Associate Programs Newsletter #200
Remember the thrill you received when you made your first affiliate sale?
My new assistant, Rupert, has just experienced it.
Today I tell about his progress, and review a new resource that describes 70 affiliate viral marketing tactics.
CONTENTS:
1. Rupert celebrates his first affiliate sale
2. Where to find 70 affiliate viral marketing tactics
3. Why I’ve stopped using Postmaster General
4. Search engine optimization strategies that work
5. Morpheus overwrites affiliate links
6. Popular articles you may have missed
7. Thought for today: Affiliate marketing
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1. Rupert celebrates his first affiliate sale
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There was great excitement on Monday when my new assistant, Rupert, checked his affiliate stats.
He discovered that he had not only made his first affiliate sale, he had sold TWO products – only a few days after pasting his first affiliate link into a web site.
His brand new web site is already receiving about 200 visitors a day – and climbing – and has generated $609.98 in sales.
That’s pretty exciting for a site which is still being built.
The site sells real, hard products, not Internet marketing related stuff.
He’s not using any gimmicks or get-rich-quick techniques.
What he’s doing is building a useful, helpful site which adds value to the Internet, a site that search engines will love.
It’s a low-maintenance site that should continue to generate affiliate commissions for years – long after today’s tiresome tricks and gimmicks have been forgotten.
To make Rupert’s task easy, I chose a shortcut.
I gave him Ken Evoy’s free “Affiliate Masters Course” and the Site Build It! “Action Guide” to read.
Rupert has been following the step-by-step instructions. So far, he has done this:
Brainstorming and research.
Chosen a niche topic in which he’s passionately interested.
Located an appropriate affiliate program.
Researched high-profitability keywords.
Written information-rich, keyword-rich articles.
Run each article through the “Analyze It!” module. (That was easy – he just clicked a button.)
Woven affiliate links into the articles.
This week, Rupert has been studying his stats. He can see which search engines are sending him visitors, which keywords people are typing into search engines to find him, and which of his pages are most popular.
There are some obvious gaps he needs to work on.
Armed with that knowledge, he’s now writing more keyword-rich, information-rich articles, keeping his focus on a tight theme, so the search engines will love the site.
It’s very early days yet.
The site still has hardly any links to it. So far, most of its visitors are coming from Google.
What Rupert finds really exciting is that, based on his research, there’s HUGE potential for more visitors and more sales.
I won’t tell you the name of his site yet, because that would spoil this money-making experiment.
I don’t want 17,000 readers visiting the site and artificially boosting the stats.
However, eventually you’ll get a chance to see it. Rupert is taking notes for a case study.
To build the site, he’s using Site Build It! –
https://www.associateprograms.com/buildit .
Site Build It! has enabled him to create the site without spending time worrying about HTML, FTP, CGI, web hosting or search engine optimization.
He hasn’t even needed to submit the pages to search engines because Site Build It! does that for him, in a search engine- friendly manner.
Instead, he’s able to concentrate on what’s most important – writing articles for the search engines to find.
Judging by the progress he’s made so far, it won’t be long before he’s receiving 500 visitors a day. Then the next target will be 1,000 visitors a day. I’m sure he can do it.
(The comment I hear most frequently from him when he’s using Site Build It! is: “Wow! This is awesome.”)
He’s so enthusiastic about his progress that he’s already started creating his second Site Build It! web site and is planning a third.
I’ll keep you updated on his progress.
If you want to earn good affiliate revenue without bothering with all the technical stuff, Site Build It! is an excellent choice.
It’s a fabulous tool, with major new modules coming soon.
The best introduction to Site Build It! is through the free “Affiliate Masters Course”.
Download the free course here:
Learn more about Site Build It! here…
https://www.associateprograms.com/buildit
UPDATE, June 5, 2002:
Wow! The visitor numbers at Rupert’s first affiliate site have jumped from 200 a day to over 340 a day, as his rankings in Google improve. It’s going to be fun watching those numbers rise. After a slowish start, his stats now show $1,809.95 in sales. He’s racing ahead with a second affiliate site, which received 185 visitors yesterday and has made sales of $279.99.
