Saturday, September 27th, 2008
There are a few things that every affiliate marketer or aspiring affiliate will need to start making his or her first dollar in affiliate marketing.
From my conversations with a lot of my subscribers, it appears that most affiliates feel too overwhelmed by the information overload. They get swarmed by all the experienced internet marketers’ emails throwing them into all directions.
Frankly, there is nothing wrong with the offers and methods taught by the internet marketers. The only problem is for a newbie, that is too much to digest.
Right here, I offer a few simple steps to start making your first dollar in affiliate marketing. If you own a list or membership site that has many newbie affiliates, perhaps you might want them to read this post.
The idea is to stay focused on a single plan and take mass action!
1. Choose Your Product
One affiliate program for a start!
While this sounds basic, the truth is, many get sucked into different affiliate programs and end up distracted!
Start with ClickBank if you are new. All you need to do is register. Approval is instant and you go for to the Marketplace to choose a good product to promote.
People will tell you to go for low competition products, ie products that few affiliates are promoting or not selling in large volumes. That’s not quite true. For me, I find from my experience in niche marketing that the hot sellers sell much better.
The reasons are simple: The hot sellers are proven to sell, ie high conversion rates. Secondly, the market is much larger!
Take a look at the Gravity. This is a single parameter that tells you how many affiliates have made at least 1 sale over the past 30 days. Not the exact number though but a good estimate. Go for at least 30 to 50.
2. Create Your Sales Funnel
By that, this is the conduit of getting visitors to your sales page. Some will advocate direct linking, in other words, sending your visitors immediately to your sales page.
This works at times. But I have only seen successful models if you use targeted paid advertising. For example, buying banners ads, text link ads, etc at Ad Networks. Unless you are an experienced marketer or have deep pockets to test different advertising avenues, this option can be very expensive! Not quite suitable for newbies.
However, it is often much better if you put your prospect through a sales funnel for the purpose of educating and preselling your prospect. Conversions are much higher!
What kind of sales funnels can you create?
a. A content website that talks about the particular market you are in.
b. A blog using free blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress is great!
c. A name squeeze page that allows you to capture the name and email address of your visitor. This allows you to follow up with him or her for at least 7 times to condition him to buy from you. Offer great content or a free report as a bait!
d. A forum signature can become your direct sales funnel. Create a catchy forum signature like this “Copy The Secrets A Newbie Used To Get A $3212 PayCheck Every Month!”. The simple way to do it is to use the headline of the product you are selling and modify it.
A case study here. If I am promoting Google Manipulator, I may actually create a signature from its headline.
Headline:
“Underground Marketer Banks $57,100 In Profit From Free Google Search Traffic And How You Too Could Easily And Effortlessly Blow Past Anyone And Everyone In Your Niche And Hit The Jackpot Using The Exact Same Simple As 1-2-3 Methods”
Signature:
“Learn How I Bank $57,100 In Profits From Free Traffic Using A Simple A-B-C Blueprint!”
3. Traffic Driving
The third part is in driving traffic to your sales funnel. This is the most challenging for most internet marketers. If you do have a budget, you can resort to PPC, ideally Google Adwords.
But if you are on a tight budget, free traffic driving techniques can also deliver a punch.
Some of the most effective and simple traffic driving methods here:
a. Article marketing – I swear by its effectiveness. After all, this is the single traffic technique that gets me well over 1000,000 visitors over a year period. Hint: Use EzineArticles.
Read my other blog posts on article marketing tips and techniques to maximize your efforts.
b. Forum marketing – Spend time contributing to at least 10 forums in your target niche. This will get you a good reputation and trust. The selling point is in your forum signature. People do make their first sales there.
c. Classified advertisements – Go to the free classified advertisement websites like Craigslist, EPage, BackPage and USFreeads. These places allow you to post a classified ad. Look for the appropriate places to post your ad.
d. Create a free report and give it away – This method is a more advanced one which I hesitated to share. Nonetheless, if you feel you are experienced to do it, go ahead and create a report with your affiliate links embedded in the report.
