Connections are the heart of online marketing. Affiliate programs take that concept to the next level.

Let’s say that you’re running a company that specializes in shoes. Your customer base knows that you’re a shoe expert but also values your input on other high quality products — like handbags. Maybe your customers have asked you about handbags, and you find yourself recommending the same options over and over again. As a shoe vendor, you’re acting as a marketer for the handbag company.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could finalize the deal?

With affiliate marketing, you can.

Company A directs Customer to Company B where the transaction occurs.

Company A then earns a commission from the transaction on Company B.

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Consumers think with both their rational and emotional brains. Study after study says that when we buy, it’s for emotional reasons. Logic comes into play when we try to justify the money we have (or are about to) spend — especially when we’re giving into our wants.

Here is what one Psychology Today article says about our shopping habits.

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Every website needs to prioritize link building. Regardless of your business type or industry, backlinks help drive more traffic to your website and are great for SEO purposes.

So where should you start?

Resource pages need to be a major component of your link building strategy. In fact, 56% of webmasters say that they use resource pages to build backlinks.

This strategy is second only to content creation in terms of the most popular ways to build links. Why is this case?

That’s because the sole purpose of resource pages is to link out to other websites, which makes this an easy process. All you need to do is find authority resource pages that are related to your site, and then convince the webmasters to add your site to their page.

It’s actually not that complex when you know how to approach it.

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There’s many things we can do in order to encourage people to purchase.

But if we’re not careful…

We’ll push people away.

These are friction points, points in our marketing and business that PUSH customers away. In many cases, we don’t even realize it.

Friction points are one of the top reasons why your prospects are hesitating from moving through your funnel.

What is a friction point?

Friction is any variable, website quality, or user behavior trend that is slowing down (or entirely halting) the progression of your company’s sales cycle.

Friction can stem from the most subtle details on your website.

Here are some common sources of friction and ways that your company can avoid them:

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With millions of passionate users, Tumblr is a social media powerhouse that can’t be ignored.

Even if you’ve never read a Tumblr blog, I’ll walk you through the steps you need to take to create an awesome Tumblr blog from scratch.

I’ll also go over how you can promote your blog within Tumblr without being pushy or salesy.

Your first step is to head over to Tumblr.com and sign up on the home page. So you put in your email, your password, and your username, and your username is really important so just like at any social media site, like Pinterest or Facebook or Twitter, you want your username to be a brand name.

So if we are signing up for Quick Sprout, you would want to make it Quick Sprout and click “Sign up,” and then put your age, and agree to the terms and services and click done. And you’re in.

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