Frequently
Asked Questions
Click
on the links below or scroll down the page to find answers to your most common
questions. If there is still something that you don't understand, send me an
email and I will try to answer your question.
Joe
Crump - joecrump@joecrump.com
What
is an affiliate program?
How
do I get paid?
What are the main benefits of your program?
Where can I find a list of all the products that you have for
sale that will make me money?
What
kind of marketing tools do you provide your affiliates to help them sell your
products?
When do I get paid?
Are all sales registered on my "sales counter"?
How will you keep track of the orders coming from my site?
Do I get paid for "back end" sales?
What is the best way to make sales?
Do I need a web site to make sales?
What can I say at my site that shows that you are different from
all the rest of the real estate and credit repair material out there?
How will my visitors order?
I have clicked through my special link MANY times, but it only
shows 1 visitor, what is wrong?
How many people will buy out of the visitors I send you?
My sales of your materials are not that high, but I get a lot of
traffic to my site. The same goes for the other product reseller programs I
belong to. What is wrong?
I don't understand all this technical details... What is the
easiest way to link to your site?
Can
I make a commission on products that I buy for myself?
What
is an affiliate program?
An
affiliate program is a sales system that allows someone like you to refer
visitors to a site like mine and make money on products that those visitors
purchase.
Each
of my products pay you a different amount based upon my expenses and profit on
that product. To find out about these products, click
here.
If
you have a web site, you can make money by using the marketing tools that I
give you in the "Products" section.
If
you have an opt-in mailing list, you can make money immediately, by sending
out an endorsed advertisement. (I have provided one in the
"Products" section that you can easily copy/paste and modify for
your needs)
I
will also be showing you how to create your own mailing list to sell either my
products or products from any other affiliate program out there. You will get
this information from me in a series of emails that you will start receiving
when you sign up.
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How
do I get paid?
Every
time someone you referred to our site, buys one of our products, you will get
paid.
Our
accounting period is at the end of the month and checks are sent out around
the 10th of the month... so if you make a sale on the 28th day of the month,
you would get a check for that sale within 2 weeks!
There
are NO MINIMUM sales required for your to receive a check. If you make only
ONE sale in the monthly cycle, you will receive a check.
All
payouts are made once a month.
If
you sell someone ONE of my products and they purchase another product later
(within 3 years!) you will receive a commission for that sale too! This is
tracked by "cookies" that are put on the buyer's computer when they
visit our site. These cookies tell us that customer was your referral.
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What
are the main benefits of your program?
1.
We have excellent products with a very low return rate (even though we offer
an exceptionally open-handed guarantee and return policy).
2.
Once you send a potential customer to our site, we have many ways to encourage
them to "opt-in" (give us their name and email address and agree to
let us send them email) to our mailing list, ezine and our autoresponders. If
they don't buy during their first time on the site, we still have an excellent
chance of selling the folks who "opt-in" in the future... and you
get paid as long as they buy within 3 years because we keep cookies active for
that long!
3.
You also get paid on any "back-end" products that your referrals
buy. Our goal is to sell each of our customers as many of our products as
possible. We have set up our business follow-up systems to accomplish this.
4.
We are constantly working on new products that you can sell for us and will
notify you as soon as they are available. We will also notify everyone you
referred to us who has purchased from us before and everyone who has opted-in
to any of our lists or autoresponders. This makes it quite possible that you
will make money on our new products as they come out even if you stop
working our program.
5.
You can also make money with us by getting other affiliates to sign up
with our program. We have a Two-Tiered payment schedule that will pay you a
commission if an affiliate that you referred makes a sale. This can be a very
effective business building strategy if you know how to get "Super
Affiliates" to sign up. I'll show you how to make it work. For more
information about the Two-Tier Program, click
here.
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Where
can I find a list of all the products that you have for sale that will make me
money?
For
a complete list of our products, click
here.
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When
do I get paid?
