Make Affiliate Money

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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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….

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I was very honoured to be asked by Norb at Niche Choppers for an interview as I have been recognised as “Affiliate of the Moment”!

This may sound silly, but I was genuinely chuffed to be asked. Norb has been intrumental in me making a success of Affiliate Marketing and the majority of the money I have made this year has been from promoting his products. For him to feel that I am doing a good job means a lot to me, don’t forget he can see how many hops I send and how well I convert, he knows if I am doing well or not in relation to others.

Norb sent me a list of questions, including my Top 5 NOTs for Newbies and my Top 5 things for Newbies to follow. The full interview is here but I thought the Top 5s would be useful to quote here.

Q: If you could give newbies five tips on what NOT to do – what would they be?

1) Do NOT start with PPC until you make some organic sales, you need to know that the products will convert before throwing money away.

2) Do NOT expect an easy ride to riches, whatever the Gurus say, making consistent money online takes a lot of time and effort.

3) Do NOT spend too much time reading and not actually taking action. There is a fine line between research and procrastination.

4) Do NOT worry if ezinearticles reject one of your articles and then you don’t get Platinum Status!

5) Do NOT buy domains when you are drunk, you will convince yourself it is great and then in the cold light of day when you check out the competition or the keyword searches it might not so good! My best one has to be when I bought accomod8.com about 10 years ago (thought it was great then realised I was missing a “m”, doh!)

Q: And now the five most important parts of your ‘make money’ ventures that newbies should follow.

1) Pick a high paying niche to start with like Forex, the time, effort and PPC costs will be more worth it than busting a gut for $10-$20 commission.

2) Buy your own domains and hosting, more flexibility, more credibility and more control than free sites. I also use squidoo, blogger, wordpress, synthasite as they rank well in Google results. I find it a good combination.

3) Pre-sell, I don’t think I have ever made a sale by direct linking to a product page, that is not to say that the sales pages are no good, but if you can give an independant view on something and explain benefits I have found it helps.

4) Focus, this is still something I am struggling with, especially with Norb releasing so many good products at the moment. Try and focus on one campaign or product at a time, even if it is for a day or a week. I find myself all over the place and have to reign myself in.

5) Choose products from Publishers who help you (like Norb) and I mean by providing great quality graphics, landing pages, email campaigns, videos. These help soo much with the pre-sell. I cannot believe how bad some publishers are at assisting their affiliates, especially as most give you less % per sale than Norb. They don’t seem to get it, an affiliate sale is one that they probably wouldn’t have had otherwise, so give us a better share and more assistance.

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I have been a clickbank affiliate for 2 years but meeting Clickbank’s 5 sales and different payment methods rules took a while, I was passively selling products via banners on some of my sites.

In January 2008, I stepped up a gear and created a site to specifically promote Clickbank products, this was a site with reviews of Paid Survey programs.  I made a few erratic sales and pretty much spent as much as I earned on Adwords!  I realised that the affiliate commissions per sale were not enough to cover the cost of clicks and the conversion rate.  ie.  if a product was converting 1 in 100 hops and the commission was $23.50, I would make a profit if my clicks costed less than $0.23

Then I stumbled across a new niche which, in general, pays much higher commissions and therefore there was more room for error and higher profits.  That niche was Forex.

I was able to obtain a very good keyword based domain which I could use to review Forex products in the same way that I did with Paid Surveys.  Within days I was indexed by Google and thanks to a few hundred backlinks the site was ranking top 5 for the keywords in the domain.

The Eureka Moment was on Monday 21st July 2008 when I logged into Clickbank to see this picture….

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I thought I should start responding to several queries I have recieved at many different forums I am active on such as digitalpoint.com, nichechoppers.com, warriorforum.com about how I have become a successful Affiliate, making a very reasonable second income.

I will share my ongoing experiences in the World of Affiliate Marketing, whilst referring to past experiences and reviewing products that will assist in making more cash.

I must say, I don’t consider myself to be a Guru at all, I am just a normal guy with a regular 9-5 job who has the drive and desire to make more money. The internet, and affiliate marketing in particular, is the easiest and quickest way I know how.

Don’t get me wrong, I have not been an overnight success, I have been making money on the internet for over 2 years now, but only recently started making the sort of profit that really makes a difference to my life.  I will try and help you avoid the mistakes I made along the way to redcue that learning curve.

Please enjoy reading my ramblings and feel free to comment.  Sign up to my newsletter to get automatic updates and special offers before everyone else.

All the best, keep making the money.

James

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