Associate Programs Newsletter #199
I’ve some great stuff for you today, including free trials to two superb products.
Get cracking and make yourself some money!
CONTENTS:
1. The lazy man’s way to tracking affiliate commissions
You can try it free for two weeks
2. Tips to help you make the most of your free trial
3. How Chuck McCullough looks after his affiliates
4. Your free trial of “Secrets To Their Success”
5. Gunnar puts the record straight
6. New site helps ClickBank users
7. Eight affiliates pass on their tips
8. Incredible, everlasting cookies, and other news
9. Latest winners of free banner advertising for a year
10. Useful free resource: Removing parasites
11. Thought for today: Never quit
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1. The lazy man’s way to tracking affiliate commissions
You can try it free for two weeks
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Every now and again I manage to get a really special deal for readers of this newsletter. This is one of those occasions.
I’ve been testing RevTrends, the new budget version of AffTrack. You could call it the lazy man’s way to tracking affiliate commissions.
AffTrack, as you probably know, is the tracking system for super affiliates. It lets them see at a glance their stats on all the affiliate products they promote.
At the push of a button, super affiliates can crunch those numbers in all sorts of useful ways.
It makes it easy to select the best performers.
If you’ve ever wasted time at Commission Junction (let’s not even think about Be Free!) or ClickBank or SiteSell trying to find out how much you’ve earned and which products are your best or worst, you’ll appreciate how many hours a week you can save with AffTrack.
No more messing around with logins, ID numbers and passwords.
No more poring over calculators and spreadsheets – if you ever got that far.
Instead, you get a tidy, totally automated summary of all your sales and commissions e-mailed to you each day.
It’s like a dream come true for the serious affiliate.
Unfortunately, AffTrack is aimed at super affiliates and is just too expensive for most of us.
So I was delighted when Wayne Porter of AffTrack invited me to test the new budget version, RevTrends.
It’s simply superb.
Now instead of wasting time trying to figure out which programs are generating the most revenue per click, I can spend that time building my business – or going for a walk on the beach.
“Do you really know which programs are the most profitable?” asks AffTrack CEO Scott McNulty.
“Surprisingly many webmasters do not! Even if two programs are generating the exact same amount in commission, one may be far more profitable than the other.”
RevTrends lets you see which is which at a glance.
Using RevTrends is simple.
You log in and – here’s the scary part – type in your password and username or ID number for each affiliate program you want to track. You have to trust Scott to guard your privacy carefully. If you’re worried about this, read the glowing testimonials and look at the impressive client list at AffTrack.com. AffTrack has the support of the affiliate industry.
Then you select the types of reports you want. Each day, I now receive a summary of sales, click-throughs, and commissions for the month so far.
I can see, for example, how many sales I made of “Make Your Knowledge Sell” or Phil Wiley’s ebook.
I can scan to the bottom of the report and see my total commissions for the month so far, and – here’s the part that’s fun – how much money I made yesterday.
Whether you’re making $10 or $1,000 a day, you’ll know instantly what your total commissions are each day. Great stuff!
If RevTrends isn’t tracking one of the programs you’ve joined, all you have to do is ask, and the program will be added to the list of those tracked.
One problem I noticed with RevTrends is that a few lines in my reports are incomplete. The problem isn’t RevTrends’ fault.
The anomalies occur because some affiliate tracking systems such as ClickBank don’t tell you click-throughs. There’s simply no click-through data for RevTrends to scoop up and crunch.
However, if you’re promoting several different ClickBank products, the reports do enable you to see at a glance which products are selling well and which ones aren’t.
“One report I highly recommend looking at is the Commission per Click report,” Scott says.
(To find that report, click on the blue Commission button and then the Commission Per Click link.)
“It will show you some very interesting information about which programs have the highest EPC (earnings per click). This should NOT be confused with CJ’s ‘cooked’ EPC where they multiply it times 100. (Ours was first.)
“Sometimes EPC can point out programs that you should be giving more exposure to – or less,” Scott says.
He’s dead right there. I was embarrassed to see among my data a CJ-tracked program, VitaminLab, which I’d joined as an experiment months ago and forgotten.
It’s getting a few clicks but NO sales. Whoops! I’ll dump that one. It might be good but it’s not right for my site.
That space on my site would be much better used by a product which has a higher EPC.
It’s having valuable data like that without wasting time digging for it that makes RevTrends so useful.
It’s awesome.
But don’t take my word for it. Go there now and try it free for yourself:
If you use this special code…
ASPRG01
…you can try RevTrends free for two weeks.
Two weeks? It won’t take two days for this dream tool to win you over.
I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.
[UPDATE: Afftrack is no longer available.]__________________________________________SPONSOR__________
Finding People and Running Background Checks are the focus of
this unique Affiliate Program that allows you to get compensated
for repeat sales from our customers. Websites that have business
customers and/or general consumers in the U.S. will notice
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Learn more about this program at:
[Defunct link deleted.]___________________________________________________________
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2. Tips to help you make the most of your free trial
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I hope you’ve already signed up for a free two-week trial of RevTrends.
