In order to create the most compelling, responsive and profitable EMS related advertisements, you need to utilize Facebooks option to heavily target and tailor your advertisements based on the EMS market.

With facebook, you can set your ads up so that they appear only to specific people, based on age, location, gender, interests, hobbies or even based on the groups they have joined within the Facebook community. In this case you want to focus on EMS, paramedics, firefighters and dispatchers.

Facebook implores a quality control system to ensure that the advertisements that run throughout their community stay within their guidelines and do not offend or disrupt member activity or overall experience.  Bes ure to use their quality control system to develop compelling advertisements that stand out in the marketplace, and capture the attention of potential buyers.

Also keep in mind that Facebook advertising is based on display, rather than search. This means that your ads will be automatically triggered to appear based on your settings, rather than when a user conducts an on-site search.

Users can also choose to rate advertisements, helping to retain quality throughout the community. So, don’t use misleading or spammy ads or you will hurt your brand and possible be banned from ads by FaceBook.

In this final top mistakes on affiliate marketing let’s talk about…

POOR QUALITY TRAFFIC

Sometimes you may try a bit TOO hard to get traffic to your EMS blog/site. You might end up focusing too much on getting a large quantity of visitors, and the quality of the traffic might be too low or untargeted. While it’s great to have a large number of visitors to your site, it’s much more important to make sure the traffic is quality traffic. By quality traffic, I mean traffic that shares a few traits.

Traffic should be:

• Targeted to the EMS industry.
• More than curious, but directly interested in the topic.
• Willing to purchase something in the EMS niche.
• Able to purchase something in the EMS niche.

The traffic should be well-targeted to your EMS blog or site. You might be able to get a few thousand visitors from social bookmarking sites to your website about marine aquariums, but these visitors may be only vaguely interested. You might buy 10,000 random visitors to your marine aquarium site for $9 on eBay, but chances are most of those visitors will NOT be interested in aquarium fish!

But if you got that traffic from targeted keywords via PPC, or if you got the traffic from search engines or a banner ad on a related site, those visitors would almost certainly be interested in aquariums!

Targeted traffic can be elusive. Sometimes it’s pretty difficult to get targeted traffic to your site. If you’re in an extremely competitive EMS niche like NREMT or EMS gear and apparel , you migght find it harder to get a nice quantity of visitors.

Most of the time it’s just a matter of:

• Getting backlinks from quality, EMS RELATED sites.
• Writing articles on the paramedic or EMT topic.
• Submitting your site to EMS related directories.
• Buying links on related sites.
• Spending time working on SEO.
• Targeting long-tail keywords with little competition.
• Focusing more on quality than quantity.

Search engine traffic is some of the most targeted and high-quality traffic possible. You should aim for getting at least 50% of your traffic from search engines, if possible. Why is search engine traffic so targeted?

Well, because people who are searching for something are obviously interested in the topic. Let’s say you are at a social bookmarking site and you see an interesting article about a recent archaeological find. Out of curiosity, you click the link and read the story. It’s an interesting story, but only because it was a little strange and unusual. On this site, they are advertising a series of books and videos about ancient civilization. Would you buy? You might. But chances are you wouldn’t. That single interesting story probably would NOT be enough to get you to buy this product, unless you just happened to be interested in the topic already.

Now, let’s say you were extremely interested in ancient civilizations. You get on Google and you search for “ancient civilization” + “recent discoveries”. You find this interesting article, and you read it. Now you see the ad for the book and video series. Would you buy? If you didn’t already have it and you could afford it, there is a very good chance that you would, because you’re already highly interested in the subject!

This is the kind of traffic you need to get. You need to get traffic that is already interested in a topic. While getting some extra traffic is nice, you should try to focus more on TARGETED traffic.

PAYING TOO MUCH FOR PPC ADS

Many affiliate EMS marketers use pay-per-click traffic from sites like Google AdWords to send traffic to their affiliate links. It’s a great idea if you have the money to spend, but it’s not easy.

PPC is actually pretty difficult to use if you don’t know what you’re doing. There are dozens of different ways to screw up a PPC campaign, and if you’re not careful, you could end up spending far more than you make. Another worry with PPC traffic is the fact that your affiliate checks will take a while to come. You may not get paid before your PPC account comes due. If this happens, you’re on the line personally for the bill. If you can’t pay it, you could lose your account!

There are several ways to make sure you pay as little as possible for your clicks:

• Choose long-tail keywords that are very closely related to the product you’re promoting.
• Bid for EMS product names rather than just keywords.
•  Be careful to avoid unprofitable keywords like “free”.
•  Group keywords into related groups.
•  Make sure your landing page is very high quality.
•  Make sure your landing page is easy to navigate.
•  Don’t send traffic directly to affiliate links.
•  Try to get visitors to opt-in to an email list before you send them to your affiliate link so you can market to them over and over.
•  Watch campaigns closely and weed out unprofitable keywords.
•  Monitor sales and eliminate products that don’t convert.
•  Make sure your ads get a high CTR on AdWords. The higher your click-through ratio, the cheaper your clicks will be.

