Make Affiliate Money
How I Make Money Online!

I’ve been messing about with web design for about a year now, using Dreamweaver as my weapon of choice. To be honest a lot of the websites I have developed have been based on the Dreamweaver Templates and CSS. And all of them have been html based. Any wizzy bits have been javascript and the only php mysql has been limited to pommo.org autoresponder.

About two months ago I was stuck with one of my sites, I wanted to add an element which was based on the current date, ie display several dates that were 3-35 days prior to the current date. I asked the question over at nichechoppers forum and some very helpful guys gave me the full code but in php. I explained I had no idea about php. “Just add the code to the webpage and rename the file .php” Surely it can’t be that easy! It is.

I fully intend to learn about php code (a book is on the Xmas List!), but have done OK with just copying and pasting code and playing with it for now. It has been trial and error, but I have just added a fairly complex bit of code to a finance domain I have www.creditfor.co.uk It was a free script that I simply cut and paste which is a Mortgage Calculator. I then modified it for £ instead of $ which was fairly simple, but then got a bit carried away and added some simple expressions to show the monthly interest only as well as the capital repayment. Playing about with this really has given me a better appreciation about how php works on a basic level.

I am told there is a good website out there for php tutorials and help called tizag.com but I am old school and prefer to read a book, so roll on Christmas.

Get stuck in guys and try it out.

I suppose there is a point in every Internet Marketer’s career that they contemplate writing an ebook or becoming a publisher, whether it be on the subject of Internet Marketing, a rewritten successful product or a new untapped niche.

I decided to start this blog as I was being asked lots of questions by people on forums about what I do to make money and how I do it. I have tried to give real life examples, cover some basics and some more advanced things. So far the feedback has been great, I always welcome more. I also wanted to have a place where I could put all my thoughts, links to useful resources and also somewhere to send people if they asked me about my online endeavours.

I think there is a market for a particular type of affiliate marketing guide, don’t expect to see lots of outrageous claims about making millions without any effort or lots of photoshopped clickbank screen shots or claims of being an internet marketing guru, I am going to tell the truth and see where it gets me! I am making a decent additional income which given the time and effort could turn into a full time job, but right now a lot of people (like me) would be happy with a little extra each month to get them through the credit crunch and buy the nice to have “extras” or “luxuries”.

I will try and document my journey to becoming a publisher, but will need to be careful with the actual details to avoid anyone getting the jump on me.

More details to follow…..

I have only recently discovered the importance of Analytics, not only Google Analytics but any sort of statistics from Clickbank Analytics to Google Adwords stats to Google Webmaster Tools.

Clickbank Analytics

The most useful thing you can do with Clickbank Analytics is to add TIDs or Tracking ID to a hoplink in the form of affID.pubID.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=TRACKING where “TRACKING” can be anything you want up to 8 characters. This code will track the click to the specific link. So for example I would use http://myaffID.siliconfx.clickbank.net/?tid=SILADWDS on links from a landing page I have set up to receive Adwords Traffic for the product SILICON FOREX. Then I would know how many of the visitors to that landing page clicked on the hoplink, I can then tweek the landing page to improve the Clickthrough Rate or CTR. I can also see if that type of traffic converts at the Clickbank end.

Adwords Stats

I use Adwords not only for getting good targetted traffic, but also for realtime keyword data. Google Adwords is packed full of stats from how many times a keyword is searched to how many times your different ad variations are clicked and so on. You can use the keyword stats to compile a list of long tail keywords to focus on for SEO and generic traffic.

Google Webmaster Tools

I have registered all of my sites with Google Webmaster Tools which is the only reliable way to find out when Google Robots have visited your sites and what they see. It is also the only accurate record of the backlinks which Google has found and considers to be of value. In addition to this you can also find out where your site is ranking for certain keywords and what keywords have resulted in visitors to your site. You will need to add a verification tag to your website to get these stats. This leads on to my most recent discovery.

Google Analytics

I had tried to add Google Analytics to one of my sites before, but somehow failed. Since I started this blog and moved it to my own hosting from Wordpress.com I decided to try and add the script here. I have seen some great growth via my hosting company stats, but Google Analytics has told me so much more about my visitors, where you come from, what keywords brought you here, what country you’re from, how long you stay on the site, which links you click on while you are here. The stats are just mind blowing and very useful. I have now rolled it out across several of my sites to help me to increase my traffic, keyword focus, CTR and ultimately ROI. What’s more it links with Adwords to increase my understanding further of what works.

Just a quick word of warning - don’t spend more time studying the Analytics than you do actually making money, this stuff is seriously addictive!

If you are just starting out in Affiliate Marketing or a Seasoned Professional you cannot fail to have noticed Clickbank’s #1 Product is Commission Blueprint.

What everyone wants to know is what is all hype about?, who is behind this product? and is it worth the money. Let me try and answer these questions.

