They’ve been around in the underground for quite a while. Just think, the feature was introduced by Brad Callen in Keyword Elite over a year ago.

It was allowed to fly peacefully under the radar for many months until Chris McNeeney came along with Affiliate Project X, demonstrating how you could basically uncover and swipe profitable campaigns from super affiliates.

Even then, it was clunky and not all that practical to use on a large scale basis.

A couple of smart cookies saw the opportunity and jumped all over it like hyenas on a 3 day old bacon cheeseburger. Then the copy cats did their thing.

So what’s the wrap? Are these things an essential element of your affiliate arsenal or just another distraction in a world of TV dinners and turbo widgets?

Convincing arguments can be made on both sides of the debate:

Why Spytools are Useless:

There are so many other important aspects of PPC affiliate marketing that this alone will make only a very small difference in your overall results.

If you can’t select good niches, work around the Google slap, bid correctly, convert visitors and create a backend, there isn’t much use for “the best keywords”.

It gives you a chance, a small advantage but it pretty much stops there.

You can find out what keywords a successful affiliate is bidding on, but can you emulate that success? It depends on a multitude of factors Spy Tools give you zero control over.

Why Spy Tools are the Bomb:

Now let’s look at the flip side. If you know how to and are able to:

• Determine who is making money and who is not
• Zero in on the profitable campaigns
• Steal their keywords and affiliate offers
• Build pages that convert
• Get a healthy relationship with Google Adwords and other PPC providers
• Track your conversions
• Monetize the back end

In that case, the Spy Tools can help you spread your kingdom faster than the Mongol Hordes could ransack a Buddhist Temple.

The idea is to find where it is most worthy to deploy your troops. That’s where the Spy Tools comes in handy.

If you think of it as your affiliate compass or dowsing rod, then you have the right idea…

*
*

Thought / Action of the Day:

If you’d like a beta invite to affiliate heaven, drop me a comment and I’ll get in touch.

Number of the Day:

7: Percentage of the 68 RSS feeds I read everyday that are useful most of the time.

Tags: affiliates, PPC, spytools, google, adwords

Time to write an affiliate pre-sell of the first type: The Walkthrough Pre-Sell. I don’t use this model much on the blog you are reading but it is extremely effective in certain situations.

• If you run a blog with existing traffic, this type of pre-sell provides valuable content to your readers. Something without overpowering commercial overtones that they will actually enjoy reading.

• You can almost always plug some keywords into this review, notably the “how to do XYZ” string, which is bound to net you some healthy targeted traffic.

Since NetFrontier is as much about Affiliate marketing as SEO and Pay Per Click, I’ve chosen to make this sample pre-sell about a product that will be useful to many affiliates.

Step One: Choose a product.

This product should be targeted to your niche and you should first ensure that you can build a story around the problem it resolves. You should also own the product itself and be able to vouch for its quality. This kind of review is not as hit and run as the Leech method and you will generally be posting it on a content site that aims to build a readership and reputation.

The point is, you want the people who buy the product to think: “Gee, I’m glad I found that article, the product I bought is really useful, entertaining, educational, etc…” Not “Damn you Alex, for selling me to the wolves for a $17 commission”.

Since NetFrontier is as much about Affiliate marketing as SEO and Pay Per Click, I’ve chosen to make this sample pre-sell about a product that will be useful to many affiliates.

The product in question is Ninja Cloaker, a new software by Matt Haslem which allows you to cloak your affiliate links and send your traffic to any page you want while setting the cookie. At the time of writing this, I’m not sure what the price point is but I believe it to be around $50.

Step Two: Form a coherent story.

You want people to read your pre-sell to the end and you want them to leave with a happy feeling even if they don’t end up buying. The best way to accomplish that is to make it interesting by telling a story. The story will dictate the entire structure of the review to come.

My story, for the upcoming pre-sell is a true one. Basically, I want to be able to by-pass merchant shenanigans like squeeze pages and send my traffic directly to the page I want, without having to ask for special treatment.

This same principal holds true when I want to promote a product that is good, but the sales page is so poorly written it couldn’t convince an ice-cream sandwich to melt in the Gobi Desert.

So my story for this example is that I want to promote products that have flaws in their sales processes and I found a solution to those problems. Here we go.

