Associate Programs Newsletter #63
CONTENTS:
1. A win-win-win free offer with opt-in email
2. My five-minute online superstore
3. How to create multiple income streams
4. Discussion lists close – new one starts
5. Toot your horn online
6. Lessons for online retailers
7. New Affiliate Radio guests
8. Corey adds $200 referral fee
9. Joanna wants a dinner for two
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1. A win-win-win free offer with opt-in email
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Journalist-turned entrepreneur Rosalind Resnick is one of the Internet's success stories. She was far-sighted enough to realize how important opt-in email was going to become.
After writing about the Net since its early days, she founded NetCreations, pioneered opt-in email marketing in February, 1996, and kept on growing. Last month NetCreations filed with the SEC for an IPO (initial public offering of shares).
If you're a merchant looking for people who have agreed to receive e-mail on any one of 3,000 topics, NetCreations' PostMaster Direct (PMD) service can help you. It is a list manager and broker for more than 3.5 million unique email addresses. Every person on those lists has opted in. Rosalind won't have anything to do with spam. She doesn't have to.
At a typical cost of 20 cents per name, she rents those lists to companies which want to conduct opt-in email marketing campaigns. Customers include Dell, Compaq, Ziff-Davis, and J. Crew. With 3.5 million names, Rosalind's company can earn $US3.5 million a year.
Highly enthusiastic about PostMaster Direct is David Beroff, who runs the world's most popular free feedback form service, Freedback.com.
He says his association with PMD is one of his top five money-earners.
With conventional banner advertising, whether you get paid by the impression, click-through, percentage of sale, or whatever, you have just one instant to work with that visitor to try to earn your income.
“Here's the simple secret that Rosalind taught me,” says David. “Along with all our other advertising programs, we also invite our visitors to voluntarily subscribe to a few opt-in email lists. They provide their email address and some demographic info, and they are then returned back to our site. We then rent these lists to advertisers who are very eager to send their targeted messages to these subscribers. (For example, CDNow.com has several times rented our list of people who are interested in music.) The key is the word ‘rent'. Rather than selling the information once, we retain ownership, and rent the list out again and again and again! (People don't unsubscribe very much because the advertisers send them discounts for products or services that they are actually interested in.) The typical rental price for a single name is 20 cents, which works out to $US200 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for every time we rent that list!”
David says that because most people stay on the lists, and Freedback keeps adding names to the lists each month, his rental income keeps rising. “This is crucial. We are still earning money on visitors who were at our website half a year ago.”
He says advertiser clients are screaming for more. “They love our huge lists, but they want them to be even bigger.” So he tells webmasters: “Instead of a paltry 5% or 10% commission, we are willing to split our profit with you 50/50 for an entire year on every name that you are able to bring us.”
This is not spam. You can't simply give David names that you have carefully gathered for your own site, when you told your visitors that you wouldn't give out their addresses.
“You have to encourage your visitors to voluntarily subscribe to these lists, and let them know that they will be contacted by advertisers with offers relevant to their interests. Tell them that every e-mail that is sent comes with careful instructions on how to unsubscribe. Tell them that they will never be spammed; the advertisers don't even get their hands on the actual addresses.”
To further prevent abuse, every single subscriber is sent an initial e-mail which they must return before they are added to their desired list(s). This helps eliminate the cases where a few people decide to get cute and subscribe their “friends”.
The program can pay very well. “Just to give you an idea, the total June rental income on only the names that we personally collected (at Freedback.com) was over $10,000,” David says.
“Like other good programs, this one does take a bit of patience. The money is there, but you do need to wait a few months for the checks to hit something substantial. We've been at this a bit over six months. Rosalind did warn us that the first few checks would be light, and she was right. Now we are quite satisfied with the revenue stream. So, hang in there.”
The set-up is a bit more involved than your normal banner program. “Yes, there are banners if you want them, but it's a lot more profitable if you add an HTML form to your key traffic pages. There's even more profit if you already have some sort of registration or sign-up page for your visitors, but you will need to integrate some code with your existing CGI. Even if you don't ask your visitors to register, you probably have a key page of content that attracts lots of people, and you can precede it with the opt-in list subscription form to give them an incentive to fill out the form,” he says.
“In any case, do not worry. I will personally be happy to walk you (or your web designer) through all the steps, so this issue should not be a concern at all,” David says.
The program is free to join.
