I’m going to share with you a small secret that will help you triple your profits on landing pages in three different ways. This technique works best with product reviews, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it work with your niche.

Capturing Data

This technique works by capturing the customers data before you send them on to the purchase/presell page of the product that you’re reviewing. By far the easiest way to do this is to offer them a bonus download (worth $50 – $100) that is related to the product in question.

Here’s a brief example I found that uses this technique with Ebooks:

Redirecting the User

As soon as the user types in their name & email address you can use an input type in the form code to redirect them to the landing page of the product you’re reviewing. This redirect is normally used to send someone to a thankyou page:

[coolcode]
[/coolcode]

This will then give the user the option to buy the original product & an email offering the downloadable product will be in their inbox (they’ll also be subscribed to your list).

If you get the free download right it can have a massive influence on the chance of a conversion for the main product.

Choosing a Bonus Product

I’ll always try to choose something that relates as closely as possible to the main product. If you’re doing a review of Aweber & want to capture addresses then you might give away a free 30,000 opt-in mailing list (which of course would be useless to them without an email marketing product such as aweber). That’s just an example but you get the idea.

Profiting

So you now have the ability to profit 3 times from this scenario:

Main Product: If your review is good & your bonus product fits you’ll hopefully convert here easily.
Bonus Product: If you have time on your hands it’s possible to use the bonus product to generate profit. Write an ebook or guide on using Aweber (or whichever product you’re promoting) & give it away free (packed full of your affiliate links of course). Don’t forget to also add any complimentary products to the bonus too (like Web Hosting or WordPress Templates etc). This also acts as a safety buffer, if the person decides not to buy the main product now, they may read the bonus product & buy from there.
Mailing List: You also now have an active member of your mailing list that you can provide newsletters, tips & tricks or more product reviews to. This is invaluable, without it, that person would be gone forever & you’d probably have little chance of ever selling to them again.

Test Drive Aweber

Aweber is allowing affiliates to test drive the system for free for 30 days. With the guarantee that:

If, for any reason, you have not captured more website visitors to follow up and increase profits then receive a 100% hassle-free refund.

It starts out at $19 & increases depending on how many subscribers you have. I have 1 account with around 600 subscribers that generates me anywhere between $300 – $1000+ every time I mail the list. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which niches are most responsive to email offers.

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This article will cover everything you need to do to ensure that your VPS is performing as fast as possible, which mostly focuses on optimizing your memory usage. Please ensure you make backups of your existing my.cnf & httpd.conf we will not be held responsible for any problems.

What you will need to action this guide:

1. Your server specs (most importantly Guaranteed RAM & Burst RAM)
2. Access to your Web Host Support for installation of
3. Root access to your VPS via SSH
4. FTP Access to your server
5. A brief knowledge of an editior (i.e. VI) if not I’ll provide the commands you need to know
6. How to restart mysql & apache in your server operating environment
7. Access to WHM

Viewing your PHPinfo

Create a file called phpinfo.php & include the follow in it:

[coolcode] ?>[/coolcode]

Navigate to that file on your server i.e. http://www.yourserver.com/phpinfo.php, you should see something like this:

What you need to ask your host to do:

1. Ensure that you have the latest PHP version (currently 5.28)
2. Make sure that PHP is compiled with the latest version of Zend Optimizer, Eaccelerator & Ioncube Accelerator.
3. Ensure that you have the latest apache version (currently 2.0.63)

Viewing your current resource usage

Log in via SSH, I normally use the Putty client for this.

Commands:

top: your current server load & resource usage.
ps aux: all your processes & which ones are using the most memory/cpu
free -m: allocated memory, usage & free memory

If you use the top command you can get an overview of the load on the server & memory usage. You can see in the screenshot above my VPS has a load of 0.02 during the last 1minute, 5 minutes & 10 minutes.

No-one really knows what the ideal “load average” should be but my general rule is that anything over below 1 is good & above 1 is average. Above 3 & you may start to notice performance issues.

With memory usage you should ideally have 100MB or so free (if not more), you really need that buffer for large traffic spikes. If you’re coming close to your allocated memory usage then any allocated burst ram will kick in. On my server I have no burst ram, just guaranteed which means I don’t have that buffer, but my system is more stable (as everyone on the VPS can make use of the burst ram).

Removing & Tweaking Unnecessary Services

There’s a number of services that you can remove or tweak to increase performance. To remove any of these services log into WHM & go to Service Configuration > Service Manager or Cpanel > Plugins in the left menu.

Clamd: This is a virus scanning service, it uses up a ton of memory do generally I’ll remove it.

Entropy Chat: Disable this.

Spamd: This uses a lot of processes & memory. You shouldn’t remove this, instead we can tweak it. Go to Cpanel > Plugins & install spamdconf, once done go to the bottom of WHM & click on Setup Spamd Startup Configuration. Change the maximum children to 1 or 2. This will stop spamd spawning too many child processes.

Cpanel Tweak Settings

In WHM under Server Configuration > Tweak Settings:

1. Make sure default catch-all mail address is set to FAIL, this will use the least CPU time.
2. Untick Mailman, this is a resource hog.
3. Change the number of minutes between mail server queues to 180
4. Uncheck Analog Stats, I also usually uncheck Webalizer.
5. Make sure you tick delete each domains access logs after run, otherwise you’ll start using heaps of Disk Space.

Mysql Optimisation

You can edit your mysql configuration (/etc/my.cnf) by typing vi /etc/my.cnf

In order to add something in vi you need to hit insert, once completed hit esc then :wq to save & quit. If you want to save without quitting type :q!

There’s a few important variables that we’re going to tweak:

1. max_connections
2. wait_timeout
3. thread_cache_size
4. table_cache
5. key_buffer_size
6. query_cache_size
7. tmp_table_size

Via ssh you can type ‘mysqladmin variables’ to see their current values & you can also see a refreshed processlist by using the command ‘mysqladmin –i10 processlist extended-status’.

The settings below should work well for a server with 512MB Guaranteed RAM (also leaving you enough free for traffic spikes), if you have burstable then you can probably look at increasing the number of max_connections to 400 & possibly the key_buffer to 64M:

[coolcode]
[mysqld]
max_connections = 300
key_buffer = 32M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 32M
join_buffer_size = 1M
read_buffer_size = 1M
sort_buffer_size = 2M
table_cache = 4000
thread_cache_size = 286
interactive_timeout = 25
wait_timeout = 7000
connect_timeout = 10
max_allowed_packet = 16M
max_connect_errors = 10
query_cache_limit = 2M
query_cache_size = 12M
query_cache_type = 1
tmp_table_size = 16M
skip-innodb
[mysqld_safe]
open_files_limit = 8192
[mysqldump]
quick
max_allowed_packet = 16M
[myisamchk]
key_buffer = 64M
sort_buffer = 64M
read_buffer = 16M
write_buffer = 16M
[mysqlhotcopy]
interactive-timeout[/coolcode]

Apache Optimisation

Apache settings are located in httpd.conf, you can use ‘locate httpd.conf’ or ‘whereis httpd.conf’ to find it.