Give it to anyone you meet, post it to free ebook directories, or participate in a giveaway.
e. Social bookmarking at top sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Digg.
f. List building – this is a lengthy process but you will be able to build a long-term business in the niche you are targeting. All gurus built their successes from their own lists or piggybacking others’ lists.
There are other more advanced techniques, but I shall stop here. By following these methods and duplicating it all over and over again, you will find yourself not only making the first sale, but many sales. You just got yourself a proven business model!
Posted in Article Marketing, Blogging, Buzz Marketing, Forum Marketing, Free Money Making Methods, General, Giveaway Events, Google Adwords, Joint Venture, Online Marketing Learning, Pay Per Click, Product Reviews, SEO, Social Bookmarking, Web Traffic | 40 Comments »
Monday, August 18th, 2008
Wow! It has been more than a month since I last posted. So where was I? In case you are wondering if I went missing forever, I have not. The last month was busy and I was away in Japan for about 2 weeks on holidays. It was quite cooling in Hokkaido and the lavender fields were beautiful! Tokyo’s weather was quite terrible – it was hot! But my wife and I had a great time at DisneySea.
Overall, it was an enjoyable trip and now that I am back, it is time to get back to posting more good stuff for you guys.
I am going to post a quick keyword tip here for all bum marketers and practically all internet marketers. Keyword research as you know by now is a must. Whether you are using it for Pay-Per-Click aka Google Adwords or for SEO and bum marketing, it is the one most critical component.
Google’s external keyword tool is now an improved version, providing approximate monthly search counts for any keyword you search. Here’s the link to the free keyword tool.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Previously, there are no figures and you probably have to second guess what the search volume toolbar means for each individual word.
If you are a bum marketer looking for a quick keyword to target, the search volumes should give you a good idea of the traffic each keyword will attract. Also, if you notice that the advertiser competition is high, ie a full bar, chances are it is profitable for the advertisers.
This should pass the first litmus test. Then, I will go to Google.com to run a search using “keyword” and allintitle: keyword.
If both shows a low result, probably in the range of lower than 5,000 for “keyword” and 1,000 for allintitle: keyword, then I will target this for bum marketing with articles at EzineArticles, Squidoo and HubPages.
But there is more to Google’s keyword tool. Notice that there is a small section on the left hand that says “Results are tailored to”. Try to fiddle with the drop-down menu, it will give you a good grasp of how much traffic each keyword is attracting from different countries in the world.
This should be useful for PPC marketers who are targeting geographically. Even for bum marketers, you can try to plan your content to contain keywords for those specific countries. For example, if you notice that a keyword looks promising with decent search volumes in Canada, perhaps you can mention about “Canada” in your article content and title to draw some relevance to it. So, for illustration’s purpose, say the keyword is “make money online”, you can try creating content based on the keyword “make money online in Canada”.
Posted in Article Marketing, Blogging, Buzz Marketing, General, Online Marketing Learning, SEO, Web Traffic, keyword research | 14 Comments »
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
Have you heard of GistWeb? If not, this is the latest free tool developed by Jonathan Leger. Jon has been pumping out many free and paid software that are useful for marketers especially affiliate marketers. This online tool is intended for people who find content research a chore.
Any affiliate marketer alive would know that writing good quality unique content is the lifeline of content publishing. Your blogs and websites need content to improve readership. Your article marketing efforts need unique content to capture the attention of the search engines to achieve good rankings.
But the trouble is, to create unique content, there are only 2 main ways. Either you write it yourself which takes tons of time and a lot of brain juice and creativity or you pay for your content.
Writing everything yourself can be time-consuming. It takes time to conduct research for the information and organize them properly before you can write a good blog post or article.
Another way is to hire someone to write for you. This may help you to get away from writing your own content, but getting somebody to write unique content for you can cost a lot of money. This is especially so if you own a lot of websites and blogs, monetized for Adsense or affiliate programs.