Step 3: Write a compelling title:

As mentioned above, this will generally involve a good old fashioned “how-to”. You may skip those words for brevity but they do convert well.

Here are some potential titles for this pre-sell:

“ How to double your affiliate commissions by eliminating commission theft and hiding cloaking your links”“How to by-pass annoying squeeze pages and merchant ineptitude”

“How to sell affiliate products when the merchant is a clueless dipshit”

Yes, you can even afford to be slightly controversial. Many advise against it but I prefer to ignore their whining and inject a dose of personality in what I write.

Step Four: Situate your reader with the story introduction.

This makes for a far more interesting read and people like conclusions. Even when you watch a dreadfully awful movie, it’s hard to turn it off before the end because you want closure. That’s why the story format works so well.

It’s time to write the introduction which basically serves to explain the problem you came across, why it was a problem and how you went about resolving it.

Here’s my story: (It’s all true, down to the keyword. Thanks in advance to the unimaginative wannabes that steal my niche.)

Last Friday, I was doing research for my very profitable dating niche sites and campaigns, trying to find new angles and keywords.

Many of these are incredibly saturated, so you can imagine my glee when I came across a couple of terms with moderate search volume and virtually no competition at all.

I could already hear the cash register ring with all the affiliate commissions I was going to make. Now they say “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” and apart from being extremely irritating, “they” are often right. Unfortunately, that seemed to be the case here.

I was able to find a perfect product that I was certain would sell like hot cakes on the superb keywords I had unearthed. Here is one of them for you “Mail Order Russian”. Russian girls are supposedly good looking, docile and great in the kitchen, so it’s no wonder lazy North Americans with poor social skills might be interested in ordering one through the mail.

I found a site that offered a catalogue for sale as well as credits for contacting these Russian women. The product looked solid and perfectly matched to my keywords.

Only trouble is, the sales page for the product was repugnant and clueless. It had all sorts of links out to other sites and products that wouldn’t pay me commission. The sales language was clumsy and full of mistakes, and of all things, the page was plastered full of Adsense ads.

It was the only product of its kind, and sadly, sending traffic to it would have been a complete waste of money, since I would have more chances of paying my visitors into Adsense Clicks and leakage than actually making a commissioned sale.

What a waste, I thought as I prepared to file the entire episode into my “gross merchant ineptitude” folder.

Step 5: Applying the Solution.

Up until now, my story sets an excellent premise that is relevant to my market. I’ve also shown that I could extract a clear financial benefit if it wasn’t for the pesky problem that seemed insurmountable. Of course that’s not the case and up my sleeve, I hold just what the doctor ordered.

So here I continue the story and even add more examples of how the product solves my problem.

Story continues:

That’s when I remembered this piece of affiliate cloaking software I had sitting on my hard drive. Turns out this thing is just what I’ve been looking for in more ways than one.

It installs in about 15 seconds and asks 2 simple questions: What’s my affiliate link and where do I want to send the visitor. In other words, I can send the visitor to a blog post or mini sales letter I’ve completed myself. One that doesn’t contain someone else’s Adsense Ads…

Perfect.

I immediately realize that this will also allow me to run another campaign I had my sights set on. Joseph Matthews has an ebook called the Art of Approaching. It’s perfect for my horny 20 year old niche. The problem is this guy forces affiliates to send traffic to his optin page before they see the sales letter.

I even emailed him about it and he said “no, everyone gets squeezed”. Not on my watch friend. I’m already squeezing the visitor on my side of things and I’m not that keen on paying to build your list.

With Ninja Cloaker (aff link), I can just send the visitor straight on to the sales page no matter how greedy the vendor is.

So I get these two campaigns running and bingo, my hunch is confirmed. Both products are converting like gangbusters. In fact my commission payouts on the ebook are higher than almost any I’ve had before on a clickbank product.

It dawns on me. Commission theft or removal. These ungrateful sods are stealing my commissions or by-passing me! Not with Ninja Cloaker. Not only does it go to the page I want, it also shows a nice, pure URL. No funky characters, no question marks, no sign of an affiliate link.

After trying it in other niches, I can confirm it makes a bigger difference than I ever imagined. For all of $50, this is one of the best investments I’ve made all year.

