Associate Programs Newsletter #76
Joanna and I had lunch today by the swimming pool at Twin Waters resort on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.
It’s the sort of place we visit only on special occasions and today was very special – we were celebrating our 19th wedding anniversary.
Just for fun, we began discussing different places we could live and came up with quite a few.
Today’s main article is about a guy who lives in Hawaii, but he runs the sort of business which could be run from anywhere in the world.
CONTENTS:
1. How Scott Dieken made $11,000 net profit last month
2. Shoplets provide shopping in context
3. The World’s Most Usable E-Commerce E-Zine
4. Vstore versus Affinia – why not try both?
5. Are freebies REALLY a good idea?
6. At last – Amazon.com provides online reporting
7. Hawaii keeps sounding better
8. Ooops
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1. How Scott Dieken made $11,000 net profit last month
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Scott Dieken, a former stockbroker and insurance salesman who lives in Hawaii, spent “lots of time” online over the past three years looking for ways to make money.
Now Scott has hit upon a formula which works extremely well – he made more than $11,000 net profit from associate programs last month.
The 31-year-old President of FinancialMachine.com creates websites aimed at niche markets and promotes only a few, carefully selected associate programs.
An excellent example is the attractively designed website https://www.FinancialMachine.com – an “online loan center that quickly connects you to a network of lenders who compete for your business”.
At a glance, visitors can easily see the purpose of the site:
“All you have to do is complete an online Q-form. We then send
your loan request to up to four lenders … Within two business
days, the lenders can respond with a decision about your loan
request. You may then evaluate the offers, and choose the one
that is best for you.”
If you’re looking for a home loan, auto loan, business loan, personal loan, student loan, debt consolidation loan or credit cards, Scott’s FinancialMachine.com can help you.
Loan calculators will be added to the site soon.
If you’re wondering if the site is reliable, you can study simple, powerful testimonials from satisfied customers.
FinancialMachine.com has an attractive, uncluttered design, obviously designed to look professional while making it extremely easy for visitors to find their way around.
Scott didn’t build it. He used designers in eastern Europe and Russia.
Scott says the best of his other websites, which all aim at niche markets, are:
InsuranceMachine.com
Submit-it-Machine.com
MatchmakerMachine.com
For Scott, it’s a full-time business which keeps him busy 10 hours a day.
However, take a close look at FinancialMachine.com and you’ll see that Scott is super-efficient. He’s not wasting time dealing with inquiries – that’s a task better handled by the money lenders, he says.
You won’t find Scott’s e-mail address, phone number, or physical address on the site. He really has created a virtual money machine – just like those crummy hyped-filled ads you’ve seen claim is possible.
The FinancialMachine.com site, which is only a few months old, earned a net profit of $3,000 last month.
It attracts about 10,000 visitors a month and Scott says about 95% of those come from GoTo.com. By paying for keywords at GoTo.com he is receiving carefully targeted traffic.
For example, if Scott wanted to pay for the search term “borrow money” at GoTo.com at the moment he could grab the number two spot for only 2 cents per click-through and pay nothing at all unless people click on his link.
However, paying for a top 10 spot with the search term “auto loan” would be far more expensive. CarPrices.com is paying 88 cents per click-through for the number two spot. If it wished, it could have number four spot for a lot less – 37 cents.
When I checked there was a huge gap between number three and number four spots – 76 cents down to 36 cents – so the site at number three spot was throwing away money, paying TWICE what was needed to maintain its position.
There must be money to be made in debt consolidation. Weblead.com is paying an amazing $3.54 per click-through to be number one.
In comparison you could be in number one spot with “cheap loan” for only 1 cent per click-through. However, if you do a search at [UPDATE: It’s now called Yahoo! Search Marketing.]
https://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
…you’ll find that only 19 people searched for “cheap loan” at GoTo.com last month while 3878 searched for “debt consolidation” and 8430 searched for “home loan”.
I asked Scott what other promotional methods he has used successfully.
“None.”
Scott says his advice for making money online is simple – implementing it is a little harder.
“Test a lot of programs and track how much you make for each user you send to the affiliate site,” Scott says. “This is the key! Know your VPU (value per user).”
Scott calculates Value Per User simply by taking his gross revenue and dividing by the number of visitors.
(That’s not the same as Marlon Sanders’ “Amazing Formula” – https://www.associateprograms.com/amazing )
“Always pay less then half of what your visitor is worth for GoTo.com keywords,” Scott says. “I get on average a 300% return on investment in GoTo.com keywords. Get rid of programs where you are making less than a few cents per visitor. Instead concentrate on your top programs and pay for rankings on GoTo.com.”
Scott says that with FinancialMachine.com he was lucky to find one that worked on the first try – LendingTree. “I’ve done only minimal testing of other loan programs but plan to do much more in the future.”
Scott says that on his other sites the following programs did not work for him:
Beyond.com
Chipshot
Fogdog Sports
Golfstore
IOwn
NetMechanic
Techwave (now called ShopNow.com)
Winning the Affiliate Game
“Unfair Advantage” Search Engine Book
Virtualis
(If you’re one of those merchants, please don’t rush to defend your particular program. I’m NOT saying that everyone will be unsuccessful with these programs, just that Scott was.)
For tracking, Scott uses WebTrends and a custom program made for him by a programmer in Hungary.
He says he didn’t have to make any special arrangements with the money lenders, although LendingTree gave him permission to publish FAQs. “The site is strictly based on affiliate programs.”
Scott says he hopes this article will put him in contact with others who are willing to share their Value Per User numbers with him – “not just those who will ask me what programs I am using or ask me to teach them how I am doing it. I would be very interested in trading VPU information with a select group of people.”