UPDATE, October, 2002:
Wow again! He’s now receiving a total of more than 1,000 visits a day and his affiliate sales have topped the $75,000 mark.
UPDATE, December, 2002:
Rupert’s first Site Build It! site has now generated $35,639 in sales and his second site $80,135 – all achieved simply by following the Site Build It! instructions. Rupert and I strongly recommend Site Build It! Get it here now: https://www.associateprograms.com/buildit
UPDATE, 2011: Both sites are still going strongly and have generated thousands of dollars each year since they were build.
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2. Where to find 70 affiliate viral marketing tactics
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Have you toyed with the idea of adding some sort of viral marketing to your affiliate marketing?
Promote once, earn forever – that’s the concept. It sounds so good, doesn’t it?
Perhaps you’ve urged your readers to “Forward this newsletter to a friend”. Perhaps you’ve written a free ebook.
But what next?
How can you launch a hugely successful viral marketing campaign, one in which you tell your friends, who tell their friends, who tell their friends, etc.?
A campaign that just keeps on snowballing – with YOUR affiliate links imbedded in it?
Imagine what that would do to your affiliate commissions!
If you’re like me, you’ve read the Ideavirus book, you’re fascinated by the viral marketing concept, but after tossing around an idea or two, you’ve put it on the back-burner.
One day, maybe, you’ll do something about it.
You’re in luck. Help has arrived.
I’ve just been reading a new ebook by Sherry Gordon, “Viral Marketing Strategies for Affiliates and Affiliate Program Merchants (and Others)”.
As far as I know, this is the first book of its kind. I’ve seen no other book which describes so many viral techniques.
Sherry, who owns https://www.AffiliatePrimer.com and https://www.ThinkJointVenture.com , has done a whole lot of Web sleuthing, brainstorming and experimenting.
Her book leads you through steps you can take to put viral marketing into effect in your affiliate business.
This isn’t a rehash of the old Hotmail story.
In 13 chapters, Sherry identifies more than 70 – that’s right, 70 – different tactics that can be used specifically by affiliates and affiliate merchants in 11 categories of viral marketing possibilities.
You’ll be staggered by the amount of ground covered here. She discusses rebrandable ebooks, “advergames”, e-cards, digital video clips, autoresponders, how to syndicate your blog, etc, etc.
She looks at everything viral from the crass to the highly professional.
She briefly discusses multi-level marketing (after all, it’s hard to get more viral than that).
She shows you, for example, how to add a multi-level marketing banner to an ebook.
She gives you viral marketing examples, with links so you can see how people are implementing various techniques.
She also describes more than 40 viral marketing resources and explains why she thinks they’re good options.
The book has a few minor flaws. The version for PCs is designed for reading online, not printing. I found I could print only one chapter at a time – and then parts of the printed words were chopped off on the right side of each page. (I was using Windows ME. Perhaps that was the problem.) If you want to print the ebook, I recommend you download the PDF version.
However, that’s a minor problem in a value-packed book which is remarkably cheap. It costs only $23.
“I’m building my affiliate business with a number of these techniques as you read this,” Sherry says. “And there’s no reason why you can’t do the same.”
As a bonus, you also get three viral ebooks (two of them are for PCs only) that use ingenious viral twists.
Why is Sherry selling such a valuable ebook so cheaply?
Simple. She’s unleashing a viral marketing storm of her own through this book. You can study her techniques and implement them yourself.
For only $23 I consider it’s an absolute bargain.
Promote once, earn forever.
[UPDATE: Sherry’s book is no longer available.]============================================
3. Why I’ve stopped using Postmaster General
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I’ve been having a few problems with Postmaster General, which distributes this newsletter, so I’ve switched to Dundee.net.
I’ve received several puzzling complaints from friends who say they have been unsubscribed somehow when they didn’t want to unsubscribe. (I don’t think e-mail filtering is the problem.)
It makes me wonder how many other readers I’ve lost unnecessarily.
