Have you ever asked yourself if you should be branding yourself or branding your business? You’re not alone. It’s a hot topic these days, and one worth thinking over.

Anyone can open a business on the Internet. The little guy has a chance. The individual can make it big. New businesses are cropping up left, right, and center.

People are feeling good these days, too. They have a shot at being someone special with their name in the lights and their work in demand. For professionals, opportunities are wide open. It’s the time to shine.

But professionals have a problem… all their assets are in their brains. When they go to bed at night, they bring their assets with them.

Consider this: If you need a break, if you want to step back from your business, or if you want to retire, your business won’t carry on. You’ll become another has-been. People will forget about you.

Elvis has left the building, folks.

Damaging Branding

Too much personal branding can be damaging to a professional. If you brand yourself too strongly, you can’t take a break, because there’s no one else to fill your shoes. Without you, your business has no value.

You can’t be replaced.

The client doesn’t want a replacement, either. The client doesn’t want Joe Fantastic to work on his project, no matter how fantastic Joe is. No, the client wants Billy Excellent, the brains behind it all, and that’s all there is to it.

What happens when Billy Excellent needs a break?

Branding Like a Corporation

Think of some big brand names: Apple, Nike, Sony… Everyone knows Nike makes great running shoes, that Apple makes fantastic notebooks, and that Sony makes good stereo systems.

People recognize the brand more than they recognize the people running the business. They buy the brand, not the person producing the item or the service. (Who wants to buy Steve Jobs anyways?)

Think back to Billy Excellent. Billy Excellent could brand his work just like a corporation instead of branding himself as the sole professional able to provide that magic.

That’s smart business. People would begin recognizing the value of Excellent Inc. – not just the value of Billy Excellent. They’d buy from Excellent Inc. regardless of who operates it.

Yes, Billy Excellent is part of that business, but he’s creating the perception that it’s the business providing the magic, not just him.

It’s the difference between building an asset and building a job.

Create a Business Asset

Start building value into your business so that potential customers think of your business name first and your name second. Get people interested in working with your business, not you.

Make sure that if you choose to walk away, your business lives on just like a big-name corporation. You can hire someone to fill your shoes and take over or run the business in your place. You create options for yourself, not obligations.

You can retire. You can move on. You can start working on building another business. Your business never dies, and your future is wide open.

And online, the future is infinite.

About the Author: James Chartrand is part of the brain trust at Men with Pens (for now). Get more from James with the Men with Pens feed before it’s too late.

One of the underlying themes from last weekend’s SOBCon was putting more you into your work. There are literally hundreds of millions of blogs out there, with more starting every day. In a sea of competition, you’ve got to capitalize on what makes you unlike anyone else.

Your unique point of view. Your writing style. Your own individual, personal stories and the way they shape your message.

There’s just one problem with all of that. It’s terrifying.

It sounds great and idealistic to just be completely yourself online, to strip naked on your blog and hope people will love you. In practice, it’s not just scary, it’s a good way to give yourself a ferocious case of writer’s block. Not to mention making life easier for the occasional wacko or stalker.

Fortunately, there’s a middle ground between being Howard Hughes and Roseanne Barr. There’s an art to revealing personal details on your blog without making yourself look dumb, pathetic or just giving out TMI.

There’s Naked and then There’s Naked

We’ve all got our own definition. Dooce’s version of naked would make me pretty nervous, but I’m downright wild compared to Godin. Decide how much personal “skin” you’re willing to show.

Don’t wing it. Sit down and work out, in writing, exactly what you will and won’t talk about. Maybe you’ll talk about old boyfriends but not your current husband, or you’ll say anything about your parents but nothing about your kids. Decide exactly where you draw the line, and live by that.

If you write a post that goes over your particular line, you can edit it and save the personal stuff for your private journal, or sleep on it (at least two nights, ideally) and post it anyway. Either way, you’ll have made a conscious decision.

When Blogging Naked Isn’t Your Idea

If you’ve got a secret somewhere, you may be closer than you think to having it shared with the world. Your sexual orientation, questionable business deals, the foulmouthed voicemail messages you used to leave, that inconvenient FTC filing. If it’s out there, someone will find it.