GistWeb.com is able to overcome both sets of problems – cost and time. Firstly, it is a free service anyone can use. Secondly, it takes only a minute for it to work.
What can GistWeb do for you?
It pulls out the gist of search results, organize them nicely into summaries of different lengths. You simply input the keyword you are interested to research on and it will go searching the web for related information. You can use the short, medium or long summary as you wish.
While it takes a little time to organize the content a bit, you will realize that it is a really cool tool to conduct online research for useful information.
Try out GistWeb today to conduct your content research and start churning out unique content as fast as lightning!
Posted in Article Marketing, Blogging, General, Online Marketing Learning | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008
By now, you would have heard of Ewen Chia or for that matter his latest Working from Home Secret Report. He is my fellow countryman, friend and someone whom I do respect a lot. Why?
Partly because I have known how hard he worked his way to today’s status as the Secret Weapon of Super Affiliates. But largely because he often over deliver on his products. Do not expect B.S from this guy.
This is the man behind successful products like AutoPilot Profits and Secret Affiliate Weapon. These reports continue to sell well on ClickBank. But I am still curious to know how this new system works and whether he can live up to my expectations.
But what exactly is Ewen Chia’s Working from Home System about? 15th April is the first day of the pre-launch to announce the arrival of this new income system.
Well, I downloaded his free report titled “HOW TO GET RICH FROM HOME IN JUST 5 SIMPLE STEPS!” or you can watch his video here:
Watch the video at Ewen Chia’s Working from Home website now!
After watching the video and reading through the 5 simple steps to get rich from home on the internet, I must say that it is still refreshing as ever. You can download the report for free without opting in to any list. So go ahead and do so.
In his 5 steps report, he covers the essential 5 steps to start making real money online fast.
1. Finding a Rabid Marketing With Huge Growing Demand
This is good old wisdom but most affiliates miss this out completely. Ewen Chia advocates in his free report that any online marketer should find a market that has ready buyers and a continuous need to consume.
The golfing and the “work from home” niches fit in the bill nicely. Rather than to sell to a market that will only buy from you once, for example, how to get rid of cockroaches, why not sell golf balls, golf equipment, golf memberships in the golf market or sell “traffic building”, “Google Adwords”, “make money online” reports and memberships to the “working from home” market?
Of course, this step involves doing some keyword research.
2. Finding an Excellent Product as a Solution to People’s Problems
In the free report, he points out the need to focus on 1 product rather than 100 of products. Just 1 excellent product is good enough. Quite frankly, I do not fully agree with him. The reason is simple – never put all your eggs in one basket no matter how good the product is.
But he does point out in this report at Workingfromhome.com that it is important for the affiliate program to pay the affiliates well. At least 50% commissions are reasonable for a digital product. This point, I fully agree.
Another gold nugget of advice which I always tell my subscribers is this, make sure the affiliate program comes with a complete set of affiliate tools such as emails, banner ads, PPC keywords, classified ads etc. I am so glad Ewen did that in his report from Working from Home.
3. Complete Sales Funnel
Kudos to him on this point about complete sales funnel. This is something that I often find missing in most make money online books I buy. A complete sales funnel does not only sell the prospect on the upfront, but it has an up-sell and a backend.
Simply put, earning a $25 per sale from a $50 product should never be your end in mind.
A complete sales funnel will allow you the affiliate earn on the upfront, up-sell and backend. Sad to say, many affiliate marketing programs perform poorly in this.
On the contrary, any product that does provide the complete sales funnel to its affiliates is likely to be a winner for a long time to come.
4. Focus on Money Making Activities
This is a practical thinking tip and I like that because I am a firm believer in this. In the report on “5 simple steps to get rich from home on the internet”, he talks about focusing on money making activities, ie those things that will get you more sales.
Well he does not explicitly mention about what are the money making activities, I can translate that to activities like website promotion ie article marketing, PPC, comment posting, forum marketing, etc and website/blog creation activities or even getting JV partners.
