The change however has had a catastrophic impact on a large number of websites (including affiliates) across the globe. I’ve personally seen some of my sites US Google traffic plummet by ~40% but seen an increase in others.

What do we know about this change?

A lot of what we initially know is based on speculation using the limited data that we’ve seen, Matt Cutts & Vanessa Fox have give some details out but the best summary of what Google is looking for in terms of quality can be found in this SMX Summary

There’s a number of things that still don’t add up for me with this update:

1. Why weren’t a lot of the major content farms actually hit? eHow is a prime example here.
2. If you have “low quality content” on your site Google treats your whole site as low quality. One would have thought Google would be able to assess quality on a page by page basis.
3. I’ve seen a number of shopping sites hit badly like theFind, yet others such has Bizrate remain unaffected.

What can you do if you’ve been affected?

I’m very reluctant to say change something right away as Googlebot still appears to be very slow at reflecting new cache dates on pages, one can only assuming that Google are tweaking this algo for another re-ranking soon. This means that you have two options:

Wait it out – there’s a chance that the algo will become less agressive & you’ll emerge back to your original positions.

Or you can start making chances now to anticipate the next layer of the algorithm.

What changes should you look at implementing?

Google wants you to remove low quality content from your site, but we still have no idea what low quality looks like in the eyes of Google. I’ve start making some changes to sites which includes (but not limited to):

1. Adding noindex to thin pages (think tag pages, empty review pages etc)
2. Fixing canonical or duplicate issues (www/non-www)
3. Fixing up all reported issues in Webmaster Tools
4. Re-evaluate any content sources that you’re using that others might also be using (think uniqueness)
5. If you believe you’ve been targeted wrongly I’d file a reconsideration request
6. Improve the content to ad ratio on your pages
7. Reduce usage of boilerplate text across multiple pages
8. Ensure that the main content of your pages are greater than the sum of the header & footer
9. Give Google feedback on the Panda Update in this Google Webmaster thread

I’m interested to know if you’ve had sites hit (especially affiliate sites):

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Adwords Landing Page Quality Update
• Time to wake up the Pagerank Orgy is over
• Moving Servers Today
• Page Rank Updating, Jan 10 2007
• Adsense Publishers reporting huge eCPM Drops

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

I thought this would be a good opportunity to outlay some of the key things you should do before applying to a network:

What you’ll need

1. Name
2. Email
3. Other contact details (Daytime & Evening Phone)
4. Current Address
5. Business Name
6. Payment details (Paypal or DD)
7. Tax Information / SS (Unless outside USA)
8. Website details including UB’s & niche
9. How you intend to send traffic (i.e. Email, PPC or SEO)
10. If Email you may be asked for the IP address of your mail server
11. Other affiliate networks you’re working with

Domain

You’ll be asked to provide the domain that you’re using to carry out any activities. Make sure the domain is active & isn’t a holding page. Also make sure that this is a reputable domain that has potential to provide leads/sales to the network.

Avoid putting adwords.com or anything similar as your domain because this probably won’t get accepted (depending on the Network, most are fine with PPC only affiliates as long as you specify). If you’re just doing SEM I wouldn’t bother putting any website down.

I submitted Earners Blog as the domain for most of the networks since this is where I’m doing the reviews. Funnily enough I did get one application declined by CX Digital Media because they don’t accept sites hosted on free hosting. I don’t know if they’re retarded over there but it doesn’t take much intelligence to figure out that I’m not hosting on a free blog host.

Email Address

This is a vital part of the equation. It’s best to provide an email address that corresponds with the domain name you’ve submitted above, this helps to cement the fact that you’re legitimate with the network you’re applying to. Try to avoid free email accounts like hotmail, gmail or yahoo.

Verification

Quite a large number of networks will now ask you to verify that you either own the website or ask you to call up & have a chat with them. This is a good opportunity to start up a conversation with an AM before you get accepted. This may give you some insights into how knowledgeable they are.

I was even asked by one network to put up a text link to one of their partner sites as verification. Um no.

What not to do when accepted

1. Don’t lie about the website that you own
2. Don’t start trying to get a better payout on offers right away, wait until you start pushing volume
3. Don’t hassle the hell out of your AM, use them wisely
4. Avoid brand bidding, you’ll get booted fairly quickly for this
5. Be careful with incentivized traffic, some offers allow it but most don’t

How you should use your AM

Account Managers are a wealth of information at some Networks, the bottom line is that the better you do, the more money they make.

Ask the right questions, don’t bust balls:

Which offers are converting well currently?
Which landing pages are kicking ass? (most won’t tell you this but it doesn’t hurt to ask)

This should be all you need to really start rolling.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Ebay ditches Commission Junction
• Building a lasting Affiliate Network – Part 1
• Adbrite
• Explode your PPC Campaigns in 6 easy Steps
• Google finally cracks down on Arbitrage

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Here’s a question from Jared:

Do you use an Adwords My Client Center? & if so what are the advantages?

If you’re managing multiple Adwords Accounts upgrading to a Google MCC Account makes perfect sense. You don’t have to log in & out to switch between them & also creating new accounts is a breeze.

I highly recommend making the jump across regardless of whether you have 1 account or several & also especially if you’re spending more than $500 a month.

There’s a few perks to having an Adwords MCC Account:

1. You can manage multiple accounts from 1 interface
2. You can split things up much better & assign budgets
3. You can bill each account seperately
4. If you spend more than $500 consistently you can take the Adwords Professional Exam
5. Get your own dedicated Adwords Professional Page
6. You can qualify for vouchers (only once you’ve completed the Professional Exam)
7. If you decide to take on clients you’re already set up

If you decide to take the GAP exam (which is valid for 2 years) you’ll be able to show it off on your sites. Not only that but I guarantee it’ll get you a much larger foot in the door if you apply for any SEM related jobs.

Upgrading your account is pretty simple:

1. Join as a Google Advertising Professional
2. Input one of your existing Adwords Account
3. Create a new Google Account to use for the login & you’re done

Now just log in & link any other existing accounts.

As a rule of thumb I normally create 1 account per website that I’m working with, I normally find that this helps me manage spends & budgets much easier.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Increase Adwords CTR with the Trademark Symbol
• $50 Adwords & YSM Vouchers for Australians
• $100 Worth of Adwords & MSN Adcenter Vouchers
• Hack Alert (remv.php) – Upgrade to WordPress 2.7
• Quick Adwords Tip #2: Quality not Quantity

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Dodgy Merchants

It’s inevitable that if you’re trying out hundreds of merchants every month you’ll eventually run into a few dodgy ones. It’s easy to think that everyone in this industry is nice & “looking out for one another” but if you think that then you need a serious reality check.

You’ve got three types of merchants

1. Those that manage their affiliate program in house with a dedicated team
2. Those that outsource the management to a network but still approve the leads/purchases themselves
3. Those that manage the program by themselves (1 man show)

Speaking from experience I’ve had trouble from all three types. But, most of the time it’s from numbers 2 & 3.

So what are the ways that merchants can cheat you out of your well fought after commissions?

Scrubbing Leads – This is unfortunately very common in our industry (especially in the adult space). It happens at the merchant level & at the Network level. This basically means that the merchant or network won’t credit a certain number of your leads, pocketing the profit for themselves & you won’t even know it’s going on.

How to combat – There’s only one real way to combat this & that’s to generate your leads locally, or get friends to generate leads for you & catch the merchant red handed. Bottom line is, if you suspect your merchant is doing this move on….quickly.

Lead Lag - This is quite common in the financial sector & relates to the processing time of applications for loans or credit cards. Make sure that the merchant is regularly approving or declining the leads that you’re sending through.

How to combat – A quick email to your AM or their manager will usually get the ball rolling on this issue. If the leads lag too long just switch merchants & save yourself the headache, their loss.

High Refund Rates – I’ve come across a number of merchants in my time that have a very high refund rate. This is one to be very wary of, especially in the financial space. If it’s your job to provide someone with a “lead” then the merchant should not be entitled to refund it for a failed application, but some merchants just don’t get what the meaning of a lead really is.

How to combat – There’s no way around this, if there’s a high refund rate then call the merchant & ask for an explanation. If it’s not worthing pursing then just move on.

Test Orders – I also get these ones from time to time, it’s possible that the occasional one or two is fine but any more than that & you should start to get worried. Why on earth are you testing so many orders under my affiliate ID, don’t you have a test ID?

How to combat – Ask the question above.

Bidding on their own Brand with an Affiliate Tracking ID – This is one of the ones that pisses me off the most. I can do all the work & presell to the customer but if they decide to go away, think about it & then come back through typing the brand into Google the merchants Cookie will overwrite mine. This is extremely common & is something that I check for before starting any campaign.

How to combat – If you can, outbid the merchant on their own brand & test how many other affiliates they’re ripping off

Non Payment – Perhaps the worst thing is not getting paid for all of your effort & hard work. Remember from time to time merchants can be late with payments or perhaps forget, but there’s a difference between a late payment & not getting one…ever.

How to combat – Email your account manager or affiliate representative first, if there’s no response then try again. If you’re talking to a brick wall then get in touch with a lawyer, they’ll write you up a letter that may provoke a response. Remember to try & research potential merchants as much as possible before you put any serious volume through them & ALWAYS have a backup incase things go belly up.

Dodgy Affiliate Networks

Running In House Campaigns – If you were an affiliate manager who was paid on the performance of their affiliates & you had access to “what was working” would you run your own campaigns? Well, there’s plenty of AM’s out there that do this & you have to cover your tracks to not give away any secrets.

Keeping your campaigns secret not only protect your profits, but they also protect your niche. Ever been bidding on a keyword with 0 competition then almost overnight you’re up again 1 or 2 competitors?

How to Combat -

Use Redirects: PHP redirects generally pass the referrer string right through so you’ll want to use a redirect that doesn’t. Meta Redirects or Javascript redirects normally do this pretty well (remember that some people do turn Javascript off). When I want to keep stuff really hidden I’ll use double redirects to prevent the AM from back tracing the redirect or seeing the real redirect as a referrer.

Encode your SubID’s: If you rely heavily on Sub ID’s don’t go naming them stuff like subid=affiliate_marketing_blog, you may as well give away your top converting keyword list on a plate. It should look something like subid=9954412, if you don’t know how to code then simply put the real subid value in a spreadsheet. If you’re a dab hand at PHP you could create a simple tracking script of your own that will identify the subid with the real search term in your stats.

Stand your Ground: Don’t let the network bully you into revealing your traffic sources once you start killing it with your campaign. If the traffic stands up on the merchants end then they network have nothing to worry about (except you not giving your campaigns away ) Bottom line is that they won’t risk losing you if you’re sending a decent amount of leads.

These are just my experiences over the years, I’ve learnt to become much more secretive about how I do things (especially when it’s PPC). I’d love to hear your experiences & what measures you take to protect your IP. Please don’t name any networks in the comments.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Different Variations of Affiliate Marketing
• Coupon Affiliates are stealing from you
• Make an Easy $20/day+ with Adsense
• How much do you earn?
• Delicioso the free Social Bookmark Submitter

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

I get emails from time to time asking about how should someone that works from home structure their day & also what are the best ways to keep focused whilst working from home (we all know how easy it is to just play xbox live all day).

So I’ve put together this guide on what I think is important to help you work from home efficiently & also get the most out of the experience, naturally everyone will be different but I’d also love to hear if you do anything different to increase your productivity or make the whole experience better.

Get up Early & get to Bed Early

Getting into a proper routine can be difficult, especially when working from home. You’ve got no boss to impress but yourself, you don’t have to be anywhere at a specific time, you don’t have anyone telling you what to do. This is generally the first mistake that people make, it’s easy to get up at 1pm then work through to 10pm that night or even 3am the next morning. However your body won’t thank you for it in the long run.

Mornings are the most productive part of our day, so use them to get your most important tasks out of the way.

Get up & go to bed at the same time as if you were going to work, if you stick to this you’ll find that you get more done & you won’t have to work as late.

