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 »
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
Are you using giveaway events to grow your list?
By now, you must have heard it a million times, the money is in the LIST!
To cut the story short, every affiliate marketer hoping to run a long-term business, selling products and making sales month after month should always pay attention to this aspect of the business – list building.
It allows you to build long-term relationships with your prospects. By offering quality content overtime, you will be able to build trust and sell your products effectively.
How to Build Your List?
There are many methods such as article marketing and pulling your visitors to a squeeze page where they can subscribe to your list, using PPC to advertise your squeeze page and doing an ad swap with another list owner and so on…
But Giveaway Events – this is one of my hot favorites! I have gotten hundreds of subscribers each time simply by participating in Giveaway events.
Tip 1 – Get a Unique Book Ready
Get a book which you have the giveaway rights to. It need not be a book written by you. As long as you have the rights to give it away, you can participate in the giveaway.
But to successfully get your report out, make it attractive for your visitor. If you are using a book that the whole world has seen, people may just bypass your report. You lose the subscriber!
What if you have not written any report? Or simply do not know how?
The easiest way is to repackage a private label rights PLR report. There are tons of these reports around in the market, you can find them at $1.99, or for free. Google “free PLR” and you will find a lot of them.
When it comes to packaging the report, all you need is to create a professional looking ebook cover. You can do it yourself if you own a photoshop action script, or you can outsource this to a graphics designer. Pop over to Digital Point Forums, and you can easily hire quite a good one for less than $15 to $20.
Now, once you have the cover ready, embed your links in the PLR and convert it into a PDF. Upload the report and get your squeeze page ready.
Now, you are ready for the Giveaway Events!
Tip 2 – Take Part In As Many Giveaway Events As Possible
The tip here is to participate in as many Giveaway Events as possible. The more events you submit your book to, the more subscribers you will get.
Here’s a list of Giveaway Events taking place now. Sign up for them quickly.
http://ultimate-giveaway.com/contributor.php?id=191
http://www.schooldaysgiveaway.com/contributor.php?id=838
http://www.sepgifts.com/contributor.php?id=10012
http://www.superjvgiveaway.com/jv/go/53
http://impactactiongiveaway.com/contributor.php?id=1467
http://www.autopilotcashstreams.com/contributor.php?id=12416
http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway12.com/x/?aff=5338
http://www.profitworkfromhome.com/contributor.php?id=4996
http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway11.com/x/?aff=4362
http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway10.com/x/?aff=7465
http://www.117network.com/jv/index.php?id=106067
http://www.freedombullet.com/jv/partners/1383
http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway9.com/vmg9/?aff=5338
http://www.ebiz-launchpad.com/ebiz/?aff=5975
http://theentertainmentgiveaway.com//jvinvite.php?id=389
http://www.viewtubegiveaway.com/vtg//jvinvite.php?id=195
http://viralmarketinggiveaway7.com/vmg7/?aff=7587
http://jvsalesautomator.com//jvinvite.php?id=161
http://householdname.biz/giveaway/go/83/jv
http://www.murraysecret.net/amember/go.php?r=257&i=l1
http://digital-ways.co.uk/go/49/jv
Tip 3 – Tell A Friend!
Most Giveaway Events work like this – they reward those who refer the Giveaway Events. So if you can refer these events to as many people as you can, you will get a higher ranking for your report, which means that it will appear higher on the downloads page. This means more exposure, more visibility and more downloads, ie subscribers!
Signing up contributors can get you even more credits, pushing your product ranking all the way to the front.
All it takes is a minute to sign up for each of the events.
Well, if you are not intending to contribute a gift, why not simply go over to these events to download all the goodies they are offering. You have everything from software to ebooks worth $1000s.
