The NO1 Newsletter Strategy

The #1 Newsletter Strategy kindly supplied by Affilorama

 

In this post we're going to look at the #1 Newsletter strategy available to affiliates: the 6-part mini course.

What is a 6-part mini course?

A 6-part mini course is essentially just 6 newsletters packed with as much value as you can possibly give. It's a strategy we have found to be highly effective, and we use it for many of our own products. What we've discovered is that we get more subscribers when we call our newsletter a '6-part mini course', rather than just a 'newsletter'.

The reason for this is that a course sounds much more interesting, and more valuable, than a newsletter. We've all signed up to 'newsletters' that turn out to be dull and uninspiring; on the other hand, a '6-part mini course' sounds manageable and effective. As we've talked about in other contexts, people do love to read a number because it gives them certainty.

The importance of quality

It's very important that the 6-part course contains your best quality work. This is an extremely important stage for gaining the loyalty of your subscribers. What you are doing is training people to continue opening your newsletters in the future. That requires positive reinforcement — if people are consistently rewarded for opening your emails by learning something new and valuable, then they will quickly learn that reading them is a positive experience, and one they want to keep doing; that is not going to happen if you waste their time and don't give value early on.

The sell

You can promote your affiliate program within your 6-part course, but it should be a soft approach. Leave the hard sell until Day 7. At this point, subscribers will be so impressed by the free content they've received so far, they'll be willing to take your recommendation seriously.
If you are able to throw in a bonus with the promotion, then that's even better. For example, if you are promoting a dog training book, you might be able to find some private label rights dog training articles that you could turn into a book. This is a great way of sweetening the deal and getting even more sales, but it's not essential.

After the course

Following the hard sell on Day 7, you can start to send out your regular newsletters every 3 days. You can alternate between instructional newsletters and the question and answer style. Every 7th newsletter should be a hard sell and be sent out the day after a regular newsletter.
We've done a lot of testing and found that an email two or three times a week is optimal. It might seem like a lot, but you've got to remember that people don't open every email they receive. Out of every 5 emails you send, they might only open only two.

Summary

In this post you've learned the best way to structure you're email marketing. To recap:

1. To start with, you send your subscribers your 6-part mini course.
2. The day after they finish the mini-course (Day 7), you send out a hard-sell promoting your affiliate product.
3. A couple of days later, start sending out your regular email series every three days, alternating between an instructional and a question and answer style newsletter.
4. Every 7th newsletter should be a hard sell and it's important that this comes out the day after an instructional newsletter, so that the momentum of all your value is maintained. 

Introduction to Email Marketing

Introduction to Email Marketing kindly supplied by Affilorama

In this post we take a look at an introduction to email marketing.

How important is email marketing?

We just can't emphasise enough just how important newsletters are to email marketers!
Although you can still make good money simply by 'traffic brokering', that is: promoting a product, earning a commission on a sale and leaving it at that, we can tell you that you've seen nothing like the profit you could be making with a newsletter.

To give you an idea of the power of email marketing: most marketers find that adding a newsletter series automatically doubles their income; in fact, it's not unheard of for people to increase their income by up to five times!

Mark Ling says that one newsletter email he sent out recently made him a quarter of a million dollars in 4 days flat; for regular promotions, he'll easily get $10,000 in sales from a single email.

Another prominent internet marketer, Frank Kern claims to have earned over $1 million in less than 4 hours from a single email.

If those figures don't grab your attention, then nothing will.

Why is email marketing so immensely profitable?

Email marketing is so immensely profitable because, in effect, it allows you to make ongoing sales to proven buyers.

You've worked so hard to get visitors to your site, it seems a pity to let them walk out the door just like that! A newsletter list enables you to keep in touch with a huge proportion of the visitors to your site. And it allows you to continue to sell to them for months, if not years, down the track.
Another enormous benefit of a newsletter is that you can also use it to promote new products about to launch. This is a highly effective way of building up enthusiasm to a fever-pitch, so that on launch day, your subscribers are falling over themselves to buy. A live launch can be extremely lucrative but, without a list, there's no way you can get a share of the pie.

Types of newsletters: online vs email-only

The products you are promoting will determine what type of newsletter will work best. There are two types:

1. The online newsletter - this is where you send out a very short email newsletter containing a brief introduction followed by a link, which the reader must click to read the rest of the content. The advantage of an online newsletter is that you can make it look good with nice graphics and layout. And more importantly, it allows you to host videos and audio, which is very important for topics such as 'learn guitar' or 'learn spanish'. 
2. The alternative is the email-only newsletter - email-only newsletters mean that the full text is contained in the email. In general, we prefer to use this style of newsletter simply because otherwise, with every action you ask people to take, you lose people - when you come right down to it, people are lazy! The more effort they have to go to, the less likely they are to bother. So, as a general rule, email-only newsletters get more readers.

In saying that, some subjects are better suited to online newsletters, as we've mentioned, particularly topics that require multi-media to be most effective.

Finally, there's also a third type of email, which is kind of a hybrid of the online newsletter and blogging. If you have a blog, you may wish to run a 'live newsletter', where the newsletters are your blog posts and you send out a short email containing a teaser and a link whenever you add a new posting. This is what we do for Affilorama and we've found it an effective way of getting more readers to our blog.

Summary

In this post, you've learned how immensely profitable email marketing is for affiliates, and why the type of email you send out will depend on whether or not you are promoting multi-media products.

 

Using Social Networking Sites to Promote Your Blog

Using Social Networking Sites to Promote Your Blog kindly supplied by Affilorama

 

In this post we're going to take a brief look at using social networking sites to promote your blog.

A blog is the perfect tool for integrating your web 2.0 and social marketing strategy.
Blogs allow you to document your thoughts and opinions on a particular topic. They are dynamic social websites that allow users to interact via comments and ping backs. If done well, your blog can make you quite a bit of money in affiliate commissions.

In general, people who like social sites will also enjoy reading and posting to blogs. It makes sense then, that people who find your blog through Digg will very often also be the type of person who wants to read and add comments to your blog.

Ways to promote your blog

Here are three great ways to promote your blog:

1. Place links to your blog on your profile pages and lenses if you are using Squidoo or similar.
2. Plug RSS feeds into social networking portals.
3. Use blogging network sites.

My Blog Log

My Blog Log is a super cool blog directory that allows you to list your blog, profile and build a network of friends. It has all the bells and whistles of a social networking site but it is build specifically for blogs.

Your profile page contains statistics on how many people are looking at your blog and so forth—which is undoubtedly handy—but possibly the best thing about My Blog Log is the 'Recent Readers' widget. The 'Recent Readers' widget is a small piece of code that you place in your side bar to display the photos of users who have recently visited your site.
Essentially this acts as a 'social proof of the herd' - if people can see that lots of others have been viewing your blog, they'll think: "Hey a lot of people read this blog so it must be great stuff!"

However the best is yet to come: the real beauty of this widget lies in how you can use it on other people's blogs to drive traffic back to your own!

As you browse the My Blog Log directory, your picture will appear in the recent readers box and this will link directly back to your profile page, which in turn links directly to your blog!
So, you can generate traffic for your blog simply by reading other people's posts!