Get Regular Exercise

Working from home can make us lazy, there’s no real need to leave the house anymore…right? Well, Since you’re waking up at the same time you normally would for your day job; you now have more time to be productive instead of sitting on the train or in peak time traffic for an hour. Use this time in the morning to hit the gym or go for a walk, maybe go out & get some breakfast & unwind.

Don’t forget to Eat

When we lead busy lives it can often get in the way of day to day tasks. Don’t forget to feed yourself. Eating 5 Small meals a day will help keep your metabolism up (especially if you exercise in the morning).

• 8am – Breakfast
• 11am – Fruit Snack
• 1pm – Lunch
• 4pm – Savoury Snack
• 6pm – Dinner

Following this routine will ensure that you don’t get hungry throughout the day, it’ll also keep your energy levels up.

Get Showered & Dressed Every Day

Whilst it’s a luxury to sit around in your Pajamas & do work every day it’s not something that is commonly associated with being productive & active. Have a shower & get dressed after breakfast then you’ll feel ready to face the day instead of wanting to get back into bed after an hour of work.

Separate Work from the rest of the House

Having an office or a space that you can work in is imperative, doing all your work whilst sitting on the sofa won’t get you very far. An office helps to keep Distractions to a minimum & also when you walk into your office at the start of the day you feel like “you’re at work.”

Have a Start & Finish Time for Work

Try to treat working from home like a normal job, work starts at 9am & finishes at 5.30pm (if you need to work later later you can). This way you’ll try to get everything you need to get done by the time work is over. If the day is “unlimited” then we tend to waste time reading blogs & forums.

Schedule your Day

Building on the previous point you can schedule your day & write it up on the wall:

• 7am – Wake up
• 7.20am – Exercise/Gym
• 8.20am – Breakfast
• 8.40am – Shower & Get Ready
• 9am – Answer & Read Emails
• 9.30am – Read Blogs, Forums & Catch up on Stats
• 10am – Work on your Bread & Butter Projects (the ones that ARE making you money)
• 1pm – Lunch
• 1.30pm – Test new ideas & tweak campaigns on test campaigns
• 3pm – Work on Link Building & Promotion techniques for Affiliate Sites
• 5pm – Research offers & potential programs for following day
• 5.15pm – Update spreadsheets with yesterdays stats & profits
• 5.30pm – Finish – Free for all work on whatever you want

Ensure you have Good Communications

You want to have a decent DSL Connection, Phone Line (or Skype), the ability to send & receive fax. You’ll also want to have a decent instant messaging program (like trillian) that lets you log into multiple networks at once.

Be Organised

Organisation is key to making this work.

Record what you spend & earn in Spreadsheets, keep your finances organised (i.e. open a business bank account). Spend money during the month on your credit cards (to earn your points), then pay it off at the end of the month.

Set up all your tabs & folders in Firefox. I use the ‘Open in all Tabs’ feature to instantly check all my stats. Or for example say you run a Credit Card Comparison website & need to update the rates, simply have a folder with all the credit card product pages in it & open them all at once with one click.

Also check this previous post on increasing productivity.

Build a Team

There’s no bigger bottleneck in your whole operation than yourself. If something is working for you then get some friends on board, outsource tasks or form partnerships with other affiliates.

Get a Pet

Sometimes working from home can be lonely. There’s no-one to go out to lunch with or (if you’re in australia) all of the people you normally talk to are asleep. I got a cat & it’s one of the best things I’ve ever bought, it’s there when you wake up in the morning, it’s sits beside you as you work & it seems to remove that feeling that “you’re alone in the house.” Now there’s an idea for a business, the ‘Affiliate marketers Pet Shop – Making you feel wanted since 2008.’

Have Fun

Don’t overdo it, working from home is fun. It’s even more fun when you’re making more money than your old job, don’t let it get in the way of your personal relaxing time & time with your family. You know what they say:

A happy wife = a happy life

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Welcome to Earners Blog, Your Guide to Earning Online
• Top Paying Adsense Keywords
• Good Internal Linking Increases SE Rankings
• Choosing the Topic of your Website based on Keywords
• Blog Stereotypes: What Type of a Blogger are you?

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Everything has a Dark Side. SEO, PPC & Domaining are just a handful of things that can be used “the wrong way” to make money, or is it the right way? Now, when I say the Dark Side I don’t mean things that are illegal. Most of the time you’re merely bending the rules or manipulating something that a rule doesn’t exist for yet (Arbitrage anyone?).

The aim of this series of posts is to delve into some of the lesser known or dubious techniques that Affiliates use to make money. To kick things off I’m going to talk about 2nd Tier recruiting & some sneaky ways to do it.

What is Second Tier Recruiting

Think of it as Multi Level Marketing, whenever you’re a member of an Affiliate Program there’s usually extra incentive to recruit members underneath you. Rewards range from a percentage cut of Profits to one time payments.

There’s a few types of 1 time payments, those that pay instantly (stupid imo) & those that also pay when the person you refer makes their first sale/conversion.

Everyday Implementation

Most webmasters will put minimal effort into promoting Second Tier programs. Perhaps a few banners here & there, or a few affiliate guides that encourage the user to sign up. The main problem with this is, 99/100 of these people that you refer will ever make any money with the program. Therefore you get Zero.

Taking it to the Next Level

There’s quite a few different ways to you can really start to think outside the box when it comes to recruiting Second Tier members. I find that it’s worth concentrating on one network at a time, build up a solid Second Level then move on. This will take sweat & tears, are you prepared to work for it?

Domains

Domains can be one of the easiest ways to take advantage of Second Tier referrals. Especially with typos. However you need to be careful to see if the company has a registered Trademark on the name. In America you can check your trademarks here. Creating a dedicated funnel page to direct affiliates through to the end program can be a great way to entice people & also get them to sign up to your newsletter. However I would strongly advise against using typos for competitive reasons. For example creating a typo of Coke & redirecting it to Pepsi.

Trademark Bidding

Some Affiliate Programs let you get away with it others don’t. There’s also ways around the ones that don’t, which I’ll touch upon in the Blackhat PPC section. A perfect example of someone using this technique is with Widgetbucks (this one is quite lucrative since you get $25 per signup).

This technique also works well if a domain has incurred any Google Penalties & doesn’t rank for its own name anymore. The above technique is extremely powerful at bringing in 2nd tier affiliates, so use it wisely.

Mentoring

Some affiliate programs (especially the ones that have Forums) are great for mentoring new starts & helping them make money. Have a look at More Niche (heaps of cash to be made from these guys). Now look at the leaderboard.

The Affiliate DoINeedOne? makes a large chunk of his Affiliate Commission each month by actively mentoring his Affiliates & teaching them how to make money. Since More Niche has products that pay $175 commission at a time & they also pay you for affiliates that your affiliates refer, he can net 5% on the second tier ($8.75) then 3% on the third tier ($5.25) & then 2% on the fourth tier ($3.5) per sale.

It pays to look for an Affiliate Program that allows you to effectively communicate with your Second Tier Affiliates for this technique to really work. It also takes a lot of time & effort. But once you’re up & running you can sit back & reap the rewards of all that hard work.

Imitation

This technique is down right underhanded but works like you wouldn’t believe. Set up a gmail account & simply “pretend” to be one of the Affiliate Managers from the Program with an offer for bloggers within the niche to “trial” the program. Most networks don’t condone Spam so be careful.

Make sure to:

• Highlight the Benefits
• Explain why they should use the program
• Highlight how much extra money they could be making

I get about 4-5 of these types of email a week, so it’s easy to see what everyone else is doing & add your own little twist on it. You also don’t need to pretend to be one of the Affiliate Managers, you can simply recommend the program to other bloggers in the same way.

You can also tie this in with my previous mentoring method by offering mentoring sessions to help the Webmasters make money from that particular program. The possibilities are endless!

To make this technique work even better, register a domain that is similar to the website that you’re promoting. For example say you were promoting Earners Blog, then register http://www.earnersblogaffiliates.com/ & set that to redirect through your affiliate ID. This is what a lot of the big boys do & it works much better than showing an Affiliate or even Cloaked Affiliate ID.

Learning Courses

Building upon the Mentoring technique, you can completely automate the whole process with something like Aweber. Simply create a website dedicated to a particular program then offer a 7 day course on making money.

Write 7 emails that slowly unravel how it’s all done (you don’t need my help on this, it’s not that hard) & set Aweber to distribute them over the next 7-14 days. Slowly tease them with information, I’d recommend signing up to a few lists to see how some of the bigger players do this, I subscribe to EVERYTHING I can, I always want to see what the opposition are doing. The beauty of a technique like this is that not only will you reap the rewards if they start making sales, but you can also presell them heaps of other products like:

• Web Hosting (Hostican offers $70 per sale)
• List Management (Aweber offers 20% recurring Commissions)
• Keyword Research (Wordze offers 30% recurring Commissions)

You get the idea. So not only could you be making serious bank on the 2nd Tier commissions, but you could also be netting monthly recurring commissions for all the other products that your Affiliates are using to help them succeed. A win win situation really.

You also have the advantage of being able to communicate with your list. This means that if you branch into other networks you can leverage off them.

There’s literally hundreds more ways to do this, you can snipe affiliates with the first few techniques, or you can really try to provide value & build a rapport with them. One will net you short term rewards, the other will give you long term rewards. It’s your call, use the information wisely

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Advertising Update & New Services Launching Soon

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Ebay has without a doubt been one of my most consistent earners over the years & now it just got even easier to make a kick ass site that’s earning you money in no time.

The Theory

The theory is simple, the Ebay affiliate program pays out as follows:

An ARCU, is an “Active Confirmed Registered User.” This is someone that you refer via your site to Ebay. They’re confirmed as active when they:

• Signup
• Confirm their Account via Email
• Either Places a bid or Buys via BIN within 30 days

ARCU’s are easy money, there are also plenty of niches out there that you can really leverage this form of Ebay income rather than the Revenue Share.

The Revenue Share is the amount of money that you earn when someone buys an item. You earn a percentage of the total revenue Ebay makes (not the sale price of the item). So naturally higher priced items will earn you more. I’m also pretty sure that Cars etc earn a flat fee, so don’t think there’s huge money in them.

So if you refer a new customer to Ebay & they purchase something then you get the ARCU & the Revenue generated.

Ebay’s cookies lasts for 7 days so you’ll also get revenue from any other items that the customer buys within that time period (Amazon only has a 24 hour cookie time, so this is a much better deal for Affiliates). I find that people quite often buy more than 1 item.

So the theory is simple, we’re going to create a site that drives people to Ebay via the various products we’re promoting.

My Results

It makes more sense for me to show you the site I used to generate the income, before going into the technique. It’ll allow me to come back & reference different aspects of the architecture.

My Niche: Electronic Music Equipment
Date Launched: 3rd October 2007

As some of you know when I’m not working or engrossed in Affiliate Marketing I’m a very avid producer of Electronic Music. I also like to keep up to date with all the latest Gear & Equipment. So I decided to create a site that would allow people to compare the prices of various types of Hardware/Software & DJ Gear from Ebay. I decided to brand the site instead of going for a keyword rich domain name (whichever you prefer). The domain used to be a blog, hence the pagerank so I had a bit of a head start as far as inbound links etc. I’m 100% certain that the domain is still sandboxed for certain keywords though.

This isn’t by far anywhere near the best niche I’ve come across, if anything it’s my poorest performer so far (there’s a lot of competition from big merchants in this space). However, one thing to note. This site doesn’t initially appear to be an affiliate site at all, instead it’s perceived as a comparison tool.

Remember, there’s always going to be one particular niche that you know 10x better than anyone else. It could be Pianos, Golf Equipment or Trading Cards for a particular game. Use your knowledge in that realm to build a site so you can get a feel for the whole process.

You can see my results for last month with this site, almost no new ARCU’s which is a little disappointing. But then again there’s certain niches that perform better for signups (think impulse purchases, music equipment really isn’t an impulse purchase).