David is one of the Net's good guys. He became successful by being extraordinarily generous.
You can call David right now, toll free in the US, at 1-800-668-3163
1-800-668-3163 , or +1 (215) 576-6800+1 (215) 576-6800 outside the United States, and let him know what questions he can answer for you, he says, “so we can both move forward and make some solid money with this”.
I told David my readers would want to know why they shouldn't just go to Postmaster Direct and sign up there as an affiliate instead of with him.
The brief answer: There's no benefit in doing that. PMD protects list owners like David by structuring the arrangement so that there is no financial advantage in bypassing him.
It actually makes more sense to sign up with David and take advantage of his experience and willingness to help you.
“Let's use some real numbers just to clarify,” says David. “Our gross rental income on our lists in July was over $15,000. Our profit (i.e., the check we received) was over $7,500. If an affiliate brought in an IDENTICAL amount of business, they would have earned $3,750 (as would we).
“The next very-reasonable question that your readers will ask is what is to stop THEM from becoming a list owner,” says David. “The answer really comes down to volume; in order to make the whole operation efficient, the lists themselves need to be a certain minimum size, which in turn implies a certain level of traffic.
“Your readers can rest assured that PMD actively monitors affiliates to identify potential list owners, and when these minimums are hit, the relationship is promoted appropriately. PMD then pays us our referral fee out of THEIR half, thus once again giving the potential list owner no incentive for circumventing us. (Even if they do, it's a one-on-one relationship, and they'll be asked how they found PMD.)”
I think this is one of those programs which is actually simpler than the explanation of how it works.
You can sign up and get David's help now:
https://www.associateprograms.com/list
And what do I get out of all this? If you make money while helping David make money, he will help me promote this newsletter. If you see the circulation figure climb in a hurry, you'll know it worked.
This is a win-win-win arrangement. The best kind.
[UPDATE: This offer has closed. Some affiliates used to earn a lot of money collecting email addresses for PostMaster Direct but the prices paid kept dropping and dropping as the Internet changed.]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SPONSOR!!!!!!!!!!!
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2. My five-minute online superstore
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I decided to test the new Affinia Commerce Network's claim that you can build a free online store in five minutes.
Kris Hagerman is right, you can. It's easy to build an attractively designed, basic store in five minutes. Just quickly sign up, choose a few items from the millions offered by more than 1,000 merchants, click a few buttons and Affinia does it all, fast.
Then you can start customizing your site, choosing which items to highlight and so on. It would be easy to spend several hours experimenting with all the options and refining the site.
Now it's time to go back and read the contract. The commissions offered vary. Greg Austin of Affinia says the current allowable range of commission (or click-through fees) varies from $.01 to $5. When you're building a storefront, the referral fee is displayed next to the product description.
You can build a complex, attractive online store with almost no work and in little time – and share all your commissions 50:50 with Affinia. If you don't have much time or don't have web design skills but want an online store fast, this is one way to do it.
If someone clicks on the link to a Compaq Presario notebook computer selling for $2,388 you will earn 3 cents. Wow!
Here's my “five-minute” Superstore:
[UPDATE: Affinia has closed down.]========================================
3. How to create multiple income streams
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You've probably heard of Robert Allen. He is the author of two of the largest selling financial books in history, both #1 New York Times best-sellers read by millions of people.
Robert's new website, new book, and audio training course all have the theme “Developing multiple income streams”.
His two-tier revenue sharing program pays $20 on your sales, and $20 on the sales of people you sign up.
Robert, who promises to be “your own personal wealth coach”, has a fantastic track record.
You may recall the Los Angeles Times Challenge . . .
“Send me to any city in America, take away my wallet. Give me $100 for living expenses and in 72 hours I will buy you an excellent property, all with none of my own money,” Robert said.
The LA Times sent Robert to San Francisco – and 57 hours later he had generated assets worth $722,000.
A few years later he did the St Louis Challenge.
“Send me to any unemployment line in America. Let me select someone who is out of work and discouraged. Let me teach them my strategies for creating wealth. In 90 days they will have $5,000 in the bank and will never set foot in an unemployment line again.”
Robert selected a young couple from St Louis, Missouri. Ninety days later they had $5,000 in the bank. Twelve months later they had earned $100,000.
Robert's latest book is called “How To Make $50 to $100,000 A Year Starting With Little Or No Money!”
