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 | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
In my visits to money making forums, I often come across questions like “how do I make money for free”, “can anyone make any money without a list” or “is it possible to make money as an affiliate”?
There are 4 simple ways to make money online if you are starting out and do not own a list, a product and simply do not have a single penny to spend.
1. Writing Articles and Selling Them
A very straightforward method is to sell original articles. You can either use project-based communities like Elance, Scriptlance and GetaFreeLancer to find work as a writer. Project assignments go for around $3 – 10 per article written depending on your skill level and reputation.
Alternatively, you can simply write a set of articles on a hot topic like dog training, dating and so on. Then sell them as PLR articles at forums like Digital Point forum. Go to all the money making forums and promote the sale. But the trick is to price each article below $1. If you can sell a batch of 10 articles @ $10 to 20 or 30 buyers, that is $200 – 300 in your pocket. Not too bad if you can do it every day!
2. Direct Affiliate Marketing
Since you do not own a product, you can simply sign up as an affiliate in ClickBank. This is the first step. The next step is to drive tons of traffic to your link.
Direct Linking Method
Basically, what this means is you promote the affiliate link directly. You can use a signature link that points to your affiliate link and be active in forums.
Go and post at least 10 interesting posts a day in each forum. Repeat it for as many forums as possible, minimum 10 forums. By doing so, you have 100 posts scattered around and 100 chances of getting some targeted eyeballs on your signature. Be creative and make some outrageous or catchy signature like “How to Make $100 Within 2 Hours”.
You can also leave your affiliate link in blog comments as well as free classified ad sites like Craiglist, BackPage, EPage etc.
Try this and do not be surprised that you will start seeing sales streaming in. One of my readers was so thankful when he made 2 sales shortly after doing so. While that is not a lot, but for a newbie, it can be very encouraging.
But one word of advice, try not to send all the traffic directly to the sales page unless the sales page converts really well! Otherwise, it makes sense to presell your prospect first.
Presell Method
This requires more work but it works like a charm. Do a review of the product be it at Squidoo, HubPages or EzineArticles. Direct the traffic to the affiliate product (EzineArticles require a website, so why not direct the traffic to a Squidoo lens you have created?)
Reviews are known to improve conversions by many fold. I personally tested it and found in one case that it actually improved the conversion rate from 1% to 5%.
Start driving traffic to your review pages using article submission, blog comment posting and forum posting.
Anyway, these are all free to set up, so why not?
3. Blogging
Go and start a free blog at Blogger or WordPress. Pick an expensive topic like Mortgage, Debt and so on.
Start blogging and update the blog frequently.
Do not use Google Adsense immediately. I discovered that it does not help you in the search engine rankings when you slap those ads on your blog while it is still fresh and new. Google often see these new blogs with Adsense ads as trashy “made for Adsense” sites and never love them.
But that does not mean you cannot put other affiliate product banners on it. 
Build it for a while, at least a month or two before you put Adsense on it and you are safe and ready to receive expensive clicks.
One important thing you need to do is to ping your blog after posting. Ping it at http://www.Pingoat.com to inform the feed directories that your blog has been updated.
Building backlinks to your blog is vital. There are many free methods like article marketing, bum marketing, blog comment posting, forum posting and link exchange.
From this method, you are monetizing your blog by earning when someone clicks through your affiliate product banners and buys the products and click on the Adsense ads.
Once your blog hits a good PR, you can even start selling text link and banner ads on your blog. Participate in Adbrite or other ad networks for more cash.
4. Sell Your Own Products
This sounds contradictory. How do you sell your own products without creating one? Well, you can always download any product and treat it as your own by participating in giveaways like:
Viral Marketing Giveaway 11 - Download Your Free Gifts Now!
The IM Giveaway – The Most Massive Giveaway With Thousands Dollars Worth Of Gifts
There are tons of free ebooks, templates and scripts with Master Resale Rights and Private Label Rights (PLR). You can simply resell them for profits.
