Associate Programs Newsletter #158
This week I’m hunting down super affiliates.
Perhaps YOUR web site is one of the ones I found…
CONTENTS:
1. How to hunt down super affiliates
2. Create your own circle of influence
– by getting to know ezine publishers
3. EVEN MORE mistakes affiliates make
– and how to fix them
4. Get your tech questions answered free
5. Site Build It! V1.5 does the “grunt work” for you
6. The Affiliate Marketing Plan Builder
7. Chart compares UK affiliate networks
8. Definition of insanity
9. Digital Goods shuts down, and other news
10. It’s the truth, John. I tell it like it is
11. Useful free resource: How to write case studies
12. Thought for today: When Opportunity knocks
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You know the definition – doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. How about trying something new, like doing things imaginatively and expecting greatness? Join the e-media leaders and create some expectations!
www.emarketnsights.com ___________________________________________________________
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1. How to hunt down super affiliates
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You want to track down super affiliates either so you can study their techniques, or to sign them up for your affiliate program.
For either reason, time spent searching for super affiliates is time well spent.
Here are three ways of hunting them down:
Attend Internet marketing conferences. At the Boulder conference I attended, Patrick Anderson named a bunch of super affiliates.
Find newsletters or mailing lists with a large number of subscribers.
See who ranks highly in several important search engines.
Let’s start with the search engines.
Here’s a quick way to find super affiliates. Go to meta search engine Ixquick – https://www.ixquick.com/ .
On Ixquick, a site gets one star for every major search engine (such as AltaVista, HotBot and Excite) that scores it in its Top 10 (the first page of search results). So this is a fast way to check nearly every major engine at the same time.
Unfortunately, Ixquick doesn’t include the best search engine, Google, in its searches. So you’ll have to try it separately.
Also, I’ve noticed that Ixquick often doesn’t accurately search AltaVista. So for some really serious super affiliate hunting, you’ll need to check AltaVista, too.
(Even with those faults, IXquick is still a very useful tool.)
Let’s assume you want to try to locate the super affiliate who earned more than $400,000 in one month from CyberRebate.com.
First you have to attempt to get inside the mind of someone who is searching for free things or shopping coupons. What words would they type into a search engine?
Free? Freebies? Free stuff? Shopping coupons? Free things? Rebates? Shopping rebates?
Not sure? Try typing some of those keywords into the Keyword Research Tool at jimtools.com and you’ll be given a whole lot more related keywords. (This tool is also useful when you’re writing articles and want to know what keywords to include.)
Weed out the junk. Choose the most likely keywords and type them into the research tool to find even more keywords, and so on. Depending on how determined you are, this could go on for a while.
Use the keywords you’ve identified to do searches at IXquick, Google and AltaVista.
For example, try a search at https://www.ixquick.com/ for “free” or “free stuff” and you’ll find sites which include:
https://www.freestuffcenter.com/
https://www.volition.com/free.html
https://www.totallyfreestuff.com/
https://www.free-stuff-links.com/
https://www.thefreesite.com/
https://www.free.com/
https://www.free-n-cool.com/
Try a search for “freebies” at Ixquick and you’ll discover more freebie sites:
https://www.coolfreebies.com/
https://www.freebies.com/
https://www.fabfreebies.com/
https://www.weeklyfreebie.com/
https://www.freeandfun.com/
Try a search for “bargains”:
https://www.amazing-bargains.com/
(which will pay you 5 cents per click for sending people to it.)
https://www.bargains-online.com/
Search for “special offers”:
https://www.specialoffers.com
Search for “coupons”:
Look what I found: https://www.hotcoupons.com/
Hot Coupons is REALLY good at working the search engines. It scores 5 stars with these Top 10 listings:
Fast Search (1), Hotbot (2), Excite (2), Webcrawler (2), MSN (4).
Seach for “shopping coupons” and in the top 10 you’ll find https://www.flamingoworld.com/ .