Step 6: Optional call to action:

Notice how my affiliate link and product mention only come towards the end of the article and the endorsement is light and casual. This is one of the keys of this method.

If you want to seem sincere (and you are being sincere right?) then you can’t try to force it down the customer’s throat.

If I were to include a call to action, it would look something like this.

“All in all, I’m glad I remembered this little jewel. If you’re doing any affiliate marketing, you should definitely check it out.”

Conclusion:

That’s all folks. Nothing more to it than that.

Next up, I’m going to write the slightly more slippery “Leech Method” review. It’s going to be exactly for this same product which is launching in a couple of days.

Stay tuned.

Tags: affiliatemarketing, reviewpage, matthaslem, ninjacloaker, linkcloaking

This is something I’ve grown quite good at and regularly achieve excellent conversion rates with, either on this blog or on other sites.

Before posting an actual demo and “reasons why”, let’s examine the different formats an affiliate pre-sell can assume.

Note: These methods are extremely powerful and I always use them responsibly. Never pitch stuff you don’t believe in or wouldn’t use yourself, it’s hypocritical and not far above stealing.

The “Walkthrough” Pre-sell:

This model is great for posting directly into your blog or content site that has an existing readership. The content has to be interesting to your existing readers and have some potential for drawing traffic from PPC. In this case, you want to write a walkthrough detailing how to accomplish something relevant to your niche and readers.
As you do so, you post affiliate links to the resource (s) you use to accomplish what it is you’re explaining how to accomplish.

Allan Gardyne is a master at this and you would do well to check out his site and immerse yourself into the proper style and vibe.

The “Leech” Pre-sell:

This is one of my favorite methods and I shamelessly stole if from Chris McNeeney’s Affiliate Project X.

This pre-sell is made to piggy back off the notoriety of a particular brand or product that will get direct searches on a regular basis.

The Leech appeals almost strictly to the potential buyers of one single particular product and is constructed to convert those prospects in to buyers that use your affiliate link. Offering a bonus is crucial to the success of your enterprise in this case.

The whole point of this type of review is to convert the visitor. You can make piles of cash with high cost keywords on PPC traffic using this method because when you do it right, you squash the competition like the pesky insects that they are.

For excellent examples of this method, you need to turn no further than your not-so-humble host, who over the months, has gotten frighteningly good at accomplishing this little “tour de force”.

This has been one of my highest converting ever:  Adsense Decoded Videos.

Those 2 methods are the only ones I use and I don’t recommend you stray too far from them since they are proven to work and hard to beat.

Up next, we’ll jump right into the Affiliate Walkthrough Pre-Sell with full explanations and complete example.

Tags: affiliatemarketing, allangardyne, presell, affiliates, adsense, adsensedecoded, google

Armed with this information, you pick winners more easily, write better converting pages and emails and slowly but surely build up a strong base of buyers and subscribers. Assuming you picked a niche with decent size and breadth, you can potentially make a good living from just this one niche.

When this kind of niche domination happens, and it will if you play your cards right, you’ve become a big fish, but you’re still far from the top tier you could reach as a product owner. Let’s quickly go over the differences.

Advantages of being an affiliate:

1) Faster and Cheaper cost of entry:

This can be anything from a direct linking campaign to a squeeze page but you get to test the waters quickly with little risk involved.

2) Few Top Level Skills required:

With an average skill set and the right formula, you can do very well. No need for extreme copywriting skills that can make or break your campaigns, if you track your keywords well, you’re 75% of the way there.

3) Easier diversification of assets:

Arguably, your assets are somewhat more fragile since you depend on other continuing to pay you well for selling their products. Affiliate programs come and go. You may lose some but they won’t account for huge slices of your income if you keep the funnel well stocked.

4) No Customers:

While customers are what put money in your pocket, you don’t have to deal with them. They whine at the vendor, not the affiliate, they ask her for support, not you. Customers can be one of the most stimulating parts of any business. They can also be the most irritating.

5) No Inventory and Fulfillment:

Assuming you sell digital products, this isn’t really a factor but with physical goods it can be a huge headache that takes the pleasure out of your business until you can completely outsource it. Here the affiliate wins big.