What you need for this technique

• Web Hosting – I recommend Hostican ($6.95 / month for 200GB & 2,500GB Bandwidth)
• A Domain Name – Quick Tip: Aged Domains kick ass with this technique. Clickmojo offer a 3 day free trial of their expired domain names service. Hostess do the cheapest .com.au domains for $25AU.
• WordPress
• PhpBay Pro ($39)
• Endless supplies of Niches

It’s not vital that you have all of the above, but that’s exactly what I’m using. There are other free creative ways to come up with niches if you read some of my earlier posts. An expired domain isn’t necessary, however you will get quicker results. If you’re a bit on the lazier side & don’t want to worry about the whole WordPress setup that i’m showing you then you can check out BANS (Build a Niche Store), it does something similar, quicker. But it’s less customisable (and costs $97).

What advantage does my technique have over BANS? well for a start each product has it’s own unique page, whereas bans works more on categories. We’re also forking out $58 less (which you can use for hosting).

Getting Started

Firstly you’ll need to install WordPress on the domain name you’ve picked. If you’ve chosen Hostican they’ll give you your first domain free, they also have Fantistico which allows for an easy 1 click install of WordPress. If not, you’re on your own with the installation I’m afraid.

Plugins you’ll need (these are all uploaded to the wp-content/plugins/ folder):

PhpBay Pro (commercial): This plugin is the brains of the whole site, it pulls products from the Ebay Category RSS feed & parses them onto your page within WordPress. It’s updated constantly so the page content is always fresh. You can choose products by name, category & you can also set negative keywords to filter out.

SEO Title Tag (free): This plugin allows us to set unique page titles for each post that we make.

Top Level Categories (free): This awesome plugin removes the annoying /category/ part from the WordPress permalinks.

Sort Categories by Title (free): WordPress normally sorts things in categories by Date, this allows you to sort everything alphabetically which works much better for a shop type layout.

Different Posts per Page (free): You can set the number of posts to display per page with this plugin, I normally set it at around 25-50 on the homepage & set it at unlimited for categories (that way your products are never further than 2 levels from the homepage).

Recent Posts (free): This plugin allows you to list your most recently added products.

Choosing your Niche

Analysing what’s selling well on Ebay is a great way to find a niche. Check out the best selling artists & the pulse for awesome ideas.

Don’t be afraid to go after big niches, you can really surprise yourself.

The Beauty of this technique is that you’re all not going out & making the same website. Sure you could copy mine, but that’ll get you nowhere unless you know Electronic Music & want to try to compete with me. Instead, you’ll get the absolute BEST results if you try to find something unique that no-one else is doing. I have absolutely no tolerance for people that copy in this game, uniqueness is everything & will make you the biggest bucks. So put a bit of thought into it.

Researching your Niche

Once you’ve decided which niche you want to target you need to decide which categories to choose, you can see the way I’ve split up the categories on the left hand menu in the image to the right.

Don’t forget you can list items in more than one category, so say for example you were doing a website about DVD’s. The Movie Transformers may appear in the Action category, the 2007 Movies category & the Megan Fox category. Try to use this feature to your advantage, it puts more weight behind that product if you have it listed in different categories (which will help rankings).

Try to come up with a list of about 20-30 categories, I always research the categories that have the highest search volume. This will come in handy later when we’re setting the page titles (for SEO).

Setting up WordPress

Once you’ve decided on a niche you need to set up wordpress.

Template: You can choose any template you want. You can make it look anyway you want. The script parses into any template exactly the same so it doesn’t matter which you use, as long as you’re happy with how things look. I plan to release the template I use for my sites eventually. Check here for wordpress templates.

Permalinks: /%category%/%postname%.php

.htaccess: This is pretty important, I’ve coded my htaccess file so that it forces a trailing slash on all URL’s (removes duplicate content problems), so that it stops virtual access to directories & also so that it redirects non-www requests to the www. Please replace the yourdomainname.com with your domain name

Options -Indexes

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
# force trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /+[^\.]+$
RewriteRule ^(.+[^/])$ /$1/ [R=301,L]
# redirect nonwww
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomainname.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomainname.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Categories: Create your categories under the manage tab. What I normally do is create a few master categories. So for example on the music equipment site, I have the equipment as one category then everything else as a child of it. Then I have the manufacturers as a main category & everything else as a child under it.

I list all my categories on the sidebar, I also never have a product less than 2-3 levels away from the homepage. This really helps rankings.

To list a child category in the sidebar I use the following piece of code:

Manufacturers

Category Titles: Most people don’t know how to set titles for categories in WordPress but it’s fairly easy with a few conditional statements. Here’s ho I do it:

Setting up PhpBayPro: To do this thing you need to grab your PID from Commission Junction (you’ll get this once you sign up for the Ebay Affiliate Program). Set the country you want to target, set whether you want your items to appear highest priced, ending first etc (I normally choose ending first).

Now you’re ready to add your first product. Simply create a new post. Let say for example we’re going to add the Transformers Movie.

Title: Transformers DVD
Categories: DVD’s, Action, Megan Fox, Michael Bay
SEO Title Tag: Discount Tranformers DVD | Transformers Movie
Content: To call use the Phpbay string is pretty easy, first we need to find out which category Transformers DVD’s are in:

Ignore the Z’s & other letters. We can see that it’s in category 617.

Ok so now we put in the code to pull up the listings:

[phpbay]transformers, 20, 617, poster[/phpbay]

This will show 20 items labeled as transformers from category 617 & will ignore all the items with the word poster in it. Pretty easy eh? If that’s worked you should see the page generate something like this:

Now you just need to start adding products. I normally add about 100 to start off with, then start promoting the website. See my previous post about TNX if you want some free links to kick start your site.

Results

You can start to see results within a few days depending on how you promote the site. If you’re doing this full time you can probably pump out about 3-4 good sites per week. I estimate that this site took me about 15 hours in total to complete.

Expenditure

Phpbay Pro: $39
Hosting: $6.95
Time: 15 Hours x Hourly Rate
Income: $155

If this site generates the same income for the next 12 months, that’s $1,860 for 15 hours work & $45.95. If you build more sites then you can offset the cost of the software & factor it into that project. The guys that are earning less than $500 a month, you only need 4 sites like this to break that barrier. You’ll also find that you have more expenditure to spend on other areas like PPC, Promotion etc.

Quick Promotion Tip: Spend the extra money & send out a really good quality Press Release when you’re launching your site. I’ve seen really really good results from this.

Conclusion

This is a very very solid way to not only kickstart your earnings but to all lay a solid foundation. This is something that I preach. The limits are endless with these types of sites, some of the weirder & wackier ones I’ve made have been the most successful so don’t be afraid to try out things like kids toys, hair products, playing cards, fps games & whatever else comes into your head. The most annoying part about this technique is Google’s Aging Filter (otherwise known as the Sandbox), it can sometimes be disheartening when you’re only getting < 30 visitors a day. But don’t despair, keep promoting & building more sites, don’t sit & worry about the non-performers. Because once you come out of the Aging Filter you’ll really start to see sales. Did I mention that these sites convert REALLY well? So even if you are only getting 30 visitors per day, you’ll still see sales

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Advertising Update & New Services Launching Soon
• Ebay Affiliate Program Increasing Payout
• Ebay ditches Commission Junction
• Ebay lays the Smackdown on the sale of Digital Items
• Reviewme Launches Affiliate Program

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

We all know that the Text Link market is now a volatile place & in order to survive you need to evolve. So what have TNX done differently to the other networks out there?

Stealth

• Is the on site code detectable? In that particular example, a simple Google phrase gives away thousands of publishers. Whilst this is only an example of the code giving errors, TNX have made their code much more versatile, in that is doesn’t give incriminating errors but rather a 404 instead.
• You can’t choose which advertisers to buy directly from, instead you pick a certain criteria of what you want (more on this later) & tnx fulfill the order for you. This increases the security for publishers.
• The links placed on publisher’s websites aren’t sitewide, therefore there’s less chance of tripping spam filters.
• The links can be contained within a paragraph of text, which again draws less attention to them.

Value

• The system offers value for publishers, in that you’re not selling sitewide links. Instead you’re selling links on individual pages of your site. This increases the overall “combined link value” of your site. (i.e. would you rather sell 1 sitewide link for $100 or 100 links on individual pages for $250?).
• TNX will only take 12.5% of the total commission, leaving you earning 87.5%.
• In turn this value is also passed onto advertisers, you can now purchase more links from varied sources (i.e. would you rather spending $100 on 1 sitewide link or $100 on 50 links on individual pages across 50 sites?).

Speed

• The speed with which the system works allows you to buy large amounts of links very quickly. You specify your link criteria & the system fulfils your order (within a few days).

Since there’s been a bit of buzz about the service I decided to give you guys a rundown of what I think from two perspectives. The advertiser & the publisher.

In theory, advertisers are signing up to services like this to make money just as much as the publishers are. Except, the advertisers are wanting to increase rankings to sell a service, whereas perhaps the publishers don’t have a service to sell & instead sell the ad space on their websites / blogs.

TNX for Advertisers

I joined TNX about 3 weeks ago & created a few campaigns for some affiliate sites that I just started recently. I deposited $100 via paypal & received around 134,000 tnx points.

I’m currently running about 16 PR2+ links which costs roughly about 14,800 points per month (about $10). I could have chosen a cheap option & went for PR0 pages, but I decided to go with domains that had a high overall backlink count (hence the increase in cost). This is one of the features I like about tnx, things revolve less around Pagerank (which many other link brokers base their system on) & more towards link equity / volume.

Pricing revolves around the amount of points that you have to spend. TNX give a rough indication on the monthly price for an individual link (& when I say rough there’s a disclaimer that points out The Maximum price can be 20 times higher):

• PR0: $0.00126
• PR1: $0.063
• PR2: $0.126
• PR3: $0.252
• PR4: $0.63
• PR5: $1.26
• PR6: $3.15
• PR7: $6.30

The price seems to increase depending on the overall number of incoming links to the domain. So a PR7 link from a domain that only has 500 total incoming links will be cheaper than a PR7 link to a domain with over 250,000 total incoming links.

Now the fun part starts, you need to decide on the anchor text to use for your links. I recommend the Wordtracker Keyword Researcher for this (no point going for words that won’t get you any traffic), also make sure you read my article on avoiding Google’s Aging Filter (remember just because you can buy hundreds of PR0 links cheap, doesn’t mean you should. Take things slow & steady). Think of getting links as a exponential curve, the older your site gets the more you can acquire without looking suspicious.

Overall TNX is a pretty good deal for Advertisers, it caters easily for those on a small budget as well as those with a much larger budget. Enabling both to cover a wider range of keywords than previously possible (with other brokers). The downside to the system is that you really have no control over which sites your links are put on; other than selecting your criteria. I did have a few links appear on a crack website & a warez forum but you are able to “block” those sites before the links go live. I also noticed that you get charged for the links before they’re even confirmed as active by the TNX spiders. Personally I don’t think an advertiser should be charged until the link is confirmed as active, otherwise you run into potential problems of charging people for something they’re not getting.

If you’re interested in giving their system a whirl you can grab 5000 (PR0) free text link ads courtesy of TNX. Remember though, don’t go overboard.

TNX for Publishers

Publishers are what makes the system work, after all if there are none then there’s no link real estate to occupy. Therefore TNX really needed to come up with a system that’d work well for publishers across a number of verticals.

As I mentioned before, perhaps the biggest selling factor is that you can sell up to 4 links on individual pages on your website. I did a quick calculation using the TNX Income Calculator. For Earners Blog it worked out to be around $250 a month. Mainly due to the fact that Google slapped down on my Pagerank.

For that particular reason, the publisher program wouldn’t be anywhere near as profitable for me as direct ad sales or even affiliate sales for a month.

Sites that I could see it working well for though are ones with a huge number of pages:

• Forums
• Comparison Shopping Websites
• Sites with user generated content

I’d also like to see them move away from “Pagerank” & give pages a value based on the number of inbound links they have. For example, my page about Digg Power Users has around 179 inbound links & is a Page Rank 2. A link on this page is going to be much more valuable than say my post about Gaming Digg, which only has 31 inbound links but is also a Page Rank 2.