These are the links to download the reports and software.
http://ultimate-giveaway.com/members.php?id=191
http://www.schooldaysgiveaway.com/members.php?id=838
http://www.sepgifts.com/members.php?id=10012
http://www.superjvgiveaway.com/go/53/
http://impactactiongiveaway.com/members.php?id=1467
http://www.autopilotcashstreams.com/members.php?id=12416
http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway12.com/x/?aff=5338
http://www.profitworkfromhome.com/members.php?id=4996
http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway11.com/x/?aff=4362
http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway10.com/x/?aff=7465
http://www.117network.com/index.php?id=106067
http://www.freedombullet.com/jv/members/1383
http://www.viralmarketinggiveaway9.com/vmg9/?aff=5338
http://www.ebiz-launchpad.com/ebiz/?aff=5975
http://theentertainmentgiveaway.com//index.php?id=389
http://viralmarketinggiveaway7.com/vmg7/?aff=7587
http://jvsalesautomator.com//index.php?id=161
http://householdname.biz/giveaway/go/83
http://www.murraysecret.net/amember/go.php?r=257&i=l0
http://digital-ways.co.uk/go/49
Posted in Free Money Making Methods, General, Giveaway Events, Joint Venture, Web Traffic | 2 Comments »
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, May 4th, 2008
Giveaways or Giveaway events are great places for all internet marketers. You can download tons of free gifts. There are ebooks, software, guides and memberships and many of them even come with full resale rights. What this means is that you not only can use them personally, you can also sell them to someone else and profit from them.
A lot of these giveaway events give away hundreds of products created and contributed by the giveaway partners. You do not need to pay a single cent but can sink your teeth into dozens of quality products. Participate in one of such event and you can set up an entire bookstore selling all these products. Wow!
You get your products, the contributors get to build their lists. It is quite a fair deal and in most cases, the people who come for the freebies are the ones who gain the most.
So if you are wondering what are the Giveaway events taking place now, here’s some details:
1. Viral Marketing Giveaway 11
This event gives you over 300 hot and fresh Internet marketing ebooks, software packages, guides, and memberships - many with Resell Rights you can turn around and sell for big PROFITS! Download them all, or just the ones you want.
If you’re interested in building a subscriber list and have a gift to contribute, you should check out Viral Marketing Giveaway 11.
It’s designed for people who want to start or grow an online business because it offers tools in all the key aspects of online marketing - from setting up websites and list building to converting sales and creating joint ventures.
Check out Viral Marketing Giveaway 11 now!
2. Lightning Giveaway 4
Mike Mazzella and David Thompson have come up with the latest Lightning Giveaway 4 Giveaway Event. This giveaway is different from most that you see. Both Mike and David have managed to arm twist online marketers including myself to contribute brand new products that you have not seen anywhere else. You get to download quality reports, software etc from the likes of:
Jason James
Soren Jordansen
Denise Hall
Doug Champigny
Jason Dinner
Reed Floren
Mike Steup
Mike Mazzella
Larry Dotson
Xavier Nelson
Earl Day
Kez Engineer
Matthew Griffin
Gregg Hall
Michelle Brouse
Joel Osborne
Stephanie Mulac
James Jackson
Barry Richardson
Jim Miller
Jordan Hall
Brad Smith
Richard Wing
Jamie Bing
Matt Ng
John Rogers
Tuks Engineer
Kathe Lucas
Daniel McGonagle
Ken Reno
David Thompson
Gina Gaudio Graves
Joe Gilharry
Edmund Loh
Aurelius Tjin
Alex Sysoef
Rick Macaulay
Shelby Carr
Greg Lloyd
Todd Gross
Mieke Janssens
Melvin Ng
Pete Hall
Julius Moltgen
Scott Case
Davion Wong
Go and download your gifts before the event closes. It will be open only for 14 Days!
Here’s your invitation link.
Lightning Giveaway 4 Special Invitation Link
If you own a list of more than 5000, you can join in as a JV member. Here’s the JV invitation link. Only on my special invitation.
Lightning Giveaway 4 Special JV Invitation Link
Posted in General, Giveaway Events, Joint Venture, Online Marketing Learning | No Comments »
