Make Affiliate Money

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had made a bit of extra money selling off a number of websites Domaining By Accident, one of them being a site promoting a Franking Machine Offer that pays £50 (at the time of that post about $100).

After I sold the original site I bought another (even better) domain and put exactly the same content up on.  This time I promoted http://freefrankingmachine.com with Adwords.  As it is such a good payout for CPA there is a lot of competition, but I have never bid top dollar.

This week I had my first sale, which cost me just £3.79.  That was from 26 clicks.  It has taken three months, so now that I know it converts I can increase my CPC and try and bring in more traffic.

I am certainly happy with the profit margin and there is room for more spend on clicks.

This offer I found on tradedoubler.co.uk which has a lot of good (well known brand) offers.

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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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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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Forex is a niche lots of experienced Affiliate Marketers shy away from for several reasons. It is considered to be saturated, full of products that are difficult to market and high refund rates.

Forex is the first niche that I started to promote which I would potentially buy in. I have bought a few Make Money Online products, but with Forex Robots and Systems I could see a wide appeal, not only to seasoned traders, but people who are looking to make an easy second income.

I had never heard of Forex until July 2008 when I heard that Norb at Nichechoppers was publishing Forex Robot software, Forex Tracer and Forex Funnel. I read the sales pages and got review copies of them to check they were legit. Norb was more than happy to let me have a review copy. This kind of commitment to supporting Affiliates is what sets him apart from pretty much all other publishers, another key element of Norbs sales pages to date that I like is no opt-in lists, drop in etc and no “please don’t leave, we are desperate to sell you something, you can talk to a real live person” BS that you see on most CB sales pages.

Anyway, these review copies have been key to my success as I have been able to give legitimate reviews of products which I have first hand experience of, I have also done lots of research into the forex market, keeping up to date with trends etc. If you can write as though you are an authority on a subject your conversion rates will improve greatly.

I have 5 Forex related hosted site, but started with just one review site. I managed to get hold of an expired domain with great keywords. I used a format that I have employed in other niches, where I gathered reviews and testimonials from others and displayed them on my site, I also invited others to submit reviews. Millions of people trust review sites such as ciao.com etc and this was the feel I was aiming for.

Whilst I have made significant sales from this site, I have also used direct PPC and also PPC directed to landing pages that I created on Synthasite.com, here you can very easily create free sites. Link to synthasite on side bar. —->

I created articles on ezinearticles.com, hubpages, knol etc and then bookmarked everything with digg.com and propeller.com.

Since mid July 2008 I have taken $4604 in commission from Forex products! Some 16% of that has since been refunded, but for me the effort has been worth the return primarily due to the high commission rates.

An example of one of my sites is www.automatedforex.co.uk which is based on a template I got from another member at nichechoppers. It really was very easy to set up and add my clickbank ID. It is almost plug and play.

So in my opinion, Forex is not too saturated to get stuck in and make great money, the products are in demand and are easy to promote especially if you have tried them out and whilst the refund rate is higher than I would like, the returns to date have definitely been worth it. The future also seems to be bright as the uncertainty of Stocks continues, investors are seeking alternative vehicles.

I hope this gives a bit of inspiration to those who are not sure about either starting with forex or if your are struggling to make it work. Good luck.

James

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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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