How to set it up?
Go to one of the free web hosts that allow you to upload web pages and files.
You will be able to find a lot of free web hosting services at http://www.free-webhosts.com.
Upload the sales page, download page and report. These are included in the resale rights packages.
Create a PayPal button for your customer to pay you.
How to promote the product?
Simply apply the methods I described in 1, 2 & 3.
So, here you have 4 really simple to follow methods to make money online without a product, a list and even budget. All the above are free techniques that work!
Once you have a hang of these methods, it is time to proceed to more advanced techniques as an experienced marketer.
Posted in Article Marketing, Blogging, Forum Marketing, Free Money Making Methods, General, Giveaway Events, Online Marketing Learning | 1 Comment »
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 | 2 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 | 51 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 | No Comments »
Monday, February 4th, 2008
Online marketing forums are excellent places to participate in for a few reasons:
1. Knowledge and Information Sharing
This is a place where online marketers gather to talk about what is going on in the internet marketing world.
When you are there, you can read about the latest product launches, ie what new ebook, membership service or online marketing software have been launched.
A lot of marketers also love to share the tricks they have learnt. Whether it is about affiliate marketing in general or specifically about web design, SEO, website promotion strategies, article marketing or pay per click advertising, you get to learn almost anything and everything.
2. Uncover Under-Served Niches
You will also be able to discover what the commonly asked questions are and what topics are hot. This is important for you to uncover niche markets or guesstimate what products will be sellable.
It is worthwhile to check out those threads that are popular. Read the forum members’ comments. Figure out what problems they are facing. See if you can find a product in the market to meet their needs. Or even create your own product if there isn’t any ready ones in the market.
3. Drive Traffic to Your Websites
Your signature link is powerful. This is where you can be creative and craft an attention-seeking signature that makes people want to click through your link. Rather than going for a signature link that reads as:
“Come to my site and read about how to drive traffic”, come up with something like:
“Discover How I Pulled In 10,000 Visitors Within 1 Week For FREE!”
The second signature will do better to attract visitors, isn’t it?
I also make use of forums to promote my blogs. Here is a trick you might want to learn.
Each time you post to your blog, go to the forum, start a thread and get people talking about your blog post. People will visit your site out of curiosity, and even if they do not, you just earned yourself a backlink with your desired anchor text.
This will help you in your search engine rankings as well as drive direct interested visitors. Expect more traffic and sales.
4. Hire Web Designers, Article Writers, Programmers & General Help
Online marketing forums do have a section dedicated for buying and selling of products and services. These can be excellent places to find affordable website designers, article writers, programmers and just about any kind of help you need.
Forums that are related to online marketing and make money online:
1. Niche Rockets
Niche Rockets is an active online marketing forum that provides tons of powerful tools and eBooks, and has a large database of educational material for online marketers.
This is a paid forum so you will not see worthless posts or comments. Members are all serious marketers who are friendly and helpful and there are nuggets of gold that can be found here. Ask any question concerning affiliate marketing or other methods of internet marketing and you are likely to be greeted with tons of effective, workable answers by the successful marketers.
2. Digital Point Forum
This is one of the oldest and largest online marketing forums around. At any point of time, there are hundreds to thousands of members posting and commenting. This is a great place for newbies to hang around and pick up some tips. Since it is free, you will be deluged also with content that is totally crappy!
3. Warrior Forum
A favorite haunt of many famous online marketing gurus. The Warrior Forum offers a great place to learn and discover more about online marketing. Many of the members are successful marketers. You can also get some great deals WSO for eBooks, software etc.
Other forums related to online marketing and making money online are:
www.im4newbies.com/forum/
www.v7n.com
A quick way to find a list of forums to participate in is to Google the search term “online marketing + forum”, “affiliate marketing + forum” or “internet marketing + forum”
Posted in Forum Marketing, General, Online Marketing Learning | 2 Comments »