Lesson Summary

In this post we take a look at using social networking sites to promote your blog. It's absolutely essential that you register for Technorati and My Blog Log. There is so much benefit to be had here. We also highly recommend Digg and Del.icio.us as our two favorite social bookmarking sites.

The Best of the Social Bookmarking Sites

 There are five excellent social bookmarking sites that you need to join. In no particular order, they are:

• Digg.com
• Del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• Technorati
• OnlyWire

Digg

Digg isn't your typical bookmarking site, although it is user-fuelled. On the homepage you'll see a bunch of recent stories that have been submitted by a member, and then 'dug' by other members.

It's a simple concept: people 'digg' stories and articles that they like and 'bury' those that they don't. This means that anyone who wants to find the latest and most interesting publications just has to look at the articles with a high number of diggs and they can be pretty sure that they'll click through to something intriguing and up-to-the-minute.

You'll find Digg buttons on Squidoo lenses and blogs all over the web and now you know why — this is a heavily trafficked site and having your article dug by users is a great way to brand yourself and drive traffic to your site.

If we take a look at an article from the front page of Digg, we'll find that there are links at the bottom to social networking sites, making it easy for people to add it to their site of choice.
You can find instructions for adding the Digg button to your own website here:http://about.digg.com/downloads/button/smart.

But a word of warning: don't dig junk advertising or you will be marked as a spammer. Digg users can be particularly venomous when they smell someone doing anything commercial. One poor guy had Diggers unearthing his phone number and prank-calling his house after he placed a comment with his business URL in the footer. So please: only use social bookmarking sites to bookmark quality articles from your site and other webpages.

What about SEO?

Unfortunately Digg places a no-follow tag on all outbound links, so it is worthless as an SEO tool — at least for top search engines like Google.

However, that aside, it is still very, very useful in terms of driving traffic to your site. In fact, so many web servers have been brought to their knees by the onslaught of Digg-referred traffic, that it's been dubbed the 'Digg Effect'!

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is one of the more well-known social bookmarking sites and shot to stardom in December 2005 when it was acquired by Yahoo. The acquisition is a pretty big hint that search engines place at least some importance on the results of this site.
Del.icio.us allows you to search and subscribe to other people's bookmarks, either individually or as a group.

For bloggers and website owners, Del.icio.us is useful primarily because bookmarks are taggable. So rather than storing a link about increasing interest rates in a single folder, you can tag it with a number of different descriptive words like: 'mortgage', 'finance', 'news', and 'economy'. The advantage of tagging is that it makes it very easy for other people who are also interested in those topics to locate your blog posts and your other tagged information and immediately see why it is relevant to them.

Additionally, Del.icio.us bookmarks are searchable. For instance, a search for 'chocolate' will turn up results based on keywords in tags, descriptions and titles.

Two other features worth a mention for the value they add to blogs are linkrolls and tag clouds. Linkrolls allow you to display your bookmarks on the sidebar of your blog, which means it's easy to draw attention to the sites you wish to promote, or that readers might find useful. Del.icio.us tag clouds display your popular tags to other people and they also look fantastic on blogs.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon helps you discover new sites based on your predefined interests. When you click the Stumble button, the site retrieves a page that matches your preferences.

You can then use the 'thumbs up', 'thumbs down' voting system to add the sites you like to your bookmarks and help StumbleUpon continually improve the sites they match you with. If you stumble enough good and interesting stuff, then other people will check out your profile and become 'fans'.

At the most basic level, you can 'discover' your own websites and add them to StumbleUpon to start getting some traffic. However, StumbleUpon blocks URLs that are submitted from the same domain name 15 times or more, so it's best to only Stumble your finest content, and if possible, what's even better is to Stumble content articles from other sites that mention you.
For StumbleUpon to work well, you need to use it regularly and Stumble a lot of good sites apart from your own. One vote doesn't carry that much weight, so it's important you get a good group of fans who also find your bookmarks, like them, and give them the 'Thumbs up' too!
In a nutshell then: the more sites you stumble, and the more you participate, the more traffic you get.

OnlyWire

Only Wire is rather special because it allows you to bookmark your page on a number of different bookmarking sites (19 to be exact) using the one, single interface. Quite a few of the 19 sites are very well-known portals and for that reason we recommend joining up with Only Wire.

One thing to note: Don't be surprised if some of the sites you try to join through Only Wire are down — just skip them and move onto the next one. The odd site on the list seems to go down on occasion — possibly because they are growing so rapidly. You will still have to enter a username in the field for each site (down or not), so if you find one that is offline, just enter a generic username and keep going.

Technorati

If you only manage to do one thing, start your own Wordpress blog on your own domain name and then use Technorati.

At a very basic level, Technorati is an RSS directory, but it is also one of the most powerful sites on the web for driving targeted traffic back to your blog. Many Internet users search Technorati for blogs on particular topics they are interested in. A lot of people who use Technorati are bloggers themselves.

When another user comes across your blog, they can link to it, subscribe to your RSS feed or add it to their favorites. These three things alone will generate a substantial amount of free, highly targeted traffic to your blog.

Once you register with Technorati (it's free by the way), you should immediately 'claim your blogs'. This is Technorati-speak for adding your blogs to Technorati's search and RSS directory.

You'll be able to give each blog a title and enter tags and categories. Each time you make a post on your blog from this point on, a keyword optimized link to your post will appear on the Technorati site.

It's not a mystery why we love this site.

To be blunt: if you own a blog and don't use Technorati, you're missing out big time. And if you don't own a blog then what have you been doing with yourself all this time? If this is the case, you need to correct it immediately!

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking kindly supplied by Affilorama

 

In this post you'll get an introduction to social bookmarking sites and how to use them for maximum SEO benefit!

What are Social Bookmarking sites?

Social bookmarking sites or 'tagging' sites are a way to store your favorite links online — usually publicly, hence the word 'social'! This type of site is the epitome of web 2.0 and has become very popular, as it's a great way for people to find new websites that they might otherwise never come across.

For internet marketers, social bookmarking sites are an excellent way of driving traffic to your website or blog.

There are two ways in which social bookmarking sites benefit marketers:

1. They have high Google PageRank, meaning they are fantastic sites to get linking to your websites for SEO purposes.
2. More people are turning to them to find the resources they are looking for. Once you add your sites and other people start to find them and like them, they will add some or all of your links to their list, and this can mean big traffic.

For example, Digg.com is the 89th most visited site on the web, meaning tens of thousands of people are going there every day.

Social bookmarking sites are very simple to use. All you need to do is register and start adding your favorite links to your list. On registration, most bookmarking sites require you to download a toolbar that goes onto your browser and provides shortcuts.

The first sites you add to your bookmarks will be all your personal webpages and blog posts - don't simply bookmark your homepage and leave it at that. Leverage these resources to the max by adding all your pages for the world to see.

Idea: Bookmarking Networks

When you have added a good selection of websites and blogs to your bookmarks, you might want to consider forming a bookmarking network, perhaps via the contacts you have made from social networking.

A bookmarking network is a group of 10 or so people who decide to collaborate on driving traffic by bookmarking each others' websites using the top social networking sites.
This will increase the chances of other people finding your sites and adding your sites to their own lists. Pretty soon, you'll have lots of people checking out your site, joining your mailing list and even buying products through your affiliate links.