TNX also offers a referral / affiliate program to all members. You can earn 13.3% of all TNX points that are generated by any publishers you refer & 5% of any points generated by advertisers you refer. You can use the points to buy links, or you can cash them out. Not as initially appealing; as the $25 per member TLA offers, but could work out better in the long run (i.e. free advertising for you).

Tips to avoid your site getting filtered

Since TNX allows you to buy a large amount of links at once, I recommend being careful. Otherwise you risk your site getting penalised for a short/medium term for specific keywords, follow these tips & you should be fine:

• Try to make it look natural, these links work best if you have a natural looking link profile, so don’t overboard on paid links.
• If you have a new site try to limit yourself to 5 new links per week for the first month.
• Mix up the anchor text as much as possible, don’t buy 100 links with an “affiliate marketing” anchor text.
• Link to deep pages within your site, don’t point all the links to your homepage.
• Don’t label any links on your site as Sponsored Links, Sponsors or Partners.

Recommendations

There’s a few things I’d like to see TNX implement to make the system a little better:

1. The ability to filter out WAREZ related sites.
2. Not charging Advertisers until the links go live.
3. Time Delay on link fulfillment (i.e. the ability to set a time delay for links to go live).
4. Email alerts.

Final Thoughts

TNX is still young, so it’s only fair to expect some growing pains. However they offer a very viable solution to all Organic based Affiliate Marketers. The ability to point 30-50 links to your site over a period of time for a mere $10/month is quite nice. Remember, you have to make investments to get returns in this game. If a $10/month investment means an extra $1,000/year from 1 site. Then it’s a small price to pay.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• No related posts

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

If you’ve joined a few affiliate networks you’re sure to have come across lead offers that promote ZIP or Email entry for the lead qualification.

Generally these offers will pay out anywhere from $.10 up to $3+ depending on the advertiser. Due to the low payout many affiliates will generally shy away from these types of offers, thinking that they are way too hard to profit from. Wrong.

The single greatest key to dominating these types of offers is Creativity.

Are you the type of person who likes to copy other people’s ideas? Then these types of offers probably aren’t for you. Do you like to think outside the box & come up with wacky ways to get people to your sites? Then you’ll be right at home.

The second greatest thing about zip & email offers is that most of the time you can promote them with little or no competition at all, because everyone will always be promoting them in different ways using different keywords. As opposed to a product where people will be targeting the product name or the products features.

Have a look at the term free ipod, that keyword is so damn saturated that you’d be bidding fairly high just to get a look in on the front page. Which would mean you’d be running at a loss straight off the bat. Not good, unless you have the budget to back it up.

Now lets have a look at another term, this time something that relates to a current event happening in Australia. The AFL Grand Final (which happens this week). Two weeks ago this page was almost empty for PPC ads. Which means easy pickings & cheap ads.

You could put up a nice simple PPC ad like this:

The ad catches the users attention, it has a call to action (which essentially dangles a carrot) & is also relevant to what the user is searching for. ALSO if the user is patriotic about their team quite often they’ll feel obliged to take part just to make their vote count.

Now all you need is a snazzy landing page. You can approach the landing page in two different ways:

1. A simple photo with the names of the two teams below it, leading to your offer page (which they then have to enter the email or zip information to win the ipod).
2. Include the email/zip entry box on your voting page & make them enter that before they can vote, then you pass the information through the offer & get the lead (you may have to check if your network allows this).

Naturally, you then set up an adwords campaign. Make sure to install the conversion tracking on your thank-you page if you’re using one. Conversion figures don’t lie, they also help you adjust your bid to keep the campaign profitable.

Have fun, these campaigns can take away from other tedious work you may be doing, depending on the event you can also run the campaigns seasonally so reember to pause them for next year .

More interesting reading & ideas on this Topic:

1. SEO Daves Guide to generating High Lead Submits (with Landing Page Example)
2. Make some cash off Jessica Alba

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Textlinkads Acquired by Mediawhiz
• Azoogleads, Join Azoogleads
• Azoogleads
• How to Apply & get Accepted by Affiliate Networks
• Stop Email Spam this Christmas with Mailexpire

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

This post is a follow on from a previous one entitled Building a Lasting Affiliate Network. Whilst many of us may find it easy to starting building an Affiliate Network, I sometimes forget that there’s still those of you who are eager to get started & know the basics. Before going into more detail I thought I’d prepare a post to put the entire scale of Affiliate Marketing into perspective.

A question I often get emailed is

How can I get started in Affiliate Marketing?

Unfortunately there’s no easy answer to this question. It takes hard work, patience & learning A LOT from your mistakes. This post is aimed at those wanting to get started but really, don’t know where to start.

Think of Affiliate Marketing like trying to save money. It’s hard to start, but once you start things seem to get easier. Once you accumulate more money, it’s easier to invest & get better returns. Then eventually your savings are growing at a much larger rate than when you started (think compound interest etc). Affiliate Marketing is fairly similar. One of the biggest hurdles you’ll have to face in this game is competition, but once you learn to embrace your competition & learn from them then you’re already half way there.

I’ve been serious about Affiliate Marketing for about 3 years, sometimes I wonder why I didn’t get into it sooner, sometimes I also think about doing it full time, however as I stated in a previous post I still love the security & challenges of my day job therefore Affiliate Marketing is still very much a passive income for me.

When I first started out I was working my day job & working on my own products & ideas in the evenings & weekends. Probably pulling in 16 hour days & pretty much seeing little to no return. It was pretty demoralising to be honest.

3 years down the track & I’m pulling in a high $x,xxx+ per month maybe working 4 hours in the evenings 2-3 times per week. Life is much better.

So what does it take to get from point A, to point B?

Point A is the beginning, starting with nothing. Point B could be anything, your own milestone of $x,xxx / month or even making enough to quit your day job.

Point A – The beginning

1. You have 0 Websites
2. A Few Ideas
3. No Knowledge
4. No Web Hosting
5. No friends in the Industry
6. No Capital
7. Time is limited
8. Limited SEO/SEM Experience

Point B – The Comfort Zone

1. You have between 1 – x amount of websites
2. Plenty of ongoing projects
3. Knowledge of how Affiliate Marketing works
4. Decent Web Hosting or at least a Dedicated Server
5. You’ve made friends who you can ask for favours (Programmers, Bloggers etc)
6. You have capital to invest in PPC, Links & exisiting Websites
7. You have money to outsource & devote more time to the things that matter
8. You’ll probably be fairly proficient at PPC & SEO

Now that I’ve put things into perspective you’ll see that Affiliate Marketing isn’t something that you master overnight, all these get rich quick books make it sound ‘too easy’ (but then that’s the point right?). Affiliate Marketing is about much more than firing up a few websites & waiting for people to buy stuff, it’s about:

1. Thinking outside the Box
2. Try not to copy everyone else, offer something unique
3. Building sites that LAST, make it STICK
4. Don’t give up until you succeed

Affiliate Marketing is a Business Model, so start treating it like one.

Start out small. Then build & keep building, soon things will start to snowball for you. One thing I see all too often is people start out by building websites on “how to make money.” I’m very guilty of this myself, I indeed made one of these sites many years ago & possibly made $750 from it. It was only when I started reacting to the market & getting outside that “make money online” bubble that I started to see returns.

Do not be afraid to go mainstream with your ideas. Do not be afraid to try every niche out there, if you don’t try something then how will you know its potential? Take the Sex Toys industry for example, I currently do a huge amount of promotion online for a client in that industry. It’s HUGE, really huge & somewhat untapped in certain markets.

So here’s what you need to do, the Earners Blog Start your Engine Checklist:

1. Subscribe to my RSS Feed
2. Come up with an idea, write it down. Instead of acting on it, start researching your competition
3. Join an Affiliate Network & master it before moving onto the next. I’d rather be making $5k through one network & get it in one lump sum than 50 small networks. Then you’ll have the money to diversify.
4. Try to make a site that provides value, shopping comparison websites work well.
5. Cloak your Affiliate Links from the Search Engines
6. Read Affiliate Forums & take it all in (don’t waste valuable time though)
7. Build links to your sites under the radar

Once you have a solid foundation that’s giving you a steady income you can start reinvesting your money in PPC, typically an ROI of 200% is good, but you can get lucky with offers that’ll pull 1000% ROI. More on this later I guess

Let’s have some quick fire questions in the comments. What are you struggling with?

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Ten Reasons why you should be in Affiliate Marketing
• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Starting Your First Website, The Idea
• Different Variations of Affiliate Marketing
• Lesson #8: Finding Affiliate Programs First

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

World

• Chinese New Year – (see here for dates)
• Valentines Day – Feb 14th
• St Patricks Day – March 17th
• Easter Weekend – (see here for dates)
• April Fools Day – April 1st
• May Day – 1st May
• Halloween – October 31st
• Christmas Day – December 25th

USA

• Independance Day – 4th July
• Mothers Day – Second Sunday in May
• Fathers Day – Third Sunday in June
• Parents day – Fourth Sunday in July
• Grandparents Day – Sunday After Labour Day
• Thanksgiving Day – Fourth Thursday in November

UK

• Orangemen’s Day – 12th July
• Mothers Day – 3 Weeks before Easter Sunday
• Fathers Day – Third Sunday in June

Australia

• Australia Day – 26th January
• Anzac Day – 25th April
• Mothers Day – Second Sunday in May
• Queens Birthday – Second Monday in June
• Fathers Day – First Sunday of September
• Melbourne Cup Day – First Tuesday in November

You’ll probably be wondering why on earth some of these dates are useful. What I would recommend doing is printing this list out then writing down a list of things you think you could sell for each occassion.

I’ll give you a hint. Flowers normally work well

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Ten Reasons why you should be in Affiliate Marketing
• Earnosphere: Week Ending 24/11/07
• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Different Variations of Affiliate Marketing
• About Stuart & FAQ

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Many Affiliate Marketers decide to leave their boss behind relatively early on in the game, perhaps when they’re making $150/day, or $200/day. I read a lot of these types of posts on forums. I have also (unfortunately) see a lot of horror stories. Like Adsense smart pricing for example. I knew a guy who easily was making $1,000/day consistently for about 6 months with Adsense. Life for him was good, that was until Google introduced their Smart Pricing algorithm & his earnings took a nosedive. Now he was left with little more than $100/day & all his eggs in one basket. He now runs a much more diverse range of Affiliate Programs like Textlinkads, Auctionads & Private Advertising.

For me, the thought of doing this was always too risky for me, I like the idea of having security at work yet still having the additional security that I’m making just as much online too. I also find that I work better in the evenings after work than if I was left to my own devices during the day.

It wasn’t easy though, from both angles. I worked hard to build up a stable online income & I also worked hard to get a solid SEO related job that would continually push me & help me learn in parallel with my own projects.

Ask yourself this question. If you’ve given up your Job for Affiliate marketing, start making some good money & then for one reason or another it all goes belly up. Where does that leave you?

Whilst a good Affiliate Marketer will learn to evolve with the times, not everyone is going to find the going that easy.

This is why I think that Affiliate Marketing is the perfect compliment to anyones normal income stream, allowing you to save more money & increase your wealth through various savings schemes, budgeting & smart investing. You could invest your Passive Income in savings accounts, or perhaps even shares or property. In Australia, if you have roughly around $50,000 saved in a normal savings account you’ll pocket $300/month alone in interest. Which is yet another income stream you can rely on.

So next time you think you earn enough to kick your boss out of his own office, step back & think about whether you’re really in the right job first. Secondly, take some time to evaluate how rock solid your affiliate programs are. If most of your income comes from Textlinkads think to yourself:

If textlinkads went out of business tomorrow, could I still make enough money to survive?

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Starting your Affiliate Marketing Engine
• Ten Reasons why you should be in Affiliate Marketing
• If You’re not Capturing Email Addresses….
• Happy Birthday Earners Blog! ;)
• 10 Easy Ways to Increase your Textlinkads Income

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Having a single site in a particular affiliate space is a great way to test out the market, you can test plenty of variables like:

1. How difficult is is to rank for profitable keywords
2. Is it a high traffic niche?
3. Which merchants convert the best
4. How responsive mailing lists are

Once you find that magic formula what do you do next? Move onto the next niche, or build more?

