That learning curve you’re facing in affiliate marketing is frustrating. I know, I have been there too. The problem with learning curves is they can really be a rough barrier to cross if you don’t have the right knowledge to get to the other side. One of these days you will either realize how to get through the confusion and make money, or you will decide there is no way to make money as an affiliate marketer. That’s what the majority of new marketers do, they quit. The reason for that is that they aren’t committed to their business. Smart people understand the power that an education can deliver. If you devote your energy to learning in an affiliate course, marketing will be a piece of cake.

A lot of new marketers don’t want to invest any money into getting their business going. The thing is that you can only get so far without investing in your business. Trying to make a lot of money in affiliate marketing without an education is like opening a Dairy Queen and refusing to pay for a freezer. You can’t serve soup in a cone! Yet thousands of new marketers are trying to squeeze money out of cyberspace without any knowledge of how to make it happen. The price of enrolling will pay you back many, many times over. The education is priceless. After finishing your affiliate course, marketing will allow you to make money and do so fast.

Wouldn’t it be worth investing some cash to know how to perform without failure? It was for me. Did you know that social marketing could skyrocket your profits? But you have to do it right or that strategy won’t pay off either. Did you know that you shouldn’t start out trying PPC campaigns? This is one beginner’s mistake that is very commonly made. PPC marketing is for those who have already succeeded in other methods of affiliate marketing. I bet you’d be really interested to learn WHY over 90% of new marketers fail. These are types of things you will learn if you take an affiliate course. Marketing doesn’t have to be difficult, unless you are going about it all wrong.

Seeing the big picture will not point out the path to take you there. Only learning what steps to take and in what order will carry you to big conversions in short order. A lot of new marketers overlook really critical strategy. They don’t understand how much their success depends on proper planning before launching a campaign. You can learn to stop picking the wrong keyword. There is a way to know that every product you launch will convert like mad. You’ll learn everything this to know and make cash fast in an affiliate course. Marketing magic is easy when you know what the heck you’re doing.

Today, every smart business knows that social media marketing is the new yellow pages, and twitter marketing is right at the top. Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day is an awesome tool to promote and grow your business on the internet. This book makes it extremely easy to follow and implement this online marketing strategy. By using the hour-a-day homework assignments, and following every trick in this book, you will be able to take your business to a new level.

In the first few chapters, you will get a rundown on how to market your business with twitter, setting up goals and other exercises to help you create action plans for you to follow. This book is not just a list of suggestions with very little results. As you move through it, you will start seeing tangible results and reaping the rewards of online marketing.

After chapter 3, the book makes a transition from a text book to a social media marketing guide as it goes into Part 2. This section consist of an hour by hour, day to day, and week to week training to advance you from a Twitter marketing rookie to a serious power user. The author does a very good job at clearing out all the noise of the web, and consolidates the necessary requirements a business person needs to know about online marketing. This book does exactly what it claims to do which is help you market your products through Twitter.

Another thing that makes this book worthwhile is all the resources it provides to the reader. Though the intended audience for this book is mainly companies looking to use Twitter as another form of online marketing, the average Twitter user can easily find value in it as well. The layout is well thought out and easy to navigate.

With so many Twitter experts on the net, it’s refreshing and helpful to get practical how-to advice from someone who has clearly guided others to achieve real business results from Twitter marketing. Despite your current knowledge of Twitter, you will be able to easily unlock new applications and methods to improve your results. As your comfort level rises, you will learn how to leverage this powerful tool as an online marketing platform. This book is meticulously organized and presented in a step-by-step manner that makes it easy for beginners as well as experienced Twitter marketers. If you desire to be among the Twitter superstars, this book will undoubtedly help you find your way.

Social media marketing is everywhere. From pop stars to reality TV stars, from big brand names to small businesses, from internet marketers to MLM, you cannot be taken seriously unless you have a social network presence. It seems the more fans and followers you accumulate, the more popular you supposedly are.

Is anyone making money?

It is far from clear whether there is real value of social networking in terms of return on investment. How does this online media frenzy benefit your business or does it just burn a hole in your time freedom, outsourcing or advertising budget?

Research from eMarketer* indicates that almost half of brands are unconvinced that social marketing’s offers real value as a advertising investment, be it time or money, and has shown the lack of clear measurements of impact and ROI from social media marketing are the reason most social efforts remain low.

What is striking is the conclusion that “While relatively few marketers reported social was pointless and overhyped or too complicated to deal with, most are still not increasing revenues or otherwise profiting from their social efforts.”

In fact of the half that had some kind of social media marketing campaign going, only about a third felt it was making them money!

What can you measure?

In an attempt to crack the complexity, Cisco have developed a social media measurement framework as a guide and resource for their internal teams to help determine what and how to measure for their social media programs and initiatives.

The measurement “streams” group the most common goals and ties them back to potential key performance indicators and metrics to track them. Hard ROI type quantitative impact measures are certainly difficult to pin down for social media marketing. The environment is completely different to the straightforward cause and effect of most pay-per-click advertising strategies.

With social media marketing, you have to track what is happening in the wider sense first, and extrapolate, thus assessing some of the softer benefits than can have a financial impact further down the line.

6 ways to assess ROI

Here are six ways you can start to assess whether social media marketing is working and your business is actually making money online:

1. Have a clear strategy for your social media marketing. Decide if it is for brand awareness, reputation building, networking, lead generation. Set targets for number of followers or fans, number of leads and assess against daily, weekly, monthly activity over time.

2. Add tracking codes to every aspect of your social media marketing so that you can attribute lead generation to different parts of your strategy specifically and follow them through your sales funnel.

3. Analyse your costs per lead, cost per conversion, cost against earnings etc. For each tracked aspect of your social media marketing campaigns, such as tweets, Facebook posts or social network PPC, videos etc. right down to the specific ad copy for any given posting or page.

4. Analyse your demographics, by using your own tracking, Facebook reporting, or different twitter profiles, or with Google Analytics. Again, track through your entire sales funnel, from impressions to clicks to leads to front end sales to back end commissions to see if there are patterns of people (gender, location, interests etc) who convert highest and are thus most targeted ‘hot’ prospects to focus on going forward.

5. Incorporate feedback activities into your marketing, such as questionnaires (e.g. Survey Monkey) based on open, focus group type questions that ask specifically how people found you, what they like/don’t like about what you do/provide.

6. You should follow up on the ways people enter your social media marketing networks and build out your marketing from there. For instance, you can use tools in Alexa to see where people come from when they visit your site and where they go next!

These are the very basics metrics you should be reviewing. At its very best, social media marketing can be an effective way of attracting highly targeted prospects into your sales funnel.

However, the path to securing a real return on costs in terms of time and paid advertising has far more to do with building trust than selling technique. Social networks are not the place for blatant sales pitches, in fact businesses and individuals show their ignorance and lack of professionalism with that approach.

Rather, social media marketing has everything to do with the development of authentic relationships and giving good value and service to others, a strategy which fosters social proof, long term customers and loyalty.