Summary

In this post we've taken a quick look at how you can use social bookmarking sites to drive traffic to your website or blogs. We took a look at why you would want to use social bookmarking sites, as well as a brief glance at the idea of using bookmarking networks.

Web 2.0 introduction

 In this post we give you a web 2.0 introduction - a quick overview of what web 2.0 is, and what it means for you as an affiliate.

What is Web 2.0?

The term 'Web 2.0' was coined a few years ago to describe the new interactive internet. Evolving web technologies allow people to get more involved with websites — gone are the days when all you could do on the internet was read content. Now you can watch videos, play games, join communities, take polls, vote on content, post comments, and much more.

From an internet marketing perspective, these innovations have been a very good thing. There are a huge number of web 2.0 sites out there, all begging people to get involved. For affiliate marketers, that means that getting backlinks to your websites is no longer a problem;in the past you had to worry about contacting other website owners, sending out hundreds of emails, arranging reciprocal links - these days you barely have to worry about that at all.

Now, there are hundreds of resources out there that will put your link onto authority sites that the search engines just love. What's even better, the search engines are extremely quick to jump on new content as you add it to your site, so you get traffic from both people and the search engines very rapidly.

Just to demonstrate how big Web 2.0 sites are: for a very long time the top three most-visited sites in the world were Google, Yahoo and Bing, the three major search engines. But, if you take a look at the Alexa rankings today, the top three sites are Google, Youtube and Facebook; these are all Web 2.0 sites, all receiving huge traffic.

The big difference this makes to us is that, instead of fighting your way tooth and claw to get into Google, all you have to do is submit your content. If it's formatted correctly and tightly focused around a keyword, then you'll start getting traffic immediately;  if you're still focused on the search engines, good news: they love these sites.

In a nutshell: Web 2.0 sites have revolutionized the way affiliate marketers receive traffic and rank in the search engines, making both processes much easier and much faster.
 

Summary In this post, we've gave you a quick overview of Web 2.0, what it is and what it means for you as an affiliate.

 

Creating a Squidoo lens

In this post we'll be taking a look at a step-by-step process of creating a Squidoo Lens.Along the way, you'll also learn some great tips for getting your lens spidered by the search engines and increasing your page rank.

Creating an Account

1. From the Squidoo homepage, click Get Started.
2. Click on: Build My Own Lens
3. Select the option to create a new account.
4. Enter a subject matter for your lens.
5. Choose the purpose of your lens from four options:
   • I want to get the word out about _________
   • I'm gonna sell _________ stuff and earn $$$, for me or for charity
   • I want to make a list of my favorite things about _________
   • I just want to do my own thing ______________
   As affiliate marketers, you'll want to choose the second option.
6. Give your lens a title and choose a URL.
7. Pick a category for your lens.
8. Give your lens a rating — most likely G rated, but if you are unsure there is a guide you can refer to.
9. Choose your best keyword and then 3 others. The aim here is to make it easy for people to find your lens when they search.
10. Choose how to get paid from the option available:
    • Donate to Squidoo Charity Fund
    • Donate to Specific Charity
    • I just want cash
    • A combo of cash and charity
11. Confirm your account by entering the required details and creating password. Be sure to confirm your sign-up email before creating your page, otherwise you will not be able to publish.

Adding Content to Lens

The moment you've created your account, a template lens page appears. To begin adding information, click the Edit button for the section you wish to work with.
Before you start writing you might want to get some ideas by taking a look at the Top Squidoo lenses.

Reviews and articles all work well as modules, plus there are plenty of opportunities to spice up your Squidoo lens by adding RSS feed, YouTube videos and a guestbook, among other things.
Adding Twitter to your Squidoo lens is also a very good idea as it helps to encourage the search engines to spider it.

We also recommend finding Squidoo lenses on a related topic to your own with PageRank and adding a comment to the guestbook. Once your comment is approved by Squidoo, you'll get a link back to your own lenses via your username. Commenting on lenses with a page rank is particularly handy because it helps your own lenses get spidered faster.

How to Be a Good Squidooer — Some Tips

Squidoo doesn't want affiliate spammers so make sure you provide valuable content. As a rule of thumb, don't create more than 10 lenses per account.

You can have as many accounts as you want, but every account has to be set up with a new email address.

Make sure that you promote more than one site (or affiliate product) per account so that it doesn't look like your sole purpose is to drive traffic to one site.

Summary

In this post we took a quick look at the step-by-step process for setting up a Squidoo Lens. We looked at:

• Creating an account
• Adding content to the lens 
• How to be a good Squidooer

 

The Web 2.0 Backlink Method

Welcome to this  post on the Web 2.0 backlink method. In this post we look at using Web 2.0 to get people (and the search engines) visiting your site.

The key to this strategy is RSS. It's a crucial tool for utilising Web 2.0 sites because it acts as a connector between your blog, your Squidoo lens, your Twitter feed and all the other Web 2.0 sites you use — ultimately helping you to form a tight network, which in turn, leads to piles of traffic.

What is RSS? A refresher:

RSS is a type of language that formats your website content in a standard way so that a variety of RSS readers can understand it and display it to subscribers.

When you go to a blog or any number of other sites you'll often see an orange block in the address bar, or somewhere else on the page. That's the RSS icon. If you click on this it will bring up the RSS feed.

How is an RSS feed useful?

Many web 2.0 sites allow you to

• create RSS feeds
• add content to their networks using RSS feeds.

They will translate your feed into standard HTML so that it can be published as content on a website. Every time you post a new article on a site or blog with RSS enabled, it will automatically update the RSS feed and consequently, any site that is using that feed. So by updating one site, you can effectively be updating many.

Not only that, each update will also provide a link back to the original source for the RSS feed. What that means is that you can build a chain or network of sites and links that ends up pointing back to your main web­site — and thereby explode your traffic through the backlinks!
The way to put this into practice is to take a systematic approach. Here's the basic method:

1. Create three or four 300 word articles that are on the keyword topic you want to rank for. Make sure these articles have compelling titles which include the main keyword. Also make sure the keywords are in the opening and closing paragraph and once or twice throughout the body text. The content needs to have a purpose and direct readers to take action.
    
2. Create a high quality lens on Squidoo and post one of your articles along with a text link back to your main site that uses the keyword you'd like to rank for.
   
3. Go to Twitter and make a post that says something like: "I just created a new lens at...(and insert your Squidoo lens URL)". This is to get your backlink spidered.
   
4. Create a page at Hubpages.com.
   Hubpages describes itself as the leading online publishing ecosystem and is in fact very similar to Squidoo. The benefit of Hubpages however, is that it gives you more tools to monetize your page and doesn't require the same amount of profit sharing as Squidoo.
   For this fourth step of the process, add your second article to your Hub, again making sure to include a keyword text link back to your main site. You should also add the RSS feed from your Squidoo lens to your Hubpage.
   
5. Go back to Twitter and make a post about your new Hubpage to get that backlink spidered.
   
6. Create a blog at Blogger.com and add the third article with a text link containing your keyword back to your main site and add the RSS feed from the Squidoo and Hubpages page to your blog.
   
