Affiliate Marketing For Employment Sites

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Affiliate Resume Writing Sales Increasing Sharply In January

Some of you might have noticed that resume writing sales were slow in December, which is normal and happens every year as people save their cash for gifts, food and partying. However, I'm sure you are also aware that January is the time for new resolutions, which means that this is when people start looking for jobs and when companies start posting job openings. In addition, beside this seasonal trend, the employment market is finally going back up, compared the previous couple years, the private sector - and mostly small businesses - having just added more than 295,000 jobs. As you can see, this beginning of the year seems to be particularly favorable to resume writing sales so make sure to take advantage of it: Now is the time to promote prominently our resume writing services to earn big affiliate $.

2010 Top 10 Affiliates

I have started looking at our yearly affiliate reports and wanted to start the year by sharing a few things with you. While I won't give you the name of our 10 higher-earning affiliates for 2010, I can however tell you what type of sites they are, which should help you figure out what websites can earn big with our affiliate program.

- 3 of our top 10 affiliates are sites offering Federal employment resources

- 2 of our top 10 affiliates are sites focusing on resume writing 

- 1 of our top 10 affiliates offers military to civilian transition resources

- 1 of our top 10 affiliates is a job board

- 3 of our top 10 affiliates are niche employment sites specializing in one industry (nursing, engineering, finance).

And, in case you are wondering, most of our top 30 sites are similar to the ones listed below.

In terms of commissions, these sites are earning somewhere between a few hundred $ and $2,000 in affiliate commissions every month.

This should tell you a few things. First, that the most profitable sites are sites that are specialized on one field. Second, this should give you an idea about what fields are currently hot when it comes to resume writing sales. A couple other things that might surprise you is that, except for 1 affiliate, all the sites listed below have a quite modest traffic but because they are able to attract the visitors they are catering to, their sales conversion rates are pretty high. Also, most of these sites have a very basic design, which underlines that what matters is the information provided not the way it is presented; as a result, you don't need to spend big bucks in website design to be successful with our affiliate program.

Get ready for resume writing sales peaking in January

I just wanted to let you know about a couple things today.

First, I am leaving on vacation tomorrow and will be back right after Christmas. So if you email me the next couple of weeks, I won’t be able to reply until after Christmas. 

Also, as you probably know, while affiliate sales are usually slow around that time of the year, they always peak right after New Year, as January and February are the busiest months when it comes to job hunting. So make sure to plan ahead and be ready when January comes, as job seekers will rush to buy resume writing services.

How can you take advantage of January job hunting rush? Here is a list of proven practices: 

- Feature our resume writing affiliate banner or link on your home page

- Feature our resume writing affiliate banner or link in your your job ads

- Include your affiliate link in the emails you send to your mailing list

- Post your affiliate link on Facebook.

- Post your affiliate link on Twitter.

- Post your affiliate link on your Blog.

Post your affiliate link on classifieds. 

Have a Merry Christmas!

 

Martial Arts Affiliate Program

For those of you who asked for me for recommendations about other affiliate programs, here is another one that is worth the try. Budovideos, a well known site specialized in martial arts, offers a martial arts affiliate program, which commission rate is 10%. I did get a sneak peak at how the program works and can attest some of their affiliates are generating several thousands dollars in sales every month. Because Budovideos has exclusive access to lots of martial arts events and has its own line of DVDs, the site has a high conversion rate. In addition, martial arts afficionados tend to buy a few items at a time so the average sale order is higher than your average affiliate program. So, if you are looking into affiliate program diversification, you might wanna give it a shot. They are managed through the google affiliate program and you can apply to their program here .... 

Healthcare job search activity booming

Just a quick note to mention that there are currently plenty of healthcare jobs available and an increasing number of candidates are getting into that field. As a result, we've noticed an increase in medical resume - and most particularly nursing resume - packages sold. So if your site focuses on the healthcare industry, I would recommend promoting our healthcare resume service to increase your online revenues.

The college job hunt is on

Those of you whose websites attract a younger crowd and, most particularly students, might be interested to know that now is the time when they start looking for college jobs. As school starts, they usually also look for jobs, whether it's on campus, internships etc ... You might, as a result, want to promote our college resume writing service in order to increase your affiliate sales. Offering a page featuring resources on how to find those jobs might also be useful, whether it's to increase conversions or attract organic traffic and if you are looking for ideas you can even have a look at our college jobs / expired job search listings.

This trend usually happens twice a year and lasts a couple of months: It obviously happens in September / October but also in January / February so if you want to cash on it, make sure to act fast ...