1) Don’t be fooled by the hype and the inflated Gravity. When Commission Blueprint was launched it instantly had over 500 gravity and that climbed to 800+ at it’s peak. It is widely considered that over 50% of that gravity was down to affiliates purchasing with their own links and that causes most of the “Make Money Online” products to have a higher than normal gravity score. The amount of people writing reviews is testament to this.

2) The creators of Commission Blueprint are the “dynamic duo” Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey. Who? Both are very successful and experienced marketing people, Steve has personally made over $500,000 from Clickbank sales and this is outside of the Internet Marketing Niche. He has been working in Information Systems for over 20 years, including CIO of a major company. Tim Godfrey was the creator of Profit Praxis, a very successful product in it’s own right (check out the 27 August 2008 sales of $74,500 - in a day!). The combination of these two “gurus” was sure to be a hit and it has taken the AM world by storm.

3) Commission Blueprint’s format is predominantly video based tutorials, pdf reports and special “secret affiliate” tools. Some of the videos are quite long at 20+ minutes, and annoyingly refer to other videos in the series (not easy to view two videos at once, like you can with books or pdfs) but it’s useful stuff and you can either download and watch again or just login and view on the site. There are some great templates on offer, 2 opt-in templates, one review, and one pre-sell. And I believe these are being added to all the time.

The Video Tutorial Course is great and has some interesting bid management and bidding strategy’s, that I have never seen or heard of before. As with most products in this niche they cover the basics and add their “secrets” so some of the more experienced guys will find it a bit boring, whilst newbies will be hard pushed to find a better introduction to this exciting world. Just as a quick note, these guys are spending big on Adwords, so unless you have a $xxx per day budget, don’t expect to make $500K in a year, but it is all scalable. I would be very happy with $50K extra income each year!

Overall, the concept and approach is unique and the product is worth the price.

Commission Blueprint >>>

JZ

Following on from my earlier post, in response to a question from ddt “How do I get Started in Affiliate Marketing? - WITH NO MONEY” , I promised to explain a bit more about BUM Marketing and Article Writing.

You may have heard the term BUM Marketing and thought, what on earth does that stand for? In fact it is not an abbreviation it is a marketing style that was designed and popularized by a man named Travis Sago. The reason why it is called bum marketing is because it is meant to be so simple and straight forward that if a bum off the street was given a computer with internet access, he would be able to generate money with this form of marketing in no time at all. You should be able to do it without spending any money.

There is actually very little difference between normal Article Marketing and BUM Marketing, but BUM Marketing is done to specifically earn affiliate income and/or create a “list” of potential customers. Plain Article Marketing is done for several reasons including building good quality backlinks and generating targetted traffic to your website containing Adsense or similar EPC (earn per click) networks.

Basic Bum Marketing Steps:

1. Choose a Niche market (like Forex)
2. Choose Affiliate Products to promote (generally ones that pay good commission and have good “gravity”)
3. Find some good keywords and groups of keywords that are searched regularly (I use Google Adwords Tool for this) This will tell give you lists of keywords and how often they are searched for in any country.
4. Set up a Landing Page like the examples in Part 1, you can use a free provider such as squidoo, synthasite, blogger, wordpress. Make sure you have the keywords you are targetting as the title and url i.e. if you are targetting “dog training guide” then look for http://squidoo.com/dogtrainingguide or http://dogtrainingguide.wordpress.com or similar, some people have suggested that using a - between words on squidoo is better, i.e. http://squidoo.com/dog-training-guide for search engine results.
5. Write a review or details of the product(s) that you are promoting on these pages and include your hoplink. Do not have any distractions or easy ways out on this page like Adsense adverts or links that are not hoplinks, you want the visitor to leave this page by clicking on the hoplink.
6. Open accounts at ezinearticles.com, hubpages, knol, etc (there are loads of article directories, but only a few rank well in Google) Knol is fairly new, but as a Google product I suspect it will start to rank well!
7. Write unique articles relating to the niche or even the products that you are promoting, they need to focus on the same keywords you picked in 3 and 4 above, in particular the title. Each of the article directories have different rules about content, links etc but ezine seem to be the most difficult to please and most inconsistent. hubpages is very easy to use, you can use images and they don’t have such stringent rules. On the flip side, you will get less exposure on hubpages than you will from ezine. hubpages is added straight away and ezine can take up to a week for an editor to approve or reject.
8. Keep submitting good quality articles to ezine and if you submit 10 in a row that are approved without problem, you will have the opportunity to ask for an upgrade to platinum status, this will give you unlimited submissions and apparently quick approval. More than likely you will not get platinum after 10 articles, and will be awarded basic plus status where you can add another 25 articles before going for platinum again, do not worry about this, just keep submitting good, keyword focused articles with links to your landing pages in the “resource box” or throughout on the hubpages example. You will get some traffic from these eventually and also good quality backlinks which will help your landing page rank higher and get more organic (free) visitors.
9. Bookmark your articles and landing pages using digg.com, propeller.com, furl.com, stumbleupon, del.icio.us etc, this will create good network of links, again helping search engine ranking of both the articles and landing page.
10. Keep updating landing pages and improve their “lens rank” etc by adding more features.
11. Most important, BE PATIENT - this is not a way to make money overnight, it will take a lot of time and effort and will take anything from 2-4 weeks to get a decent level of traffic and your first affiliate sale. It will be worth it in the end as the sales will be 100% profit and that feels great!

