This latest update has brought mixed fortunes for my sites, some coming out of the “Sandbox” and some going in, but most significantly after a period of 7 days without a sale on Clickbank, the last three days have seen commission of over $250 on a variety of products from a variety of sites, some that have never produced before.

I really hope this update is the turning point for my most significant sites and brings some much needed consistency to my Clickbank sales.

Anyone else seen some significant change in PR or site ranking?

Don’t forget PR does not actually mean you get high ranking on searches.

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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

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They pay by Paypal or wire transfer and for a Paypal payment the threshold is just one sign up at $100.  This is apparently paid monthly.

I am going to promote this on several sites and will consider setting up a landing page for PPC.  There are some great affiliate materials and some great special offers to promote including up to $500 bonus for new sign ups.  Should be easy to promote.  eToro Affiliate Program

This is part of my plan to diversify with different affiliate programs other than Clickbank.  I will soon give a summary and pros and cons of the different programs I am using.

Hope everyone had a good Christmas and is looking forward to an exciting and profitable 2009.

JZ

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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

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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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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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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

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A whole industry around SEO has developed from SEO Companies who work on a massive scale on behalf of large corporations, to SEO Gurus on the Web to Google Employees like Matt Cutts.

Until now Google have been fairly quiet officially about SEO and instead insisting that webmasters and webdesigners create sites for the visitors not for the Google Robots.  But on the 13th November 2008 they released their Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide as a sort of “SEO for Dummies” ebook.  It was originally intended as an internal guide for Google Employees, but they have just released it via the “Webmaster” section of Google.  The Link above and in the sidebar will take you directly to the pdf to download.

When I first started reading it, I thought that I knew it all, but towards the end there were several (still basic) things that I had never heard of.  I recommend everyone reads it as even if you think you know it all, it never hurts to get a refresher from the horses mouth.

Let me know if you learnt anything, drop me a comment.

JZ

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If you are a man then this can be bad news! Without getting too graphic, your reproductive organs work best and so do your little swimmers when they are cool. In fact some people will tell you that if you are trying for Children you could consider wrapping your bits in ice before making love!

I have found a great solution to both of these problems, and personally I think this would make a great Christmas Present for anyone who regularly uses a laptop on their lap.

Belkin Laptop Cooling Platform

Introducing the Belkin Laptop Cooling Platform with intregal USB powered FAN!  It costs about £15 in the UK from DABS.com but I bought one in the high street for £19.99.

It works great, just plug into a spare USB port on the rear of your laptop and off it goes.  I have been using now for about 30 minutes and I feel healthier already!  Just be careful it doesn’t get too cool down there and you freeze something so much that it falls off!

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If you are looking for a keyword rich domain in a particular niche you can simply search for the keywords on the Adwords Tool, this will give you lots of variations and tell you how many times they were searched for. You can download the list of results into a .txt file.

You then copy the list of keywords from the .txt file and paste into the godaddy bulk domain tool. Don’t worry about spaces as godaddy bunches up the words.

You can select which TLD (top level domain) you want to search for i.e. .com .net .org or .co.uk etc (you can select more than one but I would search for .com, then .net then .org etc but it depends what you want the domain for.)

Godaddy will then tell you which keyword domains are available. I was surprised how many keyword rich domains were still available in quite a competitive niche. One .com was available that had over 50,000 monthly searches.

I have found that sites with good keywords domains, particularly .com domains naturally rank well and with a bit of good SEO and backlinks can get very high in the Search Engine Results.

If anyone has any questions about this, please drop me a comment.

James

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