Our
accounting period is at the end of the month and checks are sent out around
the 10th of the month... so if you make a sale on the 28th day of the month,
you would get a check for that sale within 2 weeks!
There
are NO MINIMUM sales required for your to receive a check. If you make only
ONE sale in the monthly cycle, you will receive a check.
All
payouts are made once a month.
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What
kind of marketing tools do you provide your affiliates to help them sell your
products?
For
full details, go to our product page by clicking
here.
These
marketing tools are constantly being updated and tweaked so that you can get
maximum results from your efforts.
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Are
all sales registered on my "sales counter"?
The
affiliate software that we use is very sophisticated and will track everyone
who comes from your marketing efforts using BOTH cgi scripts and cookies.
You
will receive a special link address and affiliate number that you will use to
link to our individual websites.
The
cgi script will track your visitor through our site all the way to the order
page. It also puts a "cookie" on their computer that will be
effective on our site for 3 years.
This
software also tracks orders that are called in or mailed in to our office.
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How
will you keep track of the orders coming from my site?
We will
give you specially formatted URL's (web addresses) that you can use to link to
each of our sites.
They
look something like this:
http://zerodowninvesting.com/cgi-bin/at.cgi/123456
These
URLs will identify your unique "Affiliate Number," which we use to
track your referral fees as they are earned.
We have
installed sophisticated software, designed so that people can visit our site
through your link and either purchase our products then or come back later to
order (up to 3 years later) and still give you credit for the sale
By using the Check
Stats link you can find out exactly how many people you have sent from
your site to our site and how many of those people have ordered.
You can check your stats anytime, 24 hours a
day, 365 days a year. Your sales will be recorded in real time and will appear
as soon as someone purchases using a credit card.
If someone orders using a check, money order,
900 number or calls in an order or faxes us an order, we manually input your
affiliate codes and you are credited for the sale at that time.
We have
excellent tracking capabilities for these non-credit card purchases that
implement your affiliate codes right into the order process, but keep that
tracking invisible to the buyer.
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Do
I get paid for "back end" sales?
Yes!
You will make money on any sales that we make to your referral for a period of
3 years!
This
allows you to look at the long term value of your customers and figure your
advertising expenses based on that figure rather than the first sale.
Sometimes it makes sense to break-even on an ad or even loose money (called a
"loss leader" in the industry) if you know that the long term value
of a customer is 2, 5 or 10 times what they initially spend.
We
track these customers with "cookies" that reside on their computer
in tiny text files. This is the standard tracking device for back-end sales in
most high-end affiliate programs.
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What
is the best way to make sales?
The
Number One method for making money in affiliate programs is to personally
endorse our product to your mailing list.
If
you don't have a mailing list, you can make specific personal recommendations
about our product on your web site.
After
that, you can use pop-up windows (which I will give you to put on your web
pages), banner ads (the old standby, but still effective if you do it the
right way... my ads are designed to PULL). You can also use classified ads,
even auctions. Is anyone out there using eBay to sell affiliate products? It's
very effective if you are willing to learn the auction process.
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Do
I need a web site to make sales?
It
is much easier to make money if you have your own domain name and your own web
site. It is also helpful to develop a mailing list and a newsletter.
One
of the best returns on advertising money are solo ads and top of the page ads
in ezines. Although they are more expensive than small classifieds buried in
the text of the ezine, they are dramatically more effective.
But
you can also make money using classified ads, participating intelligently in
newsgroups and forums, and writing articles that you can submit to ezines.
My
favorite marketing method is my weekly ezine, "The Real Estate Money
Maker!" I get subscribers for this free publication a number of ways
including, right from my web sites and offering free information. I also buy
opt-in subscribers from a number of companies who provide them. They have been
very effective leads.
Also,
you can easily create a web page. It is not expensive and something, I
believe, every online marketer should eventually learn to do.
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What
can I say at my site that shows that you are different from all the rest of
the real estate and credit repair material out there?