7. Post on Twitter about that to get your Blogger post spidered.
   
8. Create a page at Tumblr.com and add the RSS feed from your new pages (Tumblr allows you to add up to 5 pages).
   
9. Post on Twitter again to get that backlink spidered.
   
10. Create a page at FeedBite.com with the RSS feed from all the previous sites.
    
11. Post on Twitter.
    
12. Create an account at Bumpzee and add your Squidoo, HubPages, Blogger and Tumblr RSS feed.
    
13. Go to Ping.in and ping all the pages you've just created, including your Twitter page.
    
14. And on and on you go....!
    I could continue, but I'm sure you are getting the general idea!

Mix it up

Don't take the example I've just given as a rigid formula to be followed to the letter. The beauty of this method is that it can be mixed up in a thousand different ways; the more original the better.

Some Web 2.0 sites to try are:

• Hubpages
• Squidoo
• Tumblr
• Blogger
• Xanga
• Yahoo360
• Wordpress.com (although they're VERY wary of anything that looks commercial)
• Zimbio
• FeedBite
• Bumpzee
• Ezinearticles
• Twitter (for getting your new sites, posts, comments etc indexed in Google)
• Ping.in (for pinging your new content)

You can mix and match any of these sites using the template we've give you.

Which Web 2.0 sites work best?

This is a common question, but the answer is simply that it doesn't really matter. The sites that work for you might be different from the sites that work for other affiliate marketers; so don't get too hung up on this issue. The best idea is to watch your web statistics and see which web 2.0 sites are sending you the most traffic. From that information, you can weed out the ones that aren't working and focus on the ones that are.
Most web hosting companies will give you a basic stats package that allows you to see where your traffic is coming from.

Forget the "nofollow" tag

The nofollow tag is what some sites add to their outgoing links to tell the search engines not to pay attention to that link. It was introduced a few years back to try to curb comment spam in blogs. It's considered a problem for internet marketers because a back­link with a "nofollow" tag doesn't really count as a backlink - it stops PageRank being passed on by the search engines, making the "backlink" useless for SEO
However, the good news is that even with the nofollow tag, people will still visit a website, read your content and then visit your site. And at the end of the day, isn't traffic what you're really after anyway?

Summary

In this lesson we looked at RSS, a systematic method for creating "backlinks" for people to find your content (and the search engines to index). We also recommended certain Web 2.0 sites.

Four Bonus Web 2.0 Tips for Even More Profit!

In this post i give you four bonus web 2.0 marketing tips for getting even more profit.

The incredible power of tagging

In addition to creating RSS feeds, one of the great things about sites like Squidoo is that you're allowed to add "tags" for your entries. This lets you to take advantage of one of the fundamental aspects of human nature: that we're all inherently lazy.

The general Joe Bloggs inhabiting Squidoo land won't think too much about the tags he adds to his material and will mostly likely only add one or two very general tags, as will everyone else.
That means most people are "competing" for a handful of very general tags.

However, if you come along and add a more detailed three-word keyword phrase as a tag (a keyword phrase that you'd like to rank on), then there's a good chance that you'll find your material appearing in the search engines for that phrase.

For example, if you've tagged your Traffic Travis review on Squidoo as "Traffic Travis Review," your Squidoo lens might well appear in Google as "Traffic Travis Review on Squidoo".
These types of phrases are often searched for within the network itself as well.

The benefits of interacting with Web 2.0 sites

It's important to realize that Web 2.0 sites are self-sustaining networks. This means they use their own algorithms to determine which sites they should make more prominent in the network. Sometimes it comes down to how many backlinks you have, but a huge part of how your value is judged comes down to the internal factors of the site.

Remember that these are social sites so don't just put up content and walk away - to get the most out of Web 2.0 sites you need to be an enthusiastic participant, commenting on other pages, voting on other sites and add friends.

For every action you take, you get a link back to your page, and the system recognizes that you're active on the site and favors you accordingly.

Everything you do produces a benefit - that's the fundamental difference between Web 2.0 sites and the sites of old.

Promoting your promotions

In the previous lesson we saw how to promote your own websites by creating networks of backlinks. But this isn't the be-all and end-all of web 2.0 marketing. Don't overlook the usefulness of promoting the sites that are promoting your affiliate sites, or in other words: promoting your promotions.

Instead of just submitting an article to ezinearticles.com and getting a little bit of traffic from people who find that article through the search engines, why not try promoting that article so that it goes up in the search engines and brings you even more traffic?

Why limit yourself to just one site high-ranking site in the search engines when you could have ten?

Using Wordpress.com in your Web 2.0 strategies

Be extremely careful when using Wordpress.com.

For those of you who aren't aware of this fact: Wordpress.com is different to Wordpress.org. Wordpress.com allows you to host a blog on their servers, while Wordpress.org gives you the software to host your own blog on your own server.

You can do what you like with Wordpress.org, but Wordpress.com is very wary of anything that smells of commercial interests.

If you want to use a blog to promote products, don't use Wordpress.com - go to Blogger or Yahoo360 (or similar). That said, Wordpress.com is still very popular; it has a huge fan base, an excellent Alexa ranking and it gets indexed very quickly.

However, you should never put a salesy call to action into a Wordpress.com blog - instead, say something like: "to continue reading about this, click here", so that your commercial interests remain separated.

Lesson Summary

Four bonus tips for web 2.0 marketing:

1. Remember the long-tail when adding tags. Three-word phrases are likely to rank much higher than one-word, generic phrases.
2. Web 2.0 success relies on your continued interaction with the sites you choose to use. The more you use them, the better your status.
3. Consider promoting the articles that promote you so that you can get traffic from multiple sources.
4. Finally: take care not to be too salesy when using Wordpress.com. 

Affiliate Marketing on Facebook

Affiliate Marketing on Facebook kindly supplied by Affilorama

 

Facebook is a social marketing network that puts you in touch with millions of individuals around the world — and that makes it a very powerful marketing tool.

Everyone's heard the saying: "It's not what you know, it's who you know". That expression epitomises the rationale behind Facebook.

One of the advantages of using Facebook for Affiliate Marketing is its ability to give you a huge amount of traffic in a relatively short period of time. If you take a look at alexa.com, you'll see that Facebook is right up there with the likes of Youtube, MySpace and Google.com. We're talking serious traffic here.

The great thing about advertising on Facebook is that not many people are doing it yet, so the costs are very low, even though the targeting ability is very good.
Facebook allows you to target groups of people very specifically by age group, country and relationship status.

According to CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook ads are a platform for businesses to use targeted advertising and connect very precisely with the audience they want.  The key to this ad platform is total user control, meaning users decide if they want to endorse or "evangelize" a brand to their family and friends.

Facebook ads come in two forms:

1. User-initiated brand recommendations — whenever people visit a Facebook page, they can announce their engagement to a certain brand by writing on the brand's wall or becoming a fan.  The philosophy behind this type of advertising is that people will most likely consider a brand that is recommended by their family or friends.
2. Paid advertising — Facebook permits advertisers to attach an ad message to user notifications. To direct their ads, advertisers can choose to target the traits that users volunteer on their profiles, such as activities, interests, political leanings and age.

What can Facebook do for you?

• Simplicity — it's quick and easy to create a Social Ad in Facebook. Just write your creative ad text, tell Facebook who you want to reach, and decide where you want the traffic to be driven. 