The first rule of professional communication is: Always tell your own story. If there’s a juicy secret out there, beat ‘em to the punch. Don’t wait around for someone else to break the news. Come clean, be as honest as you can stand, admit you’re embarrassed (if you are) and move on. When you spill your own scandals, you take away about 98% of their energy. Any political advisor will tell you that the cover-up always does more damage than the original indiscretion.

Don’t Undress Anyone But Yourself

Your spouse, your kids or that hilarious control freak neighbor might not be as ready to unveil themselves as you are. Pseudonyms are a great idea if you’re going to write about other people. The occasional obfuscating detail is good, too. Change the unimportant stuff–race, age, weight, height–so you can keep the important emotional details intact.

And if you’re a little nervous about your own personal details, there’s nothing wrong with using a pseudonym yourself. Woody Allen, Billy Holiday and Lenny Bruce all managed to communicate an intensely personal message without using the names on their birth certificates. If using another name gives you a little more courage to let your readers see through to the real you, go for it.

About the Author: Get more online marketing advice from Sonia Simone by subscribing to her blog today.

And I can tell you from personal experience that I launched an entire real estate brokerage firm with a white paper that revealed the inner workings of the MLS. I’ve seen countless other small businesses go from struggling to successful with educational marketing content that not only goes viral… it persuades people to buy.

Mike Stelzner has just released a great free video that reveals how he went from desperate to knee-deep in lucrative new business… all thanks to a single white paper.

Why should you listen to Mike (other than the fact that he was a Copyblogger contributor all last year)?

Because he’s that freelance writer who makes over $300K a year writing white papers.

There’s a whole series of free videos and other content that will follow the first video. And Mike is cooking up something else that I’m not at liberty to discuss, so that’s the reason for the tracking link.

But I will tell you this. If you decide to opt-in for the rest of Mike’s free content, you’ll receive an exclusive audio lesson in which Mike and I discuss our favorite techniques for using white papers and free reports to get people to imagine themselves buying from you.

And that’s more than half the battle.

Check it out here, and don’t forget to sign up for all the additional goodness.

The massive pool of blood in my head was pressing precariously against my brain. The doctors marveled that I was alive, much less walking and talking.

They looked and shook their heads in wonder at the MRI results. I politely reminded them I was indeed alive, awake, and actually in the room.

It was three years ago today that they wheeled me in for emergency surgery, and I said goodbye to my wife, not quite three-year-old daughter, and newborn son. I knew that sometimes people don’t wake up from brain surgery, and this might be the last time I saw them.

Wait, let’s back up a bit.

The Snowboard

It’s the beginning of 2005. I’m working way too hard, which is not surprising considering I’m managing three service businesses and a handful of online projects. My real estate businesses are booming because I’d learned how to use the Internet to generate leads around the clock, but to be honest, I’m much better at marketing then I am at managing all the people it took to keep those things going.

A buddy of mine from high school calls and says he has just the ticket… a ski trip to Tahoe. It’d been way too long since I got away, and given that my wife is seven months pregnant, I know things are going to get tougher before they get easier.

I decide to go no matter what.

I’ve never been much of a snowboarder, and some might wonder why a 37-year-old would pursue an extreme sport at all, but things like that routinely escape me. What’s the worst that could happen? Who wears a helmet?

The intensity of impact is still burned into my brain.

I’ve never felt anything that comes close to hitting the side of that mountain on a picturesque sunny day in Nevada. High school football, a few nasty fights, and more serious car accidents than anyone is entitled to survive simply didn’t compare.

As I lay there in the snow, I want to let go. It’s the first time I’ve ever considered simply giving up and slipping away. When the ski patrol comes by and expresses concern, I wave them away, and that’s what convinces me to get up.

Get up, Brian. Get up now.

So I slowly get up and walk away.

I feel terrible. Skiing is over for me, so I limp to the lodge to lick my wounds at the bar.

Hey… no blood, no foul, right?

So I thought.

The Subdural Hematoma

I get back home and back to the grind. A month goes by, and the due date for the birth of my son comes and goes, as he pulls a couple false labors just to keep things interesting.

