Make Affiliate Money

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!

Popularity: 2% [?]

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:

1. ~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.
2. ~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:

• Be sure to read section 3 if you haven’t already in our Editorial Guidelines.
• 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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

If you have a spare $2.3million to spend on a new home and you want to live in Highland Park, Illinois you could buy a piece of Architectural History but more importantly the house used in the Film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to store the Ferrari.

If you have never seen the film, then shame on you, no seriously it is a must see.  In the film Ferris and his buddies “borrow” Cameron’s Dad’s priceless Ferrari, pictured left and go into Chicago for a day out.

When they return they realise that his Dad will notice the additional milage on his pride and joy, they come up with a “genius” idea to put the car up on blocks and run the car in reverse to turn the milometer backwards!  Unfortunately the car falls off the blocks and reverses through the window of this spectacular glass pavilion into a ravine.

This 4 bedroom, 4 bathroom house is for sale here…

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/370-Beech-Street_Highland-Park_IL_60035_1109385563

more pics

Popularity: 1% [?]

I was watching the BBC News this evening and there was a report on people who have either been forced to or chosen to take on a second job/income to beat the recession.  Instead of the regular view of second incomes, like bar work, shelf stacking or similar evening activities the report was all about people making money on the internet.  The report mentioned a phrase I had never heard of before calling people making a second income after working a day job, FIVE-TO-NINERS.  I naturally went and bought www.five-to-nine.co.uk with the intention of creating a separate site to this blog giving a wider range of ideas for those wanting to earn a second living either online or offline.

The second part of the news article referred to a website called peopleperhour.com which is a site putting

“freelancers” in touch with a variety of jobs/projects placed by “employers”.  How it works is shown here http://www.peopleperhour.com/howitworks.php

Right now there are

BBC Article – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8067449.stm

Popularity: unranked [?]

I recently found that one of the Forex products I was promoting had suddenly stopped selling the product and instead replaced the Sales Page with an email opt-in page. The Automated Forex Grail was a Forex Expert Advisor which I started promoting late, but still made over $300 in commission until last week.  then the Publisher decided to rip off the hundreds (if not thousands) of affiliates who continued to unwittingly send hops to this site so that he could collect email addresses to exploit later without having to pay clickbank or affiliates commission.

I reported to Clickbank immediately and got this response!

Can you please provide me with more detail as to how you feel the vendor is stripping affiliate commissions? We take these matters very seriously.”

Isn’t it obvious?  Anyway, I explained what I said above about the publisher being able to contact potential customers direct and sell direct.  I then got this response…

“They will be removed from the Marketplace this evening.

Thank you, ”

And they have been removed from the marketplace and hops don’t work, you get this message..

“The target url was invalid. Please contact the publisher to get it fixed.”

So no notification to affiliates, no warning to change your hoplinks, to start promoting something else.  There is a flaw in this process.  All I can suggest is that you regularly check the sales pages for the products you are promoting and if you find anything suspicious let Clickbank know, they will take some action.

I got off lightly, only spent a little bit of money on ppc sending clicks, but one unlucky guy spent $1000 on www.automatedforexgrail.com two days before based on past commission it had made (this was an affiliate site not the official one).  He contacted me asking what he should do, but he is bummed.

I must add that most publishers are legit, some really bad apples get greedy, you just need to keep an eye out for them.

JZ

Popularity: 1% [?]

I recently wrote a review of the Nichechoppers Program, which I have been a part of now for over 12 months.

Last week there was one of Nichechoppers legendary Product Launches, it was actually very low key and leaked early to members of the VIP program.

Within 48 hours of the launch nichechoppers creator, Norb Czufis, produced a video giving a blow by blow account of how this launch made over $25,000 for the publishers.  The video can be seen here.

Now you may be thinking, yeah great so the Publisher made a ton of money, what has that got to do with me.  Well, think about it.  That $25K represents less than 30% of the sale price, which means us affiliates made roughly $50K in commission from this launch!

This is my account from last week.  As well as demonstrating what our share of the pie is, this screenshot also demonstrates something I mentioned earlier about changing accounts.

Obviously there is no proof that I would not have made these sales through my previous clickbank account, but surely it cannot be a coincidence that my fortunes changed almost overnight and I am now back on track to make a 4 figure monthly income from Clickbank again.

I really have Nichechoppers to thank for 90% of my success, not just this week, but for the last 12 months.

Why not find out for yourself what Nichechoppers has to offer you by Clicking Here >>

Popularity: 2% [?]

Some people have too much time on their hands, this guy has used Google SketchUp to show a physical representation of such a large amount of cash.

“All this talk about “stimulus packages” and “bailouts”…

A billion dollars…

A hundred billion dollars…

Eight hundred billion dollars…

One TRILLION dollars…”

The whole thing can be seen here….

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html

Popularity: unranked [?]

I am probably way behind everyone else with this story, but it really made me chuckle when I heard it on the BBC Radio News today.  Thats right, it has made the BBC News.

For those that haven’t heard, Joel Comm the creator of iFart and self titled “Social Media Expert” has written about court action he has taken to determine if the phrase “pull my finger” can be trademarked following agressive action by the developers of a similar iPhone application Air-O-Matic who suggest they have.

Joel writes about it on his blog (click here) and even includes the court filings!

Basically, iFart and Pull My Finger are iPhone Applications that can be downloaded to your iPhone so that you can play fart noises!  Unbelievably Joel Comm is reported to be making over $10,000 per day and this brilliant publicity will only increase that.  It really amazes me how much can be made on the internet from some very simple things.  When you have access to a worldwide customer base you can literally print your own dollars!

Popularity: 6% [?]