In this article, we will take a look at three of the current trends in the arena of rich media content, and how these may or may not apply to your business. Flash is the name of a piece of software developed in the mid-90s by a company called Macromedia. The concept behind flash is simple - to bring a degree of animation/interactivity to the Internet. It also allowed designers to create functional websites, without the need for a background in programming. Whenever you see a website with some moving (non video) content, then there is a strong chance that this is accomplished by using Flash. Typically, Flash is used in the header of a page, or within banner adverts - anywhere that will benefit from catching the eye. If you want your website to have a high visual impact, then Flash is certainly something worth considering. However, you should avoid using Flash for anything other than 'garnish' on your website or go to www.thedesignbuild.com
Stay away from including your content or navigation menu within the Flash file, as this will render this information invisible to search engines (damaging your search engine results position) and also to some visitors who may not have the Flash plug-in installed. Now that increased download speeds have made streaming video a possibility, the world has been taken over by self-published video clips. Sites such as You Tube make it incredibly simple to publish your own video to millions of viewers across the globe. They also make it very easy to include video within your own website too. For example, if you sell a product that requires instructions to operate or assemble, then you could consider creating a video to show people how things are done. You have a whole range of options available at different cost levels to creating this video, from doing it yourself and recording on your own webcam, to hiring professional actors and filming in a studio. Once the video is complete, the simplest way to incorporate it on your website is to upload it to You Tube and then use the 'embed' code to include it on your website you can visit www.magic-mini-site.com
Pod casts can be a great way to generate repeat visitors to your site, and more importantly, to have people take a bit of your site away with them! The term pod cast stems from Apple's bipod portable audio player, but it essentially refers to any audio clip stored in MP3 format on the Internet which can be downloaded and played later on a PC or portable audio player. "Why would I want to do this", you might ask? Well, it very much depends on the nature of your organization, but if you operate in an industry where news or opinion plays an important role (charity sector, marketing, finance, religion - the list goes on!), then by putting together a short pod cast of your thoughts, or recent developments in your business, and making it available on your website it gives your customers a bit more of an insight in to what your business offers. This can help establish your company as an authority voice in your industry, and people trust authority!
No matter what you've read online you need a website to succeed in affiliate business marketing.
Not only does it give you a platform to sell from it helps create trust & confidence in your products with your visitors so that they click on the affiliate link.
Don't believe the Siren calls that tell you that you can make an income from a blog with affiliate links or directly from adwords with affiliate links direct to the affiliate product.
Visitors need convincing that the affiliate product is worth their hard earned cash.
Your review, comparisons, appraisals and endorsements will be the deciding factor.
Why else to you need an affiliate website
To offer other resources that draw visitors back to your website and therefore increase your conversions of visitors to buyers. Resources like:
Articles
Audio files
Reviews of the products
Free advice
Endorsements & testimonials
Free tools and software
Membership area
Don't forget to look for ways of selling using these 'free resources' areas. Embed links to your affiliate products or pages within your website.
Opt-in forms for your newsletter and other incentives. - Generating a list of targeted visitors is a fantastic use of your website.
Somewhere to sell your own product. Even if you don't have anything to sell now, you may well do in the future. Either one that you have developed yourself or something that you have the resale rights to.
Highly optimised pages for you to display adsense ads as an extra revenue stream.
A way to develop your brand.
Somewhere to place links to other websites. This would form part of your search engine optimisation strategy.
Affiliate tool #2 - An Autoresponder
Almost every website, whatever their business, affiliate, drop shipping, ecommerce or membership or even simple adsense websites will benefit from this most essential of tools, an autoresponder.
Not just having but using this tool is the key to a successful affiliate business, Why?
Well what is the fuel of your business? Your visitors and their cash.
Now every good businessperson will tell you that it costs more to develop a new customer than it does keeping a current one.
This is the same for your affiliate website. If you get 10,000 visitors a day then you don't want them all leaving and never returning again. You've done the hard work of telling them about your website and getting it seen on the search engines, now capture their email addresses and keep in contact with them so that you can tell them about all the new offers you have in the future.
Autoresponders allow you to do this and can dramatically increase your affiliate click through and revenue. Take a look at AWeber or GetResponse for more on autoresponders.
Well before you can capture those visitors email addresses you somehow have to generate visits to your affilaite website.
One great way that has many fantastic spin-off benefits is to write and submit articles to the many article submission & syndication websites.
By writing good, keyword rich articles all about your affiliate products you can send visitors both directly to those affiliate products, via your affiliate link, as well as directing them to your website.
Plus - You increase the number of high quality backlinks to your website.
Plus - Other website owners may use your content and put it on their website, along with a backlink to your website... more backlinks, more exposure to your affiliate links, more exposure to your brand.
Plus - You get lots of lovely, keyword rich content for your own affiliate website. Great for search engines to pick up and index and also good for you to put adsense ads on for lots of extra income.
For more on article submission tools see www.simplewebsitemarketing.com
Affiliate Website Tool #4 - Link Cloaker
You may not consider this an essential... but I do. You've worked really hard to:
Build your website
Build your list
Build your article submission and search engine optimisation
Now you're getting 100's and 1000's of visitors to your website so the last thing you want is to have your hard work stolen from you.
Link fraud is serious and on the increase and you can loose a big chunk of your business as a result. By cloaking your links you are protecting your income.
The other advantage is that it can help to encourage visitors to click the link. Why? because cloaked links look neater and don't appear to take the visiotr off to some unknown destination.
So hide those ugly links with a link cloaker.
Affiliate website tool #5 - A Great Affiliate Guide
Like all great explorers, you need good maps.
There is no need to reinvent the wheel or reinvent how to run a successful affiliate business, just follow the advice of someone who is already successfully running an affiliate business. If you ask me then I recommend any one of the following three super affiliates
Ros Gardner's 'Super Affiliate Handbook'
Jeremy Palmer's 'Quit Your Day Job'
James Martell's 'Affiliate Marketers Handbook'
All offer a unique and usable guide on setting up and running a profitable affiliate website business.
To recap
Build a great website
Use an Autoresponder to capture your visitors email addresses
Write and submit articles using an article submitter
Both Martynricky & Brian Cotsen Cotsen are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.