If you haven’t, please do so now because it will make a dramatic difference to your affiliate business and I’m going to give you some tips to help you use it effectively.
It will give you a new spark of enthusiasm because it makes so simple one of the most frustrating, annoying tasks for anyone involved in affiliate selling – collecting and analyzing stats.
Have you signed up? Good. Now you have two weeks to prove to yourself how effective this tool is in increasing your commissions.
Let’s make the most of that time.
Here’s how:
As soon as you begin receiving daily e-mailed reports, make a note of how much revenue you’re earning a day.
Make a firm resolve to increase those commissions by a mere 1% each day.
Only 1%? You can do that!
Let’s say you earn $100 on Monday. Can you increase that to $101 on Tuesday, $102 on Wednesday and $103 on Thursday… ?
Of course you can.
All you have to do is be just a LITTLE bit more efficient, a little bit more productive each day.
As I’m sure you realize, if you keep this up, by the end of the year your commissions won’t just be 1% higher, they’ll be exponentially, incredibly higher.
(If you’ve read multi-millionaire Tony Robbins’ material you’ll know where I discovered this idea. It works for him.)
Remember, you’re not wasting time collecting stats, so you already have extra time to increase your knowledge, skills – and to build your revenue.
What should you do with the time you’ve saved?
The answer depends on YOUR skills. Do what you’re best at.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
DAY 1: Post a message to an e-mail discussion list. See if you can include a link to a USEFUL article on your web site in the BODY of your post. That’s much more effective than just using a signature at the end. (I saw a $100 boost in my average daily commissions when I used this technique this week.)
DAY 2: Do the same sort of thing at some other online forums, such as Neil Shearing’s popular message board – https://www.associateprograms.com/scamfree-forum . Right now, I have an eye-catching heading there that has attracted more than 130 views. Note how the boring headings don’t attract many clicks.
DAY 3: From your RevTrends report, choose your best affiliate program and promote it on a polite pop-under – one that appears only once per visitor. Here’s a free tool which creates a polite pop-under. See how that boosts your bottom line.
DAY 4: Examine how you’re promoting you’re worst performing products. If the lack of sales might be your fault, see if you can improve your pre-selling, If not, simply dump the bad performers.
DAY 5: Write a useful, helpful article for your site. Try to picture exactly what a visitor to your site is seeking and write an article solving his/her problem. Weave an affiliate link into the article. Link to the article prominently from your main page. Yes, I’ve done this. It works.
DAY 6: Write a personal endorsement, describing exactly how an affiliate product has helped you. Put it on your main page or link to it prominently. Next day, check your RevTrends stats to see how that endorsement boosted your sales.
DAY 7: Polish one of those tired old headings on your main page. Replace it with benefit-laden words. Read the bottom line on your RevTrends report to see how much your sales have improved.
DAY 8-14 : Experiment with headings, body copy, colors, positions on a page, type faces, etc., changing only one item at a time – just like the super affiliates. You’ll quickly learn what boosts your bottom line.
RevTrends is all about maximizing revenue from the traffic you have. Here’s a longer term plan for maximizing your revenue AND maximizing your visitor numbers…
DAY 15: Download the freshly updated “Affiliate Masters Course” ebook (It’s now available in a user-friendly PDF format.) Free Affiliate Masters Course . It’s the best book at succeeding at the affiliate game… at any price… and it’s free! Every affiliate needs this.
Those are just a few ideas to get you started.
You know how to do this stuff. Just do it.
Get out of bed 10 minutes earlier, watch a bit less TV, print out that affiliate manual… really STUDY it. Then do what it says.
Imagine…
$100 on the first day, then $101, $102, $103, $104, $105, $106, $107, $108, $109, $110, $111, $112, $113, $114, $115, $116…
All it takes is a TINY improvement in your knowledge, skills and determination each day.
You can do it.
Get started now, with RevTrends’ help.
Here’s the code for the two-week free trial: ASPRG01
Be sure to write and tell me your success stories – it will make my day!
[UPDATE: RevTrends is no longer available.]__________________________________________SPONSOR__________
It’s not too late to get in on 45%+ Commissions!
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All you have to do is sign-up at
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[UPDATE: This site has vanished.]___________________________________________________________
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3. How Chuck McCullough looks after his affiliates
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Chuck McCullough, author of “Affiliate Mistakes”, is doing a lot more than most ClickBank merchants to ensure his affiliates receive the commissions they deserve.
“When a visitor comes to my site through a ClickBank referral, and if they don’t buy but sign up for the e-mail course, I tag that person in my autoresponder system with the affiliate code they came in with,” Chuck says.
“Follow-up e-mails that they get from me have the ClickBank affiliate link in it to give a much better chance of you getting the credit if they come back and purchase as a result of the follow-ups.
“ClickBank tracks them by cookie, but if the user clears out their cache, or if they use a Yahoo account from different computers there is a chance you won’t be credited. Hopefully this added feature will give affiliates a better chance of being credited for the sale.”
Chuck, who has done quite a bit of Perl programming, wrote a couple of scripts to do this tracking.
