Now that we have seen the importance of taking care of your online reputation and the way to respond to negative information, here are some more best practices to consider in order to make the job a lot easier for you and even prevent negative things about your business from being posted online in the first place.

• Make your contact information easy to find

On your website, make your contact information such as your email address and phone number easy to locate. Avoid simply putting up a “contact us” form and give your customers various options to get in touch with you. While this may seem obvious, many online complaints about e-commerce sites are based around the fact that the contact information for a site operator is difficult to find on the site or is hidden somewhere in the terms and conditions.

• Respond to inquiries rapidly

If you receive an email concerning a problem and you do not have time to look into the issue right away, inform the customer of this and let them know a realistic time frame regarding when you will be getting back to them. If you don’t understand what the specific problem is, ask them for more clarifications. Avoid using “scripted” emails or automatic responses, as these often give the message that you don’t care and do not want to provide personalized service. People will feel a lot more comfortable knowing that there is an actual human being that has read their message and is truly going to resolve the matter at hand.

• Participate in industry forums

There are plenty of discussion forums online in various niches. Create an account on them and announce your presence to other members. That way, if someone is not satisfied of your customer service, they can contact you on the forum to resolve the issue, rather than making a public post about it. Furthermore, being present on online forums can give you the opportunity to interact with current and potential customers as well as business partners who might be posting questions related to your company.

• Be present in social media sites

Even if you just create a simple page with your company description and your contact information, it can provide your customers with another avenue to contact you should something go wrong. It also provides you with a quick way to get in touch with customers who are not satisfied about something related to your business.

• Delegate tasks if you don’t have time for them

If you run a larger business that gets many customers each day, it could be quite time consuming to keep checking on consumer advocacy sites, social networks and discussion forums regularly and respond to any posts. Therefore, you can assign this task to a worker who will be responsible for managing the customer service aspect of your online presence and who will forward any particular problems to you so that you can take action to resolve them.

If you haven’t joined a CPA network before, you may be wondering what types of offers are available for you to promote. Here is a quick overview of most of the offer types that you will find on networks today:

Email Submits: These offers will give you credit for the user submitting only their email address. Depending on the merchant, the user may or may not have to confirm their email address by opening up a message with a confirmation link in it. However, usually they won’t have to. Most of the email submit offers are for the “free ipod” type sites, which will let the user earn a gift by completing more offers on the merchants site. The reason why merchants can pay to get just an email address is because some of the users who input their email (a tiny minority) will go on to complete some of the offers that the merchant has on their site. They also add the user’s email to their mailing list and will then send him email advertising as well.

PIN Submits/Cell phone offers: Here the user will have to submit their cell phone number, usually to get some mobile content such as free wallpapers, ringtones, a daily horoscope sent by SMS, jokes sent by SMS or applications for cell phones. By doing so, they will subscribe to the merchant’s service which will charge them each time they receive text messages or content from them.

Form Submits: You get credit for the user filling out a form, usually to sign up for a free service, such as a dating site or a social network. The rationale behind these offers for the merchant is that a certain percentage of users will either upgrade their membership to a paid one later or otherwise buy something from them.

Lead offers: Similar to above but longer and more detailed, may involve the user filling out 3 or 4 pages of forms. Often used to get quotes for debt consolidation, mortgage or insurance offers.

Download offers: You get paid when the user downloads a piece of software such as an application, browser extension or toolbar. The merchant pays for each download due to the fact that their software may serve ads to the user or there may be a paid version available which they hope a certain percentage of users will upgrade to.

Credit card submit/trial offers: Here, the user gets a trial of a service, such as an internet fax service, “make money online” membership site, etc. or a product like a weight loss pill, teeth whitening product, vitamin supplement, etc. The user normally gets charged a small fee such as $2 or $3 for the trial. However, when the trial period is over and the user didn’t cancel, the merchant will then bill them the regular price, which can range from $20 to $100 a month. These offers typically pay more than other types, but are harder to promote as the user needs to input payment information.

Email advertising is just one of the ways for you to get the word out, either about your own business or product, or about an affiliate offer that you are running. Unfortunately, this method of advertising is often associated with unsolicited email (spam) and as such is avoided by many marketers. But there are ways to leverage the power of email advertising and have great results, as long as you follow these tipis outlined below.

