I often see this question raised by newbies on a number of forums so I thought I would carry out a quick review of my stats and revenue from my portfolio of about 50 websites. The findings were more dramatic than I thought.
Since January 2009 (when I properly started to use TIDs to track where sales came from) my sales have come from:
Review Sites with a number of products on offer: 81%
Product Name Review Landing Pages (i.e. forexboomerangreview.com) : 4%
Blog Review of a product: 2%
PPC Campaign either direct to Sales Page or via lander: 13%
The truth of it is, that of the 50+ sites I own, the majority of sales come from about 5 review sites, ranging from forex robots, paid surveys, wow leveling guides.
I hope this gives some insight into what works for me.
In response to a rather lengthy comment from Katherine Robinson here I decided that it would be a good idea to start an “Affiliate Marketing for Dummies” resource on this blog and I thought the quickest and easiest way to start was to add an A to Z guide which would cover some of the basics and acronyms used in AM.
The A to Z is on it’s own page and can be accessed from anywhere on the blog (see button above) or can be found at Affiliate Marketing A to Z
I have also added a standard Privacy Page at Katherine’s request, just so you all know if you want to post a comment on ANY blog you will have to give your email address it’s just the way it works, I would never share your email address or details with anyone.
As you can see, I respond to suggestions or comments, please keep them coming.
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!
I have had a few questions from affiliates via other forums and I figured they might be questions others also need answers to.
I would like to offer assistance where I can so if anyone else has any affiliate related questions, please post a comment and if I can I will update this with an answer.
1) I like the way you setup your sites with a frame. Can you show me how to do that as well? Would save me a bunch of research, I can possibly help you out with something sometime, i’d owe you one, let me know, thanks. (This was about my site http://www.paidsurveysreviewed.com )
It’s not a frame its a CSS, it is a standard template in Dreamweaver.
P.S. Never use frames, the search engines don’t like them, the robots can’t follow.
2) you said you use pommo.org for mailing. i want to put the opt in boxes on my blogger blogs and when people sign up they recieve an automated email and then maybe another one 72 hours later, just to push the product that little bit more if they’re not sure to buy at the time and want to recieve some info.
i know with aweber you can do all this but having had a go on the pommo trial site i couldn’t see if there was this option?
do you just send out emails whenever you feel like it to people who have opted in and they get them at the point when they sign up, like they don’t get the back log of emails you’ve sent out?
Pommo is pretty basic really.
The subscriber submits their details and then is sent an email (which you can modify) asking them to confirm the email address is real. When they confirm this they are redirected to a “thank you page” which can be a web address of your choice, even the hoplink if you want.
Once you have the list of subscribers, you can send out mailings to them, I don’t think this can be done automatically, I have just done it as and when I want to.
3) Have you ever tried using an “image src” cookie drop? They are virtually invisible and appear to be working with the testing I have done. No url shows up or anything. You can even send them directly to the site URL. As long as they visit your page, it drops the cookie undetected. Just wondering and if you have any thoughts on it.
That is called cookie stuffing and is on the black hat side of the fence, if I understand it correctly.
Something I have never done and I don’t think it is considered good practice (in some cases I think it is banned by some affiliate networks).
Do a Google search on it.
I can’t really understand why you need to do this.
As I said, if you’ve got a question, write it as a comment and I will try and help out….
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.
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