Think the affiliates have it good? I disagree. Look at the benefits of being the product owner, especially digital products:

1) You get double the money on a good deal of sales and all your personal sales.

If you are promoting your own product on PPC, you can bid twice as much as you could as an affiliate and still be profitable. When the campaign is profitable anyways, you make twice as much money.

2) You get a bigger list faster:

Assuming equal marketing, you can put your own lead capture device directly in your sales page instead of making a squeeze page which means you get a good deal of signups without ever losing a customer because they refused to optin.

3) You have complete access to the buyers list:

Clickbank gives you the names of the buyers you refer as an affiliate. You can get them to optin to your list at a decent percentage but most don’t even do it. Nevertheless, most affiliate programs don’t give you access to buyer data and even when they do, you can never build a relationship with them on par with the vendor whose product they now own.

4) You have your own affiliates:

This is a bit like your second family of customers: they require some investment and work. But they use their own money, time and resources to sell your product without you ever risking a cent! This is a ridiculously good deal. On many digital products, you make 50% of the sale price doing absolutely nothing.

You get access to buyers and subscribers you never could have gotten otherwise because they come from other people’s lists and sites where you can’t advertise as an affiliate.
When other people start busting their hump to make you money, you can’t really ask for anything more.

5) You have access to JVs:

This is another sickeningly powerful advantage the regular affiliate doesn’t have access to. As a product owner you can make twice as much money promoting the same product with the same size list.

As an affiliate, you just mail out and get commissions from the sales you make. As a product owner, you get those profits and the ones generated by the other product owner mailing out for you at the same time. Your list grows and your campaigns make twice as much money. That’s hard to beat.

6) You get Notoriety:

As an affiliate, you can gain some notoriety for your success as a seller. If you build huge authoritative VRE sites, you might get recognition for that too. As a vendor, you get interviews, media attention and expert status in your niche. More sales and more power coming your way.

Assuredly there are more such good reasons, but those are the main ones that can’t be ignored.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking being an affiliate and have no plan to stop being one any time soon. I just wanted to show how good the product owners have it.

What do you think about this?

Tags: Affiliatemarketing, affiliate, developper, copywriting

Clickbank is one of the dinosaurs of the online world. They’ve been around for ever and they are in many ways, prehistoric.

Their system only changes when the absolute force of necessity backs them up against the wall, which is happening more and more often these days.

As one of the online giants, they sure don’t help break the stereotype that’s giants are slow and clumsy. But this is about good news.

Clickbank has finally instituted IP based tracking to supplement their horrendously faulty hoplink system.

What forced them to do it was the latest release of Internet Explorer 7.

The new version has settings preconfigured to block what it considers bad cookies. The Clickbank hoplink is part of these bad cookies.

That means unless Internet Explorer 7 users go through the trouble of changing their settings to accept the Clickbank cookie so affiliates can be credited with sales, all people using the browser are a plague on affiliate marketers.

One online source estimated that 26% of internet users were running Internet Explorer 7. That means more than a quarter of the traffic you sent to Clickbank merchants with your affiliate link was not being credited to you. Instead the merchant was getting an un-referred sale.

On some campaigns, the conversions and payouts are so high that even losing one fourth of all conversions to a silly glitch wasn’t that big of a deal.

On the other hand, with campaigns that were only making modest profits and costing a bundle in Adwords clicks, 26% is a big deal.

Problem is, in almost all cases, it was more than a quarter of all profits lost. Some have reported increases in sales in the several hundred percent range.

Time to give some underperforming campaigns a new chance. I’ve already flipped on a campaign that was one of my first. In the beginning it did well and over a period of months it became unprofitable. In the last five days, it is now humming to the tune of 100% ROI once again.

Even after this improvement and the sub ID tracking which came a couple of months ago, Clickbank still has a long way to come in rivaling the more “mainstream” affiliate networks.

One of the biggest problems yet is being over accessible. This is a dual matter, one could argue. While it’s great that anybody can sign up for an account in a matter of minutes, I would bet that less than 10% of account holders ever make an affiliate sale or put up a product.

What they do is simply use their account to give themselves rebates on products other people are selling.

On Clickbank, this has become the norm. I’ve done it myself, more than once in the early days.

