Marketing. Not usually the favorite subject for entrepreneurs and other creative types. But it’s the lifeblood of your business, your career and essentially, your livelihood. Marketing is what draws people to you, gets the word out, brings in contacts and possible partners, and is largely responsible for your income. So why do we tend to resist it so much?

Most of us went into business or choose to work freelance because we love what we’re doing, and also value time freedom. So who wants to be chained to the constant demands of marketing? Like it or not, it’s one of those necessities of working for yourself, but it doesn’t have to be costly and painful. It does however have to be consistent.

The general rule of thumb is market now for clients, customers or bookings in 3-6 months, so you can see why steady efforts are important. In summer months it’s easy to relax on this a bit; warm weather, vacations, barbecues and time with friends all vie for our attention. But taking a break from your marketing now can have disastrous consequences in the months ahead. So how do you stay on top of things without losing all of your summer fun? Here are a few simple steps to make your marketing flow easier like a well-oiled machine.

1. Pick one or two things to focus on at a time. Once you get that working smoothly, incorporate something new into the mix.

2. Write out what your “marketing mix” is, and make sure it is varied for best results. Combine different components such as social media, blogging, SEO, and in-person networking. Be sure to have on-line as well as off-line elements for best results.

3. Take steady small steps – daily is ideal. Make this part of your business routine allocating a set amount of time to it each day. [note: How much time are you spending doing daily marketing now? What would your business or career look like if that was just 30 minutes per day, 5 days per week?]

4. Memorize your lines. Many people call this the “elevator pitch”. I personally don’t like being pitched or pitching, so I prefer the term “warm open”. How can you tell people about what you do, genuinely and sincerely? Write down a sentence or two, know it well and say it often.

5. Get creative and fun with it. Marketing is essentially just letting people know what you do. What would be something that feels interesting, creative and enjoyable for you? Maybe it’s sponsoring an event, contributing an article to your favorite trade magazine, or sharing the details of your latest project at social functions.

Marketing is just connecting with people; letting them know more about you and how you might be able to help them or someone they know. If you take the pressure off and let go of trying to “get something” you may actually make a connection – and that’s something that we all love and remember!

There are a lot of expectations when it comes to managing a business and those entire burdens are turned to the affiliate marketing manager. Before proceeding to the duties and responsibilities of an affiliate marketing manager, what are the abilities and skills one should have to qualify in that position?

An affiliate marketing manager must be:

o Creative, detail oriented and organized

o Flexible to be able to work with projects that can be diverse

o Positive, enthusiastic, posses the ability to work in fast-paced environment that requires deadlines and must have a certain level of professionalism.

o A team player who can work well in a multitasking office where overtime is in demand and traveling is compulsory.

o Able to communicate well in all aspects of life to maintain and build fruitful relationships.

o Proficient in using the commands and programs like Microsoft Office Applications in the computer. Also a genius when it comes to navigating through the internet.

Down to the responsibilities. To make it short and precise, an affiliate marketing manager is someone who:

1. Support sales of the affiliates with initiatives regarding marketing and promoting to achieve the entire distribution goals.

2. Develop marketing campaigns that can make quite an impact and attain innovation of promotions and campaigns about promotion to establish his company as the leader in the affiliate marketing industry.

3. Optimize and manage every aspect of a program in affiliate marketing. This will include application for incentives, recruitment, daily program management and recommending.

4. Handle all levels of communication with affiliates, answer phone conversation and e-mails that will tackle in the area of answer different kinds of questions about the product, and terms of negotiation.

5. Manage and develop partnership promotional and marketing programs that are designed to build an overwhelming amount of sales and traffic.

Moving on, aside from the numerous responsibilities, here are some of the general duties of an affiliate marketing manager:

1. He has to work smoothly with the people around him, especially the marketing director, in order to implement and develop promotions and campaigns for marketing that will help promote the entire company’s dignity and the affiliate’s goals as well.

2. Manage daily marketing on the execution and development of the project that would include creative developments and all implementation courses; ensure the compliance of strategies and standards of the product; oversee outside agencies and vendors.

3. Coordinate different kinds of projects with several departments internally including on-air promotions, creative services, consumer, online, and advertising sales marketing. While doing so, foster positive and happy working relationships through constant communication in all departments.

4. Executes basic marketing projects like writing briefs, developing timelines, collect traffic tapes and artwork, manage necessary approval.

5. Contribute to the development of sales in materials. This will include collateral materials, sales decks, etc.

6. Fill in, prioritize and fulfill daily tasks and request from the entire sales team.

7. Perform other duties that are required and as directed.

All these duties and responsibilities may come out very exhausting but if you have the true spirit of an affiliate marketing manager, it will come out naturally. A manager is someone who performs tasks and duties that will contribute to the fullest emergence of his or her company.

Many independent service professionals nonchalantly enter the Internet marketing game by throwing together a half-baked website without any plan and mistakenly believe that visitors will find them. Initially, my online business grew from word-of-mouth referrals from other clients rather than from any true Internet marketing. My website simply served as an online brochure detailing my services and my rates for several years.

