Associate Programs Newsletter #189
If you do things right, promoting high-quality products, the revenue you generate from affiliate programs can be quite substantial.
This week I received a thank-you note from Ken Evoy, who told me:
“Was just looking at the top affiliate report from yesterday’s sales. You had quite a day ($3,518.14 in sales generated in one day!)”
No wonder Ken’s program has been at the top of my Top 10 list for a long, long time. Check it out here: https://www.associateprograms.com/affiliates
CONTENTS:
1. What’s the most important thing you can do today?
2. Web site review – PART 2
Let’s start afresh
3. First steps towards affiliate success
4. FreeFiliate no longer free
5. Earn $15 by helping job seekers
6. Useful resource: 100 highest keyword bids
7. Thought for today: Looking in the wrong place
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1. What’s the most important thing you can do today?
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One of the joys of having a purely Internet business is the freedom it gives us to travel and spend time with family and friends.
Joanna and I are enjoying being in New Zealand again.
To celebrate Joanna’s birthday, nine of us lingered over a delightful meal at Oakridge near Wanaka (I sat under this umbrella – oakridge.co.nz/activities.html ).
There’s something magical about the quality of New Zealand food and wine. We’ve been savoring sweet Lappin cherries, tangy Newcastle apricots and Marlborough sauvignon blanc.
It’s times like these which make all the work involved in building an Internet business worth while.
What are YOUR goals for 2002? To earn $500 a month from affiliate commissions? $5,000? $10,000? To earn a second income? To be your own boss? To work 20 hours while earning ???
One of my goals for 2002 is to earn more while working fewer hours, so that I can spend more time with friends and family.
If you haven’t set some simple, specific, achievable, measurable goals, now is the time to do it.
Once you’ve set your goals, it’s terribly easy to become distracted by the Internet’s time-wasting temptations.
To help you stay focused on achieving your goals, the best bit of advice I ever received is to start every day by asking yourself:
“What’s the most important thing I can do today?”
Then do it, BEFORE you do anything else.
======================
2. Web site review – PART 2
Let’s start afresh
======================
Last week we examined an affiliate-driven web site – TheInternetMarketingStore.com – and discussed some the awful mistakes David Collins and Patrick Woods are making.
David asked me for advice on how to improve his site.
If YOUR site is similar to David’s, be brave, take a large breath and start again. Choose a new theme. “Internet marketing” and “make money online” are far too broad a theme for a newcomer to tackle.
Here are seven ways to find a new theme:
If you choose a topic in which you already have a keen interest, you’re off to a flying start.
(David likes “watching movies and working around the house”.)
Do some mind-mapping and brainstorming on one of those topics. See if you can come up with an idea for a site which is useful and interesting. You want a site which helps people decide what to buy. Spend a week or more on this planning. It’s important. Remember, if you enjoy reading and writing about this topic, your research won’t seem like work.
You don’t have a hobby? Look on the bright side – you can choose ANY good affiliate product or group of products and immerse yourself in that topic. You can build a site based on one product or one merchant. Your aim is to send your visitor to the merchant in a buying mood.
Solve a problem. Subscribe to e-mail mailing lists such as the ones at Adventive.com [UPDATE: No longer available.] and look for problems which keep arising. Build a web site – with related affiliate links – which helps people solve one of those problems. For example, see Neil Shearing’s https://www.NoMerchantAcct.com .
Choose a small niche, and aim to be the best in that small niche.
If you decide to stick with Internet marketing, I strongly urge you to NARROW your focus.
For example, you could build a site about any of these:
banner advertising
branding
ebook publishing
domain names
web hosts
sequential autoresponders
merchant accounts
e-mail marketing
copywriting
ezine publishing
ezine advertising
affiliate tracking software
headline writing
classified ad writing
message boards
guerrilla marketing
search engine optimization
web site creation
Internet marketing seminars
logos
new advertising strategies
classic marketing techniques that still work.
etc, etc
If that seems like too much hard work, you’re in the wrong field. Choose a totally different target audience – preferably people with money to spend and who are looking for the best place to spend it. For example, you might look for a small niche in the travel or health industries.
An example of a marketing site with a narrow niche is Harvey Segal’s https://www.ad-tracking.com/ . (Type “ad tracking” into Google and you’ll see he has No.1 spot.) Another example is Jim Bug’s https://adservers.8m.com , which examines banner ad servers in detail.
Here’s a good tip from Wayne Porter of AffTrack: “Think about all the things people buy online and how you might educate them on getting the best possible product for the best possible price.” Wayne calls this augmenting the selling process. If you do that well, providing genuinely useful information, you’ll receive repeat visitors and repeat sales.
Be a little zany. Get attention. You could have fun creating a site about removing clutter from your life. You could write an article called “10 ways to do your housework faster” and give the article to magazines and ezines. On the site, you could promote books such as “Clutter’s Last Stand” by Don Aslett (it’s a good one) – https://www.associateprograms.com/clutter . Perhaps the publisher would give you permission to use some of the book’s delightful graphics. See if you can track down Don and interview him.
You could build a web site like that quickly, spend a while encouraging sites to link to it and getting publicity, and then move on to another project.
Whatever theme you choose, study your competition. Type key phrases into the main search engines and examine the sites you find. What appeals about them? What could you do better?
Now start writing the first of 5, 10, 15, or 50 articles on your chosen theme. You’ll use these to help your site be found in search engines, with each article on a separate page, and each page optimized for a couple of key phrases.
If you don’t think you could write five articles, reconsider the topic you’ve chosen. Go back to the things you’re REALLY interested in. Perhaps they would be a better choice.
For example, because you’re interested in movies, you review DVDs. Could you cover a narrow niche that most sites are ignoring? Can you think of some way to get your visitors involved in your site, perhaps by rating DVDs in a fun way – or answering a humorous survey? Or by telling you what they think of your reviews?
