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 | 10 Comments »
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Commission Blueprint, a new report scheduled to launch on 27 August 2008, is the first from Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey. Who are these folks and what is this report about? Read this Commission Blueprint review to find out.
Steven Clayton, quite an unknown marketer till now runs a company managing Adwords campaigns for clients in the tune of 6-figures. Prior to founding hims company “Worth Overdoing Marketing and Consulting”, he was a Vice President for a $5 billion Fortune 500 Company.
Tim Godfrey is quite a new face but he isn’t. Just recently, he has successfully launched Profit Praxis, a killer product in the IM arena. Hailed as the rising star in internet marketing by two heavy weights, Chris X and Alex Goad, Tim has been quietly sweeping cool affiliate checks from the recent product launches like Google Nemesis and Four Tier Annihilation, knocking out gurus with huge lists and hitting sales of more than 280 copies sold with a list of only 7000 members.
Obviously, these guys may be unknown but are no newbies to the internet marketing industry.
What Commission Blueprint is about?
A collection of exact techniques to generate $526,422.83 in affiliate commissions within 7 months. And all using Adwords and landing pages. NO List or SEO involved!
Not a single internet marketing product was sold to hit that figure. See the income statement below.
Watch the pre-launch video here!
By now, you would have seen dozens of Google/Clickbank related product launches. In case you quickly associate Commission Blueprint with them, then you are in for a surprise. This report has a Web 2.0 twist to it.
All in, there are 14 videos and 5 PDF that explain in great detail how to execute the killer techniques to make huge profits from Clickbank products.
Learning Google Adwords is something which every internet marketer should consider. After all, increasing your traffic is the main activity every living marketer should do.
Commission Blueprint will have an entire suite of tips to show you how.
I will share in greater detail about this report when I get hold of my very own copy of the Commission Blueprint in a few day’s time.
Wait closely for my detailed Commission Blueprint review and bonuses here.
Updates on 20 Aug 2008:
I have received my first installment of the Commission Blueprint! Here’s an updated Commission Blueprint Review! Needless to say, I immediately opened the whole suite of pdfs and videos. I shall let you take a quick peek at a portion of them. This is not the complete package yet. But I am already excited after reading through the Opt-In Page Secrets PDF!
The PDFs: (there are 2 more PDFs to be added here. But just reading the first is enough to get your attention)
Opt-In Page Secrets
Pre-Sell Page Secrets
Review Page Secrets
The Videos: (The videos are impressive and make it really clear for us to understand how to execute each step. Truly a step-by-step no brainer video series)
Video 1 - Introduction & Welcome
Video 2 - How To Use This Program
Video 3 - Picking Profitable & High Converting Products
Video 4 - In-Depth Keyword Research & Advanced Tools
Video 5 - Domain Name Secrets & Hosting Set Up
Video 6 - Creating Your Story - The Essential Component
Video 7 - Setting Up Your Landing Pages For Maximum Conversion
Video 8 - Setting Up Your Campaign
Video 9 - Managing Your Campaign
Video 10 - Picking A Winner & Milking It
Video 11 - Scaling For Profit (Step From $100’s to $1000’s In Profit)
Video 12 - What Can Go Wrong & How To Fix It Fast
Video 13 - Cash Flow & Business Management
Video 14 - Wrap Up
The Templates: (All ready to be used. All you have to do is make minor tweaks to suit your campaigns. These are all proven to sell templates!)
The Review Page Template
The Pre-Sell Page Template
Opt-In Page Templates
I shall return to give you more run up on what is happening. To be honest, I am quite awed by the amount of goodies offered in the Commission Blueprint package.
Posted in General, Google Adwords, Online Marketing Learning, Pay Per Click, Product Reviews, Web Traffic, keyword research | 3 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 | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
It has been about 2 weeks since I last posted. Well, I am back after getting all busy with creating and semi-automating my network of blogs. Yes, I do own tons of blogs and with my new projects coming up soon, I got to set certain systems in place to take care of the content management as well as link and traffic building of my blog empire.
Ok, back to this post. Here are some cool and free keyword competition analyzers you can use to conduct a search for “low competition keyword phrases”. Now, “low competition keyword phrases” are much sought after for a few reasons.
Firstly, if you are an article marketer or bum marketer, using such keywords will get you ranking in top placements in the search engines really fast.
Secondly, if you are using PPC, targeting a specific long tail, low competition keyword phrase for your keyword, landing page content, ad title and ad content will bring down the cost of your ads really fast. But be mindful to target low competition keyword phrases with some decent amount of searches. Otherwise, you will be wasting time building a landing page and optimizing it around the keyword.
Which are these free keyword competition analyzers?
1. WordTracker’s Cool Google Trends Feature
You may be familiar with WordTracker but did you know that you can combine the power of the free keyword competition checker with Google trends?
Say I want to check out the keyword competitiveness of “working from home”. I will go to
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends
Take a look at this screenshot.
