I have recently been playing around with some new themes for a number of sites as I have realised how much Google loves Wordpress.
Most Wordpress Themes I have come across can be pretty hard to modify and make them look how you want them, but Woothemes FREE Themes are different, I have been working with the Original Premium News Theme on a couple of sites as I think its work quite well for review site, this site is in VERY early development http://www.onlinesurveysblog.com/
This particular theme has good advert management (simple to use) and easy admin that allows you to change things like the header image without messing about with any source code or images. I have no affiliation with woothemes, just thought I would share this link to their free themes…
I have been focusing on improving some existing sites as I said I would in my 2010 Affiliate Marketing Goals and it has paid off, the last week has seen a big change in fortune.
See my Clickbank Stats below:
The bonus is that they are not coming from just one site, but 5 or 6 different ones meaning that I am less reliant on the fortunes of one source of income.
I am currently considering my offline options and wondering if there is money to be made coaching people to do affiliate marketing, Anyone have any comments on this?
Twitter sucks because it is addictive and can take over your life!!
When I first started using Twitter it was just to find out a bit more about my favourite celebrities but now I am using it more and more to connect with other Internet Marketing people.
It really is viral and addictive, I am going to have to turn off email notifications, because I just can’t help but look immediately to find out more about who has just decided to follow me.
What I have done is automate a number of things, which I really recommend if you are a Tweeter. Check them out:
I mentioned in my recent list of 2010 Affiliate Marketing Goals that I wanted to develop a list of potential customers to market new products to. For some time I have been reading how “The Money is in the List” and yet I have been focusing on building websites to promote products. Some of these sites have had over 10,000 visitors in the last year and I haven’t gathered any details. Doh!
I recently had a wake up call and was reminded of the benefit of having an email list when a fellow Nichechopper showed us his Clickbank stats following a recent product launch, he made over $1700 in a matter of hours!
Everytime a new product is launched properly on Clickbank the Publisher provides emails and prelaunch materials to send out to your list. I always kick myself because I don’t have a list.
So now I am taking action and setting up a list. Stage 1, creating a free product to encourage people to opt in, is underway. I am writing a guide which will be in the form of a pdf ebook which can be downloaded, I may try breaking it down into a 5 part email course as an autoresponder. (This may work better for retaining people on the list and making them comfortable about my emails hitting their inbox)
Stage 2 will be to set up an email capture form on my niche sites and Stage 3 will be to set up a squeeze landing page specifically set up to gather email addresses.
I have tried free autoresponders before, but I think it is now time I spent some money and went for aweber, or one of their cheaper white label versions such as http://clients.xmailpro.com/pricing.htm $19.95 for 10,000 subsccribers. This is not a recommendation as I have not tried it yet. Will let you know how I get on.
This blog can be very focused on Clickbank products and this is my personal preference when making money even with Clickbank’s known problems. However, some of my sites from my early days on the internet continue to bring in a few dollars from Google Adsense clicks.
Google Adsense Adverts are everywhere, some of the biggest and most well known sites make the majority of their income from Adsense (and I mean Millions of $$$), these sites work on huge volumes of visitors and the % of those clicking on their ads. Plentyoffish.com the free dating site made something like $300K/month back in 2006!
Anyway, back to the point of this post, the choice between Clickbank and Adsense…
I look at it like this:
A Clickbank sale of $80 will take 80-100 hops to make giving an EPC of about $1
An Adsense click in the same niche may earn about $1
The benefit of Adsense is that you don’t have to make an allowance for refunds, the problem is you cannot encourage people to click on the adverts like you might with a Clickbank hoplink.
So, if you find a good high paying niche consider Adsense as an alternative to Clickbank. It doesn’t harm to diversify your income streams to allow for changes!
Once again, thanks must go to the guys on the Nichechoppers Forum who brought my attention to this video which show a very odd but interesting secret tip when carrying out any keyword research.
I must have mentioned before that I use the Adwords Keyword Tool when working out what domains to buy and what keywords to focus my sites on. This video shows that once you pick a long tail keyword and then search in Google the number of competing sites might be inaccurate. Watch this video for a much better explanation and demonstration.
Anyone promoting ebooks or other clickbank products will know that Christmas is traditionally a bad time for sales, it doesn’t take a genius to work out why, but I was just checking Clickbank Analytics and this graph speaks a thousand words!
So I have been taking some time out to sort out real life, the day job and Christmas etc and keeping an eye on my online income.
Towards the end of 2009 I took my eye off the ball and pretty much just kept checking on the Clickbank accounts, swapping around when required and playing with a few tweaks. Not much real ACTION to be honest.