Optimal settings for apache should look something like this, I like to keep the min & start servers slightly lower to stop too many child processes spawning & using memory:

[coolcode]
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
KeepAliveTimeout 1
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
StartServers 5
MaxClients 150
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000[/coolcode]

Restarting Mysql & Apache

Once you’re done you’ll want to restart mysql & apache. You can do this via the command line or via WHM.

Restart Mysql: /etc/init.d/mysql restart (if mysql doesn’t restart consider commenting out skip-innodb in my.cnf)
Restart Apache: /etc/init.d/httpd restart

These commands may vary depending on what your server is running.

Monitoring Changes

Use the ‘top’ command, ‘free – m’ & ‘ps aux’ to get an idea of how the server is responding. Pay attention to how much RAM you have left & also how much CPU Mysql & Apache is using. You may need to leave Mysql running for 24-48 hours to get a true picture here.

Thinking about upgrading to a VPS but not sure who to choose, let us help you with our VPS Web Hosting Reviews, tailored specifically for Affiliate Marketers or check out some VPS Coupons also check out PhotonVPS

[coolcode]top – 19:56:30 up 27 days, 4:11, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.07, 0.09
Mem: 524288k total, 386432k used, 137856k free, 0k buffers[/coolcode]

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I normally find that the amount I post is inversely proportional to the amount of money I make therefore when I’m onto something good you might find things quiet around here. Either way, on with the show.

This post is in relation to a question I had a few weeks ago (feel free to ask questions here):

Stuart, I have a website that gets around 3,000 uniques per day (in the celebrity space) but I can’t seem to make more than $6 per day from Adsense. What advice can you give on increasing this?

So lets assume you already have a celebrity site getting a decent amount of traffic (anywhere from 1k+ visitors per day), if you don’t then check out some of my earlier posts on affiliate link building & the 2008 link building guide.

Celebrities can be a tough to crack, but you just have to persist:

• There’s plenty of niches to pick, I’m not going to go into details but there’s hundreds if not thousands
• Traffic is HUGE, millions of people unfortunately lead boring lives & need their celebrity fix. So you’ll be focusing purely on volume here then figuring out testing the best way to monetise it.
• These sites are usually littered with ads, so in other words, they also can’t make enough money from just adsense. We need to be smart about monetisation.

Bread & Butter Monetisation Networks

Celebrity Sites are notorious for offering up low CPC’s with Adsense, there’s a few quick methods to increase your income:

Adsense: I normally run with a 728×90 Adsense above the fold, this is tried & tested for me as being the optimum spot for clickthroughs. I’ve recently been playing with YieldBuild, which automatically tests & rotates combinations of ad sizes & colours then continually tries to optimise for the best eCPM. I’ve seen a 25%-30% increase in about 30 days.

You could also go through & filter out the MFA ads but I’ve not had much luck with that.

Value Click Media: I average about $110 on around 420k Pageviews for one site with Value Click CPM advertising. Not the best, but it’s an addition to Adsense.

Right Media: I also run Right Media & let advertisers fight for my ad space, this generates decent returns but since my overall income is split between 4-5 advertisers I end up getting 4-5 US Cheques (I’m in Australia) which cost me $10 each to cash. Bit of a pain but it’s another income stream.

Zango Cash: This isn’t something I’ve exclusively had time to trial but I’ve had reports from at least 4 or 5 contacts that are making some decent bank from the Javascript Overlay on Celebrity Sites. I wouldn’t plan on using this if you don’t want to annoy your visitors, if you don’t care then you’ll make some decent money here.

Ideal monthly income breakdown by Network:

1. Adsense: $300-$600+
2. Valueclick: $150+
3. Right Media: $200+
4. Zango: $300-2k+

Others to consider: Tribalfusion, Fastclick, Clicksor & Adbrite (Interstitials)

Use your Analytics to Profit / Understanding your Visitors

I can’t stress enough that making money with these types of sites isn’t about slapping up the banner advertising above & moving onto the next project. Always check your analytics on a daily/weekly basis.

An example of this may be:

You notice that a particular page dedicated to Megan Fox is getting a significant amount of traffic this week from a movie website all drooling over her pictures. Do you A, sit back & watch the Adsense dollars trickle in or B try to find an offer that appeals to fans of Megan Fox, it may be the transformers DVD or it might even be a Megan Fox Poster?

Either way you get the idea here, you can target individual pages with different offers depending on where you’re getting the traction. There’s no point setting up a niche offer on every page until you see the traffic come in.

User Interaction

Interaction is key to monetisation. Ask yourself this question:

Once a visitor leaves your site are they ever going to come back?

If the answer is no then we need to find a why to bring them back over & over again. This can be done in a number of ways:

• Email List: Creating an email list that mails people when you update the website. The hard part about this is getting people on the list in the first place, try offering an incentive like a competition or a free giveaway.
• Forum: Everyone loves a forum, this is by far & away the best way to keep people coming back again & again.
• Social Features: Allow interaction with content & users.

Expand your Network

Are you dominating this niche as much as you can? or are you simply moving onto the next one without first capitalising what you have? Remember, it’s easier to grow what you already have than it is to grow something from scratch.

Think carefully around potential partnerships with similar sites & also unique advertising deals that (if you’re the leader in the niche) no one else can provide.

Research!

How are the other Celebrity websites out there making bank? I normally like to check out the Sitepoint Marketplace to see actual revenue figures & where that revenue is coming from. I’ve seen some bloody ingenious revenue generating schemes/ideas on here so that’s my hot tip for the month.

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I came across an interesting article not long ago about how one affiliate managed to dominate the Australian Ugg Boots market just as they were becoming popular (I can’t find the article off hand but if you know it kindly post it in the comments). I put this theory to the test by searching for similar items that had an international appeal but no-one was capatilising on yet.