I have a constant headache. It’s a bit strange, since I never get headaches.

But hey… I’m working my tail off while raising a young daughter, and there’s a new little one reluctantly on the way. Who wouldn’t have a headache?

On April 13, 2005, the boy arrives. Everything is right with the world, headache or not.

Unfortunately, the pain in my head intensifies. But hey… those of you who have children know how tough a new baby can be, so I don’t think much of it.

As May rolls in, I’m racked with pain. It’s horrible and debilitating, and I once again wonder about giving up. I can’t live this way.

Then the hallucinations begin.

Somehow, I survive the weekend. On Monday morning my wife literally drags me out of bed and takes me to get an MRI.

As I sit waiting for results, my biggest fear is not “You’re dying.” The answer I fear most is “We don’t know.” I can’t live this way.

The actual answer is… “You’re getting in an ambulance right now.”

A subdural hematoma is a traumatic brain injury where blood gathers between the outer protective covering of the brain and the brain itself. That snowboarding accident had sparked a slow leak in my head that became a bloody big critical situation.

We don’t know exactly how close, but death is definitely in the vicinity.

The Secret of Life

As the doctors explain the situation to me, I honestly have no fear. Given how badly I feel, I’m relieved… either a craniotomy will save my life and remove the pain, or I’ll die.

Problem solved, one way or the other.

I can still see the brave woman in the doorway, the confused little girl at her side and the three-week-old baby in her arms. As I say goodbye to the three most important people in my life, my attitude changes.

To the extent it’s up to me, I’m waking up after surgery and everything is going to be great. In a strange bit of cosmic irony, I’m more positive than ever as I roll in to have my head cut open.

The anesthesia hits, and everything fades to black.

~nothing~

I suddenly hear voices, yet everything is a dark screen in an empty theater.

Am I alive?

“I’m confused,” I manage to mumble.

“What do you want to know?” a disembodied voice replies.

“The secret of life,” I say, not sure if I’m joking.

“I think he’s okay,” the voice says, and the others laugh and clap.

Wake Up!

Turns out I woke up after surgery in more ways than one.

You see, I had been working myself to death building businesses I wasn’t really interested in. What I really enjoyed was online marketing, not running offline operations built on online marketing.

For 7 years I’d wanted to operate solely online, and I knew I could do it. Why was I doing all that other stuff?

Because I told myself I was supposed to.

It’s all too easy to tell ourselves we can’t really do what we want. That it’s not practical, or it’s too hard, or that our dreams are selfish and not the “right thing” to do.

I got over that really fast. Every delusional and self-defeating system of thought I had carried around with me for years was revealed for what it was… my own mind creating false limitations.

Some call that enlightenment. I call it getting on with living the life I want to live.

So during the three-month recovery period I unload the real estate businesses, finally let the law license lapse, and launch two online projects I’d been putting off.

By the fall of 2005 I’m operating completely online. On December 11th I come up with an idea for a blog that will allow me to “join the conversation,” so I register a domain name. Copyblogger launches 29 days later.

What do you want to do?

Why aren’t you doing it?

I don’t care what your answer is… this is the only shot you’ve got.

This is not a dress rehearsal.

Who are you to chase your dreams no matter what, you might ask?

Who are you NOT to?

Thanks for the inspiration Wendy.

About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of Teaching Sells.

This is my generation, baby. ~The Who

The right words on your website gets you what you want: better sales, more readers or increased credibility. You can achieve all kinds of goals by tweaking to target your online market audience. Be like Robin Hood in an archery contest – think, research, test and hit it dead on, baby.

Here are some good ways to get a head start: Engage in two-way conversational marketing. Tweak your tagline and make it benefit-rich and catchy. Test for the right words that resonate with your buyers and convey emotion.

Is it enough?

The Coming of Ages

There are four generations out there right now, all with money to spend: the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generation X (or the Thirteenth Generation) and Generation Y (or the Millennial Generation).

These people are zooming through the Internet connections. They’re surfing and buying every day. They’re looking for solutions, and you may have exactly what they want.