I
will give you the exact email letters that I use when someone asks me why my
programs are better, different and worth the money. For details, go to the product
page.
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How
will my visitors order?
First,
your site visitors or opt-in email subscribers will click on a link that will
lead them to one of my sites. You must give them an effective piece of
marketing to get them to CLICK. I will give you marketing materials for all of
my products that have been proven to work in the past.
My
site will then use very effective sales letters to convert as many of these
lookers into buyers as possible.
They
will be able to order using their credit card, online check or 900 number.
They can FAX in their order, mail in their order or phone in their order.
When
the customer makes an order, our sophisticated affiliate software will track
that order and make sure that you get credited as the referring affiliate.
We
will provide complete customer support for our products by phone and by email.
We handle all of the financial transactions. We will answer any questions or
requests they have about their orders.
We
also deal with any cancellations, bounced checks (we have a collection agency
who attempts to recover our lost funds) or returns as necessary - you do
nothing but sit back and collect your referral fee.
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I
have clicked through my special link MANY times, but it only shows 1 visitor,
what is wrong?
Our
tracking software is very sophisticated and will know if someone from the same
computer returns to our site. We have designed the system so it will only show
one click from each unique visitor.
This
system will help you track your ad campaign more effectively.
For
example: You run a solo ad in an ezine. You get 400 unique visitors and 4
sales. Some of those visitors may come back several times. If the click
through tracking counted every click, it may appear that you had 800 visitors
and 4 sales... this is a much lower sales ratio and not accurate enough to
base your advertising campaign on.
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How
many people will buy out of the visitors I send you?
Right
now, with the traffic that I currently get, I sell an average of 1.44% of all
unique buyers within 3 weeks of their arrival to my site. I have had ad
campaigns that were as low as .25% sales and I've had ad campaigns (to my
ezine list) that were as high as 42%!
The
type of response you get is impossible to predict without testing. The number
one rule of all marketing is "test, test, test."
By
the way, I have been told that the average conversion ratio on the internet is
1 in 700 visitors. That is .0014%. I believe that my conversion rate is as
high as it is because of my excellent sales letter and targeted follow-up
plan.
The
more targeted the traffic you send, the more likely it is that they will buy.
If you run an ad for real estate investing on a site that sells beauty
products, you may not get ANY response... of course I haven't tested it. Maybe
a large percentage of the people who want to be beautiful also WANT to invest
in real estate. TEST, TEST, TEST! ;-)
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My
sales of your products are not very good even though I get a lot of traffic to
my site. I have the same problem with other product affiliate programs I
belong to. What is wrong?
Don't
worry if you start off small. Most of the big producers started small and
built up to very impressive numbers after tweaking their advertising and
finding out what is most effective.
Try
the tips and marketing techniques I give you in the product
section of this affiliate site. They will give you a jump start to making
good money. Test to find out what works, then do it over and over again. After
you have one thing working, move on to the next thing, but don't stop doing
the first. This way you will build an effective business system that can make
you money for years to come.
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I
don't understand all the technical details... what is the easiest way to link
to your site?
If
you want to just "cut to the chase," go to our quick
start page. It will give you a banner ad that you copy and paste onto your
site in 5 minutes.
With
banner ads, the closer they are to the top of the page, the more click-thru's
you will get.
If
you don't have much time, get started right now and put a banner on your site.
If
you can spare the time to "do it right," learn how to use some of
the other marketing techniques that I give you in the product
section. It will be worth your while in money earned!
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Can
I make a commission on products that I buy for myself?
Absolutely!
The only requirement is that you have purchased at least one of our
products at full price first. Any other products or services you buy
from then on, will earn you a full commission. The reason we do this is to
keep the integrity of our affiliate program and not make it just a product
discount option.
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If
you have any problems or questions regarding our affiliate program, don't
hesitate to contact me. I succeed only if you succeed
Best
Wishes,
Joe
Crump
joecrump@joecrump.com
