Affiliate Fraud Tip: If you have your own associate program you may want to consider paying your affiliates using the online payment program http://www.PayPal.com.

It's not suggested to use this service for collecting money for your main product line (unless it’s a secondary payment option or if you are selling on ebay it’s okay), but it does give you some protection if you have affiliates who may counterfeit your checks and try to wipe out your main checking account.

Some merchants who run affiliate programs keep a separate checking account with just enough money in it to pay affiliates so that if someone does counterfeit your checks, they can’t get away with too much money.

Counterfeiting checks is not common in the USA, but if you have affiliates in many countries foreign to yours, you must watch closely for potential fraud.

Affiliate Fraud Tip # 2: Scenario: You get an oddball order for a large amount of money. The email address is from a free service like Yahoo! The credit card is accepted. You see on your order form that an affiliate from a foreign country sent you the order. – Most likely it’s a fraudulent order.

Here’s what probably happened: Either two criminal buddies paired up, or one person did the entire scam and pretended to be both the affiliate and the customer. They steal a credit card, which at the time is good because the theft is still undetected.

One member of the criminal duo buys your stuff through the affiliate link of his bad boy partner. They hope you will send a legitimate affiliate check to the affiliate who will cash the check and/or counterfeit it like the fraud tip above.

Eventually the credit card will be reported as stolen and the credit card company will charge back the sale to the customer’s credit card. You’ll never be able to recover the money from the fake affiliate and your entire checking account could be compromised, plus you’re out the cost of the product.

Here’s the fix: Don’t ship the product. Don’t send the affiliate check and call the fraud division of the credit card company immediately. Also remove the bad affiliate from your database. At all costs try to avoid getting associate software from one company and a shopping cart from another company.

And heaven forbid you try to install associate program software yourself unless you are extremely technically savvy. If you have a shopping cart from your web host and an associate program from another vendor, each company may try to blame the other when things don't work and you'll be left holding the bag. It can then take a long time to get things going and it might never fully work right.

DON’T GET CAUGHT UP IN THIS MESS! If you use a fully integrated system (like the one at: http://www.KickStartCart.com) you won't have any trouble. If you do have any issues arise, you have only one company to call and they can’t pass the buck to anyone else.

Just because it’s simple to sign up as an affiliate doesn’t mean it’s no work. You’ve got to do a good job getting traffic to your site and endorsing links, or you won’t make much money in commissions.

Article marketing is a great tool for driving targeted traffic to websites, opt-in pages and sales letters. Using the different article distribution sites can be a bit tricky, though. There are a few things to look out for when submitting articles to sites such as https://www.SelfGrowth.com

Tip # 1 – Make sure your articles are on your own site first as a page of your website. Also, make sure that the article page on your site has been indexed by the search engines first before submitting to the article sites. This will be covered in depth in a following lesson of this class.

To find out if a webpage has been indexed, copy and paste the URL of the page into the Google search box and hit “search.” If a clickable result appears, then the page has been indexed, if the result says: “Your search did not match any documents”, then it has not yet been indexed.

* We use the strategy of publishing to our websites first so that we get the credit in the search engines and not the big article sites. The site that publishes the article first gets the most credit.

Tip # 2 – That being said, make sure that your name is closely associated with the article on your webpage. ie: your name at the bottom of the article, your name at the top of the article or your name SOMEWHERE on the page that is easy to see. Article sites will reject articles that they can't easily find the authorship. If they can't find your name on your webpage and you try to submit the article to them, they will think you plagiarized it. This can hold up the approval of your article for weeks.

Tip # 3 – Keep articles between 400 – 500 words. Articles work best if they are not too long, and your reader is still engaged in the point. We suggest that if your article is 1000 words or more, break it up into two articles. This will give you more material anyway. Read the terms of service for the different article marketing sites to see the minimum text length.

Tip # 4 – Be sure to always use the Spell Checkers that the sites provide. We've seen far too many people submit without spell checking and the article site will reject it. Too much bad spelling and grammar, and you may not get valuable submission upgrades and could possibly have your account suspended. Don't believe that this sounds like too much trouble…it's good practice when submitting articles to other respectable websites that can provide you valuable backlinks, lead generation and credibility.

Write what you know

Articles help build your expertise, your brand and your credibility. They are a part of your business and can help drive valuable traffic to your websites to sell your products and services. Take parts of your books or even transcribe your MP3s, CDs and teleclasses to create content.

You're going to hear a lot about the value we put on article writing. Here are a couple tips. If you hate to write, but love to talk, you can get voice recognition software. Here are two programs that will take a load off your fingers:

https://www.nuance.com/dragon/dragon-for-pc.html    Dragon Systems Naturally Speaking

The next tip is to simply carry around a mini tape recorder or mp3 recorder, and then get a college student to transcribe/ghost write for you. Try the English or Journalism department of your local University or Community College.

Here’s an ebook on using Ghost Writers:

http://hop.clickbank.net/?powertips/ggmine

You could buy content from professional and freelance writers. It’s not expensive if you put it out for bid and it keeps your content fresh. No one wants to read content they’ve seen at 50 other places and Google won’t like you too much either if you use rehashed articles on your site.

You can find ghost writers and outsourced help to have your articles written for you at:

https://www.upwork.com

Learn more about professional article marketing.

Converting Current Clients to Email

Many small business owners will say, “I have 4000 customer addresses, but only 2 email addresses. How can I do email marketing?

What they should use are “webcards” or “web postcards”. These are post cards that have a picture of your website on one side and some type of printing on the other side. The printing should be some type of incentive offer to get the clients email address.

• Sign up for our email newsletter and get 15 percent off your next order.

• Sign up for our new E-zine and get a free 15 minute consultation.

• Sign up for our new E Newsletter and get a free 20 page exclusive report “Getting Repeat Business.”

This is about the cheapest way to reach your entire database. Whatever you spend on the mailing is worth it because once you get that email address, your costs to reach that customer go nearly to zero from then on. You also remind your customer about your website where they can go for current information, so the mailing does double duty for you.

You probably won't get all of your customers to give you their email address, especially on the first try, but you should continue to try to get it every time you have a chance. Some direct mail studies show that two mailings to the same list within two weeks of each other significantly increase your response.

Don't miss the opportunity to convert your clients to a highly profitable email list!