More seriously, Postmaster General (Mindshare Design) has been accused of helping spammers. It has appeared on several blacklists and I’ve been warned that the company is widely regarded as a spammer.
One reason for this is that some its publisher clients have set up subscription co-registration deals with unscrupulous companies which sold them junk e-mails.
When people complain of spam, they are given an option to unsubscribe from ALL newsletters distributed by Postmaster General. Some readers have told me they didn’t realize they had unsubscribed from my newsletter.
Is Postmaster General at fault? I don’t know. It publishes strong anti-spam rules, which it has just strengthened.
It may be an innocent victim.
Anyone can set up a blacklist and make up their own reasons for compiling a blacklist. Being on a blacklist doesn’t prove you’re a spammer.
However, one thing that bothers me is that Postmaster General doesn’t publish a client list, although it told me ages ago it planned to do this. In the meantime, I don’t know what sort of companies I’m associated with.
I don’t know what the whole truth is, but I can’t afford to risk damaging Associate Programs’ reputation, so I’ve switched over to Dundee.net.
Dundee.net has a good reputation. Its publishers have a total of 7.8 million subscribers. You can see a client list here:
https://www.dundee.net/isp/listhost.html
Dundee looks a good service but if you want to switch your newsletter to it, you’ll have to go through a ridiculously complex installation process. As I write this, I’m having technical problems with Dundee, so if this newsletter is late, that’s the reason.
In contrast, Postmaster General is extremely user-friendly.
[UPDATE: Over the years, we’ve tried several newsletter distribution services. Hands down, the best one for reliability, deliverability and value is Aweber – https://www.associateprograms.com/aweber ]==================================================
4. Search engine optimization strategies that work
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Remember Michael Wong?
He’s the guy who made an incredible success of eboz.com, which he created in 1998 to help people build web sites.
Within a few months, he was attracting more than 100,000 unique visitors and 750,000 page views a month.
In May 2000 he sold eboz and two other sites to iBoost. He stayed on as Editor-in-Chief of iBoost and then joined its marketing department.
A huge part of Michael’s success came about because of his skills with search engines (and 16-hour days learning all he could).
At iBoost, he single-handedly optimized more than 1,000 Web pages for the major search engines and managed all the company’s pay- per-click ad campaigns.
He achieved more than 2,000 top 30 rankings for ONE site.
Michael left iBoost in March last year and now runs his own search engine optimization business.
He’s just written an ebook, “Search Engine Optimization Strategies”. It’s an in-depth analysis of HIS findings.
There’s a lot of frustrating, contradictory advice on the Net about search engines. Michael’s 257-page book gives you his findings from his research, so you can be confident it’s sound advice.
He describes in detail how to optimize web pages for each of the major directories and search engines, and describes how their requirements differ.
For example, he’ll tell you whether hidden links, duplicate pages, cloaking, meta refresh tags and tiny text are considered spam on each engine.
Michael says that search engines refer 500 million visitors each day. Perhaps a few more of them ought to be headed your way.
I recommend his book to anyone who’s looking for really detailed, comprehensive knowledge and advice on all the major search engines.
Learn more about it here:
https://www.associateprograms.com/search-engines
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5. Morpheus overwrites affiliate links
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Neil Durrant of https://www.affiliatemarketing.co.uk has been analyzing how Morpheus file-sharing software overwrites affiliate links.
You know what that means – you’re missing out on commissions you ought to receive.
Read the sordid details on the Associate Programs Message Board (Look under M for Morpheus) and have your say…
https://www.associateprograms.com/discus/index.php
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6. Popular articles you may have missed
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Previous articles:
Are you new to affiliate programs? I highly recommend the FREE “Affiliate Masters Course”.
Download the free course here:
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7. Thought for today: Affiliate marketing
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“My surveys of other affiliate merchants indicate that you are lucky if just 1 percent of your affiliates produce significant results – one reason it’s called ‘affiliate marketing’ instead of ‘affiliates marketing’.”
– Jason Ciment
“A Recipe for Affiliate Success” (for merchants)
https://www.clickz.com/aff_mkt/aff_mkt/article.php/1016121
All the best
Allan Gardyne
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