Good Luck - Tell me how it works out.

JZ

I have had a few questions from affiliates via other forums and I figured they might be questions others also need answers to.

I would like to offer assistance where I can so if anyone else has any affiliate related questions, please post a comment and if I can I will update this with an answer.

1) I like the way you setup your sites with a frame. Can you show me how to do that as well? Would save me a bunch of research, I can possibly help you out with something sometime, i’d owe you one, let me know, thanks. (This was about my site http://www.paidsurveysreviewed.com )

It’s not a frame its a CSS, it is a standard template in Dreamweaver.

P.S. Never use frames, the search engines don’t like them, the robots can’t follow.

2) you said you use pommo.org for mailing. i want to put the opt in boxes on my blogger blogs and when people sign up they recieve an automated email and then maybe another one 72 hours later, just to push the product that little bit more if they’re not sure to buy at the time and want to recieve some info.

i know with aweber you can do all this but having had a go on the pommo trial site i couldn’t see if there was this option?

do you just send out emails whenever you feel like it to people who have opted in and they get them at the point when they sign up, like they don’t get the back log of emails you’ve sent out?

Pommo is pretty basic really.

The subscriber submits their details and then is sent an email (which you can modify) asking them to confirm the email address is real. When they confirm this they are redirected to a “thank you page” which can be a web address of your choice, even the hoplink if you want.

Once you have the list of subscribers, you can send out mailings to them, I don’t think this can be done automatically, I have just done it as and when I want to.

3) Have you ever tried using an “image src” cookie drop? They are virtually invisible and appear to be working with the testing I have done. No url shows up or anything. You can even send them directly to the site URL. As long as they visit your page, it drops the cookie undetected. Just wondering and if you have any thoughts on it.

That is called cookie stuffing and is on the black hat side of the fence, if I understand it correctly.

Something I have never done and I don’t think it is considered good practice (in some cases I think it is banned by some affiliate networks).

Do a Google search on it.

I can’t really understand why you need to do this.

As I said, if you’ve got a question, write it as a comment and I will try and help out….

If you are new to Affiliate Marketing you might not know about Link Cloaking or you may want to know how to do it.

There are several ways that I tested, I will give my personal view on each one.

1) tinyurl or offto.net cloaking websites.

When I didn’t know better I used offto.net to cloak my affiliate links, you simply put your hop link (http://affiliateID.publisherID.hop.clickbank.net) and the name of your link and they give you a url like http://offto.net/forexbrotherhood which looks better you will agree.  tinyurl and other examples are the same. 

The issue with these is that offto.net could change the link or go out of business or have server downtime all of which is out of your control.

2) Subdomain redirect

My host 1and1 allows me 100 subdomains on my current package.  A sub-domain has the format http://subdomain.domain.com and I created subdomains such as http://forexfunnel.forexrobotreviews.com and then used the 1and1 control panel to redirect this subdomain to my hop link.

I personally like the look of this, but recently I have had some issues where my affiliate id is not showing up on the payment page, so I have stopped doing this.

3) php redirect

This is the way I am now cloaking my hop links (I don’t cloak all of my hop links at the moment, only ones that might be changed by the purchaser, ie other Affiliates.)  You will need a website, hosting and a html/php editor for this, but it really does seem to work the best and most affiliate marketers use it.

You need to create a webpage such as forexfunnel.php and using the editor (I use Dreamweaver) and with no other text, html or php code add the following:

<?php
$url=”http://google.com”; // enter the url here
header(”Location: $url”);
?>

You replace the google.com with your hop link. You then need to upload the page to your website and use the link such as http://automatedforex.co.uk/forexfunnel.php

This looks professional and works just fine.

I am told you can use the following html meta tag instead if you don’t like php, but don’t be afraid of php like I was.  It really is much easier than it looks.

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://google.com/”/>

I hope this is useful to some of you starting out.

James

Some of you may have noticed a change to the Blog layout and look last week.

I was using a wordpress.com free blog called makeaffiliatemoney.wordpress.com to start with and then realised while it was good for SEO and ranking, it was very limited in terms of design and flexibility.

I downloaded the wordpress.org kit and loaded it up to my host and transferred over the posts and comments from the old blog.  this really is very easy if anyone is thinking of doing it.

I then visited UniqueBlogDesigns.com who created blog designs for the likes of Shoemoney and John Chow.  I had a look around and found that they offer this MMO Theme for free which includes all the features I need, including a rotating ad feature which is common on Money Making Blogs.

I really like the “out of the box” look, it is very Web 2.0 and I would recommend it to anyone.  I will consider a unique logo/header, but it serves my purposes just fine.  It is fully customisable and I will add a few more widgets to allow you all a better experience.

James