Make Affiliate Money

Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year Holiday. I have been off work for a total of 11 days, have travelled over 1000 miles in total, visited so many friends and family members and even had a minor car crash in between!

I had intended to dedicate a couple of days to developing my new membership site which will be my first venture into the Publisher world, but on the way back from my local Mall, some idiot rear-ended me. It took almost a full day to sort out a hire car, insurance and garage etc and in the end I didn’t get anything done.

In the run up to Christmas I had made some good consistent sales with Clickbank which was great, but from Boxing Day to 2nd January I had no sales, everyone was partying or on vacation, certainly not buying electronic products online!

So onto my goals for 2009.

1) Consistency from Clickbank Sales – at least $1500/month after refunds

2) Complete and launch new Membership Site on Clickbank

3) Revive my Everloss and Efficient Planet campaigns

4) Continue to diversify with CB products I promote to avoid fluctuations

5) Sell off some of my sites that I do not have time or passion for

6) Try to make a regular additional income flipping sites building on success in 2008

7) More regular posting on this blog with more tips and tricks

Build a number of subscriber lists to promote future products to

9) Continue to be an active member of Nichechoppers Forum

10) Do all of this while keeping my well paid day job and hopefully getting a promotion!

Anyone else set some Affiliate Marketing Goals for 2009? Post them in the comments.

James

Popularity: 100% [?]

I have been told I must leave my laptop alone for the next two days by my lovely Wife.  I know what is best for me so I will comply!

Seriously, Christmas is important especially if you are lucky enough to have a great family and good friends.

Due to my impending laptop ban I have been working like crazy on a new website which I launched today.  I decided to go back to basics and remember what I did in August to make really good money from Forex.  I have created another Forex review site (I will give details later) and this time I have been able to learn from my mistakes and lessons I have had from other people and forums.

The site is easier to read, has more graphics, good navigation and more importantly has php cloaked affiliate links which look much more professional.

I have removed all TIDs from my hoplinks, so I will not be able to know if the site makes more sales or not, but I have made sure the site has analytics etc from the start so that I can track keywords etc.

I have used a template from www.freewebsitetemplates.com which really do have free templates and they also give the psd file too.  I have learnt a lot about designing with fireworks and CSS during this site creation, every day is a school day!

Anyway, must go.  Laptop is being switched off in T minus 5 minutes!

Merry Christmas Everyone and a Happy New Year.

James

Popularity: 1% [?]

In the last month several new Forex products have been launched on Clickbank, to name a few:

Forex Detector released from the Nichechopper Stable

FAP Turbo release by Marcus Leary (currently No1 on Clickbank and climbing – could top 1000 gravity!)

Forex Boomerang is another one from Norb at Nichechoppers

Pipzu is from DP and Nichechoppers regular “Kinitex”

And it doesn’t stop there, Norb has another big launch planned for next March, not sure why the wait, but what I do know is that with every new Forex product he launches he has learnt from the previous one and the marketing is refined to improve sales.

I have taken a different approach to marketing these new products as one of my main review sites has unfortunately been “sandboxed” by Google, even though it is a PR3 and was No1 for the main keywords it is now in the depths, not to be seen for a few months, I suspect this is due to a high number of links being added over a short period of time, this needs to be the subject of another post so I will leave it there.

With PipZu I have just registered a few review type free blogs, completely BUM style.  FAPTurbo I have bought a nice domain which is being used as a lander, I have been driving traffic here as well as some direct with a hoplink from Adwords, I have made two sales so far from about $20 investment so profit is about $100.  The problem is that Google has done it’s usual adjustments and now clicks on Page 1 cost too much for me.  Still gettting some traffic though so will keep that ticking over.  With Forex Detector I have again bought a good domain as a lander and directing articles there, my ezine article is currently No1 on Google for the name.  One sale this week which was a massive $92 commission.  Let’s hope it sticks and doesn’t get refunded.  Forex Boomerang is the same as Detector, but no sales yet.

The main difference is the way FAPTurbo has blown up at over 700 gravity on CB, this means there is an incredible buzz around and the name is well known, this results in more searches for the name and then clicks via Adwords.  I haven’t tried PPC on the others as there are hardly any searches, I would rather make sales organically from these as it is easier to get on Page 1 with them without paying for it.

I am just wondering if the market is saturated now and the consumers are so confused about all of the outrageous claims of incredible profits and the different price tags etc.  If I was going to buy one of these EAs I really would struggle to know which one to go for.  FAPTurbo could hit 1000 gravity on CB, I wonder if any product has got that high before.  It just shows you how quickly the likes of Commission Blueprint fades from the top spot after all the big email campaigns have stopped!

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Apologies for the long period of time since my last post, there are several reasons for this, some private and some relating to me being busy with my day job and affiliate marketing.

I previously mentioned a desire to become a publisher and have taken some significant steps towards this with the purchase of a domain, content creation, analysis of competition and web design.  My problem with this has been focus, I have done a bit of all of these things, but not actually completed anything other than the domain purchase!  I need to take some time to focus solely on the activities required to complete this project, I think I may use some time off over Christmas to do this.

In the meantime I have also been attempting to keep on top of several significant product launches via Clickbank such as FAPTurbo, Forex Detector and PipZu, all high paying and generally converting well.  One converted 1/10 from a direct linking PPC campaign!  Made $160 from two sales!  I wait to see what the refunds are like!

I have also been attempting to improve my Web Design skills by following some online tutorials for Macromedia Fireworks.  I didn’t realise it’s capabilities which seem similar to Photoshop, but I have never used either in anger.  I have also bought myself a new laptop as an early Christmas present, I will use it soley for Internet Business for tax reasons!

I will try to make more regular updates and give more of an insight into some of my Affiliate Marketing tricks.

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There are good publishers like Norb at Nichechoppers who help and assist affiliates, offer a good share of the pie (normally 60-75%), have great affiliate materials and offer review copies for free.

Then there are bad ones who don’t and even worse they try to rip affiliates off, steal commission, reduce the % share compete with affiliates on PPC etc.  One actually took down his sales page and replaced it with an opt-in page, basically gathering email addresses so that he could email the buyer and redirect to another sales page with no commission to the affiliate.  There were many affiliates still paying for traffic to that site long after the publisher made this change.  This is scandalous.

The most recent site which I have been promoting that has been taken down with no notice is Silicon Forex.  I was promoting this product on many sites, I also own www.siliconforex.co.uk and had it re-directed to the sales page.  I was promoting via PPC, but had stopped that since Clickbank has been having problems.

I was carrying out a routine check of my links when I found that the Silicon Forex site was not responding, it is possible that this could happen for a short time, but I checked back later to find it still down.  I then emailed support and the another email address I had for the site, both were returned failed.  Finally I emailed Clickbank to advise them and to my surprise I got a response saying that they would remove from the marketplace, “thanks for letting them know” this is a major problem for CB, they have no idea what their publishers are doing.

Anyway, make sure you check your hoplinks and also the sales page to make sure all is working.  You will still see hops in CB, but they may not actually go anywhere.  I have now replaced all my Silicon Forex links to Forex Detector, another NC product which I know won’t let me down.

James

Popularity: 1% [?]

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…..

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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!

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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

Popularity: 1% [?]

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

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Popularity: 1% [?]