• Reach the right audience — when you create a Social Ad in Facebook, you can target it precisely to your chosen audience, instead of just creating a general ad and hoping it might reach the right customers. 

• Advanced targeting — Facebook lets you target your audience by interests, location, gender and age. 

• Top of mind awareness — Facebook Social Ads give your business the opportunity to become of people's daily conversations. 

• Trusted referrals — Associating your ads with friend-to-friend interaction allows you to take advantage of powerful word of mouth and referrals. 

• Content integration — Facebook allows relevant content to appear on the surface. 

 

Here is an example of one of Mark Ling's live Facebook ads:

 

 

 

 

We use this advertisement to target women above the age of 30 who are single and live in the United States. The fact that you can target people demographically is a huge advantage of Facebook advertising. 

How to create a Facebook advertisement

1. You can either create your own Facebook page or promote your existing separate web page. To create your Facebook page, you should fill in your business category and name of business, then click create page:

2. A new item will show up in the applications list (upper left) called the page manager.  Click on it and it will open another page that gets you started creating your ad.

3. You will notice a button called "Create Targeted Ad" at the bottom of the page. If you select it, you can create an ad to drive people to your new Facebook page.

4. Alternatively, you can click on "I have a web page I want to advertise" and then type in the URL of your web page or your landing page:

5. Click Continue and you will be taken to the next tab "Choose Audience."  This is where you can choose your audience's demographics — their age, gender, civil status, education status, and so on.  It's also helpful to put in some specific keywords here to match your market.

6. The next step is to create your ad. Read over the "Facebook guidelines for ad copy" to make sure you are complying with their rules. Then, just fill out your ad title and body. You can even upload a photo.

At this point, you can also select the option 'social actions relating to your ad'. What this means is that, if you are a member of a Facebook group or you own an application, then Facebook will be able to enhance your ad by associating it with the actions of those groups. However, you may only choose the sources that are relevant to the ad you're creating.

7. Now it's time to figure out your budget. There are two options: payment per view/cost-per-impression (CPM) or payment per click.  Cost per impression is a good idea if you're just trying to spread awareness, as it's less expensive overall. Bear in mind though that just because people are loading up a page, it doesn't necessarily mean they want to purchase your product or service.

On the other hand, if you use payment per click (or cost-per-click), then you only pay when users click your ads.

At this point you even have the option of selecting the period when you want your ads to run. You can either run them continuously upon approval (Facebook will check all ads before showing them), or only run on specified dates.

8. The final step is to review your ad and pay by filling in your credit card details and clicking Place Order.

 

Marketing Tips

• Before you can start advertising you need to join Facebook and set up your own personal profile. We suggest you create your personal page before creating your business one. Invite your friends, colleagues, and potential clients to be your friend. 

• Set up a Business Page and start targeted marketing. Be sure to choose the demographic of your market and enter your keywords with care. 

• Make sure your ad is specific and points to a landing page or website. 

• Join Facebook groups that reflect your business or audience's interests. You can comment on their profiles or send e-mails.  The sheer range of groups available on Facebook is surprising! 

• Set up Events for your future teleseminars and classes. 

• Strategically update your status at least once or twice a day.  This shows that you're an active Facebook member and it pushes more information out into your friends' feeds. This works especially well if you link your Facebook profile to your website and within your newsletter. Whenever you update your website or want to promote an affiliate product, simply post it as a status update. 

• Many people login to Facebook daily, so this is another good way of increasing your exposure. However, you do need to make sure that your updates are restricted to one niche subject. 

• Comment on your friends' videos, photos, and posted items. 

• Add value to your friends by being a thought leader and posting links to relevant events, blog posts, and news stories. 

• The other day I received an event invitation via Facebook from internet marketer Mark Joyner and it made me think: if you encourage people to add you as a friend to Facebook and then invite them to a teleseminar interview with the owner of a product you are promoting (teleseminars convert like crazy when done well) you can make a lot of sales. People might miss your email due to spam filters, but promoting a seminar event through Facebook means they’ll almost definitely receive your invitation!

That's it for this lesson on Facebook advertising. We highly recommend you jump in on it as soon as you can and take advantage of this targeted and low-cost way of reaching a very large audience.

How to use Twitter for Affiliate Marketing

In this lesson we take a look at How to use Twitter for Affiliate Marketing - what Twitter is, and how you can use it to your advantage.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a micro-blogging site that allows people to make posts of up to 140 characters. It may sound odd, and it seem minimalist, but it's proven to be a huge hit, with millions of people discovering that it doesn't take many words to keep others updated and share thoughts and ideas.

So why use Twitter?

To start with, Twitter is very simple to use — you don't even have to be at your computer to use it. You can make a post by sending an SMS message, email or RSS feed to your account.
Twitter is frequently crawled by Google so it's a great way of getting other sites indexed. For example, if you were to set up another website, either a blog or static site, then you can simply make a Twitter post about it and it will get indexed by Google very promptly.

For instance, if you follow the Affilorama Twitter feed you will see that we frequently mention new sites we've just launched for this very purpose. The rest of the time we give value by talking things relevant to internet marketing and things we've been up to.

Twitter and the nofollow attribute

Near the end of 2008, Twitter added the “nofollow” attribute to all links on Tweets. This little piece of code stops search engine bots from following the link (hence “nofollow”) and therefore prevents Twitter's high PageRank from being passed on or the link being counted towards your site.

This is an unfortunate consequence of Twitter being overrun by automated bots and spam, but don't delete your Twitter account just yet. Remember there is a lot more to SEO, and indeed to running an online business than just building links. Twitter is still a great tool for creating direct traffic to your site, as well as updating your followers on new content and creating contacts with new and interesting people.

Following and Being Followed

No, this isn't about stalking. Twitter is a great way of keeping in touch with other people and keeping a finger on the pulse within the market you are interested. Twitter allows you to follow other people, which means you get alerted each time they make an update. And likewise, others can also follow you.

It's important to follow of handful of other people, because this adds you to their followers page automatically, which in turn makes it easier for Google and other search engines to find your Twitter feed. Some people who have been Twittering since the early days of Twitter, and who have lots of followers, now have a very high page rank for their feed.

Following people can be even more fun if you download one of the numerous Twitter desktop clients (similar to RSS readers) which go on your desk top and alert you with a pop-up whenever one of the people you are following has made an update.

It's probably better to make sure that you follow less people than you have followers, otherwise it gives the impression that no one is that interested in what you have to say!

Setting up account

Setting up a Twitter account couldn't be easier. All you have to do is click the Join button, create a username and password, provide an email address and prove you're human. And that's it — you're officially a Twitterer.

How to Make a Twitter Post

To make a post on Twitter (or to use the official name, a 'tweet'), login to your account, go to the home page, type your message and click update.

As you can see, this is meant to be as easy as possible to enable people to easily post numerous updates throughout the day if necessary.

Tweet Later

Just like blogs, regular Twitter updates are critical for keeping followers — and the search engines — interested in your Twitter feed. So if your diary is looking a bit full for a couple of weeks, then you might want to take advantage of Tweet Later, a service that lets you schedule post-dated tweets.

To create an account, visit Tweetlater.com and fill in the required details.