 

Another great affiliate program

Since quite a few of you guys have been asking me if I could recommend other good affiliate programs, I will from now on let you know whenever I hear of a program that is performing well.

This obviously doesn't mean you should stop promoting Employment911 - quite the contrary as September is always a very good month when it comes to resume writing sales - but since several of you have an entrepreneurial spirit and are always eager to start new sites, why not sharing a few insider tips with you …

The program I will recommend to you today is the 1800Pools affiliate program which, as its name implies, specialized in swimming pools and spas. This program is available through the Google affiliate network and all you need to do is to apply here to get your application approved. What is interesting about this program is not only that it gets some good sales - I've checked their reports - but they have strong sales in summer, right when employment-related sales are slow, which makes it a great complement to the Employment911 affiliate program. In addition, for the rest of the year they offer a wide selection of winter products, which should allow you to keep your sales constant throughout the year. Now, here is a bonus tip: if you decide to promote this program now, you should be able to make a killing in swimming pool covers …

Offering Job Listings to your visitors

While I usually focus on our resume writing services to show you how to earn commissions, you can also earn commissions with job listings. Indeed, you can also make money with leads as, whenever somebody signs up on our site and post a resume, you will earn a commission (from $0.25 to $0.50 depending on your affiliate level).

I can tell you from experience that when people look for jobs on our site, they tend to sign up and post their resume, since it's free to them. So, it is to your advantage to allow your visitors to look for jobs (we offer a job search banner in your affiliate account, under Static Banners) - job seekers can look for thousands of jobs whether it's by state (for example: Florida Jobs), by industry, by keyword and they can even browse through old jobs (see our expired accounting jobs for example), in order to find the contact information of additional companies they might be interested to work for.

Will you make thousands of $ in commissions with leads? Probably not but you could easily make a hundred $ in leads, which would nicely complement the commissions you got from resume sales ...

 

 

 

New Contest: Increase your Sales by 20% & Earn a $20 Gift Card

Would you like to earn a $20 gift card? Would you like to get a bigger affiliate commission check?

Well, we have a new contest for you: Increase your Sales by 20% & Earn a $20 Gift Card.

 How does it work?

It's easy: increase your affiliate sales by 20% in March, compared to your February sales and you will be eligible to earn one of our $20 gift cards - the winners will be drawn ...

This means that not only you might earn a $20 card but in addition, your will earn 20% more commissions in March.

Since this contest starts in one week, I would recommend you start preparing for it now so that when March starts, you are already ahead of the game. To help you win, here are some easy ways to increase your sales:

• place our top-selling resume writing banner or link on your home page
• promote our resume writing service to your mailing list, in your newsletter.
• upsell our resume writing service to your customers.
• If you have an employment site, place our top-selling resume writing banner or link on the pages featuring the job descriptions.
• Create a page presenting our services.
  
• Use PPC advertising to promote the pages where you have our ads.

 Also, make sure to read the following posts, which include some great tips on how to earn big commissions:

• Making Affiliate Sales with an Opt-in List
• How to earn more than $4.50 per click with our affiliate program
• How to be a Successful Affiliate
  

If you have any question, feel free to contact me ... and Good Luck!!

 

 

 

 

 

Making Affiliate Sales with an Opt-in List

While most affiliates post links and banners to websites to make affiliate sales, another great way is to build an opt-in list. For example, if your site is about accounting, you can get people to sign up for your list by telling them you will offer them news about their industry. What you can also do is offering them some kind of freebie in exchange for signing up - for example an accounting-related e-book.

Once people are on your list, it's pretty easy. Not only can you send them a series of auto-responders after they sign up but you can also send them broadcast messages. Make your messages sound personal, like you were talking to a friend. Give them some tips, solve their problems.  Obviously, somewhere in your message promote your affiliate offer but make sure it is something your subscribers might be interested in. For example, an accounting site could promote our accounting resume writing service.

Finally, while some marketers do not hesitate to just send promotional messages to their list, you might want to mix things up by also sending them some good articles or news; this will minimize the number of people unsuscribing from your list.

How to earn more than $4.50 per click with our affiliate program

So if you read this blog or our newsletter regularly, you might have noticed that I always use the earning per click as conversion rate, which is calculated by dividing your affiliate commission $ by the number of clicks you send our way.

There is always a dozen affilites that can pull off earning more than $1 per click and if you read my previous post, How to be a successful affiliate, I gave you a blueprint on how to do it.