When you head to https://www.Google.com and continue your research, you’ll find the keyword “free” has a LOT of competition. A search for “free” on Google finds 105 MILLION pages. A good site like https://www.FreeCenter.com doesn’t appear in the first page of search results.
So, after all this research, can I tell you who is CyberRebate’s top affiliate? Who earned more than $400,000 in one month?
It could be one of the sites I’ve already named.
The super affiliates are the ones who know how to be highly ranked in search engines – and can ALSO turn that traffic into sales.
Here are a few guesses. Perhaps it’s one of these:
Yahoo!
https://shopping.yahoo.com/
TheFreeSite – https://www.TheFreeSite.com – whose newsletter has more than 170,000 subscribers.
Hans Peter Jeschke, editor/publisher of “HPs Freebies” – https://HPsFreebies.com – which has 500,000 subscribers.
ZDNet – https://www.ZDNet.com – which has a large mailing list with lots of topics. (Type “newsletters” into Google and ZDNet is number 2.)
PennMedia [UPDATE: This site no longer exists] – whose 900 newsletters have more than 50 million subscribers.
… or – here’s my best guess – perhaps it’s wily reformed spammer Sanford Wallace, who has an opt-in mailing list of 17 million, built with the help of the hugely successful Passthison.com .
BEWARE! If you click on that link, you’ll not only be blasted with pop-ups, you’ll also be hit with time-delayed pop-ups which may confuse you by appearing while you at another site. Sanford shows no mercy.
(Have a look around and see how Sanford collects e-mail addresses from his visitors, who arrive at the rate of 80,000 an hour.)
All that was a lot of work.
You’re probably thinking that there must be a better, faster way of finding super affiliates.
There is.
(To be continued.)
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2. Create your own circle of influence
by getting to know ezine publishers
=====================================
Thanks, everyone, who responded to my note to marketers who have “quit their day job”. I appreciate your willingness to help others quit their jobs.
Here’s the first of a series of insider tips from successful Internet marketers.
It’s a good tip from Melba Tate:
“Subscribe to some quality ezines. Start reading them. Every now and then write the publisher about a particular article, or service he or she is offering. Become friends with those who respond and are helpful. Keep in touch with them and build a real friendship.
“You would be surprised at the joint ventures that can come from making friends with like minded people. Much of my business has been created by having a friendship with some special people.”
Melba Tate
profitconnect.net
(To that advice I’d add: Start with publishers of small ezines, say 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers. They’re most likely to have less e-mail and therefore more time to respond. When their circulation grows you’ll reap the benefits of having formed a friendship in the early days.)
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[UPDATE: This link is obsolete.]___________________________________________________________
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3. EVEN MORE mistakes affiliates make
– and how to fix them
=====================================
For Part 1 and Part 2 see:
Five mistakes affiliates make
More affiliate mistakes
Have you forgotten to add a dash of personality?
Have a look at Chris Pirillo’s Libera Manifesto and the huge flood of responses.
[UPDATE: The responses seem to have disappeared from the site.]Chris received that outpouring of support because he injects his personality into his writing (and because he’s acknowledged as a hard-working expert in his field).
Too much of the Internet is cold and anonymous. Your web site visitors appreciate knowing that there’s a real person running the site they’re visiting.
Inject your personality into your site.
Are you failing to PLAN?
I received an e-mail this week from someone who had bought a domain and was trying to decide what to do with it. Whoops! That’s getting things backwards.
First you have to decide what you want to do. Here are three main options for affiliates. They all work.
Option 1: “Go where the money is,” says the highly successful Marlon Sanders.
Do research on what is popular and sell that. Do a survey, find out what people want and sell it to them.
Want to know what’s hot? Here’s a really fast way. Keep an eye on Yahoo! Shopping – https://shopping.yahoo.com/ . Yahoo! has done lots of research and endless experimenting. It knows what sells.
Look at the “What’s hot” list, where you’ll find such things as digital cameras, MP3 players and Razor scooters.