Then login and click Manage Tweets. Write your tweet and set the time and date for when you want it to be released.

At the specified time, your tweet will appear in your Twitter feed. Simple.

Summary

In this lesson we took a look at the microblogging platform Twitter, and how you can utilize it for affiliate marketing. We looked at:

• Why you might use Twitter
• Twitter and the nofollow attribute
• How to set up an account
• How to "tweet"
• How to make a delayed tweet

Super Affiliate Millionaire Secrets

Marketing Ideas

Looking for a little creative inspiration for your promotions? In this section you'll find a bunch of suggestions for thinking "outside the box" in your affiliate campaigns. If you've whacked up a website and peppered it with affiliate links and you're not sure where to go next... take a look at some of these lessons.

How to do Keyword Research

How to do Keyword Research kindly supplied by Affilorama

 

In this lesson you'll learn How to do Keyword Research - how to uncover large keyword lists, how to uncover more profitable keywords and which free and paid keyword research tools are the best. We'll also take a look at using forums and sites like Amazon.com to produce highly effective, highly targeted keywords!

Just remember: it's important not to rely on a single source for keywords, as each source gets their results from different sources; additionally, some tools remove plurals and others correct misspellings, which skews your data.

Traffic Travis

Traffic Travis is a very useful SEO/PPC tool available from Traffictravis.com. Traffic Travis's inbuilt keyword finder tool let's you quickly carry out essential research - the tool searches and collates data from Yahoo, Bing, Wordtracker and Google, so that you end up with a large number of keywords related to word or phrase that you entered into the search box; it also tells you how often each keyword is searched for on each source.

The keyword finder is an excellent tool for researching related words and scrutinizing the popularity of search terms. For example, if you perform a search on 'scrapbooking', you can see how popular each word is and see daily search counts for each word.

You can use the keyword finder into two key ways:

• Search for popular products to promote - keywords or key phrases searched more than 5,000 times a day in Google indicate a healthy market. Phrases searched more than 10,000 times a day indicate a very strong market.

• Build keywords lists for your PPC campaign, simply by selecting the keywords you wish to use and moving them to 'Saved' (Traffic Travis contains tutorial videos on Keyword Finder and another tool, Keyword Sorter, so give these a whirl to learn more)

Google Free Keyword Tool

The Free Keyword Tool is a tool supplied by Google as part of their AdWords toolkit. 
Keyword Tool lets you search on multiple phrases, and returns a large list of related keywords. Google shows indicators of advertiser competition, estimated search volumes and search trends for your selected location.

 

Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool

Wordtracker provides both free and paid versions of their tool; we'll first take a look at the free version, which is accessible here.

To use the free version, all you need to do is type in a keyword phrase and click "hit me". For example, a search for "world of warcraft guide" brings back the top 100 related keyword phrases.

The free version has a limit of 100 results, whereas the paid version brings back many more, plus it gives you other tools to play with.

Wordtracker Keywords 

The paid version of WordTracker is very good for finding related keywords that you might not otherwise have thought of, and it's considerably cheaper than Keyword Discovery (which we'll look at next).

Often you'll want to go "Keyword Universe" and then "Popularity search". WordTracker will produce a number of keywords and synonymous terms, and give you the relative popularity of each term, much like Google's tool does.

Note that the numbers you see in WordTracker will usually be different to those you see in Google, as they get their data from different search engines, but the relationship between the terms will usually be the same, so a term that ranks higher than another term in Google will (generally) also rank proportionally higher in WordTracker.

The good thing about WordTracker is that it doesn't lump terms together, so it's easy to see whether "dog collar" or "dog collars" is more popular, and words ending with "ing" will be differentiated. We consider this detection of variance in the keywords the most useful feature of Wordtracker.

Keyword Discovery

Keyword Discovery isn't cheap — the standard version costs $69.95 per month - however, due to the fact that Keyword Discovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines worldwide, it is probably the most powerful and accurate keyword research tool available.

One of Keyword Discovery's best features is the provision of 12 month seasonal trends, so that you can see if the keywords that you are interested in are popular all year around, or just during a certain period - for instance, if you were creating a costume website, you'd probably find that you should prepare for an increase in traffic around Halloween, and also during the summer when more people are having bachelor parties and so on.

Other Methods

Keyword research tools are one way of finding keywords, but there are other useful methods too - the downside to keyword popularity tools is that they don't necessarily tell you which terms people are using when they want to buy; it's possible to have search terms that are very, very popular, but are poor markets to try to sell to.

For example, "hairstyle" related keywords are incredibly popular, but most of the people searching on them are simply looking for pictures and other free information - they're not usually interested in buying anything. This is why we recommend you look at the advertiser competition in a market before you get too excited about a popular search term - if there are no other advertisers, there's a good chance there isn't any money in that market.

If, however, you're just brainstorming keywords that might be profitable, there's a couple of other resources you can use:

Forums

Forums are places where people go to discuss issues, ask questions, and talk about things that are stressing them out. By browsing forums related to your general topic, you can get a good idea of the sort of things that concern your target market and where their "pain" is.
For example if you go into a forum for "dog training", you may seen see topics like "stop dog aggression" or "antisocial dog". These are people who are looking for information because they have a need — they have "pain". These people are much more likely to purchase something to ease their pain than someone who is just looking for dog pictures or general information.

Be careful, however: by the same token, you may find that a lot of people are searching for "german shepherd" - this doesn't mean they're interested in buying anything however, so if you were to spend money on pay-per-click promoting this topic you might find yourself losing money, because people are not searching to buy.

Forum topics and discussions are not only good for brainstorming, but they can give you a valuable insight into what your market is thinking; they're also a great place to get ideas for article subjects, review topics and product topics.

Remember, once you've got an idea about a particular issue facing your market, check the appropriate keywords using a keyword research tool and see if people are advertising on them already - if there's no one advertising, you may need to reconsider.

At Affilorama, we're big fans of forum research and use this method all the time for our own products; we really cannot emphasis enough how great forums are for really getting to know your target market, what they are really interested in and where their pain is.

Online Shopping Sites

Another way of getting ideas for markets and search terms is by taking a look at online shopping sites such as Amazon, eBay and ClickBank. People searching for specific things on these sites are much more targeted — they know what they want enough to plug the name into a search engine, therefore those search terms are likely to have higher conversion rates, so by focusing on search terms containing specific product names or author names you're able to get more targeted traffic to your site.

For example, if you were creating a keyword list for the weight loss market, then you could search for "lose weight" in Amazon and find weight-loss related book titles and author names. If you click on the book descriptions and comments from readers, you'll discover even more keywords that are very important to the weight loss market.

You could then make money either by signing up to Amazon's affiliate program and earning a small commission if somebody purchases through your link (however, when we say small commission, we mean very small!) or, alternatively, you could have "supplemental" reviews of the "top 4 ebooks related to this topic", and then earn an affiliate commission through those.
ClickBank and eBay are also good places to finding products and authors you might like to focus on. Remember to take the names you find and plug them into your keyword popularity tool to see if many people are searching on them.

