The Context Machine

Content rich sites can earn additional income, instead of or in addition to the use of traditional affiliate banners — by using Google AdSense. Adsense serves up contextually targeted text and image ads that are targeted to particular pages of your site. They are designed to give ongoing, appropriate product purchase opportunities to your site visitors, with a minimum of effort by the site publisher. Once approved for the program, the site publisher places one link per site page, and is served up to three ads when pages are opened.

Google creates the relationships with the advertisers and only delivers the most appropriate ones to your web pages. Based upon keywords, a real time auction takes place as a visitor opens a page on your website. Based upon bids placed by advertisers, Google AdSense places relevant cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) ads on your page.

Publishers need to carefully read the conditions for participating in the AdSense program. They include not obscuring the ads in any way with color or graphics, not launching a new browser when the ads are clicked on, placing the links only on pages with content, not displaying them on pop-ups, pop-unders or email, and not changing the code provided by the program for pasting into your web pages. Bringing unnatural attention to the ads by advertising on other websites or mass mailing is also prohibited, as is labeling the ads with anything other than “sponsored links” or “advertisements”.

It may seem like a daunting list of no’s, but upon inspection they make sense because they protect you, your site and the advertisers, to prevent misuse and fraud. If you read the rules carefully, use common sense, and don’t try sneaky maneuvers, the upside possibilities are certainly worth a try.

Karen Kari’s articles and more information on the affiliate business can be found at:

http://www.affiliatebandit.com

http://www.advertisingcellar.com

http://www.billionfreeads.com

A customer service failure, simply defined, is customer service performance that fails to meet an individual’s expectations. Typically, when a service failure occurs, a customer will expect to be compensated for the inconvenience in the form of any combination of refunds, credits, discounts or apologies.

The success of such customer service recovery efforts is determined by the individual’s expectations and perceptions of the organization. Two key elements impact any effort to restore customer satisfaction: the strength of customer relationships and the severity of service failure.

Service failure: Service performance that fails to meet expectations

The strength of the customer relationship with the organization prior to a customer service failure has a buffering effect in the event of failure. Research suggests that customers who expect the relationship to continue actually have lower service recovery expectations, and in turn, are more satisfied with customer service performance after recovery.

While this may seem counterintuitive at first glance, consider the expectations of customers with a stronger relationship with the organization. A customer who does not have much commitment to the organization tends to be more transaction-focused and expects immediate service recovery when a particular transaction fails to meet expectations.

Conversely, a customer with strong commitment may demand less immediate compensations with the expectation that strong future interactions may correct the customer service failure over time. Such findings suggest that service providers not only have measures in place to identify the strength of customer relationships but also the ability to react to customer service failures.

The severity of the customer service failure moderates the relationship between customer satisfaction and commitment. Even with strong service recovery, research indicates that customers may still be upset, engage in negative word-of-mouth, and be less likely to develop trust with and commitment to the organization, if the original customer service failure was really bad.

In these cases, managers may need to do more to mend the strength of customer relationships and restore commitment. To identify such cases, service organizations need to track and identify occurrences of customer service failure as well as the severity of each.

The data available at the point of any customer service failure, most notably the information provided by the customer at the time of the complaint, should be viewed as critical marketing research data necessary not only for immediate service recovery but for improvement of future performance.

Remember, a customer service failure is defined as a failure to meet customer expectations and the success of any recovery effort is measured by each individual customer against his/her own expectations. Therefore, managers would be well served to conduct a post-recovery assessment of customer expectations and perceptions of recovery performance against those expectations.

Classic customer service failure: serving cold

The impact of service failure recovery on customer satisfaction can be easily illustrated with a familiar example. Consider the case of a restaurant patron complaining about his meal being served cold. In all likelihood, this is not a severe customer service failure if managed properly.

If the customer’s server fails to offer a sufficient apology and brings back a reheated meal after a 20-minute wait, a first-time customer may be immediately deterred and never return. If this is a long-time customer who has always received excellent service, he may or may not write this failure off, but either way will expect this sub-par service to be countered with excellent service in the future.

While you may expect the customer with a long history of having received excellent service to be more demanding in the case of such a failure, in reality the new customer has the higher expectations. His perceptions of the restaurant are impacted by only this one experience where customer service performance failed to meet his expectations. Without a formal apology from a supervisor, a refund, and perhaps a future credit, this new customer may allow this experience to so alter his expectations of customer service performance at this restaurant as to prevent him from returning.