You’ve done your research. You know the demographics of your target market. You know their needs. You’ve chosen a design that appeals to that group and you’ve wordsmithed your content to be rich in benefits.

People hit your site. Those potential customers take a look and then…

Click. They’re gone. You’re left wondering…

Where’d Everyone Go?

Sales that don’t soar may be a problem of generational targeting. You might be targeting the right audience, but you may be turning them off with the values your website portrays. In essence, you may not be effectively conveying what makes your audience feel comfortable.

Gen X might like friendly, slightly cocky content. The Silent Generation may prefer a professional, authoritative tone. Baby Boomers may like a site that stimulates thoughts of self-gratification and leisure. Gen Y might be searching for what’s cool and trendy.

Each generation has a core set of values that define the group as a whole. Life events and experiences shaped each generation’s way of thinking. They have specific beliefs, opinions and values that they uphold.

These generations needs to know that the company they’re dealing with supports what they believe to be valuable.

Are you the business they’re looking for?

Showing Your Values

Your business has core values that it conveys to your target audience. Those values might be quality and professionalism or being socially conscious and responsible. Maybe your business website shows you believe in hard work and effort or being different from the rest.

The values your business website conveys are important. A generation like Gen X isn’t going to care much about an authoritative website that tells people what they should buy. This group is reactive, and they like businesses that are all about change. They aren’t easily impressed and they are skeptical of those who make claims.

But the Silent Generation might prefer an authoritative tone in your website copy. This group of people respects experts and they like to adhere to the rules. Big titles mean something, and the Silent Generation tends not to argue with people in positions of power. Logic, not magic, is what hits this group best.

These examples show how two different generations may prefer completely different businesses based on their beliefs and values. A person from either generation may be seeking the same product - but they’ll hire, buy or work with a person who believes in what they do.

Because believing is everything.

Bull’s Eye Generational Targeting

Make sure that your website content conveys the right values for the generation of buyers you want and need.

How? Easy. Determine the values you want to convey to your audience. Choose language, tone and style that your generation prefers. As you write your website copy (or have someone write for you), make sure that your business values shine through the cracks between the words.

So what values should you aim for? Here’s a look:

Silent Generation: respect for authority; conformity and adherence to the rules; law, order and duty; dedication, hard work and sacrifice.

Baby Boomers: personal gratification; personal growth, health and wellness; optimism and positive attitude; teamwork and being involved.

Generation X: diversity and global thinking; self-reliance and independence; life balance; fun and informal attitude; technologically literate.

Generation Y: confidence and achievement; sociability and collective action; diversity and morality; street-smart; optimistic and savvy.

These days, it’s not enough to slap up a nice design and some well-written content. You have to get into the heads of your buyers and learn how they think – and why they think that way. Targeting your market means intimately knowing who’s going to feel good about your business…

And who isn’t.

About the Author: If you want to read more sharp-shooting advice from James Chartrand on targeting your market, head over to Men with Pens. Or save yourself the trip: Grab the Men with Pens feed here.

What’s the secret to effective affiliate marketing?

It all boils down to engagement.

If you have a page with an affiliate offer that ranks well for searchers in buying mode, that’s pretty high engagement. You need a trusted, authoritative site to pull that off, which means strong content and plenty of links.

But don’t forget that the very same content creates engagement with regular readers first. If you’re building authority sites that attract subscribers, you get more than one shot at affiliate revenue. You profit first with your direct readers who trust you, and then continue to generate revenue over time thanks to strategically-placed cross-links and search traffic.

The lowest form of affiliate marketing engagement comes from simply sticking affiliate banner ads on your site. I’m not saying you won’t make any money from those ads, but it’s certainly not the most effective way to capitalize on the relationship with your audience. And banner ads don’t rank in search engines, right?

So let’s take a look a five copy tactics that can bring you immediate and long-term revenue from affiliate programs:

1. Endorsements

A personal endorsement is the strongest way to pre-sell an affiliate offer, assuming your audience values your opinion. Effective endorsements are sincere and enthusiastic based on real experience with the product or service. That’s not to say that people don’t pitch things just for the money, but that can be a dangerous game that erodes your trust and authority if the product or service is poor.