Now there’s two ways that you can approach this method:

1. Look for a product that’s in demand in your own country but no-one is really selling it, then look for someone who’s selling it abroad. You can either set up a relationship with the supplier/distributer or even see if they have an affiliate program. Problems with going down the affiliate route is that the shipping will be a good deal more. I’ve had good success with the affiliate route even though the shipping is pricey provided I’m about 40% cheaper overall than anyone who’s selling the product locally.
2. Look for a product that’s in demand abroad & is already well established in your country. The above scenario applies to this too & if the product is well established it’ll probably have an affiliate program.

If you’ve done your research correctly you should already know a few things:

1. What the international competition is like
2. Whether or not you’re beating their prices
3. How they format their PPC Ads (I use the Google Global Firefox Extension for this)

You want to make sure that you can provide the same product cheaper than they can get it locally (including shipping). This will be your selling point. For example I sell one product locally that you can only buy in Australia for around $99 (excl shipping), however abroad I can bring it for around $59 (excl shipping). Which one do you think will appeal more in a PPC Ad?

Now create a minisite dedicated to the product, the site should contain general product information (including variations) & most importantly a review about the product.

I now create a very targeted PPC Campaign using branded terms & other very targeted terms I think will convert well. I know the brand terms will convert & the rest of the terms I’ll constantly test (including tweaking the review landing page) until I’m happy I have a set of 10-20 keywords that’ll convert for a minimal spend. The nature of these campaigns will attract a high CTR on the ads (since they’re so targeted) so you should be able to bring the CPC down gradually & maintain a decent position.

I’ll put this example into perspective for you. Take the Iphone, it’s only just being launched in Australia after being around for quite some time. However, tens of thousands of people in Australia “Already have one.” Now imagine getting on that train in the beginning (I admit that is probably a once in a lifetime product). But you get the idea.

Now sit back, monitor & move onto the next one.

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Whenever you hit the jackpot on a particular campaign or with a particular method it can be pretty satisfying, especially when the income stream is steady & dependable.

When this situation arises there’s normally two types of affiliates, those that move onto the next idea & those that will try to milk the current system for as much profit as they can.

Let me ask you this, is it easier to make more money from something you already know is making money? or is it easier making money trying to find another system that works?

This fine line separates those who make serious money & those who chase money.

Let start with a few definitions:

System: This is a method, tactic or idea that allows you to generate an income.

Scale: The ability to take this system & duplicate it or increase its profitability. Now just because you duplicate a campaign that does not mean you’ve scaled it x2. In doing so you may have a lower ROI therefore you may have only scaled to 1.5 times your current earnings. But that’s still more money than you were making before.

Profitability = System x Scale – Spend

So what determines how well something can be scaled? For example, it’s much harder to automate a piece of software that has been written by someone else than it is to automate something that you’ve written yourself.

Scaling equates to Volume or Tweaking

Scaling upward allows you to push more & more volume through a given offer or merchant. If you push volume then you become more valuable to that merchant. This allows you negotiate much better rates, increasing your net profit. If you had 20 smaller offers you’d never ever be able to do this.

Tweaking allows you to push your campaigns to create more revenue, which in essence is also a form of scaling.

Look at ways that you can Automate

• Can you automate creating Adwords Campaigns?
• Can you automate checking your Stats?
• Can you automate promotion?
• Can you automate the creation of Dynamic Landing Pages?
• Can you automate the creation of WordPress Blogs?

Chances are, that if you can think of doing something. Someone else has already thought of how to do it 1000 times faster.

Time = Money

Look at ways to Squeeze Revenue out of Existing Campaigns & Sites

• Can you find more relevant offers to your target audience?
• Are you capturing opt-in subscribers?
• Can you increase traffic to existing sites?
• Can you increase traffic through existing PPC Campaigns you know convert?
• Can you optimise campaigns for lower CPCs?

Simple Example of Simple Automation & Scaling

Lets take the example of creating Adwords Campaigns & importing a huge amount of keywords. How many of you manage your keywords in Excel then import them into Adwords Editor using the bulk feature?

Adwords Editor allows you to import keywords using this string:

[coolcode]keyword,exact,1.50,http://www.example.com[/coolcode]

Recently I ran a few campaigns related to DVD’s. I wanted to quickly create an adgroup around certain stars. I.e. Chuck Norris DVD’s.

I created an Excel Spreadsheet using the following piece of code:

[coolcode]=B3 & ” dvd,” & “exact” & “,” & C3 & “,” & E3 & “?aid=” & D3 & “&kw=” & SUBSTITUTE(B3,” “,”_”)[/coolcode]

This would then allow me to create a huge list of stars I wanted to target & the spreadsheet would easily create the code needed to copy & paste into adwords editor.

This particular code above creates something like:

[coolcode]chuck norris dvd,exact,0.50,http://www.example.com/?aid=999&kw=chuck_norris_dvd[/coolcode]

Using this syntax I’m able to grab a list of the top 2000 stars, fire them into this spreadsheet & have 2000 keywords all ready to roll within a matter of seconds. All I need to do is write the ad & use Dynamic Keyword Insertion & we’re rolling.

This small example not only allows me to automate the process of creating keyword lists, but it allows me to scale campaigns much quicker.

So if you’re one of those affiliates who likes to chase new ideas without really focusing on the ones that are working for you, take a step back & think about how you can make the most of what you have.

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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

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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

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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

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However, once you try out 20 different ideas you then get a feel for what’s working & what simply isn’t. This in turn narrows down your “idea pool” into a more targeted list of potential opportunities.

Almost every Affiliate Marketer I know has a few sites that I like to call their “foundations.” These sites are more than likely the first ones they built & the ones they hold dearest to their heart. If you think of Affiliate Marketing like building a house then these sites would be your starting point, holding the whole structure together to really give you the stability to make more decisions.

I’m briefly going to talk about the kind of sites that I built when I first started, these are the sites that I regard as being my “solid foundations.” i.e. if the shit hits the fan, at least there’s still something out there I can still rely on to produce a steady income.

One business model that has really stood the test of time (right from when I started in Internet Marketing) is the Local Directory Listing. A Local Directory normally includes listings that are Local (By Suburb or Postcode), National or (on a larger scale) International. It also normally serves a purpose i.e. Helping people find & locate a particular service to use, or even letting people rate services based on past experiences.

Yellow Pages is the grand poobah of all things local. If you need a product or service most people will generally either pick it up first or do a search in Google. That’s where we come in.

The Theory

The idea is simple, pick a niche, build a local directory, fill it with content, promote, implement an advertising model then start charging.

I normally try my best to target local directories to where I live. For example, a .com.au domain name will naturally rank much better than a .com for local related searches. That’s why when you search for something like a Gym on Google.com & Google.co.uk you get two totally different results. Use this to your advantage when choosing either a location or a niche.