We all know that finding a profitable niche is hard, there’s no doubting that. But holding a position within that niche can become incredibly difficult if you don’t have a network of sites to back you up.

Eli made a great post which discusses the need for a larger network of relevant websites to help you dominate the SERPS for particular keywords. The exact same principle can be put in place to help you totally dominate an entire niche & potentially take a larger share of the pie that you’d be able to get with only one site whilst also covering your back from potential outrankings. Allowing you to sleep pretty at night knowing your competition has no chance.

Lets take a quick look at the finance niche & how I would approach it from a entire network perspective.

Firstly I’d want to have one authority website, this one would cover all these areas of finance:

1. Credit Cards
2. Bank Accounts
3. Payday Loans
4. Personal Loans
5. New Mortgages
6. Refinance Mortgages

Create your main website with all the categories & products/affiliates first. Try to keep all products no more than 2 levels away from the main page of the website (i.e. no internal link wastage = less supplemental results & better rankings).

Check out this earlier post about getting links for affiliate websites, concentrate first of all on getting links to your main mothership website, once it starts ranking we can then gauge how difficult the niche is & competition is.

It’s also worth creating a finance blog as a secondary hub, write 10-30 really good posts & set them all on timestamp to be posted over a few months. Naturally I’d link using relevant anchor text to relevant products & pages within the network of websites from within the blog posts (not sitewide). I do believe that links from relevant posts on topic are much more valuable & pass more authority than a sitewide link, they also look less conspicuous.

Start syndicating your posts on Social Networks. The advantage of this technique is that your Blog doesn’t look like an affiliate site, therefore will get more attention & potentially links, which you can slowly filter into your other sites & product pages.

Naturally, getting the rest of the larger network of sites up will take you some time. You could outsource the work & get it done quicker, it’s really up to how you like to do things. I’ve found that once you have a solid template for one site you can replicate it across the board, making sure that you keep content unique & don’t leave any footprints.

Stay Tuned for More on Building a Lasting Affiliate Network

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Starting your Affiliate Marketing Engine
• Niche Domination – Solid Strategy or One Trick Pony?
• Coupon Affiliates are stealing from you
• 2009 Link Building Guide
• Set yourself goals for 2007

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

The Quality Score is a direct measure of the quality of your landing page in relation to the keyword you are bidding on. Like me, many Affiliates have noticed an increase in the minimum bid across the board:

• Webmaster World Thread
• Digital Point Thread

It’s no suprise to me that Google is constantly trying to improve the quality of sites & landing pages, especially after the update to the Adsense page quality terms & conditions that was announced last week.

In the threads above you’ll notice that even people with relatively high performing keywords (8% + CTR) have been hit. For those of us that made a killing from sending affiliate offers directly to the merchants website a few years ago, you will know all too well that this just doesn’t work too well anymore, high minimum bids make profit margins very small. But we adapted & started creating highly targeted landing pages that brought the minimum bids down & made the campaigns profitable again.

My own personal views on the recent changes are that Google is trying to increase the quality of sites advertising on Adwords by pushing up minimum bids. In doing so only the Affiliates that are smart enough to adapt will continue. It’s no real surprise that there’s a lot of newbie affiliates out there all sending traffic directly to the merchant page bidding on hundreds of untargeted keywords that won’t convert & in the end driving up my costs. I personally think they are looking now at much more than just the landing page on its own but more the entire structure & theme of the surrounding website (if it exists).

So what can you do about the recent changes?

This is the question that everyone is asking, it’s also something I personally feel Google needs to be much more open about in the Adwords Guidelines.

Well, lets look at how Google defines a Quality Landing Page?

The whole article is a bit vague, however you can see in a round about way some of the things they are now looking at on Landing Pages.

So, here are my tips for increasing your Quality Score in accordance to the Adwords Policies:

Provide relevant and substantial content.

If you’re not using the keywords that you’re bidding on within the content of the page is it going to be deemed as relevant in the eyes of the Adwords QS bot?

Relevant content means:

1. Including Keywords on the Page
2. Having Content on the Page & not just images
3. Not using scraped content & dup content
4. If you have Ads on the page you need to distinguish them from the rest of the content

Number 4 is interesting, perhaps the Google QS Bot is now looking for landing pages with Adsense Ads & then checking to see if they are disclosed. Although this is merely a thought.

Be upfront about your services and offers and how they are provided.

Make sure your website includes the following:

1. About Us
2. Contact Page

Treat a user’s personal information responsibly

This is short for make sure your website has a privacy policy. There are plenty of resources around the internet to help you create one of these.

Develop an easily navigable site.

I’ve personally found that my Quality Score greatly increases for a landing page when that page is part of a larger website. Landing Pages that exist without the presence of a larger structure don’t seem to do as well.

Other tricks that have worked well for me:

1. Masking Affiliate Links
2. Dynamic Keyword Insertion for Landing Pages
3. Using Adcenter more

It’s becoming harder & harder for Affiliates to take the easy route out. I can only see it getting harder & harder as time goes on.

My advice is, build quality websites & structure your Affiliate Offers & Landing Pages around the website. These types of sites generally don’t get slammed or banned. But this involves much more work than throwing up a generic landing page?

Which is exactly what I think Google is trying to weed out.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Adwords & Iframes, Outsmart your Competition
• $100 Worth of Adwords & MSN Adcenter Vouchers
• How to Upgrade to an Adwords My Client Center
• Adwords Landing Page Quality Update
• $50 Adwords Coupons for Christmas

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

So far I’ve been doing quite well, although I’m still getting to grips with a lot of new terminology & ways of thinking. I’ve found that many of the following fundamental principles apply to both stock market trading & affiliate marketing:

DYOR (Do Your Own Research): Don’t just follow the crowd, learn to investigate & dig deeper yourself. Just because someone says an Affiliate Program or a Share is good doesn’t mean that it necessarily is. Watch out for the Gurus or people who seem to “know it all” & be very wary of what they say (I don’t claim to know it all ).

Don’t Believe the Hype: Lots of people like to try & ramp up stocks to make them sound more appealing. Just like people write convincing sales letters to get you to buy their products.

Newbies find it Frustrating: Of course when you get into a new area of expertise or adventure you’ll initially find it very tough. What’s the best place to learn in these types of situations? Forums. When I was originally getting into Affiliate Marketing I spent a lot of time lurking on Forums & trying things out myself. Same with the Share Market, I’ve found 3 solid forums & I’m lurking, taking in as much as I can, watching for trends. THEN making calculated decisions on what to do with my money.

It’s easy to Make a lot of money very Quickly: With enough backing & the right idea you can make a LOT of money with affiliate marketing. Making the right decision at the right time with a stock can yield the same results. Either way, no-one can put it on a plate for you & there’s a certain amount of risk involved with every venture.

It’s easy to Lose a lot of money very Quickly: We don’t always get it right all the time. When things go wrong they can go very wrong. Risk calculcation should always play a big part in both the Affiliate Marketing game & the share market.

Diversify, Don’t put all your Eggs in the One Basket: Easier said than done, especially when one stock or ad creative is working much better than others. What happens when that market drops out or that creative stops converting? Learn to spread out your ideas & reduce your overall risk.

You need Money to Make Serious Money: Not always the case, it is possible to start out small & work your way up. But to make SERIOUS money you need the initial capital. For example If I place down 1k on a stock & it goes up 300% then I’ve got 3k. Whereas if I put down 50k & it goes up 300% I end up with $150k (Minus capital gains tax etc). Same goes with Affiliate Marketing, more PPC budget means more opportunities to convert.

It’s all Taxable: Don’t forget that all your earnings from Affiliate Marketing or Shares are taxable. Shares in the Australia fall under Capital gains tax (which is 50% in the first year & 25% in the second), unless it’s your full time gig. Affiliate Marketing falls under income tax, so the more you earn the more tax you pay.

Either way, I have now added another income stream to my portfolio, quite a profitable one at that.

Good luck.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Alexadex, No Cheating!
• Different Variations of Affiliate Marketing
• Ten Reasons why you should be in Affiliate Marketing
• Firing your Boss for Affiliate Marketing

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Here’s my top 10 reasons why you should be doing Affiliate Marketing:

1. Affiliate Marketing is not a solo project, you can integrate it into your existing monetisation systems to increase your income portfolio. Don’t treat it separately.
2. Affiliate Marketing not only diversifes your income portfolio but it also reduces the risk of losing all your income should something happen to another account (i.e. Adsense).
3. You have the ability to target the products & services that you WANT to target, rather than rely on Adsense or YPN to contextually target related products.
4. You can place Affiliate Links in PDF’s & benefit from people reselling the ebook.
5. Products & conversions will normally pay out in a lump sum for a signup or lead rather than paying out per click, promoting the right products in the right way can result in an fantastic EPC (Earnings per Click).
6. There’s hundreds of Affiliate Networks to work with, each specialising in different areas.
7. Affiliate Marketing is a great way to supplement other investments, for example I put all of my Affiliate Marketing earnings in Investments to greater increase their worth. If I wasn’t doing Affiliate Marketing I’d not have those additional investments therefore my overall income, savings & retirement plan wouldn’t be as secure.
8. One of my favourite things about Affiliate Marketing is the ability to be able to think outside the box & be creative with what you’re doing. For example check out this website I saw a few days ago called Blackle. It an “energy saving” search engine. I.e. a Google Adsense search box with a black background. Ingenious.
9. Affiliate Marketing relates directly to Search Marketing in a lot of capacities. SEO, PPC, Conversions & Analytics. Experience in these fields can look great on a CV & also show experience within the industry.
10. There’s nothing better than waking up in the morning, checking your conversions & having it bring a big grin to your face. Even better, tweaking your campaigns as much as you can to squeeze that last bit of revenue out of them.

What do YOU love about affiliate marketing?

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Step by Step Affiliate Marketing Guides
• Earnosphere: Week Ending 3/11/07
• Firing your Boss for Affiliate Marketing
• Starting your Affiliate Marketing Engine

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

1. The Quality of Affiliate Websites
2. Increased PPC Competition & Prices

Nowadays setting up disposable affiliate websites is not as easy as it once was. Not only that, Affiliate Marketers are now faced with a new challenge:

How the hell do you drive natural links to a website that’s clearly just promoting affiliate products?

I’m going to address some of the techiques I use & some of the techniques I’ve seen on other blogs to overcome this issue. This should hopefully help you dominate your niche & take your affiliate websites to the next level. Leaving your competitiors to sit back & cry.

1. Creating a Blog on the Affiliate Site

The nature of blogs & the information they provide make them very linkable. Writing indepth posts about a particular topic or subject can attract natural links to your blog, which you can then filter into your Affiliate Product pages. Blogs are also received much better on Social Networking sites.

Pros: Effective | Allows you to direct targeted internal links | Keeps content fresh

Cons: Time Consuming | Lack of knowledge in the area to write fresh articles

2. Creating the Affiliate Site as a Blog

Many affiliates have been cutting out the middleman & using blog platforms such as WordPress right from the getgo. This allows them to integrate articles in with affiliate reviews to make the whole site look much more natural. I’ve found this particular technique to be quite successful. This will attract links to particular posts which can allow you to deep link with relevant anchor text into product reviews.

Pros: Allows more flexibility with content | Affiliate links can be hidden seductively within posts | Easier to do well on social networks since your site doesn’t look like spam

Cons: Time consuming | Easy to lose interest if you’re not converting | If you build up a readership you feel like you need to blog often

3. Squidoo

Squidoo is a great way to support affiliate product reviews. Simply create a new account & write an overview for each product review in its own lens. Tag the lens as much as possible & also join as many groups as possible. Next interlink all the lenses together using a links plexo & choose the anchor text you want to rank for. Now also link back to your affiliate website with the anchor text you want to rank for from each lens. Bookmark the lens using Onlywire. Wash rinse & repeat.