Summary

In this lesson we've looked at several methods for turning up suitable keywords for your PPC/SEO campaign, including using keyword tools such as:

• Traffic Travis
• Google's Free Keyword Tool 
• Wordtracker (Free or Paid)
• Keyword Discovery

We've also looked at a couple of alternative methods including:

• Using forums
• Using online shopping sites

And again, just remember: it's important not to rely on a single source for keywords - use a variety of these to make sure you get the most out of your keyword research!

Understanding market interactions

 As an affiliate you want to maximize your profit, so ideally you want to find markets that are successful for both pay-per-click and SEO. So the question is – is it still worthwhile selling in a market where you can only make money with only one these methods?

In this lesson we look at Understanding Market Interactions

Pay per click doesn't always work

Generally speaking, if you are making lots of money with pay-per-click you will also make good money with SEO.

However, the opposite isn’t always true. 
For example, the website haircutadvice.com ranks very highly in the search engines and receives lots of visitors, but it only profits from internal advertising. When we tested pay-per-click, the results were dismal!

It turns out that although there are thousands of people searching on hair cut keywords, they aren’t looking to buy. And this means they very rarely click on ads.

Nevertheless this website, which is largely made up of free content, still makes some money through CPA offers and Google Adsense, so it’s not all bad!

Predicting the market

You might be wondering whether there is any way that you can predict this situation when researching markets. The answer is, yes, to a certain extent.

For example, you can see evidence that the hair style market is SEO-weighted when you search for the words ‘hair cut advice’ or ‘hair style advice’ in the search engines. There are very few, if any, pay-per-click ads on display - yet there are over a million websites containing information and pictures.

You may well find other markets like this at some stage; markets with high numbers of people searching on the keywords, yet with very little pay-per-click advertising.

You shouldn’t reject these markets out of hand - most other marketers will, so it can be worth your while putting together a website and earning income from SEO, albeit a smaller income than you would earn from a market that makes money from both pay-per-click and SEO.

SEO is also a fall-back position.  If you are unable to profit from pay-per-click but you’ve done everything right on your site, then you can still aim to get lots of traffic and make money that way.

Using one form of marketing to enhance another

How SEO can help improve your pay-per-click

The advantage of SEO is that you can experiment with dozens of search terms without any expense, whereas this is much more costly with pay-per-click. Although your website may only rank for a small number of search terms early on, at a later stage you might find you are ranking highly for long-tail keywords you hadn’t even thought of.

Google Analytics is an essential tool in this situation because it shows you all the keywords people searched on that lead them to your site. Reviewing this information can help you spot new search terms to bid on in pay-per-click, and there’s a better chance they’ll be profitable terms.

This strategy is particularly useful if you are listing on Page 2 or more of search results and wish to get greater visibility for that term.

How pay-per-click can help improve your SEO

As we’ve learnt in previous lessons, pay-per-click can be a costly learning curve for affiliates - however, if you can afford to invest the money, you’ll find that being able to analyze the data from your pay-per-click campaigns is enormously beneficial – not only for improving your ads, but also for improving your SEO! 

Chances are, if you are making lots of money in pay-per-click, then you’ll also make a lot of money in search engine listings.

As many as 80% of search engine users will click on the natural listings rather than pay-per-click, so it’s worth transferring the market information you learn from pay-per-click to your website. For example, you might find that ‘stop german shepherd aggression’ profits wildly in pay-per-click. Now that you know this is a successful keyword, you can make a big effort to optimize your website for that term and cash in on the free traffic too.

Summary

If you can succeed with Pay-Per-Click in a market, you can usually succeed with Search-Engine-Optimization also, but the reverse isn't always true.

You can often find out by doing a quick search and seeing whether a keyword is heavily SEO'd, or has a balance of PPC and SEO sites.

However, don't completely disregard markets that look bad for PPC - many other marketers will, which leaves you room to build a site to take advantage of  the market and gain an (albeit small) income.

Choosing Affiliate Site Topics

For many new affiliates, Choosing an Affiliate Site Topic is the biggest hurdle on the path to success. As we mentioned in an earlier lesson:

• There are many different affiliate programs you can promote
• There are hundreds of different markets you can promote to
• There are lots of different methods for promoting products

These are all great points, but with so many options you have a perfect recipe for indecision, so let's tackle these points one at a time.

First on the list of paralyzing decisions for new affiliates is what topic to focus their affiliate efforts on. You could find something suitable after just a day of brainstorming, or it might take you a couple of months before you settle on something so here are some ideas for approaching this task:

1) Do you have any interests?

The first thing you can do is sit down and brainstorm. Write a list of your interests. Write a list of your hobbies. Write a list of the subjects you know something about. Write a list of the subjects you'd like to learn about. You don't need to be an expert on a subject to build a website - you will learn along the way.

However, it is absolutely critical that you choose a topic that you can take an interest in - remember: you're going to be spending a lot of time immersing yourself in this subject. You're going to hang out on forums related to this subject, read blogs that talk about this subject, compile articles about this subject and review products related to this subject. If you're not remotely interested in the subject, regardless of how profitable it may seem, you're going to give up on affiliate marketing altogether within a month.

This is particularly true with your first few sites when you're likely to be doing a lot of the work yourself. Later on down the track when you can afford to outsource some jobs, you might be able to delve into less interesting topics but, for now, motivation is your greatest resource, and if your topic bores you to tears then you're going to run out of motivation before you even get out the gate.

2) Look for opportunities

Once you've got a list of subjects, start looking around for good affiliate programs. Browse the affiliate networks. Consult the search engines and see whether any affiliate sites show up for related terms. Take a look at what and how they're promoting and start collecting ideas. Note down your ideas and keep a record of any related sites or products - even if you don't end up using these ideas now, you might want to review this list for one of your later websites.

Another thing you can do is visit forums related to these subjects and see what sort of things people are talking about. Find out what they're interested in, and what they're concerned about. This can help you narrow down your topic or discover aspects of the topic you might not have thought of. For each aspect of the subject ask yourself: is there a way to make money from this?

If there don't seem to be any affiliate programs for your topic, think about whether the topic is good for an Adsense site: consider whether there are a lot of people searching for information on this topic and whether Adsense pays well in this market. You may want to tuck this one away in the back of your head for a time when you feel like making an Adsense site.

3) See what everyone else is doing

This seems like a slightly counter-intuitive principle with affiliate marketing, but you should generally go where everyone else is going. Promote the products that other people are promoting in the markets that other people are working in. If you're having difficulty finding a good market under your own steam, have a look to where there is other affiliate activity. Try browsing the affiliate networks and looking at the products that seem to be attracting a lot of affiliates (eg, check ClickBank's "gravity" measure). Look around at successful affiliate sites and see which products they're promoting. Are they well maintained and full of comprehensive information? If so, they're probably doing pretty well. If they're doing well, then you can do well too.

INSIGHT:Be gentle, it's my first time

Often its the case that with your first website you'll be struck with this horrible brain freeze, but as soon as you start learning the ropes you will begin to see many more opportunities.
This is because you'll learn the indicators for a successful market and you'll get ideas for different ways to approach them. Until you've been through the process with one website your insight is pretty limited. One way to think about it is that your "real" job at this point isn't to find the best possible market you can find, it's just to find an acceptable market to get started in; keep a pen and paper next to your computer so you can write down these new ideas as you stumble upon them!

