4 Steps To Success With Agriya’s Clone Scripts
There is an old saying that’s often rolled out whenever something goes wrong or doesn’t happen in the way you want it to. It goes a little something like this:
Failure to plan is planning to fail
When it comes to building your online business using one of Agriya’s clone scripts like our Etsy clone or Airbnb clone then not having a clear plan of action, or a business plan, is just the same as planning to fail. Can you think of any other business in the world where you can just ‘wing it’ and see how it goes? We can’t!
The beauty of the Internet is that it is such a controlled environment compared to a bricks and mortar business. You can buy visitors to your website and calculate the conversion, you can change the entire layout of your website and track the impact it has, you can network directly with tens of thousands of potential customers, you can contact your past customers at a click of a button and so much more.
However, don’t mistake this opportunity as being the easy path to success, your online business needs as much planning and thought as any regular offline business. Before you even buy one of Agriya’s scripts you should have a business plan in place and know exactly what you are going to do and when.
So without further ado, here are Agriya’s 4 top steps to success when you use one of our products.
Do Your Market Research
Agriya has been telling our customers to focus on niches since day one. Every website started out focusing on a niche and grew from there, you’ll never be able to stock the range of products Amazon do from day one, so don’t even think about becoming the next Amazon, instead, find a specific type of product to sell and become the go to online shop for it.If you are planning to use our Groupon clone script then you need to mix it up with some offline research. If you don’t already have good connections with local business owners then it’s time to step outside and start knocking on business doors. Find out what their needs are, find out if they have used coupon sites before, what were the positives, what were the negatives, how can you build something that creates a win-win for everyone?
Doing research online is about judging consumer demand. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to judge interest in your niche by seeing how many searches are being done each month, then check out forums and blogs to find what people are discussing, what problems are they facing, how will your new website overcome these problems?
Have A Business Plan
Saying you need a business plan is all very well but if you’ve never written one before then you need to research how to write one. It’s not that you will be submitting it the banks to get a business loan, but it’s important to get the plan on paper so that there are no surprises or you are not sat infront of the computer one day wondering what to do.Your business plan needs to comprise the results of your market research along with how you plan to actually make money. You need to do competition analysis to see who you will be competing against and find out what they do well and what they do badly.
A business plan will also try to estimate the cash flow in to out and of your business. A brand new website with no prior community to back it up is going to take several months to be generating a good income so ensure that you have the time, money and determination to keep growing the business, even if it’s not making anything to begin with.
Have A Unique Selling Point
By the time you have completed your market research and business plan you should have a good idea of what your visitors are looking for and where your competitors are failing. This is where you come up with your unique selling point to differentiate your business from everyone else.Woot do a great job of building a USP in the daily deals industry because their website is fun, quirky and they have a particular way of writing to make their deals sound irrevent and awesome at the same time. From their constant engagement with their customers they have built up such a loyal following that even their “mystery boxes” achieve millions of dollars of sales – and the customers don’t even know what they are buying!
A USP can be anything from targeting a certain niche to out of this world customer service to awesome social media engagement to content marketing. SEOMoz are an SEO software company but their USP is the fantastic content they add to their blog for free everyday that keeps people coming back for more.
Focus, Commitment, Determination
Building your online business is going to take time and determination, whether it’s speaking to people in the real world or trying to drive traffic to your website through various Internet marketing efforts. If you have the funds (which should have been identified in the business plan) you can outsource a lot of the work or hire someone to do it for you, other wise you will need to invest your own time in to making your website success.The key to building a successful online business using one of Agriya’s products is consistency. Nothing will happen without your involvement so ensure that every day you are doing something that is growing your busines, whether it is networking, content writing, SEO, seeking out new opportunities, talking to business owners or something else. If you can spare at least an hour a day to build up your website then you will achieve success in the long term.
If you want help, advice and consultation on how to build a successful online business using one of Agriya’s clone scripts please get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to assist you. If you’ve got any other suggestions on how to make your online business succeed then add them in the comments below!
How To Use Burrow’s Affiliate Program
An affiliate program is like crowdsourcing your marketing agency and you can get a lot of exposure for your business with virtually no up front costs when compared with something like PPC. An affiliate program also has the added advantage of only paying for performance so while you might be paying for visitors who take no action when you run a PPC campaign, an affiliate program means you only have to pay the commission when you have the money in your hand.
Think about this too: If your affiliates are doing the work to send you targeted traffic, you can let them worry about SEO and rankings, you’re getting all the targeted traffic you need and with so many affiliates talking about your website the chances are a media company might pick up on your story because it’s creating such a buzz on the ‘net.
Competing directly with well established websites like Airbnb, HomeAway and 9Flats is going to be a challenge when they have multi-million dollar advertising budgets but an affiliate program is the perfect solution to conduct a guerrilla marketing campaign to get exposure for your company.
Burrow comes with a feature packed affiliate program option which lets you manage your affiliates, set the commissions and handle all the payment requests. Even if a booking is refunded the system is intelligent enough to roll back any commission earned by the affiliate. But there is more to running an affiliate program than just enabling this feature on your script, it needs to be well managed and well thought out.
