Marketing Tip of the Week: Get Linked!

Did you know that you earn an extra 30% of every sale when a customer buys your products from your website? That's 70% or seven of every 10 dollars!

Linking up is easy and we have put together a handy guide which walks you through the process. You can access it here. There are also some great tips about how to optimize the placement of your products as well, so check it out even if you're already selling your products through your website using iAmplify.

Our partner Pure Classical Pilates made their downloads available on their website and saw their sales increase significantly!

If you have any questions about getting linked up, email us at expert@iamplify.com.

Twitter Tutorial

This is our fifth post in our blog and social media tutorial series. This tutorial is about Twitter, the "micro-blogging" platform that has become quite popular in the past few months.

Twitter’s “micro-blogging” interface is perfect for transmitting tips, quick thoughts, updates and links. When you have something quick that you want to tell or show people, try messaging it through Twitter.

You can sign up for Twitter at: www.twitter.com.

Sign up under your own name or a catchy name which means something to your business. Be sure to capture your name while it's still available!

Next, fill out your personal profile. Here you can add your location, your website and a short bio about yourself. You can also upload a photo of yourself and pick a background design from Twitter's design templates. If you prefer, you can download your own custom design template.

Then Twitter will ask to search your email addresses to find people you know who are already on Twitter or who you might like to invite to sign up to Twitter. You should encourage your followers to sign up for a twitter account so they can get updated news and offers in a timely manner. Once you have connected with people on your own list, you can also search for like minded people on Twitter and follow them. It is an acceptable practice to follow people you do not know and often, once you follow them, they will also follow you.

Try searching for keywords that are important to your business, like self help or fitness and you will find other people who mention these keywords in their posts. You can search for keywords through Twitter search.

Now, it's time to post. Actually, it's better to post a few "tweets" before you follow people you don't know so they can see a sample of what you are going to post. There are quite a few spammers on Twitter so people are starting to get suspicious of people who don't have a lot of details filled out in their profile or people who post the same thing over and over.

To post on Twitter follow the instructions below:

1. Log into your account at: http://twitter.com/
2. Type in “What you’re doing” in 140 characters or less, and you’re all set.

Twitter is a great place to let people know what you’re up to. You can tell your followers what you’re working on, what you’ve just completed, or offer a link to your website or iAmplify product page.

One great thing to remember is that you can paste your affiliate links directly into your Twitter post, and they will be tracked through the iAmplify Affiliate Program. Follow the directions on how to pull your affiliate tracking link from your affiliate text link html code in our WordPress Tutorial. You can shorten your links by using a tinyurl service. This is especially helpful since you can only use 140 characters when posting.

Check out this "Ultimate Guide to Everything Twitter" to get more in-depth details about using Twitter.

Here's another great post about finding followers on Twitter:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/11/looking-for-m-1.html

This post is a case study on how Twitter drives sales:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/twitter-drives-traffic-sales-a.html

And don't forget to follow us on twitter @iAmplify!

Wikepedia Tutorial

This is our fourth blog post in our blog and social media tutorial series. This week's tutorial is about Wikipedia.

Wikipedia.com has become one of the foremost outlets for user-generated information on the Web. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has “grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages.”

If you search Google regularly, you will notice that Wikipedia articles generally rank very high in the search results. So publishing a page about yourself or your business on Wikipedia can be a great way to market yourself or your website. You can significantly increase exposure to yourself and your products.

However, be careful about how you approach writing articles on Wikipedia. Wikipedia strongly discourages writing autobiographies because it is difficult to remain neutral when you are writing about yourself. While it is strongly discouraged, you can still create an autobiographical page if you are strategic about it. Write about yourself or your business as objectively as possible and as if you are writing about it solely with the purpose of providing information. Better yet get someone else to write it for you! Read this article for helpful information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autobiography

Getting started

In order to edit within Wikipedia, you will need to create an account. The steps are easy and their interface walks you through this process. To get started, go to http://www.wikipedia.com and click on ‘Create Account’.

Get the introduction and learn more about Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction

The basic editing cheat sheet is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet

More information about creating your first page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article

Take special care to search for your name or business in Wikipedia to make sure there is not already a page created about you. If there is a page about you already, you can simply add information or links to the existing page.

