Make Affiliate Money

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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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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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

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This is in response to a comment by ddt.

Part 1

The first thing I must tell you is that Affiliate marketing is not “easy” and you probably won’t make hundreds of thousands of pounds overnight.  I have been testing and trying different things for over a year now, just on Clickbank products.

This is going to sound like an advert, but until I found Nichechoppers I really was just playing around with it.  Norb provides amazing graphics and assistance with all of his products, just check out his everLoss product at the moment and show me another publisher who will give you a ready made minisite with such amazing graphics.  All you need is a domain, a web hosting account, a basic html editor (notepad works if you don’t have cash) and then ftp software to upload a ready-made site already SEO optimised.

If you literally have no money, try squidoo or synthasite.  Synthasite will literally allow you to have your own site with no adverts whereas Squidoo is covered in Adsense ads.  An example of one of my squidoo pages is http://www.squidoo.com/efficient-planet

I produced this very quickly using affiliate materials from several publisher sites.  It is simple and to the point with cloaked affiliate links to the publishers sites.

An example of one of my synthasite pages is http://10minuteforexreview.synthasite.com which I created as a landing page for PPC adverts.  The bonus with doing this with synthasite is that you will also rank well in search engine results if you have good website titles and good content.

In my opinion this landing page looks very professional but was made just from content provided by publishers.  You will note that the affiliate links I have used in this example have not been cloaked and include a “tid” that tells me that the hops came from adwords traffic.  This allows me to track conversion rates.

I hope this gives a few examples of how to start affiliate marketing for free, also known as BUM Marketing.

In Part 2 I will explain a bit about Article Writing.

Any more questions, please write a comment.

James

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A quick note tonight as I am still really tired after the long weekend and Weddings!

I had to make a few changes to a couple of my websites tonight as I had noticed some had been dropped by Google completely, I don’t mean just slipped a few pages, I mean not indexed.

One of them is The Forex Brotherhood which was riding high for “forex brotherhood” terms. It was a holding page and list builder during the pre-launch period and the end of August. Then I decided to redirect it with a hoplink to the Forexbrotherhood.com site, so when someone clicks on theforexbrotherhood.com it goes to the official site. I did this using a php redirect script on the index page.

This worked fine for a while and the site still ranked well for my keywords for several weeks giving me lots of hops and a few sales.

Then suddenly Google updated and the robots then found nothing, no meta tags, no content, no keywords etc etc. All of the links I have built obviously still remain, but they mean nothing if google finds nothing on the site. DOH!

I have reverted to a landing page with some keyword rich content and a list builder. Lets hope Google finds it again quickly and I can get back to where I want to be on the SERPS.

So my tip is, do not use php redirect on the index page if you want it to rank in Google, if you just want to use it as a direct link for ezine or adwords etc then fine, but I want search engine traffic too.

This might not be news to a lot of experienced marketers, but if one of you learns something then I am happy enough.

JZ

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Whatever you think of DigitalPoint Forums with it’s constant spamming, newbies who can’t be bothered to do their own research, the lack of moderation (particularly in the Clickbank Section) and the bonkers “trigger happy” moderators who seem to ban people for no reason, it is very good for one thing, BACKLINKS.

Signature links are a valuable commodity on DigitalPoint and other forums which have the “do-follow” setting activated. They can provide direct traffic from people drawn by the Anchor Text, but more importantly for me they are links respected by Google that improve the Search Engine Results Position or SERPS.

There is an almost daily debate on DigitalPoint about whether forum signature links are good or bad and whether too many too quickly can damage your rep with Google. All I can tell you is that they have always been great for me, I have had sig links on my own profile ever since I could and more recently I have bought links from medium level posters.

I do believe the theory that too many links, too quickly can actually go against a site so I have not looked to buy from high post count members. I focus on buying at least 6 months from members with between 1000-2000 posts and who are averaging 5-10 posts a day. I have actually made what I consider to be good deals, I bought one link for 12 months from someone with 1800 posts for just $40 and this week I bought 3 links and an avatar from the same person for 12 months for just $12! They only have 400 posts at the moment, but that is still more than I have!

I verify all my sites with Google’s Webmaster Tools as this is the only way I am aware of that gives you the accurate number of links Google has trawled and one of my Forex sites is currently showing over 2500 links, almost all of them from digitalpoint. I assume if they were worthless then they wouldn’t list them!

There are risks involved with relying on either your own or another member’s sig links. The biggest threat is that you or the person you bought from gets banned by dp, when you are banned, even temporarily, then your signature is removed and therefore your links are not displayed and picked up by search engines.

You also have the risk that someone you bought links from could remove the links, especially if they got a better offer from someone else, this should not happen if they worry about their reputation or “itrader”, but I keep checking back to see that the people I bought from don’t remove the links. You must check that the links are correct and that they haven’t just put up your anchor text with their link.

The best way to protect against this sort of thing is to check their history, check their itrader and reputation. You will also get a feel for them by sending a PM to discuss the possible trade.

DigitalPoint have various rules about sig links, I have quoted them here for convenience, in case you are not aware of how they work and the minimum requirements to have one.

Our system has automatic signature guideline enforcement. Currently the restrictions are:

Up to 250 characters
No more than 3 lines
No more than 4 links
Images are not allowed
Adult links are not allowed
Signatures and live links within posts are not available to users until they have been a member at least 7 days, have positive (green) reputation and have at least 10 posts.

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