Plan Your Creatives
Just offering an affiliate program isn’t going to be a guarantee of success you have to remember that most people need to be led by the hand in simple small steps in order to do something. If you just say to the person, put this link on your website or blog very few people are going to actually do it, you need to sell your affiliate program as much as you are selling your website to new visitors.
The first thing to do is to create a variety of graphical advertising banners for your website which affiliates can simply copy and paste on to their website (it’s all about making their job as easy as possible). You need to create banners in multiple standard sizes as described by the IAB, a few variations in each size with different calls to action will suffice.
It’s not just the graphic banners you need to create though, you need to add no-work copy and paste text that your affiliates can add to their site. Consider preparing material for the following creatives:
- Review articles explaining how your website works
- Travel or tourist guides for the places where people are offering places to stay on your website
- AdWords ads your affiliates can copy and paste
- One sentence descriptions of your website
- Pre-formatted forum signatures
- Solo emails
In a nutshell, the easier you make it for your affiliates to copy and paste marketing messages to their website the more likely you are to get people promoting your website for you.
If you have the budget you can even consider some customization to the Burrow software to create an XML data feed that regularly updates with the latest places to stay and your affiliates can build whole websites showcasing these places on their website.
Set Up An Attractive Commission
If your affiliates have to spend their time and effort putting affiliate links on their site or even building entire websites based around promoting your site you need to make it worth their while. You can look at the Internet marketing arena here because often the best selling products are not selling more because they are the best in the market but because they offer their affiliates the best commissions.
Put yourself in the shoes of an affiliate who just wants to earn money on the Internet. Product A is the most comprehensive product ever produced on a particular subject but only pays out 5% commission on sales. Product B is an average product but pays affiliates 75% commission. The vast majority of people will promote the 75% commission one because for the same effort they earn exponentially more.
The same concept needs to apply to your affiliate program. Paying your affiliates $0.50 on every booking isn’t going to inspire anyone to get serious about promoting your site. Paying the affiliate $5 on every booking is going to be a much greater motivator.
Burrow gives you the flexibility to offer commissions on new users that are signed up as well as commissions on bookings. You can even use one and disable the other. If you decide to offer a signup commission then the amount can be quite low, this can be set between $0.10 and $1 per signup. To ensure that people don’t just get 10 of their friends and family to sign up to you can set the minimum payout amount to $100.
The commission on a booking can be either a percentage or a flat fee. Remember that you are taking a booking fee from the buyer and a small fee from the seller so your commission shouldn’t exceed this amount otherwise you’ll be running at a loss!
The image above shows some other important considerations. The cookie expiry period is how long the user should be tracked for, for example if your affiliate sends a visitor to your site but they don’t sign up straight away but instead come back the next day, do you still want your affiliate to get credited? If you set the cookie to just one day you probably won’t get any interest in your program, it should be set to at least 30 days.
Paying commission on every booking is an important consideration. If you check this option then you can feasibly pay a lower commission because the recurring income potential will be higher (and you can highlight this to your affiliates). However it does meant that in the long term you would earn less as you have to pay out commission on many future bookings so it might be an idea to have a high commission on the first booking and no future commissions. The decision should be led by the performance of your business, do you find that people just make the one booking or make many bookings over a lifetime.
The commission holding period is an important consideration because we live in a world of online fraud where credit card payments can be reversed so you don’t want to pay out your affiliate commissions until you are certain that the payment is legitimate. Holding a commission for 30-90 days is commonplace for affiliate programs.
Finally you have the threshold limit which is the minimum amount an affiliate must earn before they can request a withdrawal. Set it too low and you’ll be constantly processing payment requests, set it too high and affiliates will be demotivated. Try to set it so that an affiliate needs to get several bookings before they reach the threshold.
Spread The Word About Your Affiliate Program
Your regular users who book places to stay are not really your target audience to promote your website. They will do this by word of mouth rather than set up a dedicated website telling everyone how wonderful your service is. Instead you need to go to the places where hardcore, full time, super affiliates are hanging out. This means registering on affiliate forums and getting your website listed on affiliate directories – and this is where your effort of making awesome creatives and setting highly motivating commissions comes in to play. These full time super affiliates will review what you have got to offer, consider the ROI from a marketing spend and time point of view and decide whether it’s worth their effort to promote your site to get a slice of the travel industry pie.
If you are trying to split your time between promoting your site to buyers and promoting to affiliates then remember that if you signup one affiliate they have the potential to promote your site to hundreds of people that you might have otherwise reached and you only have to pay out when you have been paid upfront.
Respect Your Affiliates
Finally, if you want to make your affiliate program a success when using Agriya’s Burrow software make sure you respect your affiliates. This means making sure you pay them on time and every time, never delay the payments and don’t change the terms of your affiliate program for the worst without consultation.