Pros: Squidoo links pass a good amount of authority | Squidoo lenses rank very well naturally so this can provide extra exposure & inbound links to the lens

Cons: No cons other than time

4. Dominate the SERPS

Are you wanting to rank for a particular term? Then dominate that term by flooding it with as many of your own targeted pages as you can. All linking back to your original Affiliate Site.

I.e.

http://www.myspace.com/earnersblog/ & http://www.squidoo.com/earnersblog/

Register a page on:

1. Squidoo
2. Googlepages
3. Blogspot
4. Myspace
5. WordPress
6. Typepad
7. Spaces.Live.com
8. Feedburner

Register User Profiles on:

1. Digg
2. Mybloglog
3. Bumpzee
4. SEO Moz
5. Stumbleupon
6. Last.fm

Use all these relevant pages to link back to your own site, which will help increase your serps ranking for that targeted keyword. If these pages rank well & dominate the serps it will also increase your overall market share & push out competitors, which is always a good thing

Pros: Ability to dominate for a particular keyword | Can leverage off other sites link popularity

Cons: Time consuming | May take time to get all the profile pages indexed

5. Forums

Register on related (& unrelated if you wish) forums. Set your signature with the anchor text you want to rank for. Go back to some of the older posts with pagerank & authority (I like to use the Strongest Subpages Tool to find authoritative pages).

If you’re feeling particularly inventive, make a load of posts then come back in 3-4 weeks, edit the post & insert your links. This will avoid detection by the mods & admins.

Also search for forums that have VBSEO enabled. You can find heaps by using this query. VBSEO rewrites user profiles thus helping that page rank better for the chosen keyword.

Pros: Thousands upon thousands of forums to utilise

Cons: Profile may get banned for spamming if you’re not making relevant posts | Forums may require a certain number of posts to use signatures

6. RSS Feeds

Using RSS & XML feeds are great ways to get inbound links quickly, check out these posts:

1. Using RSS Feeds for Backlinks
2. Automated XML Backlinks

Check out the RSS top 55 for more places to grab RSS Links from.

Pros: Can accumulate a lot of backlinks in a short period of time

Cons: Scraper backlinks are spammy & may provide no overall value

7. Blog Commenting

Finding blogs that don’t have the nofollow enabled is a great way to spend a day. Set up an excel spreadsheet, hell even write a script to do it for you. There’s a dofollow plugin now that will remove the nofollow tag on WordPress. Start your research there, you’ll soon find lots of blogs that are Dofollowing (i.e. Easy Pickings).

Pros: Quick easy links

Cons: May get deleted if your anchor text is too spammy | Quite a bit of research involved

8. Sponsoring themes & templates

I mentioned this before in my sponsoring wordpress themes post. There hundreds of different templates you can sponsor, it doesn’t have to be just wordpress.

Think Joomla, Movable Type, Vbulletin, Invision Power Board, PHPBB etc.

Pros: Cost Effective | Can gain lots of links very quickly

Cons: Can’t control who is linking to you | Many sitewide links could trip spam filters

9. Link Bait & 301 Redirect

This is perhaps one of my favourite techniques at the moment. Create a blog purely for linkbait purposes & write articles for Digg, Netscape, Reddit & Stumbleupon. Once you’ve gathered around 1,500 links 301 redirect the pages & blog to your existing Affiliate Marketing websites to boost their authority.

Pros: Good way to fight supplemental results | Possible to amass a large amount of links organically & very quickly

Cons: Links may not be relevant to your niche & may not help your affiliate pages rank any better (think a bit about this one ) | Writing a popular story can take time & a lot of perseveration.

10. Link Feeder Sites

This again is something that Eli touched on a while ago in his post about Link Laundering. Basically you’re using existing sites that requires registration to build targeted backlinks to your Affiliate Sites. These can be software download sites or even reciprocal directories. If you set up a nice network you can instantly get about 200-300 links per day to sites or pages that you specify with the anchor text that you specify. Check Eli’s post out for more detailed information.

Pros: Can build targeted links very quickly | Can choose the anchor text

Cons: No control over the quality of sites the links go on | Too many links with the same anchor text could trip the spam filters, so rotation is necessary.

So there you have it, a breakdown of some of the top methods you can use to really boost your affiliate websites up in the serps & start capatilising on the traffic you’re missing out on.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Link Building Guide Part 1 – Thank You Mr Yahoo
• 15 Ways to become a Digg Power user in only 48 hours
• Happy Birthday Earners Blog! ;)
• 2009 Link Building Guide
• Advertising Update & New Services Launching Soon

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

The two biggest setbacks for anyone who wants to get into affiliate marketing are:

1. Not enough time to pursue ideas quickly enough
2. Not enough capital behind you to start new sites or ppc campaigns

One of the other major setbacks is deciding whether to stay in your full time job or not.

I personally am a huge believer in a career that I know will be a solid backup to any affiliate marketing that I do & I also love my job, however it has the disadvantages of point 1. Not being able to spend as much time as I’d like on campaigns or ideas.

There’s always outsourcing but more on that another time.

So, how do you make that transition from working Full Time into Affiliate Marketing full time?

Ebay

I know it sounds stupid but trust me, Ebay was what initally got me into Affiliate Marketing & it still accounts for a good proportion of my online income.

I’ll give you a few reasons as to why marketing on ebay is good:

Automation: You can automate almost every aspect of selling on ebay once you have a product.

Audience: You have a huge audience, don’t have to worry about SEO or Marketing. It kindof falls into the old “Build it & they will come” scenario.

Education: I’ve found that most ebay users & buyers are much less educated than your average Google User so you can sell products that only focus on high level details rather than the nitty gritty stuff.

These three factors alone make ebay the absolute perfect way to market any product you’ve created yourself online.

I’ll quickly give you an overview of what I do to create & market an item on ebay:

1. Create an informational product in PDF format. Make it as professional looking as I can (spelling, layout & logos). Provide a lot of useful & actionable information, actionable is important if you want to make affiliate sales from within the book.
2. Lock the PDF file so that people can’t copy & paste the information.
3. Slightly sprinkle the PDF with cloaked affiliate links, these convert pretty well from ebay sales believe it or not.
4. Include an opt-in list inside the ebook so that I get them on my mailing list, chances are if they’ve bought the book they’ll buy more from you later. You can use Aweber for this ($19.95/month).
5. Create a selling page for the item that will entice the user to buy the product (you’ll need to know basic html for this). This should include things like proof of concept, does the product work? Testimonials & even include screenshots of your feedback if it’s all positive. There are tonnes of ebay tricks you can use to get more exposure & get more views however I’ll leave them for another post
6. Create about 10 listings of the product across a few different categories with varying copy & pricing to split test how it performs. You can easily sell a great book for $20 if the selling page is done right.
7. Set up Outlook Express or Thunderbird to automatically deliver the ebook to the buyer once the paypal payment notification comes through.
8. When you send them through the ebook also let them know about other products you’ve got listed, also hit them with the link for the mailing list again.
9. Once you figure out from testing which copy & categories work best load everything into Turbo Lister & automate the process, you will also need to split test various finishing times for the auctions. I quite like my auctions to finish on Monday morning on Sunday Evening.
10. If you have a good product & selling page you can easily be shifting 5-10+ copies of it per day automatically & making a nice monthly cheque off any residual affiliate commissions.
11. Then market a product to the list Bi-Weekly or whenever you find something that you think will interest them. If you’re selling heaps of products at a low price it’s quite easy to use Ebay to build up a quick marketable opt in list.

That’s pretty much it. Each of those steps can be drilled down a bit & streamlined once you get your first product sorted.

Doing this properly you could be pulling in around $2,000+ a month per item.

Once you’ve got the stability & residual income every month you will then have the ability to fire your boss & start working on your other ventures online. It’s all about building your portfolio & diversifying your income streams.

Too many people try to make all their cash from Adsense instead of looking at the bigger picture & really breaking into as many markets as you can.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Lesson #8: Finding Profitable Niches Easily with Adwords
• Affiliate Marketing as a Passive Income
• 1c Clicks from Google Adwords for Arbitrage
• Trick to Increase your Technorati Rank
• Stealth Link Building – Part 3 – Social Link Scouting

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Since I work a full time job I wasn’t able to really put as much effort into the experiment as I’d liked but the results were somewhat interesting for the amount of time spent working on it.

Here’s what I did:

I picked 10 products from the Clickbank Marketplace which had a gravity of anywhere between 20-100

I did some keyword research on the product, so I looked at the types of keywords people might be using to search for that product. For example, a dog walking guide people may search for “how to walk your dog” etc

I then wrote 2 articles for each product. These took about 15mins to write, so all up I spent probably about 6 hours preparing everything.

I made sure that the articles had keyword rich title tags i.e. “How to Walk your Dog” “How to download games for Zune.”

I did an objective review of each product, so basically I said that normally I’m quite skeptical of these sorts of products but boy was I surprised when blah blah blah. I made sure I gave each product a rating in different categories, i.e. value for money, features & so on.

I added all of the articles to USfreeads, didn’t pay for any to be featured but I’m sure that might provide some sales, that’s something I’ll try for the next update.

Once I’d done that I wanted to get the USfreeads Advert indexed in Google. So I use Bookmarking Demon as usual to Submit to as many social networks as possible. If you’re cheap you can also use Only Wire.

Ok now I wait until the articles are indexed in Google. Once they are I then submit the reviews to Article sites such as Ezinearticles, Goarticles. There’s hundreds of article directories, submit the article to around 10 or so. Make sure that you include links back to your USfreeads advert in the footer with good anchor text (i.e. how to walk your dog).

Wash, rinse & repeat.

You can also make WordPress Blogs, Blogger Blogs, Squidoo, Hubpages, Myspace Pages & heaps more. But I didn’t on this occassion. Perhaps next time round when I get a bit more time to experiment.

Anyway I thought I’d share my results in using the above technique with a screenshot from the new Clickbank account.

Not a massive amount of earnings but not bad for about 10 hours in total work. Now If I was to do the same thing month in & month out I’d be growing the number of articles I have online, growing their inbound links using articles & other sources. Eventually I’d have over 240 articles within a year. These will make me money month after month, not just for the month I write them.

The beauty of this is that the earnings above are probably lower due to the amount of time the pages take to get indexed & ranked. So I plan on increasing the earnings easily by next month.

So for any of you guys out there who are struggling to make any money, it’s not difficult. Don’t just sit there & check your stats everyday wondering why you’re not making any cash. Keep writing reviews, articles & just keep doing it over & over. Eventually you’ll hit a sweetspot & the sales will start to mount up. Once you get a nice tidy Clickbank balance running you can then start pouring that money into other ventures

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Clickbank Tracking Problem Fixed
• The Death of Clickbank
• Internet Explorer 7 Nuking Clickbank Affiliate Links
• Creating a Viral Opt In list
• How much do you earn?

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

A few years ago, back when the net wasn’t quite as savvy as it is now & I was in uni; I did a few marketing exercises that almost proved to be more profitable from one days work than one website might be in one year. Call it an experiment, I was curious to see what was beyond internet marketing.

Poker, Bingo & Roulette was quite a common occurance where I used to live. They’d throw a tournament every Saturday night. Mostly older people but you’d find the occasional high roller now & then. I noticed that Casinoblasters had a real nice downloadable package that would allow you to burn all their Casino Software onto a CD with your affiliate ID included.

This is back when I was getting on average $200 CPA (Per Player Signup). I was eventually moved to a Rev Share system which incidentally made me more money.

Anyway, I made about 150 CD’s & got them all printed with details of the “free signup bonus” which was around $400. I also made a tactics guide for the various Casino Games. Roulette, Blackjack etc in which I positioned as a training guide.

“Want to become a better player? Then you can play online with a free signup bonus & hone your skills”

Once I’d handed out all 150 (which took more than 1 weekend unfortunately) I waited with baited breath & checked my stats. I thought that the conversions might be low due to the number of older people that played, but I had 27 signups that each made an initial deposit! which qualified me for the CPA of $200. An easy $5400 dollars.