Let’s for the purpose of this article choose a niche in my hometown of Melbourne. We’ll go with the theme from the previous note, Gyms. I can imagine that searching for a gym in your local area would be a fairly common thing, as people want to know if there’s a Gym local to them or to their work. I know I’ve searched for this exact thing before.

For step one you’ll need to research the competition. A quick search in Google shows one main competitor, the Good Gym Guide. I quickly use the SEO For Firefox tool to get an idea of what sort of Link Volume I’d need to beat them. 296 Inbound links, pretty poor. So we know the only thing they have on us is time. Further analysis shows they’ve been up & running since 2000, that’s a pain but nothing we can’t handle.

For step two we’ll do some keyword research on Gyms & related terms.

The graph above is from Google Trends, I use this to get a rough idea of search volume. You can see a number of things in this graph:

• Searching for the Gym is on the rise in Victoria, Australia
• There’s a significant rise in the number of searches around Christmas & New Year

These are both promising signs for starting a Gym based directory website.

Next, lets look at the search volume in Keywords Analyzer & Wordtracker to get an idea of what breadth of keywords we can target besides just going going for Suburbs:

There’s quite a lot of brand name Gym’s coming up in Keywords Analyzer, so we may want to also consider splitting the site into sections. For example “Brand Name Gym in Suburb.” That data also gives us some useful keywords that we can try to build content around. One thing to remember is that quite often these keyword tools will strip out plurals so the term “curve gym” could be “curves gym” (which just so happens to be a popular Gym in Australia).

I’ll then use Wordtracker to dig a bit deeper & find related keywords to Gym, however since I’m focusing on an Australian niche here I won’t use Wordtracker for the Keyword Research:

You can see we’re now building a nice list of other potential things we can target like Personal Training, Health Clubs & Fitness Clubs, the list is much much bigger, so I’ll generally take notes & store all the potential keyword candidates.

Finally I’ll grab some data from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, this tool gives Australian Data so it’ll hopefully give us some useful stuff:

Nothing overly different in this list, although there’s some low hanging fruit to pick up that we can use for some articles etc.

The more data sets you can get your hands on for keyword analysis the better, I’m a big fan of using multiple tools to get different angles & compare data for consistency. Last thing I want to do is go after a keyword that’s ranking in position #3 on Keywords Analyzer then realise that it doesn’t show anywhere on any of my other keyword tools.

So we now know what we need to do, we just have to execute the plan.

The Process

For step three you’ll need to put together a list of all the suburbs within the area you’re going to target. That’s fairly straight forward. Start with the bigger suburbs first. I’d initially start within Melbourne & branch things out.

For step four you’ll need to register a domain, I’d normally say try to brand it but keep with the gym or fitness theme.

Step five, you’ll now want to think about how you’re going to structure the site. I’d be inclined to keep things simple first. I’ve put together a rough layout to follow:

Keep all the suburbs & listings as close to the front page as you can. What really annoys me about directories is that you can get buried under 4-5 categories before you’ll be seen. This isn’t good for Search Engine Rankings & it’s not good for potential advertisers. That’s why I’ve emphasised having the list by suburb in the left hand menu. This works really well.

For SEO, make sure each page has a unique title:

• Homepage – Gyms & Fitness Centres in City
• Category Pages – Gyms in Suburb
• Gym Pages – Gym Name in Suburb

You don’t need any special kind of software to do this, I normally just use WordPress for these types of sites (I do plan on releasing a few prebuilt WordPress themes to do this with ). However if you want something with automated payment systems etc then you’ll need to do a bit of research.

Eventually as you get bigger you can start branching out into subdomains:

• melbourne.yourdomain.com.au
• sydney.yourdomain.com.au
• perth.yourdomain.com.au

Before you know it, your dealing on a National scale, instead of a local one.

Launching

Before you can start charging for advertising, you’ll need to prove that the site is getting traffic. I normally pump about $600-$1000 into an Adword campaign & send a Press Release to kick start things from a traffic perspective. A similar site I launched two months ago is doing around 162,000 Page Impressions a month.

I also recommend checking out this article I wrote on Google’s Aging Filter & Trustrank.

Those sorts of statistics are what Advertisers want to know. So make sure you’re tracking everything with Google Analytics. Also look into tracking outbound clicks so you can get an idea of which advertisers are getting decent enquiries.

Collect Email Addresses

Collecting email addresses is one of the easiest ways to generate revenue. You need to provide value to the list in order to gain their trust first though. Aweber is my preferred list management tool for this.

Create a 10 day course which consists of 10 tips that automatically go out each day when someone signs up to the list.

You can market affiliate offers to your list, allow gyms to advertise in it & also highlight any special offers that members might find useful.

Monetization

Is this type of site profitable? Hell yes it is. I used to do SEO for a client whose revenues were over $350,000 / year using this exact method.

There’s five main ways to monetize this type of site. The great thing is that you can use all the forms of monetization all at once. I still have heaps of these types of sites that make decent cash with Adsense, I’ve just not bothered turning them into anything else other than an information hub.

To really start making decent cash out of a project like this is that you’re going to need to get on the phone & call people. Sell your product to them & make them feel like they need it. This works, really well. You just need to crawl out of your “internet marketing cave” & knuckle down. You’ll thank yourself for it later.

Once you’ve got traffic, write down 5-10 benefits you think advertisers will get from being on your site. Make it sound exciting, make them think that if they’re not on your site then Gym Buddies down the road will be getting all the memberships that they’re missing out on.

Adsense: This is the simplest form of advertising, I’d use this when you first launch to try & offset the cost of any initial marketing costs.

Affiliate Programs: Some of the gyms out there offer affiliate programs, there’s plenty of other types of affiliate programs that would perform well, Weight Loss etc. Having a mailing list makes this section of monetization even more profitable as you know you have a targeted list of people at your fingertips.

Banner Advertising: You can see advertising space in the form of banner ads, niche sites can normally sell ads on a CPM basis ($10CPM is a good round figure). You can manage this type of banner delivery with Openads.

Direct Placement: This is going to be your big money maker, actual Gym’s paying you a yearly fee to be included in your Directory. It’s up to you what you charge, but there’s a heap of cash to be made here. Again you need to provide value to the client, they won’t renew at the end of the year if you’re not sending them traffic. Reinvest money made to provide as much value for the client as possible. You’ll keep them year on year if you do this, instead of just a once off.

Sell the Database: Databases of information sell well around the internet. If you create a database of all the gyms in Australia then someone, somewhere will want to buy it.