Conclusion
The affiliate program built in to Burrow is a very powerful and very flexible solution to market your website but you can’t just enable the feature and hope that people just start promoting your site, it takes work and effort but the rewards can mean you have a crowdsourced army of marketers working to promote your site leaving you to do other things, like count all the dollars rolling in.
Awesome Handmade iSocial Video – Really!
So, many months ago one of our Business Development Executive’s came up with an idea of creating a ‘handmade’ instructional video for iSocial that would teach individuals and companies how they could use the software to build communities and social networks. The concept was simple, it would be ultra low tech with hand drawn graphics rather than some snazzy flash animation.
Sounds simple, right? I mean, how hard can it be? Do some drawings, record it and then add a voice over in post production, job done, takes maybe two weeks.
Well, as with so many seemingly simple ideas, this project took on a life of its own, two months after it was first conceived, filming finally started.
The first problem? The camera we used was too low quality and the picture was fuzzy.
A few weeks later we tried again with a HD camera, but this time we found that it was recording in 4:3 ratio and had those annoying black bars to the left and right when we uploaded to YouTube.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
So we went for a third video shoot, this time using my basic Sony compact camera (DSC-W270 if you are interested) mounted on a tripod. The results was sensational, not to mention conclusive. If you want a high quality video, choose a Sony compact camera, oh wow, I really should get them to pay me for saying that.
Using state of the art video processing and post production software (Windows Movie Maker) and nothing more than blood, sweat and tears, a movie was released. Unfortunately, due to the mass coverage of James Cameron’s Avatar in the media, we didn’t even make it on to the IMDB, so we are forced to release it as an underground, self published video. We hope that maybe this way it will achieve cult like status amongst hard core Internet users.
Now, without further ado, ladies (yes, there are some female web surfers, so I’ve heard) and gentlemen, three months in the marking, a budget of almost $5, I present to you an artistic journey simply called: Untitled.
Social Media Marketing Strategies
With the rising dominance of Social Media in the lives of consumers marketers are jumping on to the bandwagon and coming up with countless new ideas and strategies to target the supposedly transformed consumer behavior. However, social commerce strategies to drive sales and increase customer loyalty, once implemented have rarely performed as expected or produced measurable results. Unlimited targetability was the premise of both B2B and B2C social media marketing, but consumers turned out to be too unpredictable for such strategies to succeed.
Apparently, consumer behavior can only be best understood and acted upon in scale by grouping similar consumers together. Human behavior is fairly simple and simple models of behavior almost always outperform complex models. One-on-one marketing is good in theory but almost impossible to implement.This is the golden age of data. Nearly any media metric can be measured and data mining produces quantities of data, however, without substantive data knowledge and proper modeling the data is mostly worthless. As, Eric T. Bradlow, co-director of UPenn’s Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, says, “Many social commerce problems have been addressed previously, and massive amounts of data will not change the continuing need for the understanding of basic and primitive customer behavior which provides the correct lens to view social media data.”
Mass marketing has lost favor in the face of social media marketing and viral marketing. However, mass marketing is still the most effective technique available though it is important, considering the proliferation of media channels, to ensure that the right media channels are selected. Social media marketing requires that very huge numbers of social media users share product recommendations for any significant impact and the same goes for viral marketing. These techniques may be effective for B2B marketers who have concentrated markets but rarely have much impact on B2C marketing. Rarely does the buzz created by such strategies translate in to product purchases.
Content is important but it has impact only if it reaches consumers. Traffic driving strategies such as referral programs must be the cornerstone of marketing policy. Many people try using the “Long Tail” (items which individually sell only in small quantities) niche driven marketing as one way to boost sales but such investment should be made only if justified by volumes.
Marketing through social networking site
Nowadays promoting online marketing in social networking site is one of the hottest trends. It offers numerous benefits that would help you and your business. It is a cheap, reliable, quick, and highly effective online marketing medium. Where, you can focus on advertising of business entirely on people who are actively engaged in looking for products or services offered by you. Remember the more time and effort you put into each social networking site, the more you’ll get out of it.
Webmasters can create a business profile on social media site to share only information that they want the entire world to see. They can also create a personal profile as well and make contact with other members. It helps to get potential customers, clients, and vendors. They can make changes on their profile, products and company online, and they are reflected almost immediately.
Webmasters can form a network with prospective international buyers and decision makers and showcase new products and services with clear photos, audios and videos, highlight company news, and build brand loyalty. This allows webmasters to make business connections without hard sale. They can learn about latest trends, form business alliances, learn tips and so on within the network.
Webmasters can keep their customers up to date on events, special occasions and other useful information to maintain healthy relationship with customers on social media site. They can form a group with similar interest and gain number of clients and valuable customers within their group of contacts. Also they can make video presentation about their company details, products and services among them.
Social networking site is an extremely valuable resource and if you utilize the resource properly, you can promote products or services effectively. There are countless of social networking scripts out there. So it is difficult to pick a right script to focus your efforts on. Agriya infoway has designed Kootali – open social script available at an affordable cost. It helps you build a social networking site and makes you to sit on your chair and just a mouse click away to make a purchase hastily.
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