2010 needs more ACTION, I plan to do the following:
1) Update a number of existing sites with fresh content, maybe a fresh look to try and improve conversions. Making sure that I also meet the new FTC rules on testimonials etc.
2) Link building for key money making sites to improve traffic, some have dropped a fair bit dur to my lack of ACTION.
3) Cut down on the number of sites I have and focus. A lot of the sites I bought on a whim (probably when drunk) have now expired and I have not re-registered them. These were mainly product name URLs like forexboomerangreview.com etc which never really made any money.
4) List building – I have realised that I have missed out on building a relationship with my site visitors and more importantly the opportunity to upsell to them later on. For example my most successful site has had over 10,500 visitors in 2009 and I don’t have a single email address!
5) Product creation/become a pubisher – I think I probably said this in 2009 Goals! I have an idea for a Clickbank product, it is in a competitive niche, but I think I have a unique idea for it and I have the data/info for it. What I need to do is be honest with myself that I probably need help with it, both technically and graphically for the the website. I have not decided if this will be on a pay as you go basis or having a partner. Watch this space.
6) Make some decent regular money again to pay off last years tax bill and more importantly this years holidays! First holiday planned is to Vegas in April so I need to get moving!
Anyone who uses ezineArticles for affiliate marketing BEWARE, they have started a WAR on you and your fellow marketeers.
Below is a post on ezinearticles blog indicating that they are making a stand against anyone using ezine to direct traffic to affiliate sites.
I have never been a huge fan of ezine, they have always ad very strict editors and silly rules and now this proves they are not willing to play the game. Luckily there are lots of other good article directories out there, many of these were listed here last month.
Most affiliate marketers don’t write original content and if they do write their own articles… their articles are thin, regurgitated Frankenstein article spin-written by some software program… only to flip our end users to a clickbank site (ie: they added no value in the process).
Affiliate marketers fall into one of two camps:
~90% who have decided to scale their craft into hundreds and thousands of articles have become highly efficient at writing keyword loaded copy while making sure that their articles seldom deliver on the promise made in the article title…because if their articles delivered on the promise they made in the title…they fear our end users would never click to their website.
~10% are in it to share genuine expertise with original articles that came from their background…and they are doing this gig to explore a phase in their business life where they are trying to figure out how to convert traffic into dollars so that they can build their own products to sell. This is the type of affiliate marketer we welcome and even on some days, call “ideal.”
Our position and reason why it’s “war” and personal:
We want our million+ daily end users to leave with a positive experience. Delivering thin non-original articles only to flip the end users to a long sales letter page that further promises the moon and stars for only $49.99 does not always deliver a positive end-user experience.
Last month we cracked down on penis enlargement articles and rejected thousands of them that over promised and massively under-delivered. This month our Editors have been instructed that any article that is ‘thin’ in originality AND the end destination URL is an affiliate link; we’re going to reject for “Non Substantial or Not-Original-Enough Content.”
No, we’re not going to over-react and make a big move here. We’re talking about the subjective decision where the article missed the mark by 5-15% vs. where we would have previously accepted the article and let it pass.
We didn’t get to our current success together this many years by thinking ’short-term’ oriented and the fact that our Editorial standards raise every single month should not be a shock to anyone. It’s the way it’s been since day one. Affiliate marketers who submit thin non-original articles are wasting their time submitting to us.
Lastly, some tips about how to get your affiliate-link-included articles accepted:
Do not increase your word count for word count sake. More words that say nothing is not better than fewer words that say nothing.
Insist that your ghostwriters (if you use them) must blow you away with original ideas, seldom thought about solutions, unique perspectives and not the same crap every other article already says about a particular topic. RAISE THE BAR.
Keep the spammy looking article titles to a minimum if at all. Hype does not help get your article accepted faster. Know we’re checking your article body to make certain that you deliver on the promise(s) made in your article title.
Don’t submit 10-1000 articles on same rehashed topic with only the words and tips re-arranged. Our anti-derivative software is being continually tweaked to reject this behavior.
Be proud of your articles. Most affiliate marketers don’t fight us when we reject their articles because they were not worth writing home to Mom about in the first place.
Hope this helps.
If you’ve got tips or advice as to how we can discourage affiliate marketers from wasting their time submitting thin non-original content to us, we’d like to hear it. Our end goal here is to raise the quality of the perception the marketplace has of the type of articles they can expect to find within EzineArticles.com. This focus also helps us look good to those who refer traffic to our members’ articles.
I have recently been playing around with some new themes for a number of sites as I have realised how much Google loves Wordpress.
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