If you have a passionate interest in movies, you’ll find it much easier to write a newsletter on that topic – and easier to attract and retain subscribers.
Where possible, be a little outrageous. Be memorable. Remember, you want to make your site so interesting that people will link to it without even asking for your permission.
Get your visitors involved in your site in some way. Aim to create relationships with your visitors so that they’ll keep returning.
I see that on TheInternetMarketingStore.com [This link no longer works] David has chosen to sell Ken Evoy’s products.
(David told me: “I will probably end up devoting my entire site to the SiteSell products as they and Ken’s affiliate program are, by far, the best I have found on the Internet so far.”)
Great choice, they’re excellent. Everyone selling anything on the Net needs “MYSS! 2002” – https://makemy.sitesell.com/myss . However, I think David really ought to re-read the section in MYSS! on designing web pages for search engines, and the section on pre-selling, and… well, the whole book!
If you want to promote Ken Evoy’s products because they’re so good, be more creative.
For example, I noticed that one SiteSell affiliate had written an article explaining which products sell best on the Internet, drawing heavily from Ken’s 16-point checklist in “Make Your Site SELL!” – https://makemy.sitesell.com/myss [UPDATE: Make Your Site Sell is now free.]
Here’s a different approach to consider…
Imagine how much more powerful your Internet marketing site would be if you could honestly describe how you have used Ken’s excellent advice to build a site about your favorite movies (or whatever you choose) and earn a useful income from it.
You could describe how you’ve used Ken’s tips on optimizing your pages for the search engines and his tips on pre-selling to increase your affiliate commissions. If you gave specific details, it would be a powerful selling message.
Here’s what I suggest David should do…
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3. First steps towards affiliate success
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Your first step now is to return to Ken Evoy’s free “Affiliate Masters” course, print it out and study it carefully.
It’s more than 100 pages of precise advice on how to profit from ANY affiliate program – and it looks as though David has skimmed over and ignored almost every tip in the five-day course.
DON’T start building your new site today. You need to do the brainstorming and planning and thinking FIRST.
Ken’s free course will help you do that.
Download the 10-day free course here:
Your second step is to get Marlon Sanders’ “Associate Program Marketing Handbook”.
It describes 25 ways to earn money with affiliate programs and at only $20 it’s amazing value.
Get it here: https://www.associateprograms.com/affiliate-manual
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[UPDATE: No longer available.]___________________________________________________________=====================
4. FreeFiliate no longer free
=====================
Due to financial pressures, the FreeFiliate affiliate tracking
solution is no longer free.
It has been replaced by FusionQuest – https://www.FusionQuest.biz
– which charges modest fees.
When JB McKee set up FreeFiliate in 2000 he hoped that it would
be supported by sponsors.
“Whenever someone clicked on an affiliate link to a merchant’s
program through the tracking system, a window would pop up that
would contain advertising,” he says.
“However, a year and 5,287 e-mails later it has become apparent
that the concept just isn’t going to work. There are not near
enough pop-ups generated to earn any appreciable income,
especially in the current abysmal state that the Internet
advertising industry is in.
“The fact is that the concept may have been intrinsically flawed
from the beginning and may have contributed to the rather low
click-through rate. The bigger, professional affiliates do not
like the idea of having a pop-up triggered whenever someone
clicks on the affiliate link on their site. Some don’t like it
because they feel it will be annoying to visitors to their site
and will put them in a bad light, which is probably true. Others
resent the idea, feeling that their work of promoting a program
is being exploited, which may also be true.”
More than 500 affiliate programs have been set up using the
FusionQuest (formerly FreeFiliate) system.
FusionQuest system has features which FreeFiliate didn’t offer.
It allows affiliates to link to specific pages in a merchant’s
web site and tracking has been improved.
More enhancements are on the way.
FusionQuest charges a $79 set-up fee and a monthly fee based on
the number of click-throughs: $14.95 per month for up to 25,000
click-throughs, and $14.95 more for each additional block of
25,000 click-throughs.
“The fact is, FusionQuest is actually a better alternative
anyway,” JB says. “It is better to spend a small amount each
month for a system that will be successful and profitable rather
than spend nothing, except your time, on a system that is not
successful.”
More details:
https://www.associateprograms.com/fusionquest
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5. Earn $15 by helping job seekers
==========================
Here’s a program which caught my eye when it was added to the
AssociatePrograms.com directory the other day.
ResumeRabbit.com instantly submits a customer’s resume and job
requirements to more 75 top career sites such as Monster,
Headhunter, HotJobs and Dice.
If you have a site aimed at job hunters, you can tell them how to
save 60 hours of research and data entry and make their resume
available to more 1.5 million hiring managers every day.
Affiliates are paid $15 for each customer referral.
You can join the program at Commission Junction:
https://www.associateprograms.com/cj
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6. Useful resource: 100 highest keyword bids
================================
For a quick look at how much people are prepared to bid for
keyword click-throughs, see:
Top 100 highest keyword bids on 7Search:
https://7search.com/scripts/searchterms/top_paying.asp?n=100
Here’s an oddity: Today an advertiser was paying 85 cents per
click for the No.1 spot for “buy a star” while the second placed
bid was only 2 cents.
To save money, the top advertiser obviously needs to check out
some keyword bidding tools. You can find a good selection here:
https://PayPerClickSearchEngines.com/search-engine-tools.shtml
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7. Thought for today: Looking in the wrong place
===================================
“I believe that money problems in business are not our biggest
problems. Our biggest problem is lack of ideas. Too many people
are trying to find money for their business when they should be
finding creative ways to overcome difficulties and turn problems
around.”
– George Shinn, author of
“The Miracle of Motivation”