Other potential profitable niches

The Gym example above is just to show you how things can be done, here’s another handful of niches that it could be applied to:

• Natural Therapies
• Adult Services
• Churches
• Hairdresses & Barbers
• Restaurants

Final Overview

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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

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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?

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Here’s the list of Forums I read & why I read them:

Wickedfire

This is a great forum for out of the box thinking on Affiliate Marketing & Traffic Generation. I spend most of my time here in the Affiliate Marketing section. This forum in particular doesn’t like Newbies posting stupid questions, so take your time to absorb as much as possible before asking questions. Don’t bother asking about Page Rank or trying to flog your latest Ebook because you’ll get flamed quicker than a roast dinner.

Digital Point

Digital Point is a tad more on the serious side. However it has fallen foul of a massive influx of Overseas Webmasters trying to make their own fortune from Adsense & Affiliate Programs. Webmasters here generally care more about Page Rank than conversion rates. For that reason I recommend not spending too much time getting caught up in any of the Sections other than Affiliate Marketing (there’s occassionally some good stuff in there). I spend most of my time here in the Buy & Sell Section, there’s some real gold to be found (outsourcing etc). One Webmasters trash is another’s treasure

Ewealth

I mostly cruise over to Ewealth to read up on their Clickbank Forum. Not too much to say other than that, there’s quite a few Clickbank power affiliates over there so plenty to learn (if you still use Clickbank )

Webmaster World

I’m a big fan of this forum. Why? Well there’s definitely much less rubish to wade through here. If I notice something up with Google Search, Adwords or Adsense then chances are there will be a thread in one of the relevant sections with some good concise information. These guys are much more worried about rankings than Page Rank, unsolicited advertising is very tightly controlled & you can also see the hottest topics on the homepage if you’re pushed for time.

A Best Web

Probably one of the most active Affiliate Marketing forums on the net. If you need more specific information about a specific network or program then they might have a dedicated forum here for it. I spend most time here in the Commission Junction, Linkshare & Shareasale sections.

More Niche Forum

I enjoy reading this forum as these guys are pushing products that most Affiliates won’t normally associate themselves with (i.e. Diet Pills, Penis Enlargement etc). It’s refreshing to see the techniques these guys are using (build, build, build ).

Blue Hat SEO Squirt Forum

This is Eli & Rob’s Blue Hat SEO forum for Squirt Members. Again, lots of thinking outside the box aswell as case studies on what works & what doesn’t. Unfortunately you need to sign up to Squirt to access this one, Registrations are currently closed but keep checking back for some openings.

Simplified SEC Forum

This is the forum associated with the Simplified SEC cloaking software. Again this requires a subscription to the software to gain access but there’s some real nuggets of gold in here from Blackhats & people pushing real volume at Affiliate Marketing. The members here also document their earnings from when they started, some include tips & tricks & other useful nuggets of information about Affiliate Marketing & Search Engines.

Syndk8

Syndk8 is another pure Blackhat SEO forum, this one is free to join. This forum can take a while to get used to, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of information presented. Again, I use this forum to gauge what sort of techniques are currently working for Blackhat’s & people bordering on the Grey. I can try to come up with ideas that allow me to rework these techniques but also make them LAST, rather than getting banned after 3 weeks.

So hopefully now you should be getting all the information & food for thought that you need. Remember, don’t spend all day on forums. Try to spend only 30-60 minutes digesting information & the rest of the day working on building & promoting. Soon you’ll start to be able to draw your own conclusions about what’s working & what isn’t, rather than relying on other people’s.

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When you’re working on projects alone, the smallest of tasks can end up exhausting all of your resources & decreasing your productivity.

I like to put a dollar figure on what I think my time is worth. For example, I think that a full days work for me is worth $400, BUT then I spend the whole day trying to figure out why my wordpress template doesn’t look right I have effectively wasted a lot of valuable time.

So why not outsource this work? If you’ve theoretically just lost $400 for getting no work done & you can hire someone to do the job cheaper then why wouldn’t you?

Well firstly, Outsourcing can be a daunting task. Especially if you’ve not commissioned anyone to work for you before. So how do you go about it?

This all depends on the type of project you are working on, the expectations & the timelines. You can get a good feel for these metrics by looking at projects other people have submitted on Elance or Get a Freelancer. The advantage of doing work with companies like these are that generally it’s free to post your project & you only pay when it’s done. You can also track the progress.

What I’ve found however is that if you are consistently working on projects that demand design, coding & development then eventually you’ll need a dedicated person for that job. When that time comes how do you go about finding the first person?

Finding the right person is never going to be an easy task. Just look at all the companies you’ve ever worked for, was the team ever perfect? Probably not.

When it gets to the point that you need to hire out of necessity rather than choice then chances are you’ll also be willing to accept a much lower quality applicant than normal.

The following series of posts will try to look at outsourcing from a few different perspectives & varying project sizes.

1. Your Friends

Project Size: Small to Medium
Pros: Friends will work for food or shelter :p
Cons: If the shit hits the fan you can put stress on your friendships, you also tend to give you friends much more leeway & less slack than if they were an employee. Work also can drag out much longer if the project isn’t planned.

Friends are always one of the easiest ways to start getting help for projects. Just have a look at how Nate Whitehill & his crew work. This setup works well for these guys because they’re all business partners all working towards a common goal rather than one guy working but all his friends working for him.

That’s a decision you have to make when getting friends on board.

2. India & Malaysia

Project Size: Small to Large
Pros: Very Cheap Labour, Hard Workers, Will do all your menial tasks.
Cons: Timezones can be an Issue, So can Communication. These guys need tobe managed & expectations need to be set.

Outsourcing beyond your friends is probably your next step. If you’re on a limited budget then chances are you’ll look towards India or the Philippines. It is possible to hire a programmer or designer with years of experience for around $300 US/month. So theoretically you could have a small team working for what you’d pay 1 programmer at home.

You’ve got two choices here. If you just want to outsource your project then check out the two project sites I mentioned earlier in the post (Elance or Get a Freelancer). If you want to hire a small team then you’ll need to write up individual job descriptions of exactly what you’re looking for. When you get applications, you’ll want to screen each inidivdual then see their portfolio:

1. Have they worked in a team before?
2. What websites have they worked on?
3. Examples of coding work
4. Examples of design work
5. References

Checking references is vitally important, treat them like your background check. Rely on these heavily if you’re hiring people with lots of experience. You may also be able to hire students part time or graduates who are all self taught but still know their stuff.

Communication is vital when you’ve got a remote team working for you. I’d recommend getting skype set up so you can communicate instantly. I’d also recommend using a task management system like Basecamp to track progress & keep tabs on what’s happening on a daily basis.

