Make Affiliate Money

Once again, thanks must go to the guys on the Nichechoppers Forum who brought my attention to this video which show a very odd but interesting secret tip when carrying out any keyword research.

I must have mentioned before that I use the Adwords Keyword Tool when working out what domains to buy and what keywords to focus my sites on.  This video shows that once you pick a long tail keyword and then search in Google the number of competing sites might be inaccurate.  Watch this video for a much better explanation and demonstration.

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I am currently testing a new approach to article marketing by creating my own specialist article directories. The first of these is Email Direct Marketing which I created following purchase of 150,000 PLR articles from Digital Point Forums for just $4!

I was skipping through the thousands of articles and came across a whole file dedicated to email marketing containing 190 PLR articles. I then used my tried and tested URL search using a combination of Adwords Keyword Tool and the godaddy bulk domain tool to quickly find a popular three word domain name with little competition. 3000 searches a month on Google and 800k results. I also know it is something that I can promote CB products with and get good CPC from Adsense.

I purchased the .info name after finding out that the .com and most of the other TLDs are up for sale. This cost me $0.99 for a year! So far my investment is $4.99.

The next step was getting hold of a wordpress based article directory theme for free. Luckily someone at nichechoppers had just posted about one which they were using and it looked pretty cool, if a little limited graphics wise. http://articlesss.com/article-directory-wordpress-theme/

Download the theme and the essential plugins, throw it up on your site and you have an instant article directory that anyone can submit articles to. IT is very easy to configure to exactly how you want it with basic wordpress knowledge.

Finally I have uploaded 40 articles at the time of this post, OK it is PLR but it already has a few hits and with more and more content (I hope to get to about 150) it should rank for quite a few keywords.
I have just put Adsense up for the minute as I am looking to diversify my earnings, it will also help if I decide to move the site on in the future, lots more people use Adsense than CB.

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Not sure if this is a well known technique or not for searching for good available domain names, but I have just started using Google’s Adwords Tool in conjunction with godaddy’s bulk domain tool.

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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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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Buying and selling domains and websites for that matter can be very profitable, but I never bought any of my domains with the intention of selling them on again. I always bought domains with the intention of developing a site and monetizing it.

I have bought my fair share of rubbish, mostly when I’ve had a few drinks and it seemed like a good idea at the time! For example I was up late watching a series on TV called SKINS, which promised to be the next big thing for the British Youth. It was on C4 in the UK and I got very excited when I saw that c4skins.net and c4skins.co.uk were available. I did NO research and got carried away. Once I owned them, I started to check out what already existed on the internet in terms of fan sites, forums etc. I found that C4 was way ahead of the game with a fantastic site set up complete with great graphics, forums and information. There was no way I could compete with this so I shelved the idea, I actually turned one into my first affiliate page advertising the richjerk etc.

The lesson I learned from this was to do my research before jumping in with both feet.

The next lesson, and the real point of this post, is that I have found having keywords in the domain does so much more for SEO than any number of links or even content (this is my experience). This week I sold two of my sites, both with good keyword domains, as I have never had the time or inclination to promote and build links for them. I made approx $500 from the two sites which I think is great considering they cost me about $20 to buy!

site one – www.postalfrankingmachine.com was specifically bought to promote an offer which paid $100 per sign up. I had one of these during the year I owned the site.

site two – www.debtandloans.co.uk was bought originally to promote loan and mortgage offers, but never made any money so I added Adsense and made about $150 in a year.

So in total an investment of $20 plus approximately 5 hours of my time in total plus hosting for a year $30 (I can host a unlimited number of sites so this is an approximate share of one years hosting).

Profit = $750 – $50 = $700 or 1400%

SO even if your sites are not that successful, consider selling them on to someone with more traffic or just ability to promote and you can still make a good return.

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