As with any effective copy, endorsements focus on benefits more than features. You might find that picking out the most compelling benefits is easier in a personal endorsement, because you’ve experienced those benefits first hand. Share how a recommended product or service has changed your life for the better, and you’re naturally talking benefits.

2. Reviews

A review differs from an endorsement in tone and structure, but by the end of the piece, you end up with an endorsement nonetheless. Let’s face it… writing up a negative review might be a great way to vent, but it’s not the smartest revenue strategy when it comes to affiliate marketing.

So, as with endorsements, it’s smart to review products and services you actually use and benefit from. From a copy perspective, you add credibility by pointing out how the product or service isn’t perfect (let’s face it, there are very few perfect offerings), and then go on to explain why the imperfection doesn’t negatively impact your perception and enjoyment of the product or service.

3. Tutorials

Years ago, the easiest way to do really well with content-based affiliate marketing was to release a free ebook loaded up with affiliate links and watch it go viral. That strategy can still work, but generally the content must be much stronger, and the affiliate pitches more subtle. Another long-time strategy is the email mini-course, in which you deliver tutorial-style content by autoresponder that ultimately promotes one or more relevant offers.

These days, producing video tutorials that show how to use a product or service are extremely effective at pre-selling affiliate offers. Remember, teaching and selling are closely related, so “how to” content that naturally gets a prospect more comfortable with a purchase is smart. Plus, you can use broader tutorial content as an “ethical bribe” to get people to subscribe to your blog or a targeted sub-list, which allows for multiple relevant offers to be made over time.

4. Bonuses

Using a bonus or special deal approach is a great way to uniquely sweeten an affiliate offer. You essentially promise to add in an additional item if people buy through your link, or you work out a promotional deal with the merchant that only you can deliver. You then work the extra value into your endorsement, review, or announcement with a great headline and benefit-oriented copy.

You’ll see this strategy used quite a bit in competitive pay-per-click situations, and also during big product launches where lots of people are promoting at once. But it’s a really strong strategy anytime, because it demonstrates that you’re focusing on adding value and delivering great deals to your audience.

5. Articles

Can you promote affiliate offers with your regular content? In other words, can you create content that has independent value and also makes you money, no matter where it’s syndicated or scraped?

You can, but it’s tricky. Let me give you an example with an article I wrote last year called How to Create Ebooks That Sell.

In this article I managed to:

• Create a compelling keyword-rich title
• Deliver independent value
• Attract links
• Generate positive comments
• Endorse a product while disclosing the affiliate link
• Make a healthy 4-figure profit immediately
• Rank for my targeted keyword phrases
• Collect continued monthly commissions
• Receive reader emails thanking me for the recommendation

When I spoke at PubCon late last year, I dissected this post and explained everything I did and why. But I think if you simply take a look at it in light of what we’re exploring in this series, you’ll figure it out.

What about Disclosure?

Disclosure of affiliate links has been a hot topic lately. From a pragmatic standpoint, being transparent with your audience can solidify your relationship with them, and that’s really what this is all about. But there are also ethical and legal issues to consider, none of which are cut and dry.

So, in the next post, I’ll try to shed some light on the subject of disclosure. Hopefully you’ll understand the issues surrounding disclosure of affiliate links a bit better, and even see how disclosure can be turned into a selling point rather than a liability.

About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of Teaching Sells.

I don’t think there’s a more scorned form of literature than the romance novel. “Bodice rippers,” “trashy books” or “that Harlequin crap” are some of the more charitable terms I’ve heard. It was probably pure perversity that led me to try to write one. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be, and I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did.

The four romance novels I published taught me more about writing than anything else I’ve ever done. And when I began to write marketing materials, and later blogs, I realized that the key to writing romances is also the key to any kind of persuasive writing.

No, contrary to popular opinion, it’s not the sex that gets the reader to turn those pages.

It’s the pain.

People who don’t read romances think they’re about some dumb Fabio type who rides a white horse and rescues a woman even dumber than he is.