I didn’t stop there, this gave me more ideas about how I could integrate the real world into the internet space. Aswell as integrate the internet space into the real world. You really need to think of ways that you can cater to someone’s needs that will result in them performing an action via one of your affiliates. The more targeted you can be, the higher your conversions will be (as with any form of marketing).

This idea eventually let towards my $200 dollars a day idea.

Have you ever printed 100 stickers, written on your web address then stuck them everywhere you think they’ll be seen? You’d be interested to know the results?

I would love to hear stories from people that have embraced this bridge in the Online & Offline industry with success & remember if you enjoyed this post you can do a Review of my Site (Honest or Dishonest I don’t care)

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Affiliate Marketing as a Passive Income
• Happy Birthday Earners Blog! ;)
• Ten Reasons why you should be in Affiliate Marketing
• Bumpzee vs Mybloglog….Fight!
• Long or Short Articles?

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Firstly, let me tell you that yesterday I made $800 from answering questions on Yahoo Answers. Not bad eh?

Lets look at why Yahoo Answers is an Affiliate Marketers dream & it’s for one reason only:

People are asking questions because they want your Advice.

So what if someone is asking “What’s the best mortgage for me?” then you’re pointing them to a Mortgage Company via your referral link?

Yesterday I experimented with what works on Yahoo Answers.

1. Mortgages
2. Personal Loans
3. Credit Cards
4. How To Ebooks
5. Ringtones

Azoogleads perform quite well along with Clickbank. Good thing about Clickback is that you have a referral link you can drop for just about any type of question.

i.e. What’s the best music site to download from?

Then drop a nice link from one of those Music Download offers. Easy.

I’ve found that in order to convert you need to give a good concise answer to the question. You can’t just jump in & drop your referral link. Give a good answer, gain the trust of the Questioner & you’ll have yourself a conversion.

Even if you don’t want to drop affiliate links you can also “Cite Resources” & drop the links to relevant sections on your own sites. Thus getting some link equity in the process & appearing “less spammy.”

So check it out, it’s an absolute GOLDMINE if you do it right.

You heard it here first.

I’ve not experienced anyone reporting any of my links for spam or anything like that. The key is to appear as genuine as possible, I also try to answer questions in different categories so the same people don’t see me dropping links all the time.

One thing to note about Yahoo’s Guidelines:

NO COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY: You may not post URLs for the purpose of directing commercial activity to a non-Yahoo! site.

So you use this technique at your own risk

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Digg’s HD-DVD Revolt, the best Linkbait Ever?
• Firefox 2.0 Download Released
• $50 Adwords & YSM Vouchers for Australians
• 2009 Link Building Guide
• Link Building Guide Part 1 – Thank You Mr Yahoo

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

The technique allows you to quickly create a redirect on a Blogspot page straight to your Merchant site.

Advantages of this are:

1. Easy to Set up
2. Set & Forget
3. Only promoting 1 Page
4. No need to worry about Copy

Firstly you’ll need a Blogger Account

Next you’ll need to find a product to promote. I usually choose something from Clickbank or a Ringtone offer from Azoogle. With clickbank I normally pick something that has a decent payout and a Gravity of around 50 or so, that way it’s not overly saturated but still has a bit of traffic.

Create a new Blogger Blog & name is something related to what you’re promoting: product-review.blogspot.com

Now you need to make at least one post to activate the blog, make a random post about whatever you want it doesn’t matter we won’t be showing this when we’re finished.

Now insert this Blogger Template into your template & replace the “Insert Affiliate ID Here” part with the ID of the affiliate program or product you’re promoting.

Publish the blog & visit it. The page is hosted on blogger but it redirects to the merchant site via an Iframe.

Now use something like Bookmarking Demon to promote the hell out of the page using the keywords like “Product Review” & make another

To give you an idea of how well this works, I made 20 about 6 weeks ago & I’ve made around $600 in sales since. Easy.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Textlinkads to allow links on Blogger
• Blog Stereotypes: What Type of a Blogger are you?
• Internet Explorer 7 Nuking Clickbank Affiliate Links
• Earnosphere – St Patricks Day Tomorrow!
• Clickbank Tracking Problem Fixed

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Well, whilst I won’t call myself a total expert in this field I will share with you some of the techniques I use to keep on top of the game. If you guys know anymore then I can add to this thread

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is your friend. I use it on all my websites to find out if someone has been writing about me or my sites. I get notified the instant Google picks it up. You can do this for any search string you want. So why not use some search strings related to Affiliate Programs?

“new affiliate program”
“affiliate program launching”
“new affiliates”
“affiliate program”

These strings will bring up new & exciting updates whenever you need them. You can then suss out the information & put it to use however you choose.

Clickbank

To find about new products on Clickbank I use CBtrends, a nice free website that allows you to download all the new products listed within a specified timeframe in an excel format. Which can be great for building product related keyword lists also

When it actually comes to choosing a product to market, what I’ll usually do is draw up a shortlist from the excel file of products I think might be profitable. Then I’ll look & see if there’s any hype surrounding the product. I’ll also survey the competition & do a bit of delving. This is all part of the fun of finding the products to promote first, you can set the benchmark for all the other affiliates.

Commission Junction

This can be a tricky one, there’s no surefire way to find the best affiliate programs on here. I usually just keep tabs on what is launched every day. Then I’ll keep my eyes on the EPC for the program & how other affiliates are doing. But on CJ some of the programs I never would have thought could be profitable are my MOST profitable. Like Car Parts, Notebook Batteries & Concert Tickets As I always keep saying, think outside the box with these guys as you have the chance to be SO DIVERSE with the huge amount of products at your fingertips here.

More Niche

For those of you who don’t promote More Niche’s products then perhaps this is the kind of affiliate program you should have a good look at. They give you heaps of notice in advance when launching new products & creatives so that you have time to build your sites before it even launches. Check out the More Niche forums also, loads of good information about Affiliate Marketing for pros. These guys know how to build sites.

RSS Feeds

Add as many Affiliate News & Blog related RSS Feeds as you can to your reader within their own Group. Normally you can see when a product (or service) is starting to create a hype or a buzz. A good example of this was the Buttefly Marketing Manuscript or The Rich Jerk when they were first launched.

Network with Affiliate Managers

Possibly one of my favourites. Don’t be afraid to add your affiliate manager to your AIM or MSN. Talk to them frequently as they can be your number 1 source about new & exciting product launches before anyone else even has a whiff about it.

Get in Quick

Once you hear about something get in quick. Register Squidoo names, Blogspot Blogs, Domains. Get as much shit as you can together. Even if you don’t decide to promote the product there’s always the possibilty of SELLING those domains to someone that is for a much larger portion of cash than you bought them for.

With registering the domains, try & get as close to the original domain as possible. If you can benefit from type in traffic then you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank (unless you get an EFT that is )

I’m interested to hear what other methods you guys use to keep on top of new Affiliate Programs & CPA services. Drop a line in the comments

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Not choosing the right Affiliate Programs
• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Affiliate Programs: My Top 5
• Lesson #8: Finding Profitable Niches Easily with Adwords
• How much do you earn?

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

The most consistent method for generating revenue for me has been Dedicated Affiliate Sites. These are sites made for & completely tailored to a specific product or service.

There’s a few reasons why these sites perform quite well:

1. Very, very targeted
2. No leakage to other affiliates or advertising
3. I generally spend more time on SEO for a dedicated site rather than SEOing a particular page for my exisiting site.
4. You can become an industry leader with new niches very quickly if your content is good.
5. Domains can be submitted to directories whereas individual pages can’t.
6. If you’ve got a good domain name you can sometimes leverage typein traffic.

Firstly you need to find the product or service you’re going to promote. I suggest doing plenty of research into this, I blogged about researching saturated markets a few weeks back. If you can get on a product early, perhaps even before it’s launched then this is when Dedicated Affiliate Sites really come into their own league. Having the site ranking before a product generates a hype is one of the things Power Affiliates do better than anyone else.

Once you’ve chosen the product or service that you’re going to promote you now need to pick a domain name. This is where you can reap HUGE benefits if you get in early too.

Say for example I created a site to market my product about Supreme Blogging Tips & I created the domain:

http://www.supremebloggingtips.net

If you were on the ball & fast I would naturally go & register http://www.supremebloggingtips.com. Chances are you’ll get a HEAP of type in traffic piggybacking off the original domain.

Obviously that sort of scenario doesn’t popup too often, so I’d normally at least go & buy a domain with the product title in it as a keyword. So if you’re promoting Keyword Elite you may choose http://www.keywordelitereviews.com or something similar.

Now you have a few choices, this normally depends on the type of product. If i’m promoting a product that is going to get type in traffic I’ll normally fill the whole screen with an Iframe which redirects via my affiliate link to the merchant page.

If not I’ll normally fire up a wordpress blog. Create a custom template & write a few articles about the product. Write some reviews & other linkbait type articles. I’ll slowly release these articles over the course of a few weeks whilst building links in various places.

Normal link building steps include:

1. Creating a Squidoo Page
2. Submitting Articles to Digg
3. Submitting to a few select Directories
4. Sneaking links into Wikipedia
5. Leaving comments on blogs related to the topic
6. Signing up to related forums & having a signature

There’s some more stuff in there that I do but I’ll leave that for some future posts on link building. It’s important to try & choose the right anchor text to rank for. You ideally want to rank for the product name, you also want to rank for buy, order, purchase & reviews of that particular product.

Try to deep link to inner pages of the blog also not just the homepage in order to stop any pages going supplemental. I normally don’t recommend link exchanges.
I will use the plugin sh autolink to link certain trigger keywords to my affiliate ID for the product. As usual I redirect the affiliate link through a PHP Script in the hope it may rank for the keywords too.

Track the progress of your rankings with the Digitalpoint Keyword Tracker & if you’re not ranking well enough then work harder on your link building & link baiting.

Wash, Rinse & Repeat.

If you have the patience to do this you can bang out a new site everyday. Lets say you do 5 sites a week for a whole year & each site on average makes you $50 a month. At the end of the year you’ll have 261 sites making you $50 a month each. Which can work out to an impressive $13,000 a month.

Obviously these are just rough estimates, you may have sites that make you $500 a month, some may do $25. The more you push at it the more month you will make & the better you will become at sourcing out new & exciting affiliate offers.

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Moving Servers, Expecting Some Downtime on the Weekend
• Dedicated Product Pages Get More Exposure
• Make Your Mark with Trackbacks
• Starting your Affiliate Marketing Engine
• Advertise on Earners Blog

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

I find this technique gives me the highest conversion rate out of anything I’ve tried. So it’s worth doing well.

The method relies on “walking” a person through a particular method or technique whilst getting them to unknowingly purchase a product or service through your affiliate link. After all, you’re “helping” them do something they were searching for.

Let give a few examples:

Johnny searches Google for “How to Set Up a Mailing List”

You’ve written an article entitled “How to Set Up a Mailing List”

Johnny comes to the site & starts reading the article.

Now since this is highly targeted, we know the person that visits this page wants to know exactly how to set up their own mailing list. Now all you need to do is walk Johnny Step by Step through the entire process.

So you might use the following line “Ok, in order to get started you’re going to need an account with Aweber. These guys are the icing on the cake when it comes to Mailing Lists, just about every big internet marketer usese these guys. Simply click on the link below to sign up then we can continue showing you how to set up the mailing list.”

Johnny goes & signs up to Aweber. You then walk him through setting up the mailing list with Aweber. You get your commissions & Johnny gets his mailing list.

Why is this technique effective?

1. You’re giving the person exactly what they want.
2. You’re showing the person exactly how to do it.
3. You’re only showing the person ONE way to do it, it’s either do it my way & make me commissions or don’t bother.

You can bring this method to a lot of different areas:

1. Show someone step by step how to play poker, but get them to sign up to your casino of choice first.
2. Show someone how to do Arbitrage but show them how to do it with a tool like Keyword Elite & get them to sign up through your 7search Affiliate Link.
3. Show someone how to use ebay & get them to sign up to Ebay first through your affiliate link.