You can read the first fascinating chapter online now, listen to Robert and sign up for his free newsletter:
[UPDATE: I stopped promoting Robert Allen when he tried to get me involved with MLM stuff. That's not my field.]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!SPONSOR!!!!!!!!!!!
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4. Discussion lists close – new one starts
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It was sad news this week when outspoken critic Mark Welch of Adbility.com announced that due to “continuing systemic defects” in the egroups.com service, he was terminating all the discussion lists he moderates, including Affiliate-L and Click-L.
He describes all the problems with the egroups.com system here:
egroups.com/group/wsba-digest
I asked Mark if he would start another discussion list.
“My resources are stretched beyond any reasonable limit, so I won't promise anything,” he said.
Running a popular discussion list takes a lot of talent and hard work. Excellent moderators, such as John Audette at I-Sales, weed out boring posts and stimulate interesting conversation. Phil Wiley of Ozemedia.com briefly tried running an affiliates discussion list and decided to it into a message board.
Lesley Anne Lowe and Paul Graham of the-toolkit.com/ began strongly with the Toolkit Discussion List but it faded away.
“I don't think I managed to get a wide enough base of people and after a while it became very time-consuming considering the smallish number of subscribers we had,” Lesley said. “If I'd had some help it would have been easier but as usual I jumped in and tried to do it all myself.”
In a few days Ola Edvardsson, who publishes the affiliatetips newsletter, will launch a moderated discussion list called “affiliatetips – the mailinglist”. Everyone who is interested in affiliate programs is invited to join.
Ola writes well and has an intelligent, helpful style. This new discussion list could be worth trying. You can sign up here:
affiliatetips.com/talk.htm
Good luck, Ola! I've signed up.
[UPDATE: This discussion list faded away, too.]========================
5. Toot your horn online
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Traffic Gems is a singles site where singles who spot each other in traffic can make contact. The affiliate program pays $5 per new member, says Liz Smith of Traffic Gems.
Here's how Time magazine described Traffic Gems:
For $10 a month, members receive in the mail a shiny car decal that lists their screen name and the address trafficgems.com. The idea is that other people stuck in traffic may think you/your car look cool, jot down your screen name, then go home and send you a message.
“When you meet someone online, first you fall in love with your mind, then your senses get involved,” says co-founder Bill Kostyan. “Traffic Gems starts with the senses. We bring back reality.”
You can join Traffic Gems at Commission Junction:
https://www.associateprograms.com/cj
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6. Lessons for online retailers
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Stefanie Puetz-Lehmann of http://www.partnerprogramme.com says that the “State of Online Retailing 2.0” study includes results on affiliate programs. “They found that Internet-only retailers generated 6% of their revenue from affiliate sites, compared with only 1% for multi-channel retailers,” Stefanie says.
Eight Lessons for Online Retailing:
shop.org/research/summary.htm
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[UPDATE: This program closed.]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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7. New Affiliate Radio guests
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Latest items on the Affiliate Radio Network include:
Lex Sisney from Commission Junction
Joe Michaels from Nexchange
Brad Waller from EP.com
Greg Zedlar from Cardstar.com
Declan Dunn's Affiliate Tips
Affiliate Solutions '99 Coverage
realvoices.com/affiliateradio/
[UPDATE: RealVoices died.]===============================
8. Corey adds $200 referral fee
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Corey Rudl, who has the top-selling marketing course on the Net, keeps adding improvements to site and making it more useful and lucrative for associates.
Now he has partnered with Total Merchant Services so his associates can earn $200 referral fees, and $50 for sales by sub-associates, by promoting merchant accounts.
“We offer a total e-commerce solution (which includes your merchant account, secure server, processing software, and real-time transactions),” Corey says.
For under $30 a month, web businesses get “EVERYTHING they need to take credit cards and process them online”.
[UPDATE: This product has been withdrawn from the program.]You can join Corey's program here:
https://www.associateprograms.com/coreys
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9. Joanna wants a dinner for two
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When the Associate Programs Newsletter hit the 9,000 subscriber mark I told you that Joanna and I would celebrate by going out for a meal. Well, we did. Honest! However, Joanna insists I tell you that it wasn't exactly a romantic candlelit dinner. It was lunchtime and I'd just been to see a specialist for a gastroscopy – so I was too groggy to say much.
We hit the 10,000 subscriber mark this week. We'll celebrate properly this time.
All the best
Allan Gardyne
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