“I use AutoResponsePlus ($99 and they have an affiliate program – https://AutoResponsePlus.com ) for my autoresponders and newsletter. It has a tracking function that allows you to tag each sign-up to determine where you are getting the most signups, etc.
“What I did is use a Perl script for my index page which gives me quite a bit of control.”
So someone arrives at the site after clicking on a link like this hop.clickbank.net/?assoc/affmatch but doesn’t buy…
As that visitor leaves the site, a pop-up invites the visitor to subscribe to a free four-day e-mail course on maximizing affiliate profits. If the visitor buys later, the affiliate still earns a commission.
“I just look at the referral… like ?hop=assoc.affmatch, and strip out the assoc part and put that into the pop-up that comes up when they leave (which is another Perl script). If they sign up for the course, they are tagged with that ID for all follow-up messages.
“In each autoresponder message I use: hop.clickbank.net/?{TRACKINGTAG}/affmatch instead of AffiliateMistakes.com. The {TRACKINGTAG} part becomes assoc in the emails.”
Chuck says that one thing he definitely wants to do is take care of his affiliates.
“I’ve seen many times that the programs that really focus on their affiliates do the best. Using ClickBank’s program doesn’t give a lot of flexibility, so I have to be creative to extend it wherever I can.”
Chuck put the same sort of careful thought and attention to detail into his ebook, “”Affiliate Mistakes: Maximizing Your Profits From Affiliate Programs!” It’s a very useful book.
Several people have told him that he’s selling it too cheaply, so on May 1 he’s raising the price to $47.
If you’re very quick, you can still get it for only $27.
[UPDATE: This product is no longer available.]================================================
4. Your free trial of “Secrets To Their Success”
================================================
Here’s a bargain for anyone who hasn’t signed up for Corey Rudl’s “Secrets To Their Success”.
You can try it free.
Corey is so confident you’ll love his private site that he’s giving away free trials – for how long, I don’t know.
You have absolutely nothing to lose.
This is a fantastic site. Grab this chance to see it free.
[UPDATE: This private site is no longer available. Here’s another really good source of Internet success stories.]=================================
5. Gunnar puts the record straight
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Here’s a nice way to point out a mistake.
Gunnar Bengtsson writes:
Hey Allan,
Great tips today!
Just wanted to say that the thought for today credited to Antti Lindström is actually from Douglas Adams’ excellent “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series. Hope you have a nice day!
Gunnar Bengtsson
https://www.onefunsite.com
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6. New site helps ClickBank users
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Harvey Segal has launched an affiliate-driven site that offers useful tips, tools and resources for merchants and affiliates who use ClickBank. Clever idea.
https://www.clickbankguide.com
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7. Eight affiliates pass on their tips
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For her new ebook “Secrets Of Top Marketing Affiliates Exposed” Lisa Frenzel interviewed eight affiliates who earn from $300 to $22,000 a month in commissions.
Most of them earn several thousand dollars a month.
The book contains a few multi-level marketing links but the vast majority of the content is about affiliate programs.
Lisa has added a useful summary, making it easy to see how the affiliates’ answers vary. Lots of good advice here from people (including me) who are earning a good income from affiliate programs. It’s only $27.
[UPDATE: This product is no longer available.]==================================================
8. Incredible, everlasting cookies, and other news
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FindYourPerfectPartner.com says it has “9,999-day” cookies. Neil Shearing’s ScamFreeZone tries even harder, saying it has introduced “100-year” cookies!
https://www.associateprograms.com/scamfrees
“eBay’s Temporary Insanity at Affiliates’ Expense”
clickz.com/aff_mkt/aff_mkt/article.php/1012011
PayPal problem: Armed with nothing more than a text editor and a Web browser, a crafty fraud artist can change prices of items at hundreds of e-shops that use PayPal.
wired.com/news/business/0,1367,51977,00.html
“It typically takes from 1,000 to 10,000 spams to make one sale,” writes Paul Myers. “If you buy from a spammer, you are PERSONALLY responsible for the next 1,000 to 10,000 spams sent… Including the porn spam sent to your kids.”
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9. Latest winners of free banner advertising for a year
=======================================================
I’ve just drawn the latest lucky winners of free banner advertising for a year on AssociatePrograms.com.
The winners are:
Whitney & Marnie (two crazy chicks from Canada)
Piggybackdirectory.com
“We don’t claim to be the experts, we simply provide the expert resources.”
Gary Harvey
https://1ClickProfitSt.com
…eProfit News You Can USE
Kenneth Doyle
https://www.feedyourhungrymind.com/
Internet Marketing Information
Would you like to go in the draw to win free banner advertising for a year? It’s easy. All you have to do is provide a link to https://www.associateprograms.com. Thank you!
[UPDATE: This offer has closed.]============================================
10. Useful free resource: Removing parasites
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Parasites are dodgy programs that may get installed on your computer without your knowledge or consent. Many applications described as “freeware” come infested with parasitic software that latches on to the web browser.
Check your computer for parasites here:
https://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/
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11. Thought for today: Never quit
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“I show up for work every day, and I never quit. Nothing special, just persistence.” – Frank Garon, super affiliate.
All the best
Allan Gardyne
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