Quick Tip: If you get a good group of guys/girls working for you don’t forget to reward them with a bonus if they really excel in a project.

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A typical Press Release at PRWeb will set you back about $169 if you leave out all the fancy SEO features. Which are really a member of the PRWeb team picking your categories & tags for you, except the SEO Anchor text links which I’ll go into later on. I always go for the more expensive $249 option for that option alone.

Here’s my top 11 tips for a successful Press Release on PRWeb:

Choose the Right Time

Submitting your Press Release at 5pm on a Friday night isn’t going to get you as much exposure as submitting it on Monday Morning. Think about Timezones too, who is your target market. For example if I’m sending a Press Release for the Australian & US Market I’ll typically send it on Tuesday so the US Market gets it on Monday Morning.

Optimise the Headline

Having a boring headline will do nothing for your exposure & clickthroughs. This is where good copywriting comes into play. If you run an Adwords Campaign you’ll have a good idea of what kind of headlines work well in your industry. If not then I recommend Glyphius, this is a piece of software that algorithmically scores ad copy based on past trends then spits out a score. The higher the score, the more appealing your Headline is. I’ve had great success with this.

Don’t claim to “be the best” if you can’t back it up

At lot of Copywriters will try to make statements like “We’re the leading company” or “We’re the best.” Don’t make statements like this unless you can reason Why you’re the best, use the opporunity to really sell the website or company here.

Don’t use Conatives like We, You, I or They

Using Cognatives not only makes the release sound less professional but it takes away Keyword ranking potential. For example:

Giving away a Free Pen that they can use

should turn into

Giving away a Free Pen that professional writers can use

Give an overview of why your site is unique

A Press Release is the perfect opportunity for you to sell your website, if your site offers something unique that others don’t then play on this in the Press Release. This will give journalists & bloggers something to write about & potentially attract much more attention than normal.

Use Quotations

PRWeb has a nice Quotation feature that will take a paragraph from your Press Release & Emphasise it. Use your most compelling message in this space & really make it work for you.

Add a Picture or Media Files

You’re allowed up to 3MB of Pictures & other media files. Pictures will also display beside your Press Release in the natural listings. Again, use this opportunity to add some media & get your money’s worth.

Include Anchor Text links in the Press Release to Deep Pages

A Press Release is one of the best ways to get a brand new website indexed in the search engines & also give it some authority. Since Google trusts new websites less, sending out a press release will instantly give you site some Credibility (and some links). For example I recently just sent out a Press Release for one of our new Bike Trading websites & used these three keywords:

1. Bikes for Sale
2. Bike Accessories
3. Cheap Bikes

Surely enough we’re already starting to rank for these terms within a week of Soft Launching the website. So use those Anchor test links to your advantage. I see too many press releases that just include the url of the website (i.e. www.earnersblog.com). This will achieve nothing. This option is only available in the $249 option on PRWeb.

Select all your Categories & Tags

You have the ability to select a certain number of Categories & Tags. Choose the Maximum possible. If you run out of ones within your industry then choose the most popular Categories. Choose tags that appear on the main page, these get the most amount of exposure.

Include the right Contact Details

If you have an inhouse SEO or even a Media Company sending your Press Releases quite often the sign up users details will get added to the Press Release. This obviously isn’t good when you’ve got potential clients contacting you. Make sure you have the right details in that space.

Socially Bookmark the Press Release

Once the Press Releases is live, start bookmarking it & sharing it. If it’s of value then more people will see it, that means more people will see your company or website. Don’t just let the Press Release do its thing, give it a nice push in the right direction.

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What if you could set up 30 of these mini campaigns?

I like to call this technique Brand Leveraging. It’s fairly easy & very straightforward, but there’s two condition’s that need to be met before you can start:

1. The merchant must not have a trademark on their Domain Name / Brand Name registered with Google.
2. The merchant can’t be bidding on their own brand terms (unless you want to fight them for it).

You can find heaps of good merchants to use for this on Commission Junction & Clixgalore.

Simply sign up to their affiliate program, start a new adgroup in Adwords & target the brand name whilst linking directly to their homepage (via your affiliate link of course). For example, lets say Earners Blog was the brand name, you’d bid on the keywords:

1. earners blog
2. earnersblog
3. earnersblog.com
4. www.earnersblog.com

Now write 3-4 compelling PPC ads & test for 72 hours. This will allow you to gauge the amount of traffic the brand terms get & will also allow you to split test the Creatives for the highest clickthrough rate. If you’re getting decent traffic then get rid of the 3 worst performing Creatives. This should also allow you to lower your bid fairly low (since you should have a decent quality score).

This technique allows you to leverage directly off people coming to the website purely on brand. This usually means they’ve either:

1. Bought something from the site before
2. Visited the site before
3. Been told about the site from a friend

Either way I’ve got some very profitable & very very cheap campaigns running that really exploit this technique. I’ve found this technique works best on Shopping Cart style stores, since users will always tend to buy more than one product at a time.

Enjoy.

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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

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When working with a website quite frankly nothing works better & is more stable than some good old fashioned link building with that personal touch. But now that Search Engines are becoming smarter at “discounting obvious links” we need to make sure that are links are getting the most value whilst still being undetectable.

Why is Stealth Link Building good?

1. Well firstly you can choose which pages your link will appear on
2. You can choose the anchor text
3. You can make an informed decision about how much link weight or authority the site will pass
4. The links are less noticable & less likely to be discounted

The days of getting links on “link pages” are falling behind us, appearing natural in the eyes of the search engines is the way forward. Besides, why would you want a link on a “link page” that has no incoming authority or backlinks when you could find the page within a website with the highest authority or most relevance to your website & drop the webmaster an email?

How can I practice Stealth Link Building?

The process of obtaining solid links that will really count for something isn’t something that will happen overnight. It will take time, effort & dedication. But, with most things you’ll get better & better at it as time goes on.

First of all you need to create a shortlist of websites within your niche that you’d like a link from. I personally don’t go after the sites that are too SEO’d, but rather aim for a website that has a more natural feel to it (from an SEO standpoint). Check to see which sites already rank well for the terms you want to target & add them to the shortlist.

Once you’ve got a list of about 50 websites, you’ve now got to see which pages on the site are most relevant to your website or the anchor text you want to use. You can check this out using a simple Google query:

site:thewebsite.com “anchor text”

This will bring up any pages within the website that contain your anchor text.

Secondly you want to see which pages within the site are regarded as “authority pages.” You can check this in 3 different ways:

Using the SEO for Firefox tool to check how many page links, .edu links & .gov links a page has.