Try to write a plot like this and you’ll quickly gather a pile of rejection slips. Simplistic boy-rescues-girl stories don’t sell. Good romances show a couple who fight their way through a mountain of painful, difficult conflict before they get the reward of being together. Sure, the couple might be impossibly good-looking, and there might be some castles or cowboys involved. But beyond the trappings, a page-turning romance has at its core a whole lot of pain.

Make ‘em suffer

If you want to write effective copy, you must learn to engage readers emotionally. And if you want to study emotional writing, try reading a few highly successful romance novels. Get over being embarrassed–if you can buy Cosmo or The Enquirer to study headlines, you can buy Laura Kinsale to learn what writing skillfully about pain looks like.

Clear, vivid expression of pain is a great way to build empathy with your reader. We’ve all been miserable. We’ve all been heartbroken. (And we’re all, secretly, a little melodramatic about our own woes.) If you can describe a painful, difficult problem in strong language, you’ll start to create an emotional bond.

Make ‘em really suffer

Good copywriting describes a solution to a problem. Great copywriting makes you feel both the problem and the solution. If the problem isn’t vivid, even a great solution will feel tepid.

The beautiful, tender-hearted governor’s daughter is a lot more appealing if the pirate hero was abandoned at the age of three to be raised by wharf rats. If the problem is bad enough, any solution feels miraculous.

Don’t wimp out. Inexperienced fiction writers often confuse a mushy conflict with being “nuanced” or subtle. Faulkner understood massive conflict, and so did Hemingway and Shakespeare. Audacity is another great trait you can learn from reading romances. Be bold.

If your product just solves an irritant, that’s ok. Anyone who’s survived deerfly season knows the power of irritation. But make it major, painful, unbearable irritation.

Dig deep into the problem you solve. See if you can find a threat to your readers’ core–to their sense of self, to the people they love, to their most important connections.

No marketing technique can help you if your problem is fundamentally no big deal. Find a problem that is a big deal, then solve it.

Show the redemption

Once you’ve made your readers good and miserable, you’re ready to cut them a break with your solution. Be sure you paint it as vividly as you did the pain. You’re creating a strong contrast: loneliness to connection, disease to robust health, despair to joy.

Your readers might not jump into your arms right away. But when you hook them with a vivid description of their problem, you’ve taken the most important first step: creating an emotional bond. Find their pain, explore its deepest roots, paint it vividly, then offer a real solution.

I’ll be the first to cheer as you and your customers ride off into the sunset, happily ever after.

About the Author: Get more online marketing advice from Sonia Simone by subscribing to her blog today.

Affiliate marketing isn’t that tough… if you’ve got attention and trust.

You can gain attention and trust through your relationship with people who agree to receive content from you. And you can gain attention from people via search engines because Google trusts your content.

Ideally, you want both.

Of course, there are ways to make money with affiliate marketing that don’t involve content at all. You can use search marketing to send traffic to pre-sell landing pages, and sometimes even directly to the merchant offer (see Affiliate Project X for those strategies).

Different strokes for different folks… but I like to build online assets. Building a subscriber list is a valuable asset, because you can market to these folks over the long-term with multiple offers if you preserve the relationship. Likewise, a site well-positioned for valuable keywords in search engines is an asset that can bring targeted traffic and revenue for years.

Let’s take a look at three affiliate marketing strategies that build assets and sustainable businesses. The first focuses on list building, the next on link building, and the last on both.

List Building with Paid Traffic

This is a classic online list-building strategy that still works wonders in email-friendly niches (and things are still more email friendly than some of you might think). The goal is to drive traffic to a landing page that persuades the visitor to opt-in to your newsletter, either with effective copy or a sample of the content. Targeted traffic should ideally come from search engine pay-per-click ads, but other advertising methods can work if they’re cost effective.

List building is all about opt-in conversion rates and the value of each subscriber over the life of the relationship. This is where valuable content comes into play… you’re not going to get someone to give up their primary email address unless you promise and deliver valuable content in return. And your lifelong customer value will be lower if you don’t maintain a good relationship with your list.