While it may seem good for the end consumer, it has a darker side.

As an affiliate that pays good money or invests their time in building a strong site or large newsletter, all traffic has a cost. Unless you run your business as a hobby, you clearly want rewards of the financial type for the effort and money you expend.

When you promote a product to this traffic asset you create one way or another, you expect your due.

On Clickbank, a very large slice of the traffic you receive, particularly in the internet marketing niche, will simply change a couple of letters in the link and get paid for the sale instead of you. It’s just too easy to do. 3 minutes and you have a Clickbank account which can be used for any product sold.

This forces affiliates to look elsewhere before selecting a possibly superior Clickbank product to promote because of the inevitable loss of sales. I know for a fact that response will be much better on non Clickbank products for this very reason.

That has the direct effect of losing sales for the merchant. If the affiliate is unsatisfied, the product doesn’t get attention, mailings and reviews.

One might argue on the reverse side that people would not have bought the product in the first place if they couldn’t get 50% off this way. Debatable for sure.

If they hadn’t been trained in this manner, that wouldn’t even be an issue. Most affiliate networks ask for a demonstration of minimal competence before attributing accounts to new users. Either a website, a list or some other proof. Clickbank needs to jump on that bandwagon and also make tracking links individual to each product, as well as enforcing the “no buying through your link” policy.

When that happens, they will secure their market position rather than leave it wide open for the competition to swoop in and steal it, the way it is now. Let’s see which happens first.

P.S. Go download Firefox, it’s 10 times better than IE.  Combine it with Opera for regular browsing needs, it comes with a great email client.

Tags: clickbank, affiliatemarketing, affiliates, internetexplorer

That factor is: other people.

Without other people, you can’t make sales, you don’t have affiliates, you don’t have JVs, you don’t have collaboration. That means you painstakingly have to do everything yourself and you only ever have a very small percentage of the reach you could have.

Earlier today I was re-reading Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing Manuscript. I’m not a fan of all of his work but he certainly was able to propel himself to the top of the guru heap in record time. His products continue to become bestsellers and that’s really no accident.

The Butterfly Marketing Manuscript is a blueprint of sorts on how to build a successful marketing site, have a monster launch and keep the buzz going long after the trumpets have sounded.  Did I mention it’s really good?

It also refreshed my mind as to the importance of WIIFM: what’s in it for me?

It’s the question on everybody’s mind 98% of the time. When faced with just about any decision that doesn’t involve primary obligation or responsibility, people run the proposition by their WIIFM filter.

Should I read this ad? Should I buy this product? Should I reply to this email? Should I help this guy?

Whenever you do something that requires a response from somebody, go out of your way to answer the question they invariably have on their mind…

What really decided me to write this post was a short inbox clean up. Right in the middle of the Manuscript, the WIIFM was trotting in my mind and I remembered I hadn’t filtered emails for a while.

It came up because I have products launching in the next months and of course I want to gain as much traction and momentum as possible to gather steam for the launches before the products go live.

Now, this is just business, it’s the name of the game, and yes, it’s selfish and utilitarian:

I have a folder in my email processor marked “smartpeeps”. As you can guess, it’s reserved for what I consider to be valuable contacts “smart people”.

When I place a name in this folder, I obviously ask myself first: what can this person bring me?

Do they have a list, a product, a blog, a show, newsletter or perhaps some other form of influence? Do they have a special skill or can they get me in contact with someone who does? Do they have some or other claim to fame?

If they do, I drag and drop their name into the folder.

Every once in a while, I go over this folder and check the names in it. When I see that I haven’t heard from one of them for a long time, I write them a short email.

Something very brief and to the point, updating them on where I’m at and asking if I can help them with something they’re working on, or just inviting them to tell me what they’re up to.

I keep myself fresh with my smart peeps because they will be useful in the future.

To make it to this folder, you need to have something to offer, the more obvious the better. The more related to one form of influence or another, the more stars you get.

The easiest way to be perceived as influential is to have one of two things or both: a blog or a list.

Generally, those that have created a product have at least one of these elements so they are excellent candidates.

My point in all this is that you should always try to create lasting value in whatever you do. It’s great to make affiliate sales but it’s better to build a list while doing it.