Use the Webuildpages Strongest Subpage Tool to find authority pages on a website. This can sometimes be innaccurate though for example if you query squidoo.com you’ll notice a lot of spam backlinks which have been banned in Google but still appear in Yahoo.

The final way is by using a tool by Fromshawn, it’s an Authority Site Finder Tool. Best of all it’s free.

Stay tuned for more on Stealth Link Building

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That’s 3 months of link building, writing articles, linkbait & working. That’s a lot of time.

If you’re starting out in Affiliate Marketing should you really be waiting around for your sites to come through Google’s filters? OR would your time be better spent hunting down some domains that could rank for you in as little as 2 weeks?

Bingo

Despite what many people say I feel there’s really no such thing as the Google Sandbox. It’s just that newer sites are subject to more filters than older ones. The more trust your website gains the less it becomes filtered & the easier you’ll find it to rank.

There are 2 basic ways to beat these filters & rank your sites quicker.

1. Build natural strong links from relevant sites (not too quickly)
2. Buy an aged domain with authority already

If you are planning on making Affiliate Websites then can you really afford to wait up to 3 months for a domain to start ranking? How much in potential revenue is that? Even more, say you’re creating a website to promote a particular product, what happens if you get filtered & by the time you end up ranking the competition is too fierce?

Don’t get me wrong, it IS possible to rank new sites quickly & it can be done (depending on the keywords) but what if you could buy an aged domain & rank right away & make money right away.

So what do you look for when buying an aged domain?

Age: This for me is the most important factor, the older the better. Pre 2000 is always a winner.

Banned: Check the domain hasn’t been banned.

Backlinks: Check Yahoo Site Explorer to see how many backlinks the domain has.

.Edu Backlinks: Does the domain have any authority backlinks?

Indexed: Has the domain been indexed before? search engines calculate a domain’s age from when it was first indexed. If a domain has a good Search History then you’re onto a winner. To check this out fire the url into Way Back Machine.

Price: What price are they asking for? You can pick up a good domain for around $10-100 if you look in the right places, a small price to pay for not having to wait to rank.

Pagerank: Generally Pagerank isn’t an issue for me although many sellers will try to sell the domain based on Pagerank. I’m more concerned about age & IBL’s. Although if pagerank is an issue please check to see it’s not fake.

Where to look?

• Digitalpoint Domain Forum
• Domain Name Forums
• Domain Forums
• Name Pros
• Sitepoint Domain Marketplace

I don’t think I really need to say any more on this subject. Buy smart, rank quicker, make more money

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Photos: It’s no doubt that using photos of scantily clad women attract huge attention to your auctions. Check out this auction for some ideas.

Getting People to put your Auction on their Watchlist: Some ebay listings have quite ingenious ways to get you to add their auction to your Watch List. Check out this auction. The more watched an item is the more likely it’ll make it into the Most Watched Items List.

Know your Market: Spend plenty of time seeing what other people are doing. See who else is selling what you are selling, see who is doing it most successfully, see which of their products/titles is converting most often & build on that.

Writing Compelling Titles: You want to catch people’s attention so don’t write lame titles. You want to get the person into the auction & then start preselling them the product or service that you’re offering. I normally research my competition to write titles effectively, then split test them over the course of a week for performance.

Use Bold or Featured: Many people don’t want to spend the extra cash for these addons but depending on what your CPA is or what offer you’re promoting using these features could double, triple or quadruple the views on your listings.

Ending the Auction: I’ve found the best time to end an auction is between 6-9pm on a Sunday Evening. I always try to run the auction for the full amount of time aswell.

Increase your Reputation: Buy lots of small $0.01 items, I bought about 250 when I first joined to get my reputation up & instill some trust in my buyers.

Set up a Store: If you’re pushing enough volume set up a store. It’s only $15.95/month. You should end up selling up to 25% more of your inventory a month.

Use Auctionads: Link to you auctions using auctionads from your websites. You can use the string
auctionads_ad_kw = "seller:sellerid"; to show auctions from your own listings.

Use TurboLister: I use Turbolister to list all my auctions easily & quickly. This speeds up the process & allows me to spend more time on promotion.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment hopefully this helps some of you guys that have been struggling a bit

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BTW, I plan to reorganising all my categories into static pages about each topic. So for example the Arbitrage category should hopefully end up being a static page with info & tips about Arbitrage then the posts contained within the category so watch out for that!

Anyway, lets get started.

This technique feeds off peoples urge to see wierd & amazing photos or stories. The kind that make it to the front page of Digg or get Stumbled for weeks on end. The technique is fairly simple.

Register a brand new domain, make it catchy. I.e. damnthatsamazing.com

Get a host that offers DECENT bandwidth. We’re mostly going to be concentrating on pictures & images so you’ll need this. I recommend Dreamhost for this, dirt cheap & their bandwidth increases per week. I’ve got one account with them that now has over 3TB of bandwidth & I use A LOT of it.

Set up the site however you like. I normally use wordpress as I’ve got a set template I like to use that I can set up fast. If you’re using WordPress make sure to use these tweaks to Speed up WordPress. This will ensure that the site doesn’t die from MYSQL overload when the traffic takes off. Also apply my permalink adsense tweak for better targeting.

Now that you’ve got your template set up & you’ve tweaked everything it’s now time to add Adsense. I always add adsense to the very bottom of the post. Personally I’ve found that 468×60 works the best for me since it’s less invasive than the 338×280 however I always recommend tweaking & testing as much as possible.

Now it’s time for the content. This is the fun part. I always have loads of fun with these sites. You can be REALLY creative, rather different from the creativity needed for Earners Blog to attract attention. The easiest way to get good ideas is to search Digg for a particular keyword then sort the searches by “Most Diggs” you can also check Stumbleupon for the items that have had the “Most Stumbles.” You’ll start to notice a pattern. A lot of the popular sites are mainly pictures & funny images with the odd wierd story thrown in there.

Simply take some of the top posts & create your own take on them. So for example The Craziest Urinals from around the world, go onto Flickr & expand on the post by creating a huge collection of “Wierd Urinals from around the world” even bigger than the one that made it onto the Digg front page. Quite often Diggers will digg the same story or variations of the story twice, even three or four times without realising it.

You can also research your own stories, but pictures are too easy to get traffic from (aside from the bandwidth issues,. especially if you find some really wierd or “out there” ones. Submit the story to Digg & Stumbleupon. You can exchange Stumbles from Stumblexhange & Diggs from Diggxchange. Always remember to create a NEW account when trying either or those services out. Read my post about becoming a Digg Power User for more tips. Also make sure to include a stumbleupon link & a digg this links at the bottom of each post.