Here are 3 quick tips that make this affiliate marketing strategy work:

1. You can’t be shy about promoting, or else you won’t make any money. But you also need a balance between solid content and affiliate offers to maintain a positive relationship. Crafting content that offers independent value but also naturally leads to a product recommendation is one smart way to do it (more on this in the next installment of the series).
2. You’ll do better with Google Adwords by having a high quality score for your landing page. The best way to do that is to host the page on a domain with plenty of content and a decent amount of inbound links. So consider marrying this tactic with a blogging strategy that provides the content links you send to the list.
3. Beyond opt-in conversion rates, your main concern is recouping advertising expenses as soon as possible. One way to do that (and also make immediate profit) is to send the new subscriber to a highly-relevant affiliate offer as soon as they opt-in. Read more about that from Patrick Coffey.

Link Building on Keyword Domains

This is primarily an SEO strategy that takes advantage of two key factors: Google’s current algorithmic preference for exact-match keyword domains, and social media link attraction strategies (aka link baiting). The idea is to build up link equity and trust in the domain itself and then rake in search traffic for lucrative keyword phrases.

Your first task is to invest in the right keyword-match domain. I say “invest” because if it’s an exact-match keyword phrase that pulls significant traffic, someone already owns it. And I say “right” keyword-match domain because these keywords must revolve around a topic that is supported by lucrative affiliate programs.

Next, you must come up with a social-media friendly content strategy. So while the main portion of your site is professionally designed to make authoritative affiliate offers (say for credit cards), your blog must contain a steady stream of Diggable and bookmarkable content. What you’re after are the links more than the direct traffic, because you want to build the overall authority of the domain from a search engine standpoint.

To pull this off, the content strategy is just as crucial as the domain name, and it has to be aimed squarely at what people have demonstrated they want. Social media news sites love big resource posts related to getting ahead and getting things done. So if you’re promoting a credit card site, you need to promote content with financial “life hacks” that show people how to get more for their money, eliminate revolving debt, and live life well for less.

Building Authority Sites

Building an authority site allows you to enjoy the benefits of subscribers and search traffic, and it can be done without advertising or expensive domain names. You’re more focused on building a real brand and a site that also ranks well in search engines. If you take the time to do it right, you have a truly defensible online business that can’t be crippled by an algorithmic alteration.

Authority sites come into being because they deliver great content that people have demonstrated they want, and they make money by covering topics that can be supported by (among other things) lucrative affiliate programs. Your overall strategy involves matching up desirable topics with profitable products and services.

You don’t need a huge audience to make good money from affiliate marketing, but you do need a strong relationship with the right people. Publishers often worry that they’ll lose part of their audience if they make affiliate offers, even if those offers are highly relevant.

My response to that is, unless you’re using the wrong tactics (which we’ll explore in the next installment), people who desert you for making relevant offers are not the right kind of people. Put another way, would you rather have an audience of 5,000 that makes you $10,000 a month, or an audience of 40,000 that makes you $3,000 a month?

Sure, you want subscribers… and when you dish out great content on a regular basis, you’ll have them. But when it comes to making money with affiliate marketing, what you need are buyers. People who won’t even consider buying are not good for your business.

Copywriting Tactics That Work for Affiliate Marketing

Up next, we’ll explore various copywriting techniques that can be used to maximize affiliate sales. The key is to match up the right copy approaches with your content model and audience.

Stay tuned…

About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of Teaching Sells.

Any questions?

Kristen Galles wants to help book clubs tackle and appreciate good books, both classics and more recently due to customer interests, hot new titles. Until recently, Kristin was selling 2-3 kits per week but sales have seen a downturn. She’s looking for a tidy annual revenue.

• Product Summary: Standard and Custom Kits for Book Clubs to help members tackle and appreciate the classics. Kits include questions, bookmarks, menu ideas, vocabulary lists, activities, etc.
• Promotion Medium: Google AdWords primarily
• Total Budget: $100/month
• Creative Objectives: $25,000 annual revenue
• Offer: None, sample kit is viewable from site
• Target Audience: book clubs that focus on fiction, primarily female
• Product Price: varies, starts at $10/$15 up to $25

WHAT WORKS:

Thoughtfully-prepared, high-quality product - You offer an excellent product for book clubs serious about exploring great literature and still have some fun. Nice variety of titles, too.