You have to be sure that everything you do on PPC is tracked and monitored carefully. Since you are spending money for every click, you must make sure those clicks are as profitable as possible. If you can set up named campaigns or use tracking codes in the affiliate programs, you should do so. This will help you see exactly how much traffic you’ve sent via PPC (as opposed to other traffic sources) so you can test various ads and keywords.

PUTTING TOO MANY OR TOO FEW ADS

Whenever you promote EMS affiliate products on your bog/site, it may be tempting to put a ton of ads, assuming that the more ads you put on the site, the more clicks you will get.

This is a mistake. When you put too many ads, it will be harder to get links to the site, and people will also be more likely to hit the back button without viewing your content at all. Think about it for a moment. When you visit a website that has a large number of ads, what is your first inclination? For most people, they assume that the site was made solely for the purpose of making money. They will usually leave if there are too many ads. Some people make the opposite mistake. They don’t want to “bother” their visitors, so they put very few ads. They may make the ads so small that they are practically invisible. In this case, they will get very few clicks, thus making very little money.

You have to find a good balance. You need to make sure you have enough ads, and they are prominent enough to get clicked often, but not so intrusive that visitors leave immediately. I like to use Google AdSense’s guidelines. They allow a maximum of three ad blocks per page, and I find that works well for EMS affiliate banners, too. I usually put one ad at the top of the page, another either in line with the content or in the sidebar, and another at the bottom. On some sites, I may also place a few text links in the content itself. Sometimes these content links work best and I will have another article on using that as a sole affiliate method coming up.

You should also make sure to showcase the ads in a way that makes them appear to be part of the site, but so they will also stand out. If you make them too obvious, the site will look ugly and spammy. If you blend them too well, they won’t be noticed.  You should test and track various ad types, sizes, and placements until you find a combination that gets you plenty of clicks, but also plenty of sales on those clicks.

Keep testing placement to see what works best with your visitor type. Keep this in mind when ever you decide to add another affiliate product to your pages.

POOR CHOICE OF EMS AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

When you choose an affiliate product to promote, you should be sure to choose one that you believe will convert well. You should also be sure the company itself is known for integrity, or at least doesn’t have a poor reputation.

It can be difficult to anticipate how well a particular EMS merchant will convert. If you have the opportunity to choose between a number of different EMS merchants for a single product, it won’t always be price that determines how well each one will convert. There are many factors that determine whether someone will buy from a particular merchant. These factors may include, but are not limited to:

•  Whether they have heard of or trust the merchant.
•  The price of the item.
•  The price of shipping.
•  Shipping methods available.
•  Reviews of the product or merchant.
• Customer service quality.
•  Site quality and usability.
•  Quality of the description and sales method.
•  Payment methods available.
•  Quality and quantity of item photos.
•  Many other factors.

Sometimes you may think you have a winning combination. You might find a merchant that has a very low price, low shipping, a great looking site, and a quality presentation, but it may not convert well. There may be factors you’ve missed, or factors you never would have thought of.

In this case, you should test other merchants. It might be that the particular EMS related item you’re promoting just doesn’t sell well. It happens! But it may also be the merchant, so you might want to test various merchants before you abandon a product completely. You also need to look at other related products. Sometimes a product just doesn’t convert well at any merchant, in which case you would just need to choose something else.

Occasionally you may choose an entire niche that is unprofitable. Maybe you focus on EMS gear or apparell and it just isn’t working well with your visitors. This doesn’t happen all that often, but it can happen. In this case, try a different niche within the EMS field, maybe equipment or study and training resources.

Take a look at some study and training resources by The EMS Professional you can be an affiliate of and earn between $7-$70 per sale.

The EMS Professional Affiliate Program

EMS Boot Camp Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing for EMS blogs or paramedic websites is a very simple concept. Almost anyone can make money with it very easily. But there are a few things you can do that can derail your efforts big time.

If you know these things before you get started, then you have a much better chance of making really good money right from the start without wasting time or money. If you’ve already started your affiliate marketing efforts, you may be making these mistakes already. But it’s never too late. You can start turning your campaigns aroun right now, and it only takes a few minor changes in most cases. In fact, just a few easy changes can quickly increase your income. Perhaps doubling, tripling, or even more the amount you make!

Mistakes Part One

NOT BUILDING A LIST

Perhaps the biggest mistake affiliate marketers make is not building an email list. Building a list is crucial in most markets. You need a list of people you can market to again and again. Unless your sites are particularly sticky (meaning people stay for a long time and come back often), you only get one shot at making money from each visitor.

If someone leaves your blog/site without buying anything, that may be a customer lost. They probably won’t be back to your site, so you’ve lost them forever. But if you get them to opt-in to your email list before they leave, the you have the potential to market to them again and again. You will be able to send marketing messages out to them often, and you may get several sales from a single individual over the course of their membership to your blog or email list.

If you aren’t already building an email list, I highly recommend doing so. You may want to give away a freebie as an incentive to get people to join your list. This might be a free resource, or some sort of course that teaches them how to do something. There are a bunch of places you can find free reports or resources to offer your list. If you don’t have your own freebie to offer you can look around and ask other EMS bloggers or paramedic websites that have free stuff of you can use it for your list building efforts. Most will grant you permission as long as you don’t alter the content or use spammy list building strageties.This will help entice more people to join your mailing list.

I recommend Aweber for your email list building needs.

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