Today’s hot sellers are flowers for Mom from https://www.FTD.com , the oldest and largest floral organization in the world.
Option 2: “Follow your passion,” says Ken Evoy. Choose a topic in which you are passionately interested and build a site around that theme. That way, you’ll enjoy what you’re doing and derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. It won’t seem like work.
“Everyone, absolutely EVERYONE, has a special interest… a passion,” he says.
Having trouble choosing a topic? See Day 2 of Ken’s free “Affiliate Masters” course. It shows you how to brainstorm your concept.
Option 3. Become passionately interested in something. Immerse yourself in all the little details about a topic and suddenly you’ll become so absorbed that it’s like a hobby, not a business.
That’s what affiliate programs have become like for me. Perhaps for you it could be digital cameras.
If you become passionately interested in products which are hot sellers with little competition, that’s even better!
To learn how to find those HIGH PROFITABILITY topics and products, see Day 3 of the “Affiliate Masters” course.
Download the 10-day free course here:
Plan first, set your goals, and then act.
… and have fun.
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4. Get your tech questions answered free
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The Newbie Club has just introduced major improvements, including free technical support.
“We have negotiated with a large established international technical support company to offer solutions to computer, Internet, operating systems, software, and program learning problems which we ALL experience from time to time,” says Joe Robson.
“Support is given by over 90 full-time highly trained and experienced technicians, and e-mailed questions will be replied to within three to four hours.”
Club members now have unlimited access to all the free tutorials, free courses, free ebooks, free articles, free resources, free tech support and the free affiliate program.
Membership of the Newbie Club is free.
You don’t have to be a newbie to use the free tech support.
Check it out here:
https://www.associateprograms.com/newbie
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5. Site Build It! V1.5 does the “grunt work” for you
=====================================
SiteSell has made major improvements to Site Build It! with the launch of Version 1.5.
New modules have been added and the Manager totally revamped.
No other tool on the Net does all these things for you.
Site Build It! automates and accelerates the hard and tedious parts of building a successful affiliate business:
Brainstorming a long list of topic-keywords.
Researching the profitability of those keywords.
Preparing content for your theme-based content site.
Analyzing your pages, allowing you to build highly optimized search engine-friendly pages at “the touch of a button”.
Submitting your pages to the search engines automatically, but in a friendly manner (not mass submission).
Checking that the search engines have listed your pages.
Querying the search engines to let you know your rankings.
Preparing pay-per-click search engine bids.
Bidding optimally at the pay-per-clicks.
“This is pure ‘grunt work’ – it normally takes even pros weeks and weeks of slow, repetitive ‘manual labor’ to do it all,” says SiteSell President Ken Evoy.
SBI! reduces each of these steps to mouse clicks, freeing you up to focus on the important aspects of your business.
The early bugs which beta testers found have been removed, and Site Build It! just keeps on improving.
Now there’s an “Action Guide” – a pdf book written in SiteSell style, which takes you by the hand and in a light-hearted fashion leads you through all the steps necessary to successfully and efficiently “build income through content”.
There’s also a new newsletter just for Site Build It! users, to help you get the most out of this tool.
Remove the tedium from your affiliate marketing and let this tool do the tough stuff so you can concentrate on building your business.
Get Site Build It! now.
https://www.associateprograms.com/buildit
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6. The Affiliate Marketing Plan Builder
=====================================
The affiliate marketing experts at KowaBunga! Technologies – makers of My Affiliate Program software – have written a new ebook, “The Affiliate Marketing Plan Builder”.
It will help you design a successful, custom-tailored affiliate marketing strategy.
It will show you the decisions you need to make and steps you have to take to run a successful, effective affiliate program.
This book is brand new and I haven’t read it yet, but any material I’ve seen from this company has always been of high quality.