Personal experience and passion of the developer - Your passion for good books comes through loud and clear. Now put your relevant teaching experience upfront, too. Tell your prospects about you and why you’re the one to help book club leaders lead their clubs for $15. And do add a photo of yourself. (Your dog is cute but his photo won’t make folks feel comfy about spending their money with you.)

WHAT NEEDS WORK:

Direct your PPC prospects to a specific landing page (or series of landing pages) written and designed to close sales - You dilute the interest and momentum of your pricey PPC traffic the moment you direct them to your homepage rather than a sales-centric landing page. Review my Landing Page Series for a ton of good copy and design ideas to assist you in crafting landing pages that will help you close more sales with greater speed and efficiency. Suffice it to say, your current product pages are confusing to read and cluttered to look at. Taking this one recommendation to heart will make a world of difference to your overall response and revenue.

Strengthen your product value - When free information/resources are your main competition, you’ll need to pump up the value to get someone to pay from $10/$15 on up for a single book club kit. No one needs what you sell so you have to make your prospects want what you have to sell. To my mind, your copy needs to focus on the hassle of pulling all this info together solo and the high-value, low-cost benefit of letting an experienced, passionate literature diva pull it all together instead.

Too many choices, somewhat ill-defined - I was confused as to what was what and what each cost. I’d simplify the offerings. Standard, custom, questions with bulleted details for each along with the price.

MAVEN MULL-OVERS:

Embrace your marketing reality - There was a little bit of the disapproving teacher in your material to me, a sense of frustration with book clubs that focus too much on the social chit chat and not enough on serious book discussion. Add to that the further frustration that clubs tend to focus on popular rather than classic literature.

Reality Check: YOU CAN’T CHANGE THIS BEHAVIOR/MIND-SET. However, perhaps through a regular series of articles your own blog as well as distributed to other sites, you can nudge club leaders to consider a classic book once in a while. Support this with testimonials from leaders who have added classic works to their schedule and the wonderful response it had, etc. In the meantime, you might want to say what you’re about upfront with a little snob appeal - kits for clubs serious about literature or something along this line. You could do this nicely with a new tagline. (Or you could go with the flow and offer a serious AND chit-chat version for each title.)

Rethink your sales goals, look for larger markets with deeper pockets - Roughly speaking, you need to sell approximately 1,100 kits per year (92 kits per month) to meet your goals. That strikes me as unrealistic unless I’m woefully underestimating the size of the non-ad hoc book club market. How many formal, active book clubs are out there? How many books does each club cover in a 3, 6 or 12 month period? What’s your guestimation of clubs willing to part with a little $$ for guidance versus those who won’t? If there aren’t enough clubs with deep pockets and a willingness to spend, I don’t see how you can reach your sales/revenue goals.

So where are the bigger numbers with the bigger pockets? You’ve already identified high school teachers. As a high school literature teacher yourself, you are in a great position to reach colleagues in ways a non-teacher can’t. Play off your strengths to larger markets with bigger numbers. Work with relevant associations, perhaps the National Council of Teachers of English, to see where you can generate a little positive synergy.

Survey your current customers - Email a selection of your customer base, standard and custom, and get specifics on the benefits and features your customers like best. Rework your copy to better reflect these concepts and push them forward in your overall content.

Consider getting rid of the standard kits for book clubs and go right for the custom kit customer - If free is your toughest competition in the book club market, it strikes me that your best opportunity for a breakthrough is to focus on building super-duper custom kits filled with great stuff that would simply take too much time and effort to compile otherwise. Use your standard kits as an entree to test other markets - high school English/literature teachers, perhaps even adult-level ESOL/GED teachers who would appreciate imaginative approaches to teaching the classics. I’d also consider marketing to the Girl/Boy Scouts and similar teen service organizations for the low cost standard kits.

My thanks to Kristen for sharing her creative plan with me and Copyblogger, and for her donation to Heifer International.

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About the Author: Roberta Rosenberg is The Copywriting Maven at MGP Direct, Inc.