It’s fine to spend your time learning and applying, but why not create an echo of that value by starting a blog or a site and slapping up an email capture mechanism on it.

Then when people consider you, you aren’t just a random name in the webosphere, you’re the owner of content, the leader of your audience and the director behind a list. You control influence.

Beyond your intrinsic humanity, you have extra value: commercial value.

The more of this commercial value you control, the more power you have. Consider this power as your lever, the kind you use to lift things far too heavy to move on your own.

The longer your lever, the heavier the object you can move. This is how you move up the food chain and catapult yourself into the center of attention.

First you gain a little power, which you then use to gain more and more. At some point, people realize the power you hold and the offers come pouring in. Your opportunities for making money are so numerous one of your most important functions becomes determining what is a better usage of your influence: your time.

Your time is too precious to be a single use disposable commodity. Build something lasting and start today, in no time at all, people will start placing your emails in their “smartpeeps” folder…

Tags: influence, marketing, smartpeople, value, blogs, emaillist

I’ve written so much lately the ink well was dry. Mush on, this is a big year…

That’s why Net Frontier Marketing has gone without posts for a couple of days.

I’ve bought a couple of products lattely and I think you will find the reviews interesting. I don’t have time to written lengthy reviews of them all so I’ll with something out of the ordinary, for me at least. 3 short posts in the same day.

The first product I bought was Maximum Overdrive, a print newsletter by Woodrow Maximus or Woody Maxim as he is now called.

As he bluntly put it, in 1997 he had developed “geek super powers”, meaning an advanced knowledge of computers and the web.

He quickly went on to build one of the largest porn empires the web has ever seen, accumulating untold amounts of cash along the way.

Somewhere down the line, he got married and had a family. His own conscience found what he did for a living somewhat objectionable and he threw in the towel, selling off his empire for a huge pile of fungolas.

Then what?

After a couple of months of enjoying all the free time, he was back at the computer. Very few true entrepreneurs can stay away very long from the thing they love.

Poor Woody. What he found next, as he states, was worse than porn. It was full of lies, hype, inter-breeding, nepotism and all those lovely things.

No, I’m not talking about politics.

What he found were guru sales letters. The ones that promised advanced traffic secrets and ways to make money online were those that he had a particular problem with.

Here’s the thing. As an adult webmaster of his caliber, you accumulate a bag of tricks and methods that is at the cutting edge of traffic generation and monetization. The industry is so competitive your virtual real estate can plunge down the tube in a hurry if you don’t keep abreast of the cutting edge traffic tactics.

But you also need to monetize that traffic like a pro, otherwise you’re just kicking up dust. Woody Maxim was (is) a pro at both of those aspects.

Understandably, when he started buying the latest junky ebooks, he was very disappointed, to say the least.

That’s how Maximum Overdrive was born. A kind of answer to all the junk peddlers and a real source for people starting out online or those that haven’t achieved the results they were looking for, sometimes after years of being mislead.

It’s still somewhat of a mystery what you’ll find in Maximum Overdrive, since the publication is so new. So far only one issue has seen the light of day.

What are the results so far? They are smashing. Check this out.

On April 11th, the newsletter had less than 170 subscribers.

This newsletter talks about how to make money reviewing software products from Regnow. The newsletter invites subscribers to sign up under Maxim to the affiliate program. From this he earns 5% of what the sub-affiliates earn.

On April 10th, Woody made $732.12 of commission from these sub-affiliates. What that means is those 170 subscribers made $14,642.40 on the 10th of April. In one day, the buyers made close to 15k. From the first newsletter.

Immediately actionable, extremely profitable proven methods, that’s what you get in Maximum Overdrive.

Get a trial issue for only $15 for a limited time.

I mean you only stand to leak some of your traffic and make the other guy affiliate commission so why in the world would you do it?

Ah, good question. Well the answer is simple. That other person happens to be giving away information so valuable that it’s worth taking that risk to let your own readers in on it.

And that’s what brings us to Earners Blog.

I stumbled across this site a couple of months ago and was immediately impressed with the attractive layout and clean graphics. But it was the content that really got me going.

