thing you will need is a program named Alexa that you can download
from: http://www.alexa.com
Alexa
will integrate with your browser and provide you on statistics about
the sites your visit, and among them will tell you how many visits that
site receives.
Any
site that scores over 250 visits it's worth approaching to make him
your affiliate partner, and those with over 20,000 visits will be unapproachable
(too difficult to convince)
Another
tool you can use is Ixquick http://www.ixquick.com/
Make
a list of the most popular keywords related with your site
Look
for them at Ixquick
Ixquick
will display results based on the top 10 positions in the major
search engines. It will put a star for every top 10 position in one
of the major engines
Once
you found popular sites related with yours, you need to find
motivated sites that might be good endorsement marketing affiliates
to have, and for this you can use the Pay Per Click Search Engines.
On
the Pay Per Click Search Engines webmasters must outbid each other to
obtain top listings to your most popular keywords. Those that rank high
are motivated, and serious might be partners.
There
are many Pay Per Click Search Engines, but the most important are:
Overture
http://www.Overture.com/
7Search
http://www.7search.com/
FindWhat
http://www.findwhat.com/
eBay
http://www.bay9.com/
And
you should also try to locate targeted e-zines and for that you can
enter your site's keywords at:
Best
Ezines http://www.bestezines.com/
Dominis
http://www.dominis.com/
HOW
TO FIND YOUR COMPETITOR'S AFFILIATES
An
affiliate to one of your competitors, might be a good prospect to offer
him a second income stream through endorsement marketingo of your product.
The
first thing you need to find is Affiliate Program competitors and you
can find them at:
The
Associate Programs Directory http://www.AssociatePrograms.com/
Refer
It http://www.refer-it.com/
Once
you find them go to AltaVista http://www.altavista.com and write:
link:competitor.com
- host:competitor.com
This
will search for all the links that point to link:competitor.com
minus those that link to him from himself -host:competitor.com
Do
this search for all your major competitors and you'll discover their
most active affiliates
Once
you find your ideal partner for endorsement marketing, you will need
to contact him, and you will find that the most interesting ones will
be harder to contact, because they receive many low quality offers,
so you will need to cross the believe barrier.
If
you can do it phone your contact and you will distinguish yourself from
most of your competitors.
Study
their site and/or newsletter and make a valid comment about them, and
add an in context mention of your product and/or proposal.
The
best thing you can do is to personalize your letter with that person's
name, and if you can't take it from his site or e-zine you can look
for it at:
Better
Whois http://www.betterwhois.com/ here you can find the name
and the phone!
Bottom
line: How to avoid the recycle bin?
Put
yourself into your "might be endorsement marketing partner's"
shoes and
think
what kind of proposal you might consider as interesting
Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi
This article is part of "How to Sell
on The Web"