Next, I will click on the little icon on the right column that says “Niche summary for working from home”.
It will bring me to this screen that shows the Google competition and the actual number of visitors from the No.1 website in Google.
Powerful, right? Within a few minutes, one can easily find some long tail low competition keywords to target. Now to the second free keyword competition analyzing tool.
2. SEO For FireFox Plugin
Yes, this is an add-on for your SEO browser.
Download it from
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
Install it and run the tool. See the screenshot below when I try to check if the keyword “working from home” is worth targeting.
It pretty much tells you a great deal about the sites that are ranking well for the keyword “working from home”. If you see most of them with a high PR and tons of backlinks, this is a good sign that you should avoid it!
But if the sites that are ranking well for the keyword phrase are all low PR pages with small number of backlinks, the keyword phrase could just be the low competition keyword phrase you are looking for!
Posted in Article Marketing, General, Online Marketing Learning, SEO, keyword research | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008
What are the most important or must-have bum marketing tools in your arsenal?
I talked about the bum marketing method in my previous post. Today, I want to spend some time to talk about the essential bum marketing tools that I use quite often.
1. Brainstorming for Niches and Products
In brainstorming for ideas or niches to target for my bum marketing efforts, there is one place you will love to go to.
CB Engine – it is quite simply one of the best tools to find hot products to promote. I like the feature that lets you filter off the search results according to your preference such as minimum commissions and commission payout percentage and so on. Personally, if the commission payout is lower than $20 per sale, I will ditch it.
From here, you can also get to see which are the market movers and what are the most popular topics. With the pro version, you get a full set of cool tools to use as a ClickBank affiliate.
One word of advice here – the “make money online” market is one where the buyers tend to be very well-informed! It may not be that easy to make money out of them.
While it is also such a huge market where tons of products are sold, it is not recommended for the newbie bum marketer. Target the other niche markets using your bum marketing method.
2. Keyword Research Tools
Once you decide on a market to target, it is time to do proper keyword research. A lot of people get this wrong by focusing on keyword research first before looking at the market’s profitability.
Some tools I use frequently include:
a. Google’s very own keyword research tool
This is a free tool to find long tail keywords. But it is not the best since you cannot figure out what is the exact search count.
b. Keyword Elite
If you have money, invest in Keyword Elite. It is one of the most powerful keyword research software I use to find the right keywords to target for the bum marketing method. This is hands-down one of the best bum marketing tools!
c. NicheBot
NicheBot is a super dynamo when it comes to churning out laser-targeted keywords for your bum marketing articles. I use the paid version which gives me detailed run downs on what are the exact keywords people are searching.
This bum marketing tool also suggests which “Jackpot” keywords you can use to dominate any niche market you are in. These are keywords and keyphrase where there is almost zero competition! This is perfect for my bum marketing method.
It is meant for more elaborate keyword research and ideal for PPC campaigns as well.
3. Writing Content for Bum Marketing Articles
I used to write all my articles for bum marketing traffic. But with a network of 50 over blogs, it can be extremely challenging to write all my content.
There are some tools and services that make things really simple for me.
a. Instant Article Wizard
This is my baby for the bum marketing method. The reason why I say that it is a tool made for bum marketers is because in the whole bum marketing strategy, pumping out articles fast is the key to win the game! And that is what Instant Article Wizard does.
Oh, do not simply slap an article together with the search. Well you can and chances are the article is highly readable, but I expect a lot out of my articles.
So I will normally use it to do my content research. Find all the necessary data and information and then write an original article altogether.
b. Hiring GhostWriters
Ghostwriters are so important if you intend to run a successful business. Outsource your writing to good writers. Pay them well enough and you are never in lack of quality unique content.
$5 for an article is quite reasonable. I often use GetaFreeLancer and DP Forums for my content writing needs.
4. Submitting the Bum Marketing Articles
Article directories are my main battlegrounds to charge up profits from the bum marketing method.
I rely heavily on article submission software and article submission services.
Article Post Robot is the ultimate well-invested tool I found. It has earned me many fold the one-time price I paid for it. With one click, my article is distributed to over 400 article directories including EzineArticles. So far, this is the only tool that can post to the correct article category.
Read this review about Article Post Robot to understand what it can do for you.
The next are the article submission services, Unique Article Wizard and JetSubmitter. Both are hands-free services that distribute my articles to well over hundreds of article directories. Read about these two services at this article submission service review site.
I love UAW more simply because it also posts my articles onto their network of blogs. So far, I have seen quite a number of my articles that are posted on blogs ranking Top 10 in Google. I consider this my secret weapon among the bum marketing tools I own.
I hope I did not miss out on any tool that is useful for bum marketing. Feel free to post your comments about your arsenal of bum marketing tools here.
Posted in Article Marketing, Blogging, General, Online Marketing Learning, Product Reviews, SEO, Web Traffic | 7 Comments »