Over time, I became tired of trading time for money. Upon gaining some time and experience in business, the independent service professional has a rude awakening that there are only so many hours in the day and consequently that limits the number of clients that can be served.

Despite all the useful information I’d absorbed over the years about expanding my business reach through the development of products that I could sell on my website, I just didn’t want to devote the time necessary to create multiple streams of income for my business. However, as I began to see friends and colleagues do this successfully in their businesses, the light bulb finally went off, and I realized that this was my next step, as well. So, I bit the bullet and began to try some of the strategies and began to get quick results from what I had implemented.

In my own professional development as an Internet marketer, as well as from work with clients over the years, I’ve come to realize that there are 5 Internet Marketing Mindsets that must be in place for someone to be successful online:

1. Create content that can be re-purposed. The goals here is to create your content once and find multiple ways to use it or multiple ways of delivery. So, for example, if you have an Inspiration Line phone service in which you record an inspiring thought each day for your clients, you can record these calls and have them serve as a publicity tool by distributing them as a podcast. This will help drive traffic to your site and bring people into your marketing funnel. When you’ve accumulated enough recordings, you then sell a subscription membership so that the buyer receives a new inspiring thought each day via email or a direct-to-desktop service. Over time, you can categorize recordings by topic and then combine the recordings into multiple motivational CDs or .mp3 downloads and make them available for sale online. When you’ve been doing this for a year, perhaps you then parlay the recordings into a book or an inspirational card deck. Sometimes it helps to start with the end in mind.

2. Record everything that you do. Whether you’re doing live events, radio or TV interviews, teleclasses, webinars, etc., it pays to record and have a permanent record of everything that you do. Having a digital video recording of yourself in a one-day live event can be packaged into a “home study” course. Teleclasses with transcripts can be resold individually or packaged together for a bigger product. Radio or TV interviews can be placed on your website to enhance your credibility and convince a meeting planner to pay you big bucks to come and provide a keynote speech. Open your mind to the possibilities for re-purposing your recordings.

3. Get yourself and your customers into a sales mentality. Many of my clients simply like to have their products sit obscurely for sale on their websites and do nothing to make their list members or website visitors aware of what they have for sale for fear of offending their visitors or subscribers. If someone is going to be offended because you’re trying to sell to them, then just let them go. You don’t need a list of tire-kickers who want to sponge all the free info that they can from you and never buy anything — you’ll never be able to stay in business that way.

I have to chuckle when I do a promotion and get an email from someone on the list who chastises me for “daring” to sell to them and notes that they much prefer to “decide” when they want to buy something from me and then they threaten to leave the list. I just respond that I’m sorry that they feel that way, but unfortunately I’m not a trust-fund baby, and that my hard-earned information has the same value as any info that they might get from their car mechanic, doctor, attorney, or accountant, and I’ve never seen any of those professionals give away what they know.

Creating a sales mentality means that you need to acknowledge that you’re in business to make money through selling and that your customers need to become accustomed to having you sell and seeing things for sale all over your websites. This is no different than the trait needed for success if you were to own a brick-and-mortar retail establishment. You can still provide free and valuable information to your visitors, but reserve the right to take that info, create a unique packaging and title for pieces of info on the same topic, and put it up for sale.

4. Acknowledge that people will pay more for convenience and instant delivery online. Many times, as I’m trying to help a client determine the price for a product, they’ object to the price I suggest because they compare it to a physical product that can be purchased in the local bookstore or online bookstore for less. The “buy it now and give it to me instantly” mentality that is prevalent among online shoppers dictates that you can charge a higher price for an electronic product than a physical product because the shopper can fulfill his/her need for instant gratification and receive the electronic product in mere seconds. Wouldn’t you rather do that instead of having to get in the car to make a trip across town to buy the product or waiting a few days for the delivery of a physical product from an online store?

And, people will pay for convenience. I recently spoke with a client about selling her content that was ready available in various locations all over the Internet. She was concerned that no one would pay for the product since it was currently available online at no cost if someone were to look hard enough. I told her that many of her customers didn’t know it was available online, and even if they did, they would have to invest a great deal of their free time to gather all the info in one place. Few of us have that luxury of time today. For most of us, if it’s easy and convenient and will save us some time, we’ll buy it.

5. Plan your business growth around your marketing funnel. Independent service professionals shouldn’t live on the sale of their services alone. Trust me, at some point in your business, you won’t want to do that any longer. You need to create a marketing funnel of your products and services that range in price from free to very expensive and base your marketing strategy around that funnel. Your online business success will depend upon people being able to “sample” your expertise before deciding to purchase your service.

Remember that it takes 7-10 “touches” before a prospect will turn into a customer. Give them several ways to experience your expertise, all the way from free to expensive, with any number of price points and options in between. Keep your marketing funnel in mind in all that you do and strategize how every new activity, whether that’s creating a new product, writing another article, offering a new service, or being a guest on a radio show fits into your marketing funnel.

By adopting these 5 Internet Marketing Mindsets into your daily marketing mantra, you’ll be well on your way to positioning your online business for many years of success!

Copyright (c) 2006 Donna Gunter