While most of our top affiliates get their traffic mostly from organic rankings, there is a method that people have kind of forgotten but still works: Using PPC traffic to make sales. To give you an idea, there is currently one affiliate who is earning more than $4.50 per click by mostly sending Adwords traffic to a page that presents one of our service. That affiliate did his homework and is only advertising keywords that generate sales so that he doesn't spend a lot of money and gets high Return on Investment thanks to laser-targeted traffic. Here are two things you should know:

• He is advertising with Adwords in a midly competitive market - so yes Adwords still works ...
• As for knowing the right buying keywords, there is two ways: first you can use the Adwords suggestion tool and if you dig around, you will figure out what they are. Second, you can just look at our landing pages, since I optimized them for those buying keywords ...   

No Affiliate Links = No Affiliate Sales

Before I get started, I hope you guys read my previous post, How to be a successful affiliate, because there is really all the ingredients you need to make sales.

Now let's get back to the title of this blog post. By this I mean that if you guys don't put any affiliate link on your sites or don't promote them to your mailing lists, you will never make any sale.

Why am I saying this? Well even though it might sound obvious, there are plenty of affiliates who sign up with our program and never put any link up. Lots of these affiliate sites have potential and by not putting any resume link up, they are losing on affiliate commissions, most especially as resume writing sales are currently going strong. 

So once again, I'm recommending to those who haven't done so yet to put some links up. Just putting our best selling link or banner on your site won't take more than a couple minutes ... So you have to ask yourself "is spending a couple minutes copying and pasting a banner on a page and ftping it worth making a few hundred $ in affiliate commissions every month?" ...

How to be a Successful Affiliate with the 2009 Employment911 Affiliate Program Recap

Let's have a look at what happened last year and what lessons we can learn from it.

First, I am glad to announce that once again, your affiliate revenues increased in 2009 and it's looking good - to give you an idea, your affiliate income doubled in two years! This means two things: First that some of you guys did a great job at promoting our services to highly qualified traffic. Second that our affiliate program is working well and that our landing pages have strong conversion rates - and just to let you know, I am always testing and tweaking our pages so that your sales conversions increase.

Now let's look at conversion rates (calculated by dividing your monthly affiliate revenues by the number of clicks you sent us):

• The highest conversion rate for an affiliate last year was $4.74 per click.
• A couple affiliates had the highest conversion rates for at least 3 months.

This is telling us two things:

1. If you focus on getting visitors that have a need for our services, you will make easy sales, work less and won't waste money and effort on unqualified leads.
2. If you do intelligence work when it comes to keyword research, you are 100% sure to succeed.

As for the most successful affiliates, here is some interesting data that you can use, whether you are starting your website or updating it:

• 2 of the top 5 affiliates are in the Federal employment field
• 1 of the top 5 affiliates is a resume service review site
• 55% of the top 20 affiliates are job board sites
• 65% of the top 20 affiliates are industry niche sites
• 30% of the top 20 affiliates are content-rich informational sites

Regarding the types of resumes you guys sold the most, here is what you should know:

1. 47% of affiliate sales were Federal resumes and other documents needed for government job applications.
2. 33% of affiliate sales were standard entry, mid-level and executive resume sales.
3. 7% of affiliate sales were engineering resumes.
4. 6% of affiliate sales were finance resumes.
5. 3% of affiliate sales were nursing resumes.
6. 2% of affiliate sales were military to civilian resumes.
7. 2% of affiliate sales were resumes for temp and seasonal jobs.

So here you go … with all the data I just gave you today, you should have enough information to become one of our most successful affiliates and earn big!

January Affiliate Program Sales

Hello, I got back from vacation a week ago, as you might have noticed on Twitter and just wanted to give you an update about current sale trends. While I will give you soon more details about how the affiliate program performed in 2009, here is some information that might help you increase your sales:

As expected, affiliate sales increased sharply the weekend following new year's eve, which means that people are getting back to looking for a job - new year resolutions are contributing to this as well.

As for what's selling, here are the details: What is currently selling the most is our regular professional resume writing package, whether it's entry level, mid level or executive resumes. Federal resume writing is also selling but, for the time being, it's pretty modest as most jobs haven't opened yet - remember government jobs have strict deadlines. There are also quite a few finance resume and military resume sales.

If your site isn't specialized in any industry or field, I would recommend promoting our top-selling resume writing banner or link (remember putting it on your home page guarantees you a 20% commission rate, instead of 12.50%). And if your site is specialized in any of the fields listed above, I would recommend promoting the appropriate links, which you will find in your affiliate account.