Earners Blog is written by a guy called Stuart , he’s an Aussie from Melbourne and over the 4 years he’s been doing the internet marketing thing, he’s discovered some remarkably imaginative and profitable ways to turn a profit online.

It’s rare, in this age of information overload, that you’ll find a blog you like reading so much that you’re willing to suck it up and wade through the archives to find more of those golden nuggets that drew you in.

Well, that’s what I ended up doing and I’ve come up with a selection of my 5 favorite posts, each just about guaranteed to open you mind to a new money making venture.

Here they are, in no particular order, for your enjoyment:

Whitehat Site Black Hat Promotion:

Tired of whiners who can’t get their sites indexed? Content Generator sites getting you nowhere? Go for some good old middle of the road backlink generation tactics.

Lesson #7: Make Money with Dedicated Affiliate Sites:

This post details the art of building mini-niche sites and ranking them for product names and other high converting queries. Brief, crisp and to the point. Start building your own dedicated affiliate sites.

Cloaking & Ranking Your Affiliate Links

As I mentioned before, clickbank links are ugly. So are most affiliate links. Not to mention that leaving them out in the open will have people stealing your commissions. Here’s a nifty alternative that allows you to not only cloak, but also rank your affiliate links.

Walkthrough Affiliate Marketing:

Some of the best keyword phrases to generate traffic for are of the how-to type. If someone is searching for “how to setup an autoresponder” , there’s a good bet you can help them out by showing them how and sell them something very very softly by including it in your affiliate walkthrough.

Make $200 Every Day, It’s Not that Hard?

Ok, this is a really good one. It’s been said before but Stuart has a very interesting take on the matter. This is a near surefire way to make $200 a day.

Well, I could go on like this but you get the point.

Here’s an interesting little time saver:

First, sign up to Earner’s Blog RSS Feed

Now when you get to your computer in the morning or night, whenever it is, tell yourself you have to read the Earners Blog Feed last. That way you ignore and pass over all the useless junk you have in there to get to the good stuff faster.

Works for me

Tags: earnersblog, makemoney, ppc, affiliatemarketing

In it he analyzes the so-called “aftershock” caused by his reports as well as the strategy he used to go from a no-list, no-name nobody to 7 figures a year, all in less than 90 days.

Since the report is somewhat long winded, like so many things these days, I’ve condensed the important parts here and added my two cents.

If you’d rather read the whole thing, you can download it here: The Autopsy

The Premise: You can make money with click-flipping. And the next version of the List Virus will be extra powerful.

The Style: “ In this report, I’m stepping out of bounds, breaking all the rules of internet marketing once again.”

I’ve been quite cynical of Scott Boulch in the past. Statements such as the above certainly have not helped.

If you’re “stepping out of bounds and breaking all the rules”, I really expect something completely different from you. Something I haven’t seen before. This is not it.

On the other hand, Scott Boulch did burst onto the scene in rather remarkable fashion and quick analysis reveals that he has just about done what tens of thousands of internet marketers dream of doing. Making a million bucks in a couple of months.

And it actually wasn’t that hard. He just needed to enrol the right tools and a “go big or go home” attitude.

Before we get into some quotes from the report that pinpoint the pillars of his success, let’s review some results.

Scott Boulch lanched “The Death of Adsense” an “out of bounds report that broke all the rules and seriously pissed off the gurus”.

He paid out $0.50 for every optin subscriber and made the promotion go viral as we will see below.

Result: 34,270 optins.

From the input he got from this list, he launched at least 3 successful products and we haven’t seen the last of him, of that I can assure you.

These products are:

Clickflipping.com : his core membership site where you learn the ins and outs of clickflipping.

Price: $997 upfront and $297 monthly membership.

I’m not a member so I can’t comment on the quality of the program but it does seem like a hefty sum. Not to mention that that membership fee is close to a monthly car payment… Scott doesn’t reveal data as to how many he’s sold but we can assume it was several hundred packages.

LifeafterAdsense.com: $49 monthly membership

According to Scott’s figures, he presently has over 1000 people enrolled.  That’s a sweet $50,000 montly residual income, for those of us keeping track.
TheListVirus.com: I can’t remember the exact price of the software but it wasn’t cheap and it appears to have sold out, at least momentarily.Assuming Scott outsourced everything, from the sales copy to the design and the software to support, he still made a fantastic ROI on his initial investment of only $17,135 which he happily paid to build his list.

