business marketing

To make money online at home, affiliate marketing is the right online business model for you. In addition, the choice of your affiliate marketing software can either sky rocket your online success, or guarantee a serious failure for you. Therefore, it is worth to devote time and energy to choose the right affiliate marketing software, but the question is how to choose your software?

What should you consider when you’ve to choose your software?

1. Your vendor must be reputable.

Affiliate marketing field is unfortunately crowded with non-serious companies that promise you the moon and deliver nothing. Therefore, in case you want to target the best affiliate marketing software:
o You need to choose a robust and well-known affiliate vendor that is ready to provide you with a list of their previous history with other customers that stayed with this vendor for years and not for days.
o Never spend a cent in getting any affiliate marketing software without checking at least 3-5 online reviews and forums to read un-biased stories and reviews how effective and efficient this software is.

2. Good customer support is a key factor.

Customer support is a significant factor to choose your affiliate software vendor. You do not need to buy the product and stay alone with it. Instead, you need to get a continuous support in case you need to change something. Therefore, I’d recommend you to contact the vendor and ask for more information about their software and a free trail as well and see how they react.

3. Never target small internet marketing software companies.

Unfortunately, some small internet marketing software companies try to offer very low price products, or even free products in order to show you that they are better than other well known vendors. Therefore, compare other things rather than the price when you target a software vendor like its popularity.
A dramatic problem with small software vendors that they sometimes accept more clients regardless if they can afford to serve them or not and you’d, therefore, suffer later on. Additionally, small companies with low reputation can be gone from the market without any previous alerts.

4. Ask your vendor if you can create your own reports with their software.

On key factor to target the best affiliate marketing software is to ask your vendor if you can generate your personalized report rather than having to live with an automatic generated report with no chance to edit its settings.

5. Explore several vendors to compare different features.

A brilliant approach to target the best affiliate marketing software is never to rely on only one vendor. Instead, explore multiple vendors and see what their features are in comparison with the first one. Then, ask your target vendor “Why I should buy your software”. I.e. tell them to inform you about that their features that are not offered by the other vendors.

Regularly, marketers want more out of what they have bargained for. And because of numerous demands, they end up in a pile of questions that need quick solutions. Marketing and branding has never been easy but because of our fast growing technology, affiliate marketing software has been made possible.

What is affiliate marketing software? It is one type of software that enables the integration of a seamless tracking system for affiliates embarking on a full pledged solution. Talking about networking, marketing software is made to suffice the struggling effects of branding affiliates and marketing them. This is because every affiliate has the pure capability to market themselves individually and sell the company’s products, earning very high commissions.

How can Affiliate Marketing Software support success?

1. Traffic? No problem.

Affiliates can bring as many traffic as they possibly can and not worry if they’ve got their name stamped on that deal. What’s worse than not having someone to visit your site is not being marked as that person who is responsible for large numbers of customers. It’s an affiliate’s worst nightmare. But because of the affiliate marketing software present these days, affiliates need not worry. And companies or marketers should make it a point to install such software to ensure the security of every affiliate’s account.

2. Commission reports made easy.

Whenever affiliates make a huge commission, it is the company’s obligation to run commission reports and confirm that the visitor really came from its true source. Affiliate marketing software made it easier for companies to run down the program and see the amount of money they owe to every affiliate.

3. Pay your affiliates right on time, all the time.

If you’re having a hard time tracking down your affiliate’s basis, it would be harder to pay them on time. That is why affiliate marketing software is probably the most useful software in terms of affiliate marketing business. Now you don’t need to worry about paying your affiliates on time because when using such software, it is efficiently possible.

4. Summary? No worries.

If you keep on worrying about summarizing different areas of sales, affiliate marketing software is just about everything. This is very efficient most especially in the field of organizing and keeping track of those important records. This will also minimize committing mistakes that you wouldn’t dream of happening. Summarizing through affiliate marketing software ranges from sales to commission to clicks, leads and impressions summary, name it.

What does affiliate marketing software spell out? T-R-U-S-T. How can a person trust your company or whatever it is that you’re offering them if in the first place you don’t have evident proof of supporting it? Trust is a very important word especially in doing business. You can never give your support to anyone without gathering enough amount of trust in them. In vice versa, the affiliate can trust you and you can do the same.

Now remember, every software has its own use. It will depend on the kind of report you need to fulfill. There are no cons in installing such software in your hard drive. It can do more good than evil. What’s amazing about affiliate marketing software is that you can easily and efficiently determine exactly how much you owe an affiliate and the moment you realize it, the easier it is for you to show them the money.

2011 Outlook for Small Business Digital Marketing

Just received some updated statistics on Small Business advertising spend from the 2011 Outlook report from Borrell Associates. Borrell surveyed over 2,800 Small Business owners to find that, of the 84 percent who will spend on digital, 53 percent plan on increasing their budgets in 2011. Money invested in website development, social media and e-mail marketing will grow more than 30 percent in 2011. On the flip-side, local print media, newspapers, directories and radio will continue to get squeezed out of the budget with double-digit cuts across the board from most SMB’s.

According to the report, Small Business represents a huge growth market, and accounted for over 70 percent of all online advertising expenditures last year. Social media is especially interesting for SMB’s and most are interested in Facebook, Twitter, location-based services, and daily deals platforms. I think YouTube also makes sense for the right kind of small business so I’d expect to see some interest and spending there as well. It was interesting that Borrell did not include any data related to YouTube or Mobile marketing strategies. Despite all of the buzz around mobile and video, it seems that small business owners just have not caught-on the way larger brands and retailers have.

Potential Pitfalls

Despite all the data suggesting growth and willingness to spend, the reality is that there is still a lot of confusion as to who to work with to make all of this happen. There is so much noise in the market right now, with average small business owners getting 22 new media advertising pitches a month. These pitches range from local boutique agencies to national solutions like Yodle, ReachLocal and Web.com. It is this noise and shear amount of options that paralyzes decisions makers. With so many so called experts and best-of-breed technology platforms to review and analyze, making a decision alone can take several weeks.

Furthermore, many Small Business owners still lack a real understanding of digital. Website analytics, social media insights and search engine marketing tactics are still fuzzy. Due to this minimal amount of knowledge, SMB’s must trust the provider they partner with to do the right thing. Unfortunately, most of the “big-boys” of SMB marketing are focusing on market share and not the quality of the products or services they provide. This mentality leads to less than stellar results for business owners and a burned relationship for the provider – which ultimately hurts the perception of every SMB marketing company.