Make Affiliate Money

Getting customers to your site should always be ranked as high as the importance of the quality and the excellence of the product and the services you provide. They should go hand in hand in providing your customers the satisfaction they get in exchange for the money they have paid for them. Customer service should be just as fantastic so that the customers are provided with the same satisfaction.

One of the ways you can combine marketing and customer service is through opt-in marketing. With an opt-in list you get the opportunity to introduce your site and products on a good time basis. Opt-in marketing strategy is a marketing strategy that is virtually low cost and not time consuming. Here, you get the consent of your website visitors to subscribe to your newsletters and other promotional materials such as catalogs and free promotions.

Opt-in marketing uses your list of subscribers to send e-mail to. These e-mails will contain the materials you will send to your subscribers. It is essential that you present your promotional items in a manner that will catch the interest and the eye of your subscribers to keep them wanting for more. The best way to do this is to provide fun, entertaining and informational articles.

Well written articles full of content and useful information will help in building your list as more subscribers will be enticed your list. When they have read the samples of your contents in your sites, they will be intrigued as to what will come next. Subscribing to your newsletter will offer them a glimpse of what you have to offer next.

Many sites and companies have captured the importance of articles and this also aids in search engine optimization. As more people are heading towards the internet for their information needs, serving the right information to them via articles in your site will increase the flow of your website traffic. With more traffic, the percentage of your sales will grow. More sales turn into more profit.

They have seen the rise for the importance of well written, information enriched and keyword packed articles for the content of their site as well as for newsletters. These articles provide the information many are seeking in the internet. If your site has them, more people will be going to your site for information and research.

Well written articles would also boost your sites reputation. If they are filled with many information you will be regarded as well informed and an expert on the subjects that you tackle. Your articles must be well researched so that the people will trust you. When you have gained their trust, they will always come for you for their needs on that subject.

In connection, you must write articles or commission them to tackle subjects that are closely connected with your type of business. If you have a site for a medicine tackling a certain disease, your articles must be about the diseases. Or if you sell materials for home improvements provide articles with those themes. Most articles searched for are tips, guidelines, methods, manuals and such. If you provide these articles to your customers and you have their trust, they will always go to your site for help and advice as well as for your products.

With the loyalty of these customers, they may subscribe to your opt-in list to receive all the information you have. If you provide them with the answers for that need, they will be happy to be receiving your newsletters as well as other promotional materials to keep them well informed. Others may even forward your newsletters to other people when they find a certain article interesting.

You should provide links in your newsletter so that when other people are reading it and wants to read more, they may click on the link and go to your site. With the articles you have in your site that are good, they may decide to sign up as well for your opt-in list. This will build your list and make it bigger.

Make sure to keep your subscribers happy and interested in your newsletters and promotional materials. Keep on posting and writing good articles for your site and newsletter. If you are not interested in writing them or if you just don’t have the time, there are many available well experienced and knowledgeable writers available to help you out. This is an investment that will pay for itself in time.

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Matt Cutts confirmed via Twitter (how very 2009!) that the PR Toolbar update happened on 30th December 2008. Twitter/MattCutts

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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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

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For those of you also promoting Forex products you may be interested to know that there is an MT4 Trading Platform that pays a CPA (Cost Per Action) of $100  for new people who sign up.  They have their own affiliate program here

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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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

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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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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.

James

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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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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

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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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