Here were the keys to success, as listed by Scott in “The Autopsy”:

“People talking to each other about what you have to say. Think Shock and Awe.”

“Any press is good press.”

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

All these refer to the “wow factor” that The Death of Adsense had. A skull on the cover, a powerful, controversial affirmation…

“Study other successful campaigns and mirror their copywriting style.”

“Horizontal Marketing: One guru is enough to get the other gurus on board.”

Ah yes, the ever popular “copy and be copied.”

“When the customer opted in, an affiliate account was automatically created for them… and they had banners and creatives in their face, all ready to go.”

This is a very important point. True you won’t be able to pull this off in all niches but it’s a sure winner for anything related to affiliate marketing.

And it also reminds us of how lazy we are. Imagine your customers and prospects are the absolute laziest sods in the world. Make your most desired action readily available to them at the click of a button. The easier the better. Even filling up a form is too much. We are just that lazy.

More Keys to success:

“If you don’t have a product to sell, just ask the market what if wants and make it.”

This is exactly what Scott Boulch did. And it worked.

He came out with the first report and started surveying customers. While he was building products to sell them, he kept their attention with a second report and some pre-launch hype. At the height of desire the products launched and hit the bull’s eye.

At a certain point in your internet marketing endeavours, you begin to learn more from a product’s marketing and sales pitch than you do from the product itself.

I don’t own any of the products so I can’t speak for their quality. But the whole coup went down brilliantly.

Flawless execution, M. Boulch.

Tags: ScottBoulch, Clickflipping, internetmarketing, affiliatemarketing, deathofadsense, theautopsy

It’s a hefty order but I like challenges. To catch yourself up if you missed it, read part 1.

When I left off, I had two major missions to accomplish. I needed a pre-sell powerful enough to bring the massive conversions I will need to claim my stakes in this incredibly high competition niche.

Second, I needed an irresistible bonus that would not only entice visitors into buying but practically force them to buy from my affiliate link, no matter how many other pre-sells and bonuses they had been offered.

Tall order.

And I went WAY overboard. So far I’ve got about 8 hours of work on this bonus and I’m a little more than half way through.

That’s quite a bit more time than I had planned to spend but his bonus is incredibly powerful.

Looking back on it, I don’t regret spending the extra time because this is something I will be able to use again and again to supercharge my own affiliate campaigns.

This is one of the things I should have done a long time ago. It would have saved me a lot of time and certainly helped me make more of my affiliate campaigns a glowing success.

In fact, this bonus is so good; I am already seeing how it can become a product in and of itself, and a darn good one at that. Ok, I’m excited, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?

To create the bonus, the first thing I needed was the idea. I asked myself “what is the most difficult part of the process?” In other words, what part of Affiliate Project X will the average buyer have the most difficulty with?

Here are some of the ideas I came up with:

• How to write an autoresponder series, with swipe file
• How to choose profitable keywords, with examples
• How to write stunning articles in 15 minutes, with swipe file

Bah. They all would have made a good bonus. But it’s so been done before…

I sat there thinking.

Thinking I need to go bigger, better, more useful. And as I sat thinking, I dreaded what came next: writing the powerful pre-sell that would make visitors focus their attention like a laser beam from start to finish.  From headline to affiliate link…

I dreaded it because it’s a lot of work and it’s not easy.

And then it came to me. The pre-sell.

That’s the really hard part.

That’s what makes 95% of promotions fail.

That’s what chases new affiliate marketers out of the scene with their tails between their legs before they give themselves a fair shake…

And so my bonus was born. The Art of the Pre-Sell: Affiliate Marketing on Steroids. Or some such thing. I haven’t come up with a title yet but you get the picture…

Tomorrow I should finish the bonus and I’ll describe how I built it and what’s inside.  And it’s not just a rehased little guide…

If you participate by leaving a comment on this post, I may even send you a pre-release copy so you can give me your appreciation.

Stay tuned and check out Affiliate Project X if you haven’t already. If you have, you know how powerful this bonus will be…

Tags: AffiliateProjectX, Affiliateprojectxreview, APX, AffiliateProjectXbonus