What Works In Internet Marketing Works Even Better In Other Markets

Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 1:14 am

I just won a 40in Sony LCD TV in an affiliate competition, and that wasn’t even first place. In another competition this month I won a Rolex watch. During this year I won a Apple iTouch and some other prizes.

In July when I reopened Blog Mastermind, I ran an affiliate competition for my partners, giving away top 10 prizes, including a Mac Air as a first place prize.

These competitions are common place for Internet marketing launches. The people who sell products related to how to make money online know how effective a prize competition is for motivating affiliates to promote. Strangely enough, it’s not the prizes the affiliates really want since they could easily buy the items – it’s the glory and beating their peers that matters most.

Regardless of the motivation, affiliate prize competitions work and help you make more sales, so why is it that marketers in other niches don’t make use of this technique?

Prize competitions could be considered a standard in Internet marketing launches so it’s not going to surprise anyone, but if you were to run a competition in a non-IM market, you are going to be doing something new, something different – and I’m pretty confident it’s going to work REALLY well at motivating your affiliates too.

New is Powerful

What creates buzz in any market is something new. “New” is powerful, and while the bar is rising very high in the Internet marketing niche for what can be considered innovative, it’s still relatively easy to be seen as an innovator in online marketing if you just take what the Internet marketing crowd are doing as a standard and apply it to your non-IM market.

This is why concepts such as the product launch formula work so well. Outside of the film and television industries and a few innovative companies like Apple, most companies market their products with stock standard – and let’s face it – boring styles of marketing like dry television, radio and newspaper campaigns.

While affiliate competitions and product launch formula style buzz campaigns won’t work for every type of product, chances are what you are selling online could benefit from a few innovative techniques that no one is doing in your industry.

Let me ask you this – if you are currently selling in a non-make money online market right now, has anyone ever done an affiliate competition to motivate launch partners when a new product is released? Even the concept of affiliate marketing is not applied to a majority or products sold online.

This to me spells opportunity. All it takes is for you to put in a little extra effort and you could be seen as an innovator in your market – and best of all, a winner when it comes to your profits too.

Yaro Starak
Copy-and-Paste Marketer