You can learn more about this new book here:
https://www.associateprograms.com/plan
For free excerpts, send a blank e-mail to:
myaffiliateprogram.920.2031 AT optinpro DOT com
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7. Chart compares UK affiliate networks
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Since MagicButton.Net went into liquidation there has been some ‘vulture-like’ activity, says Robin Gurney, Director of DVisions – https://www.dvisions.co.uk .
DVisions has created an affiliate comparison chart of the UK affiliate solutions providers and plans to keep it updated:
https://www.dvisions.co.uk/AP_solution_matrix.pdf
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8. Definition of insanity
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Michael Werner, who describes himself as the “Dream Pusher” at https://www.DreamJobsToGo.com , writes:
“Liked the latest newsletter, and it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes: ‘One definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results’.”
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9. Digital Goods shuts down, and other news
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Digital Goods, formerly SoftLock, has closed its doors suddenly, because it was unable to raise the funds it needed. Authors used Digital Goods to sell ebooks.
Express.com has filed a voluntary petition for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.
iMotors, a seller of used vehicles, has ended operations due to a lack of sufficient capital.
The Lycos traffic affiliate program ended on May 7. Affiliates will be paid.
WebsiteSponsors, which is owned by iBoost, has told affiliates that it is closing down its program because it was unable to collect money owed by advertisers. Affiliates will be paid.
Amazon.com is losing customers nearly as fast as it’s gaining them. Its customers may not be as loyal as initially thought, according to analyst Mark Rowen.
cnnfn.cnn.com/2001/05/08/technology/amazon/
Jeff Bezos to regularly sell Amazon shares
nytimes.com/2001/05/09/technology/09AMAZ.html
Amazon Anywhere not quite everywhere
news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-5862548.html
Buy.com reports loss as sales plunge 40%
news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-5801361.html
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10. It’s the truth, John. I tell it like it is
====================================
Here’s a letter I received this week, from “John”, who wants to remain anonymous.
John writes:
“I have read most, if not all of your newsletter archives, and one of the main points is that people can make good money from affiliate programs.
“Today I read your newest issue online where you talk about mistakes people make in affiliate programs – and you make this statement:
‘Are you selling ONLY other people’s products? It is possible to earn a living that way, but such successes are rare.’
“Why would you say something like this if your site and newsletter is about making money with affiliate programs?”
Why would I say it? Because it’s true. I’m trying to counter the ridiculous hype we all see so often.
Yes. People CAN make good money with affiliate programs. Some affiliates earn $10,000, $20,000 or more a month.
However, it’s not easy. It only SEEMS easy after you’ve done the research and done the work, and when the checks keep arriving…
Despite whatever hype you may read, MOST affiliates don’t earn much. About 95% of the commissions are earned by 5% of affiliates.
I’d love to change that. I’d like to help even out those sales figures a little. I’d also like to help you get into the top 5% who do very well.
The first step in helping you is giving you an accurate picture of the challenges.
__________________________________________SPONSOR__________
FREE Tutorials, Free Courses, FREE Technical Help with your computer:
And a FREE affiliate program:
Join the Newbie Club. Did I say it’s free?
https://www.newbieclub.com?associates
___________________________________________________________
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11. Useful free resource: How to write case studies
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Case studies are a good way to get free publicity and boost your business’s image.
For example, you can write a case study describing a little marketing experiment you did. If it contains fresh, useful information, newsletter editors and mailing lists will be glad to publish it.
You can also use case studies on your web site as an affiliate marketing technique. You can write a case study describing how you used a product you’ve bought and how it helped you.
Here’s a good article by Hollis Thomases which tells you step-by-step how to write an effective case study.
webadvantage.net/tip_archive.cfm?tip_id=148&&a=1
[UPDATE: This link is obsolete.]
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12. Thought for today: When Opportunity knocks
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“Things are really rough,” remarked one netpreneur to another. This morning Opportunity knocked at my door, but by the time I pushed back the bolt, turned the two locks, unlatched the chain and shut off the burglar alarm, it was gone.”
All the best
Allan Gardyne
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