Make sure you are allowed to do it: If you are promoting an affiliate or CPA offer, be sure that the offer in question can be promoted by email and what the restrictions or rules are. Certain offers are barred from email promotions, while on certain others the messages and subject lines have to be entered exactly as provided by the merchant. If you fail to follow these instructions, at best you will be warned by your affiliate manager. At worst, you can get banned from the network outright and even lose all of the money that you have accumulated during the month.

Make sure you have permission to email these people: This means that they have opted in, either by entering their email on a dedicated box on your website, or were aware of the fact that they will receive promotional emails when registering for a site that you own. You should always keep the logs which include the timestamp, email and IP address associated with the subscription, as you may be asked for it if you are running affiliate offers.

Be wary of certain “email marketing” providers: Some companies may claim that they are able to send your message to “millions of targeted opt-in subscribers”. Unfortunately, in many cases these email addresses are simply scraped from the web to form a list. If not, they are sent to a list of emails that have opted in on a certain site (usually a contest or freebie site) which had a mention stating that “we may give your email to our promotional partners”. While this may not be against the rules of most offers, you will get poor results, as these lists have been sold and resold and resold again. Chances are your email will just end up in the recipient’s “Junk” folder or simply be deleted.

Don’t waste time with “paid to read” email providers: While all of these people did indeed opt-in to receive these mails, and the provider guarantees that people will click through to your site, you will once again get poor results, meaning little or zero conversions. Why? The people clicking on the link in your mail are earning points or a small sum of about half a cent to do so. They don’t care about what’s on your site and will close it just as soon as the timer runs out. You will indeed get a lot of traffic, but chances are none of it will convert anyways.

Keeping your email opt in page clean and professional is important to showing your users trust and respect. Make sure you emphasize privacy and the purpose of your list. List the benefits of being a member of your email list such as giveaways, free information, gifts, or whatever benefits your list might have. This helps gain trust right away from your users and makes them feel like they will benefit from joining your list, rather than giving away their privacy to a third party. Trust is the most important thing you can build on your opt in page.

The opt in email page takes some time to perfect, but the main objective is to keep the person interested enough to want to give you their personal information such as an email address to offer them solicited information. This is known as opting in to receive the information and allows you to send them related information. Most people will not simply put in their information if they see no incentive or gains that they would receive for doing so. This is where you would provide a free gift for giving you their information. This allows you to provide a free gift as the ethical bribe to earn their email address information.

This means that you will be tasked with gaining the trust of opt in subscribers. The more that you work to gain the trust of the potential subscribers, the more likely they will be to opt in. Once you do get their trust to give you their information you will have to continue earning their trust. Sending them the free gift via auto-response scripts is important to utilize. Do not bombard them with spam and offers they do not need.

Delivering on the join request is very important. You will have to ensure that they will be receiving important information that they will want to read without asking them to buy anything at first. Once gaining their trust has gone on for a few days to a week, your email responses could be tailored to ask them politely to purchase a product. If they do not continue on, the next email should outline why they should buy it. After this, the emails should explain why not using the product is less effective than other products or methods. This will usually provide them with a reason to purchase within a set time frame if their interest is caught well enough.

CPA stands for Cost Per Action.  CPA networks are becoming very popular for internet marketers to make money online because companies are paying high commissions for leads.

To give you an example i use a number of CPA networks which ill talk about in a minute that have a number of companies that will pay you commission for every lead you send them.  For example if you send your email lists/website traffic to the advertisers landing page and your referrel puts in their email address to receive whatever they are selling you can earn upto $15 just from your referrel putting in their email address.

I did an experiment the other day and put a link on my facebook status for anyone who wants to make $10 to fill out a free survey.  5 of my facebook friends clicked on the affiliate link in my facebook status and i made $50 just from them completing a quick 2 minutes survey on the advertisers website.

Big named brands spend millions of dollars a year on advertising and the reason they pay so much for leads is because once they have your referrels contact details they can then create a relationship with them and send them offers via email or even sell on their contact details to third partie companies which is a massive business.

I recommend the following CPA networks as they pay the based commissions.

CX Digital Media – Click Here To Register

Neverblue – Click Here To Register

When you fill out your application make sure to fill out the following:

Your complete address, contact telephone and email address that is registered with one of your domain names, e.g john@yourdomain.com , also one of your main websites that you will use to promote their CPA offers.  Make sure your website is upto date and looks professional and related to the niche your hoping to promote.  As your will go through a verification process before you can get accepted onto the network.

You will get a phone call to verify your account, which is normal.  Activation takes about 48 hours