You can contact Scott at
diekens AT yahoo.com
You can see how he’s achieving those sales here:
FinancialMachine.com
https://www.FinancialMachine.com
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2. Shoplets provide shopping in context
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Pop2it.com, a start-up company set up in January by Igenesis founder Sririvasan Sriram, is launching what it calls a new form of embedded e-commerce.
The service allows websites to include “shoplets” at various places in their pages, which, when clicked on, take readers to contextually relevant product lists.
For example, the visitor may be reading a travel article and a menu of travel-related shopping choices will appear.
The shopper can buy without leaving the site.
Pop2it.com says it has a network of about a dozen merchants offering one million items. It plans to launch on November 1.
The FAQ does not say how much partner sites will be paid.
[UPDATE: This site is no longer online.]============================================
3. The World’s Most Usable E-Commerce E-Zine
============================================
I just checked my sales statistics at Ken Evoy’s “Make Your Site Sell” site. A very impressive 9.7% of the people I’m sending to Ken are buying his book. That’s a conversion rate most Internet marketers can only dream of.
Playing a huge part in that success is PRE-SELLING.
Ken works far harder than any other associate program merchant I know of to help his associates boost their sales. He puts a lot of emphasis on teaching associates how to prepare their visitors before they reach his site, warming them up for the sale. (It’s not difficult when his 800-page book is such incredible value at only $17 US.)
Week after week, month after month, Ken comes up with highly useful ORIGINAL advice in his three free newsletters:
- SITE-SELL! https://makemy.sitesell.com
- Sales from the EDGE (only for MYSS! owners)
- 5 Pillar Affiliate Report (only for affiliates)
It’s obvious that he puts a lot of time and effort writing these newsletters. “But it’s worth it because it’s just so important to provide people with the right information and tools,” Ken says.
Lately, he is being assisted more and more by his most successful associates, who are passing on methods which they are using to achieve impressive sales. Ken puts those tips in his newsletters, too.
I’m so swamped answering e-mail that I don’t get time to try every marketing suggestion which Ken makes. However, recently he convinced me to try just one simple tactic – and next week he gleefully reported that sales from my newsletter were up 60% on the previous week’s sales.
Why don’t you put Ken to work for you? Start getting Site-Sell! “The World’s Most Usable E-Commerce E-Zine”.
It’s FREE, of course. Ken is that kind of guy.
https://www.associateprograms.com/best-ezine
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4. Vstore versus Affinia – you could try both
=============================================
My mainly favorable description of Vstore last week obviously upset John McCrea, VP, Business Development and Corporate Marketing at Affinia.
John says his competitor VStore “has poor prices, no brand, poor shopper features”.
Ouch!
Here’s his description:
“Vstore’s real competition is Amazon (or any of the other leading
merchants working with Affinia), since Vstore is the merchant-of-
record, and they source from the same distributors used by other
merchants. Unlike Amazon, however, Vstore has poor prices, no
brand, poor shopper features. Getting 15% commission is only
attractive if products actually get purchased. Why would someone
buy from Vstore, when they can get the same product for less
money and with better customer service from Amazon?
“Affinia is all about helping small- to medium-sized websites. We
put them at the center of a universe, in which they can easily
pick relevant products from a wide variety of BRANDED, TRUSTED
online merchants. Via Affinia, a website can create a truly
UNIQUE storefront, rather than choose from a limited menu of
‘canned’ storefronts. We pay sites for the traffic they refer to
merchants, rather than have them assume the conversion rate risk.
“Most affiliates are surprised to find that a very small
percentage of the referrals they send to merchants turn into
sales. At Affinia, we take on that conversion rate risk and pay
out the fair value of a click. The only reason that affiliate
programs don’t pay per-click is that they don’t have to, because
small websites have no leverage. Affinia wants to help small
websites get a better deal.”
VStore uses the pay-per-sale approach while Affinia uses pay-per-click.
Setting up a superstore using either is remarkably quick and easy.
With Christmas coming up, it would be an interesting experiment to set up TWO gift shops – carefully selecting various items based on different themes, one with Affinia and one with Vstore.
If anyone does that, I’d love to receive detailed results.
Here’s John McCrea’s Affinia Storefront:
Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from Watching Spock
shop.affinia.com/mccrea/Store18
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5. Are freebies REALLY a good idea?
===================================
We all know that giving things away is a great idea, don’t we? After all, “free” is a magical word which makes people click.
However, Bob Serling argues persuasively that giving things away only encourages people to expect more free things. Here’s his fascinating article:
Smart Marketing On The Web –
How To Rid Yourself of Freebie
Collecting Tire-Kickers And Deal
Only With Prospects Who Are
Serious About Doing Business With You
bobserling.com/freenewsletter/issue24.html
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6. At last – Amazon.com provides online reporting
=================================================
Amazon.com has made major improvements to the help which it provides its associates.
It now provides:
- online reporting
- fully automated link generation
- complete account maintenance
- an extensive graphics library
It also has an “Associate of the Month”. This month’s is klydemorris.com/bookstore.htm
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7. Hawaii keeps sounding better
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Thom Reece keeps improving the E-Commerce conference in Hawaii. He has added Dan Janal to the line-up of speakers – and added a million-dollar hole-in-one golf contest.
All conference attendees will be able to buy a one-on-one session with any of the speakers for only $25. At that bargain price, I’ll jump at the chance to pick John Audette’s brain.
I wonder how much one good idea could be worth . . .
I hope I’ll see you there.
[UPDATE: It was a good conference.]=========
8. Ooops!
=========
Sorry. I left the “com” out of two URLs last week:
BizLand’s free 35MB business web hosting
https://www.bizland.com/
Neil Durrant’s Affiliate Announce.
All the best
Allan Gardyne
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