Inserting links to your downloadable products on your Wikipedia page:

Once you have created your page or found the page that someone else has already created for you, you can insert a text link to your products in the ‘External Link’ section of the Wikipedia page. Here are the steps for inserting the text link into your page:

1. Go to www.iamplify.com and search for the product or products you would like to feature on your Wikipedia page
2. Copy the URL of the product landing page
3. Login to your Wikipedia account
4. Go to your Wikipedia page
5. Click on the ‘edit’ link for the ‘External Links’ section
6. Go to the last external link (usually denoted by a *)
7. Add a * on the next line and then [
8. Then paste the URL and hit the space bar
9. Add the text you would like to appear as the link. For example, Kathy Smith Downloads. After the text add another ]
10. Each link should look similar to this:

* [http://www.iamplify.com/store/bio/Kathy-Smith/products/author_id/226 Kathy Smith Downloads]

11. Scroll down on the edit page and click ‘Show Preview’
12. If the preview is satisfactory, then click ‘Save Changes.’ This will prompt you to enter a confirmation cod

More Information

• About Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

• Making the Best Use of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Making_the_best_use_of_Wikipedia

Self Growth Tutorial

This is our third blog post in our blog and social media tutorial series. Now that we've posted tutorials about the two most popular blogging services out there at the current moment, we are going to move on to social media sites. Let's begin with SelfGrowth.com.

SelfGrowth.com is a great website that aggregates self-improvement experts on the Web. There are numerous categories on their website including personal growth, finance, health and fitness and spirituality. In fact, most of our partners fit into one category or another.

The Self Growth website allows their users to link to their websites, etc. online. This guide outlines how to link to your digital media downloads from your SelfGrowth.com page so that you can increase exposure to yourself and your products.

Getting started

If you have not done so already, you should create a Self Growth account. The steps are easy and their interface walks you through this process. To get started go to http://selfgrowth.com/user/register. You will most likely want to create a Professional account.

Inserting your downloadable products into your SelfGrowth.com page:

Once you have created the account, you will need to submit your website for approval in order to create an ‘Expert Page.’ The approval process takes about 24 hours. Once that is done, you can edit your Expert Page, adding bio information, contact information and product information. Here are the steps for inserting the product links into your page:

1. Login into your SelfGrowth.com account.
2. Click on the ‘Expert Page’ tab from the yellow tabs at the top of the page
3. Click on the ‘Products’ tab from the blue tabs at the top of the page. These will be right below the yellow tabs.
4. Scroll down to the Audio & Video products section
5. Leave this web page open and pull up a new tab or window in your web browser
6. Go to http://affiliates.iamplify.com
7. Login to your iAmplify Affiliate Account
8. Search for the product you would like to feature
9. Click on ‘Get Links’
10. Copy the code for the product Text Link. Here is an example for the text link code for Marianne’s Miracle Matrix.: <a href=http://affiliate.iamplify.com/scripts/t.php?aid=b4958085&bid=0f97c381><b>Get a FREE 30-Day Subscription to Marianne Williamsons Miracle Matrix </b><br/><img src="http://affiliate.iamplify.com/scripts/sb.php?aid=b4958085&bid=0f97c381" width="1" height="1" alt="" border="0"/></a>
11. Go back to the web page for SelfGrowth.com, which should still be in the products section of the ‘Expert Page’ tab.
12. Insert the Product name in the box labeled ‘Title’
13. Insert the text for the Text Link code box labeled URL
14. Edit the Text Link so that only the bolded part remains (note that the numbers for the ‘aid’ and the ‘bid’ will be different when pulled from your affiliate account.)

<ahref=http://affiliate.iamplify.com/scripts/t.php?aid=b4958085&bid=0f97c381><b>Get a FREE 30-Day Subscription to Marianne Williamsons Miracle Matrix </b><br/><img src="http://affiliate.iamplify.com/scripts/sb.php?aid=b4958085&bid=0f97c381" width="1" height="1" alt="" border="0"/></a>

15. Click the ‘Submit’ button at the bottom of the page.
16. Repeat this process for each of the product you would like to feature on SelfGrowth.com (we would recommend you do this for all of them).

Other Tips

• There are probably many other SelfGrowth.com experts in your industry. Be sure to network with them by becoming connected through the social networking feature in your account. This is a great way to meet others, create collaborations for seminars or downloadable products, etc.