I can think of hundreds more possibilities, can you? Enjoy

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Learning not to Waste Money on Adwords
• Ten Reasons why you should be in Affiliate Marketing
• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Different Variations of Affiliate Marketing
• About Stuart & FAQ

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Mass Affiliate Link Redirection

This particular method allows you to keep all your affiliate URL’s in one php file. You can assign each URL a name, then call it whenever you want.

Create a .php file & call it redirect.php

Open up the file & insert the following code:

$links = array(
“earnersblog” =>; “http://www.earnersblog.com”,
);
header(“Location:”.$links[$_GET['site']]);
exit;
?>

You can replace Earners Blog & the URL with whatever you want. You can also add as many other URL’s below this one as you want.

To call one of the links you need to call it using the name you’ve described it as. To call the link above we’d use the string:

http://www.yoursite.com/redirect.php?site=earnersblog

And there you have a very simple Mass Affiliate Link redirect script that can hold an unlimited number of URL’s.

Single Affiliate Link Redirection

I use this method to redirect single affiliate links. The advantages of using this method is that if you point enough link juice on the affiliate link you can sometimes get it to rank in MSN. This can mean free commissions from organic clicks. The url structure also looks much cleaner which will attract more clickthroughs.

Say I want to create a file to redirect to Earners Blog. Simply create a file called earnersblog.php

Inside the file place the following code:

header( ‘Location: http://www.earnersblog.com’ ) ;
?>

Now when you want to call the link just use http://www.yoursite.com/earnersblog.php

As you can see, using this method makes the link look much more like a static page. Therefore your reader is more likely to click & possibly buy. If you’re consistent & use this linking method throughout your site for external affiliate links you may find some of them ranking in MSN. This is generally dependant on the Anchor text you decide to use for the link.

Until next time

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Do You Squidoo?
• Make Money with Dedicated Affiliate Sites
• Dispelling the Pagerank Myth
• Recropical Link Cloaking – What you Need to Know
• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

If a product is popular or getting a lot of press then of course you’re going to want to promote it? But, unless you’re quick off the mark chances are you’ll already be out bid or out ranked by experienced affiliate marketers who have already capitalised on it.

The key to choosing the right affiliate programs is experimentation, knowledge & your ability to know when enough is enough.

It really also depends on the methods you’re using to promote the affiliate products. If you’re trying to promote affiliate products on your website you will find it much easier to narrow down the possible affiliate programs, however you won’t have as much choice & possibly may not even find an affiliate program that suits your niche.

For example if you run a website orientated to Mobile Phones you may decide to run some Azoogleads Ringtone Offers, or if you run a Business Forum you might run a program like Goto Meeting.

When choosing an affiliate program I’ll normally look at a few key factors:

1. Would I buy the Product myself?
2. Is the product good value for money?
3. Is there something in this product that they can’t get anywhere else, cheaper?

I’ll then look a bit more indepth & do some research on:

1. The Competition
2. The ROI (Return on Investment)
3. The Landing Page

I’ll also look at affiliate programs that only sell one particular product versus those that allow you to promote multiple products.

An example of an all rounded affiliate program is Adult Friend Finder. I’ve been promoting these guys for a while now & have found a number of things:

1. Good Conversions
2. Good Clickthrough Rate (Due to the Geo-IP Location Scripts)
3. Good Payouts

Again it depends on the type of website you have, but generally you can always find a solid affiliate like Adult Friend Finder that will act as a good source of residual income to your other monetization methods.

The key to mastering the art of choosing affiliate programs is difficult, don’t expect to learn it overnight, it takes experimentation & testing until you get it right. But once you do get it just right, you can sit back & let it become a solid earner for you for years to come. I guess that’s what we all strive for

If any of you guys have had success with a particular affiliate program I’d love to hear from you, I’ve been testing a lot of Commission Junction Advertisers lately & hope to post results soon

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Lesson #8: Finding Affiliate Programs First
• Choosing the Topic of your Website based on Keywords
• Affiliate Programs: My Top 5
• How much do you earn?

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

Maybe if you’re doing blackhat stuff you can afford to be more lazy & go for volume, but whenever each click is physically costing you money you really need to be one step ahead.

Product Research should take up at least 30% of your time.

I normally plan like this:

1. 30% Product Research
2. 30% Keyword Research
3. 20% Writing Creatives
4. 20% Tweaking

For example, you log into clickbank to look for products to promote. Most people instantly go for the products that have the most Gravity. Firstly, there is a few fundamental faults with this:

1. The Competition is Fierce
2. The Product has been around for a while already
3. PPC Prices will probably be more than your CPA

That is the main problem when you promote a “single product.” You only have a few set paths that you can follow. Most of the Affiliate Marketers follow those paths leaving the market saturated & hard to come up with new ideas or new methods.

So what should Product Research Entail?

Research should be all about assessing the risk of a particular product verses the potential ROI (Return on Investment). They way I like to do this is by picking products then looking at the current competition.

So for example I find out in Adwords how much you would need to bid to get into the top 10 for the brand name & other variations of the brand.
So say for example I was promoting Affiliate Project X, which at the moment is so competitive it’s probably not worth the hassle.
The average person is making $33.52 per sale (which also shows there’s quite a high return rate). However to get into the top ten on Google you’re having to bid around $1.50 Per Click.

This means that you would need to get a conversion rate of about 5% just to break even at the start. This sort of analysis tells me that the market is saturated & would take a lot of time to get a steady position for a reasonable price. Bear in mind that CPC does come down over time provided you can get a good CTR (Click Through Rate).
You should also research your competitors shelf life, take a screenshot of the top 10 adwords ads for your main keyword then compare it with next week. If the ads are still there then it means that particular campaign is profitable for that webmaster. Wash Rinse & Repeat this process, you will be gaining valuable insight into proven campaigns.

Pick up & coming products in the market, I also try & focus more on brands & brand names. So for example if someone were to search for a Nixon D2X Camera Lens they are probably looking to buy one. If I can redirect them to the merchant page for that product I have a high chance of getting a sale. Moreso than redirecting someone who is searching for Affiliate Marketing to the Affiliate Project X sales page.

If anyone else has any interesting methods they use for research just drop a comment, I can think of hundreds more but I want to get you guys thinking outside the box for yourselves

Related Reading:

• Super Affiliate Handbook
• Affiliate Project X
• SEO Book

Related Resources:

• SEO Tools
• Agloco

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• 15 Reasons why most people fail at Affiliate Marketing: Mini Series
• Make Money with Dedicated Affiliate Sites
• Step by Step Affiliate Marketing Guides
• Starting Your First Website, The Idea
• 12 Tips to Increase your Earning & Blogging Productivity

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

1. Not doing product research properly & picking saturated markets
2. Not choosing the right Affiliate Programs
3. Not throwing enough money into the Adwords Campaign
4. Not being original enough
5. Concentrating on only one market instead of several
6. Linking Directly to Advertisers instead of having Squeeze Pages
7. Not Testing more than One Adwords Creative
8. Picking too many general keywords in Adwords
9. Not setting up Niche Groups in Adwords
10. Not calculating a maximum CPA for the product you’re promoting
11. Targeting the wrong market
12. Not using Microsoft Adcenter
13. Not Cloaking your Affiliate Links
14. Not asking for the Business
15. Not doing Competitor Research

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Ten Reasons why you should be in Affiliate Marketing
• Step by Step Affiliate Marketing Guides
• Earnosphere: Week Ending 3/11/07
• Earnosphere: Week Ending 10/11/07
• Different Variations of Affiliate Marketing

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd

You could read countless ebooks telling you that Adsense is the way to go, however I find that most new webmasters get blinded so much by the pennies they’re making on Adsense to really look at the bigger picture. There are literally millions of different ways, combinations & methods to earn money online. You just need to be creative.

People moan that Black Hat SEO’s are unethical, which to a certain extent could be true (For some). I like to think of them as Creative SEO’s, alway willing to try new things & put new methods to the test. There’s more creativity because there’s less conformity to how things “should” be done. This can be a great mindset to have when brainstorming about earning money online.

So without further ado I’m going to show you step by step how I used to make $200 / day, sometimes more. It’s got nothing to do with Google or Adsense but I hope that it will give you the urge to look at other avenues & get your creative juices flowing. Once you see how potentially easy this is you may never want to waste time on low paying clicks ever again

This particular method can work with a number of products or services, I however used it to make money from Online Casinos. It’s probably a good idea to check out whether the law in your country permits you to promote Online Casinos before trying this one out, I was living in the UK whilst I was promoting this so it was perfectly legal for me

Step 1

First of all you need to become an affiliate of a good Online Casino. I worked with about 5 or 6 to finally settle with one I liked.

My favorite is Casinoblasters, they’re the affiliate program for the Golden Palace perhaps the largest online casino in the world. They pay on time via Wire Transfer every month & I’ve never had any problems. You can view your reporting in real time so you can check to see how much cash you’ve made

There’s two types of program with them:

Revenue Share: You get paid 50% of the Revenue the Casino Makes off any signups for life. So for example if you sign up a few High Rollers you can make serious cash from this option.

CPA: If you’d rather play things safe then you can opt to be paid up to $300 PER SIGNUP. Needless to say I chose this option.

So first of all let’s get a Casinoblasters Account. You can sign up by clicking on Casinoblasters.

Step 2

This is the research phase. To promote my Casinoblasters Affiliate ID (which linked to the CPA at Golden Palace) I had to explore a number of different avenues. I realized that the online Marketplace for Casino Websites is fairly saturated & I would have to put in way more work than I’d want to in that area.

I decided to do offline promotion, i.e. not on a website.

So I went about writing 10 small ebooks, each based around a particular roulette strategy. I researched the most profitable strategies (is there such a thing? ) & also the ones that seemed most actionable. This is important, if a potential buyer doesn’t believe a strategy will work they won’t try it in the first place. Just like if you think this strategy I’m telling you about isn’t achievable you won’t try it, right?

Once I’d written the ebooks, I made sure I had calls within them to my Affiliate Link for the Golden Palace. I’m not going to go into details about what the ebooks contained, that’s up to you to test out. But they more or less walked the person through the strategy, explained how much they could potentially make then asked them to sign up & try it out.

Step 3

This part is the main execution of the plan. How was I actually going to circulate the Ebooks? I did this in 3 ways. Each slightly more ingenious than the last:

1. I made a folder containing the ebooks & shared them on file sharing networks. Perhaps clocking up 15-20 downloads per day.
2. Sign up to Ebay. Simply sell the ebooks on ebay for $0.01 each. I was selling 50 some days which was raking in some serious cash. If you write a larger ebook, give it reseller rights & let others resell it for you.
3. This is perhaps the most ingenious way of distributing the ebooks. Sign up to Ebay, buy one of those ’1000+ Resellable Ebooks’ pack for like $2 then unzip them all. Zip one of your ebooks in with every ebook as a ‘bonus ebook’ then resell the pack on ebay for $0.25 or whatever. Then every time someone resells an individual ebook they’re also distributing your ebook for you, talk about viral

Conculsion

It’s a simple method with some big ideas. You can see for yourself the potential of this working easily & bringing you in some easy cash. I still get hundreds of clicks & some conversions everyday just from people reselling my ebook on, which is a tidy couple of thousand dollars a month. This way I can still make cash & let everyone else do my legwork for me. This is what you should be aiming for, the less work you have to do the more time you can spend on other projects or brainstorming sessions.

If you try this method, drop me a comment to let me know how you get on. I hope this article has been useful for you

Signups: Casinoblasters, Sign Up to Ebay

---
Related Articles at Affiliate Marketing Blog | How to Earn Money Online - Earners Blog:

• Review Earners Blog #4
• Integrating Online with Offline Marketing
• Wickedfire’s War on Make Money Ebooks
• Free Resellable Ebook Package
• Revver: The Future of Making Money Online?

Get Coupons, Deals & Reviews for your favourite online stores at StoreCrowd