His Mini-Day tips is simple but trust me, many people do not really implement that. It took me some time to convince my online marketing student to do that.
5. Be Proactive
Wow! This is such a SIMPLE step but the trouble is, many folks are just too bogged down by distractions.
Remember, knowledge has no value until it is acted upon.
So, even taking a little action on what you have learnt will put you in a better income position. Massive action will really let you quit your day job, work from home and get rich from home on the internet.
This free report is a good read. Do watch the video and download it to read up the details.
By the way, Ewen Chia’s Working from Home Secret Report will be launched on the 21st April. You will read about it here!
This 50-page no-fluff report will probably be the key to make real money online fast, quit the rat race and replacing your income with the internet in 30 days or lesser.
Within the Working from Home Secret Report, you will discover 3 proven and easy ways to earn cash within 30 days.
Within the report, expect to:
See proof of how Ewen Chia went from $0 to 5 figure with a Brand New Website In 30 Days
Learn the 4 simple stages of all successful online businesses
Discover how to pick a profitable market to sell your products within minutes with free tools only. Also, you will be able to find rapid markets with ready cash to spend.
Learn how to leverage one top website to start your business without any website of your own and start earning in a week.
Master the art of spying on the hot sellers and “stealing” the profits for yourself.
See Ewen show you how he made his first million bucks and how you can copy him and let somebody do all the grunt work for you!
Discover how to create simple ONE-page websites that outsell the super gurus. You will also receive some examples so that you can copy for your own success.
Learn 4 easy methods to get hot buyers ready to buy whatever you are selling to them. And 3 of these methods are totally free of charge.
Learn the exact step by step method of creating and selling your own product within 7 days.
Discover the technique of pricing your product. Yes, you will learn the psychological reason for why certain price points will automatically click within the buyers.
Know the fastest and simplest way to accept credit cards online without paying a single cent until someone buys a product from you. No sales, no need to pay!
What is the price of Ewen Chia’s Working from Home Secret Report?
$9.97!
I will let out a little secret here:
On top of the report, the Work from Home Secret Report all comes with bonuses like:
Bonus 1:
The “Instant Income System” which is an income system with a complete sales funnel that lets you earn up to $156.77.
Bonus 2:
“How To ‘Steal’ Other People’s Work And Get Rich”(Retail Value: $67). Within this report, you will:
Find out how the Web 2.0 phenomenon can help you ramp up your earnings quickly.
Discover 4 killer “pre-sell” page secrets that will beat out the competition
Learn How to Find Excellent Affiliate Programs to Promote
Sounds like a lot to me. Before he takes down the report and video from the Working from Home website, go check it out.
Posted in Article Marketing, Blogging, Buzz Marketing, Forum Marketing, General, Online Marketing Learning, Product Reviews, SEO, Social Bookmarking, Web Traffic | 54 Comments »
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
You may be wondering if there is any value at all in commenting on others’ blogs. I shall share my experience here as well as discuss why people love to leave blog comments around.
1. Improving Link Popularity
Blogs allow you to post a link in your comments. This is a free backlink to your website. If the blog post is a high PR, eg PR 7 blog post, you are practically getting a PR 7 backlink FREE. And all it takes is a few minutes of your time.
A PR 7 backlink costs anything between $50 and $200, and in most cases, that is a monthly bill you have to pay to the text advertisement networks like TextLinkAds.
2. Indirect Traffic
I love posting comments in popular blogs. The reason is simple. Popular blogs get a lot of attention and visitors. When the visitors read the post, they will find your comment and follow your link.
Highly trafficked blogs can get 10,000’s of visitors daily. Even a fraction of that can be worth a lot to your website.
You may have noticed also that some blog posts rank well in the search engine results. Imagine traffic from the search engines coming to your website. Wow!
3. Gain Better Search Engine Ranking
A blog comment link is also counted as a valid backlink to your website. Like what I mentioned about improving link popularity, having a backlink from a blog which carries the same theme as your website is a thematic backlink which will boost your search engine ranking.