Summary

Choosing an affiliate site topic is one of the hardest things that new affiliate's find themselves having to do. Some ways to make this process easier can include:

• Writing lists of your interests, what you know about and what you'd like to learn about
• Visit forums related to a topic to see if there's new angles or insights you haven't thought of
• See where everyone else is succeeding

Don't be too concerned if you don't find the "best possible" market - for beginners it's really about learning the ropes, gaining insight and building up lists of ideas!


 

How to Choose an Affiliate Program

How to Choose an Affiliate Program kindly supplied by Affilorama

 

Before you throw yourself headlong into the marketing activities that will dominate most of your time as an affiliate, it’s critical that you select a good market in which to exercise your marketing skill. Not all products with affiliate programs are profitable and even the best marketing efforts can wasted if the program isn’t attractive to visitors, or doesn’t pay out a good commission.

While you could find a profitable market first and then locate affiliate programs within that market, it’s actually a lot faster to do it the other way around. In this lesson we'll cover Researching Affiliate Programs.

Step 1: Find a suitable program

ClickBank

ClickBank contains many excellent affiliate programs for digital download products.
Generally speaking, there are three things that distinguish a profitable program from a waste of your valuable time.

1. Commission is 60% or moreOver the years, we’ve reached the conclusion that it isn’t worth the time and effort to promote a product unless your commission is at least 60%. As the majority of products in ClickBank retail at $30-$70, abiding by this rule means that you earn a minimum of $18 per sale. There are dozens of products in ClickBank that pay out 60% or more - the very best often pay out 75%.
   
   However, there are a couple of exceptions:
   a) Very high sale price: If the product sells for $155, then a 50% commission isn’t all that bad and will still be worth your time. Even so, we don’t suggest going below a 50% commission.
   
   b) Recurring billing: Subscription-based ClickBank products often enable you to continue earning a commission every time the customer pays their subscription. In this case, you can lower your base to 40%.
   
2. A High Gravity RatingThe ClickBank gravity rating is based on the number of different affiliates that have made a sale during the week. A high gravity rating means that lots of affiliates are making sales and, in general, you can take this to mean that the product is in hot demand and has a good chance of being profitable for you.
   
   There is one exception to this rule: Internet marketing products.
   Internet marketing products are frequently purchased by affiliates through their own affiliate link. By doing this they get a big discount on a product; unfortunately it also radically skews the gravity, so when viewing the gravity of internet marketing products, don’t take the gravity of these kinds of products at face value. The category most likely to be affected by this type of activity is Marketing & Ads.
   
3. Check out the sales pageOf course, low gravity is not necessarily unprofitable - after all, every new product has to start somewhere! However, if a product does have low gravity, then you need to dig a bit further to work out whether it will convert well.
   
   The best way to make learn more is to click through to the sales page and:
   
   • Check for lengthy sales copy. Short copy doesn’t tend to convert well.
   • Compare the copy with competing products. Is it convincing? If competitors have better looking and better-sounding sales copy, then there is probably a reason why this product isn’t doing well.

Example of Good Affiliate Program

This program has it all: a great gravity, a 75% commission and a high sale price.

 

Example of Bad Affiliate Program

In contrast, this product has a very low gravity, low commission and low sale price; if you were to view the sales page you'd also see it’s fairly short and not that convincing.

 CPA Programs

Cost per acquisition programs pay a commission for each action, rather than each sale. For example, some CPA programs pay a commission on each email address captured, others for a zip code, and others still, for filing out an application form.
Popular cost per acquisition sites include Epic Direct Network, NeverBlue, HydraGroup, Clickbooth, ClixGalore

Good CPA programs are:

1. Zip code offers. Why? Because they are easy. All you need to get people to do is enter a zip code and you earn a commission. I know of several people earning over a million dollars a year just from zip code CPA offers. 
2. Commissions over $1. Why? Because earning $1 a sale makes your effort worthwhile. Sure, there are plenty of programs paying 0.20 per acquisition, but is it worth the work?
3. Unrestricted promotion. This isn’t really a "rule" as such, more of a warning. Some programs look great in every way…but only allow you to promote them via email. This is fine if you have a list, but what if you don’t? So make sure you check the terms and conditions before going ahead. You’ll find that some programs have no restrictions, others have a few, and some have a lot! They’ll not doubt have good reasons for these restrictions, just make sure you’re aware of them.

Physical Product Programs

There’s only one rule for choosing a good physical product to promote and that’s:
Make sure you are earning at least $40 per sale.

Physical products have a low markup compared to digital products such as offered by ClickBank, so, instead of applying the "60+% commission" rule, look for at least $40 per sale. This means that for a TV retailing at $2500, you would want to be earning a 2% commission ($50) on each sale.

Step 2: Assessing the Market

Now that you’ve found some likely looking affiliate programs, it’s time to find out what the market's like.

Lots of Competing Affiliates on Primary Search Terms = Healthy Market

As the saying goes: there’s nothing wrong with a bit of healthy competition.
Ideally, an Internet search on the primary search term for your market should reveal heavy competition from affiliates in the form of lots of PPC ads. You can take this as a sign that there is money to be made in the market.

For example, a search on "dog training" – a market we know to be highly profitable - reveals dozens of PPC ads, and many are clearly affiliates.

On the other hand, a search on "face painting" brings up only five ads – and only one of these appears to be an affiliate. This suggests that the face painting market is either undiscovered, or unprofitable - almost definitely the latter!

Plenty of Niche Search Terms

Competition on primary terms is good, but there still needs to be room to make a profit.
Using the free WordTracker (or similar tool), your next step is to check up on the number of niche search terms for the market.
A good market has plenty of niche search terms with relatively little competition - for example, the game ‘World of Warcraft’ is very popular over the globe. It’s a market with a lot of affiliates, but there are also literally hundreds of niche search terms:

Similarly, competition is intense in the dog training market for that keyword phrase, yet there are plenty of niche terms with low competition such as:

‘stop pitbull aggression’
It’s not all about PPC ads either - for example, although the niche term "stop fox terrier digging" has a number of competing PPC ads, there seems to be plenty of opportunity for an SEO site for this search term.

Are there multiple products to promote to the market?

While not strictly necessary, it can be handy if there are several quality affiliate programs within the market that you can promote, especially if you wish to build a list.
In a market with multiple affiliate programs, such as the dating market, you could promote "How to Attract the Opposite Sex" for two weeks, and then switch to "How to Gain Self Confidence". A few weeks later and you could offer ‘How to Start Conversations’; you’re offering great value to your list and also continuing to earn money through repeat buys.

Summary

In this lesson we looked at choosing a suitable affiliate program and some of the pitfalls to watch for; we also looked at assessing the affiliate market: Some of the things to watch out when choosing a program include:

ClickBank

• Products should have over 50% commission, preferably over 60% (with certain exceptions)
• Check the product has a high gravity rating or (if it's a new product) check for a decent sales page

CPA Programs

• Commissions should be over $1
• Beware of promotion restrictions (unless those restrictions work to your advantage)

Physical Products

• Look for commissions over $40

The second step is assessing the market

• Look for to see if the market has healthy competition (that's a good thing), but still  has room to grow
• Look to see if there's multiple quality products to promote to the market