The long-time customer has his expectations set by a long history of excellent dining experiences and may be easier to satisfy in the immediate wake of a customer service failure.
In either case, the restaurant manager must immediately begin to turn his focus on ensuring future service delivery levels and enhancing the strength of customer relationships with each of these patrons.

About the author

Brian Backer is a project manager with Polaris Marketing Research. The Atlanta marketing research firm specializes in consumer and business customer service satisfaction, including service satisfaction tracking and service quality measurement. Polaris’ state-of-the-art marketing research also includes customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement programs, including personalized project management. Backer can be reached at 866-217-7014 or find out more at the Polaris Marketing Research website at http://www.polarismr.com.

Since the advent of the internet affiliate programs have
been a staple internet success. Origionally they started
out as single tiered programs and eventually evolved into
what we have today.

Opportunities for everyone multiplied by ten. But let’s
take a closer look at affiliate directories and the way they
currently operate. What I’m about to tell you will change
the way you see things entirely. Don’t worry, The rain on
your parade will be short-lived.

Affiliate directories currently provide a means to an end.
They supply eager affiliates with quality products and
services to promote with good commissions which generally
keeps affiliates happy and well fed. So what’s wrong with
that? Nothing except for one thing! You usually sign up to
their free e-mail newsletter and go about your business.
But wait, there’s more.

What are they doing with that opt in subscriber list of
theirs? Making money! Are you cashing in on it? No, they
don’t want you to. You just signed up as a sub affiliate or
they may have a deal with the website for a monthly fee or
commission per sale. When you market a product they make
money. Nothing wrong with that either.

Question is, how can you recruit your own army of sub
affiliates as well? Traditionally when you market a product
you target “consumers” not potential sub affiliates. If
you’re smart you probably provide them a way to join your affiliate program, but how effective is this method? If 1 out of every 100 people buy the product, what’s the conversion rate for sub affiliate signups? How about network marketers? I’ll let you do the math on that one.

Without a website it’s virtually impossible to compete with
the big dogs. But wait, all hope is not lost. See, I
promised the rain on your parade would be short lived!
Here’s were the fun really begins.

Imagine, per say opportunities existed for you to overcome
these “limitations” and have even more residual income
streams. Or better yet, one very stable residual income
stream.

would you take advantage of those opportunities? Take into
consideration the advantages of 2, 3, and 4 tiered affiliate
programs and multilevel marketing.

Multilevel affiliate programs offer you the potential to
increase your income dramatically. When the revenue drops
in your own sales your bases are covered and you’ve got
nothing to worry about. With multilevel marketing you never
have to worry about your income dropping off a cliff and
disappearing completely.

Once you’ve recruited your downline all you have to do is
help them to succeed for you to succeed. The difference
between the two is that affiliate marketing is a glorified
one hit wonder and multilevel marketing keeps working for you long after you’ve put in the effort. You don’t have to constantly work at driving traffic to your site in the hopes that sales will be generated.

Now don’t go off half cocked thinking you can recruit sub
affiliates and do nothing yourself. Without the sales part
of the deal you don’t have squat! Nobody wants to go
through all that work to find that a whole lot of sub
affiliates just wanted to get rich quick without any effort
on their part!

Ok next question. Are there any websites designed
specificly to help affiliates and network marketers succeed?
Yes but at a price. As a seasoned marketer or a newbie your
always looking for an edge, and most of your time IS STILL
being spent being marketed to. And you still don’t have
access to a stinking opt in email list! With network
marketing you don’t have to worry about building a list as
much, or maybe not even at all if you so choose.

Now here’s the most important question of all. Even if you
did have access to a opt in list what would you do with it?
were would you start? Would you be able to duplicate your
results thousands and thousands of times over by yourself?

Probably not. Not without a whole lot of time and money
invested. It’s a sad reality that most marketers don’t
succeed. Consider all the sources that your getting your
information from. Not “ONE” of them has all the answers and
they won’t give you the chance to all work together with
others towards a common goal without the right things being
in place at the right time.

Wanna learn how to generate thousands of highly targeted visitors, absolutely free?
=> http://www.iwantchoices.com