A Case in Point:
I posted a simple comment in http://alokjain.in/affiliates-road-to-financial-freedom/.
The results: 9 subscribers for my free report & 1 sale came in within the next hour.
I have seen such happenings from time to time.
What about the “No Follow” tag?
When blog commenting first got popular one or two years ago, many spammers also got onto the blog comment train. Comment spamming became rife and many legitimate and popular blogs got hit by tons of worthless comment posts. Some are posted manually, others by automated blog comment script.
As a result, many blog platforms, notably WordPress implemented the “No Follow” meta-tag on many blogs. By this, the search engines would not follow the comment links. Hence, each link is not counted as a valid backlink, ie no search engine love.
Should we get overly concerned about this “No Follow” tag issue?
Here’s my take on this.
Firstly, not all blogs use this “No Follow” tag.
Secondly, considering the indirect traffic that still continues to stream from the blogs, there is really no harm in posting even in blogs with the “No Follow” tag.
Thirdly, you are only spending a few minutes to post your comment. That is worth the potential hundreds of visitors that will continue streaming in to your website for a long time to come.
In the next post, I will discuss about 2 blog commenting software, Comment Hut and Comment Kahuna that are able to find high PR blogs that do not have the dreaded “No Follow” tags.
Posted in Blogging, General, Online Marketing Learning, SEO, Web Traffic | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
Blogging to the Bank 2 and its first version – the brainchild of Rob Benwell have been responsible for the success of many online marketing bloggers such as myself.
Prior to making my big break in 2007, I was struggling with making money online. Partly because I was spreading my attention across too many things and getting distracted, and partly because I did not come across any proper guidance or teachings that really mattered and worked…Blogging to the Bank 1 was one of the first ebooks that really taught me how to get started to make money online with blogs. Subsequently, I did figure out other more powerful methods to complement the techniques covered in the report.
The Blogging to the Bank 1 was a classic 37-page report written by Rob about creating an empire of blogs around profitable niches. The first version talked mainly about using Blogger blogs to market products from ClickBank. I need to qualify that it was applicable for all other products though.
It was a report that detailed exact steps of how to target the right keywords and how to create a Blogger blog from scratch including how and where to add your banner to promote the target product.
Click to view a sample blog
Blogging to the Bank 1 focused more on ranking well in MSN, a smaller search engine in comparison to Yahoo and Google. The methods of driving traffic using other smaller feeder blogs could work back then but in today’s context, it is no longer working well.
Firstly, MSN has changed its ranking algorithm, and secondly, Google has also devalued links through black hat linking methods.
It was what fuelled the creation of Blogging to the Bank 2. This time round, Rob focuses on teaching bloggers how to create a WordPress niche blog empire. Once again, ClickBank products take centre stage and in his usual style of writing, he teaches you step by step in building a WordPress blog from scratch that promotes a single product in the 61-page report.
In this full report, he talks about:
5 Secrets that will Make Any Blog Successful and Profitable for a Long Time to come
Step-By-Step Blueprint to Create a Long Lasting Blog Empire
6 Traffic Driving Techniques that Pulls In Over 30,000 Visitors to Just One of His Many Blogs
and more.
Along with the report, you will also get 5 sets of blog content and ready banners for 5 popular niches, article submission software, blog submission software, special tool that hunts for high PR blogger blogs to take over, and 2 other mini reports on whitehat and blackhat blogging techniques. For a price of $47, this is a valuable deal.
But one technique that was mentioned in the ebook about “stealing” high PR blogger blogs is no longer valid. So is the tool provided.
Nevertheless, all in all, this is a report that will help anyone aspiring to be a successful blogger do so in the shortest time possible.
If you purchase this ebook Blogging to the Bank 2 today, post your comments with your receipt number and I will send you a download link to ebook and software gifts worth $3215.
Posted in General, Online Marketing Learning, Product Reviews | 1 Comment »