If the story takes off you should start seeing traffic fly in. Pictures are also very very linkable content so you’ll start to see loads of links from blogs & other sites referencing the posts. To give you an idea, I had a story hit the Digg front page two weeks ago which resulted in 1,081 unique links to that page. Quite impressive. You may want to check out how to deal with hotlinkers to conserve bandwidth.

If you make an exciting post like this twice a week you’ll start to build up a nice readership & the adsense money should quickly creep up to $20/$30 per day within about 2 weeks. Easy, you’ll be able to Shop Online to your hearts content.

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Two of my previous posts stand out:

1. Affiliate taking advantage of VA Tech Shootings
2. Apple Iphone Marketing

Number 1, whilst it isn’t someone “predicting” a future trend it’s a clear indication of how a lot of affiliate marketers think. If I personally see or think something will take off I’ll almost certainly try to register a domain name for it.

A perfect example of something like this is American Idol. As soon as you get a whiff of all the contestants names you should instantly see dollar signs. As it currently stands most of the domains are already registered. You’ll find that if you’re not really quick with things like this the opportunity will pass quickly.

There’s lots of opportunities throughout the year for registering domains worth value:

1. Big Brother
2. American Idol
3. The Biggest Loser
4. So you think you can dance
5. Dancing with the stars
6. The Amazing Race

You can use Google Trends to get an idea of popularity & search volume for each show. As you can see from the graph below American Idol really leads the way in reality shows.

Taking it a step further you can also get on the bandwagon quick with TV shows. No-one ever expected heroes to take off as big as it did right? If you’d got in early then you’d definately be cashing in right now. Which TV Shows have taken off within the past 5 years:

1. CSI
2. Lost
3. Greys Anatomy
4. House
5. Heroes
6. My Name is Earl

Once again using Google trends you can see the trendline for search activity. Lost leads the way.

The same can also be said for technological & software announcements:

1. Ubuntu (which does very well on Digg)
2. Iphone

So where am I going with this? Well the point I’m making is that it can be difficult to predict future trends. Quite often affiliate marketers can’t predict trends, rather they jump on board as SOON as they find out. Many leave it too late, those that don’t normally milk it, then move on to the next trend.

So what are good ways to find out about new trends? How can you ensure that you have your head & shoulders high above the rest?

Google Zeitgeist: This is a gem in any affiliate marketers book. It’s a small Google project that shows you the most popular searches for the previous week. You can also look internationally, for example I like looking at the trends in searches here in Australia.

Ebay Pulse: I prefer using this for PPC, it allows you to see what’s hot on Ebay in a variety of categories. So for example these wierd fluffy toys called webkinz are super hot on there right now. I wouldn’t have had a clue what they were or whether they were hot if I’d not been keeping an eye on Ebay Pulse.

Amazon Bestsellers: Another awesome outlet for anyone doing agressive PPC campaigns. Get the lowdown on EVERYTHING that is selling well on Amazon. Narrow it down by category & get ideas you’d not thought of before.

Adcenter Keyword Forecast: This tool can help you learn about future predictions in search volume for particular terms, I quite like the fact that you can get raw numbers from this tool rather than just a graph like Google Trends.

Netvibes: This is probably my feed reader of choice right now. I can literally have a different tab for each niche I want to learn about & fill it with information. Very very powerful.

Here’s my top 5 tips for making money from trends:

1. Be quick, very quick with registering domain names. If you can get a good content site up first you can become an authority in the space very quickly.
2. Don’t get caught on the back foot by not anticipating growth, have a solid monetisation strategy that you can track & tweak.
3. Don’t just rely on old faithful affiliate programs (adsense etc), think outside the box & sign up to some specific programs that directly fit your niche.
4. If you’re making a site that’s likely to get high traffic make sure to monetize with CPM banners. Doubleclick, CPX or Rightmedia.
5. Create linkable content, just because you got the domain name first or came up with the idea first doesn’t mean people will link to you if your content is pure crap.

Until next time.

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I spent a lot of time analysing what works on Digg & what doesn’t. However what a lot of people fail to notice is that 99% of the stories that are submitted rarely make it beyond 1 digg (from the user themselves).

The reason for this is the mentality of the submitter. They think that creating an account then submitting their stories is enough for the story to hit the front page. However, it’s just not that simple.

Here’s an account of how exactly I created a profile & became a power user that had 4 stories front paged with no help from any IM friends, within 48 hours of creating the Digg Account:

1. Create a Digg Account
2. Choose a memorable name & a good picture (picture is vitally important, notice how the top user supernova17 has a bright image ). Make the name memorable. Bear in mind you’re not trying to deceive here but merely some extra persuasion which will help with initial diggs.
3. Start by digging stories from users in the “upcoming section” make sure & leave a nice comment on each.
4. Add friends & digg their stories regularly. Adding friends is key to making this work.
5. Check for people that have added you as a friend using the “See who befriended you” tab.
6. Start submitting stories from places like reddit & stumbleupon to get an idea of how many initial diggs you are going to get. If you’re getting less that 10 diggs from friends then you need to do more digging & building.
7. Try to comment first on stories you think will hit the front page, this increases your exposure & increases your chances of acquiring friends.
8. You’ll instantly get a feel for what’s working & what’s not working. Now it’s time to tweak things.
9. Don’t submit into the general category. Things scroll off too quickly & don’t linger enough to get that initial “boost.”
10. I added anyone that dugg my stories as a friend. If they check their “befriended” tab they’ll probably add me too. This works well with newer users who have less friends. Make them feel wanted :p
11. Create a huge list of resources to scour for stories. 50-100 is good, tech blogs, apple news all that sort of stuff you want right in your feed reader.
12. I Created google alerts so that I’m getting info on hot topics right to your email inbox.
13. Don’t post your own stories until you’re sure you can get that initial 10-20 diggs to get your story noticed. If you’re posting your own stories you need to make sure they’re professional, not spammy otherwise you’ll get buried & the blog will get banned.
14. I now have a Digg account that will automatically get 15-30 Digg’s from my friends as soon as I submit a story, depending on what the story is about. For example they’ll probably not digg SEO or Affiliate Marketing related stories.
15. Have fun digging, remember it’s a game. It’s not difficult. You just need to network & build relationships then you’ll be rewarded

Welcome to everyone that’s come here from Digg! I’m surprised that you’ve not nuked my server….yet. Please feel free to have a look around, here’s a few other posts that I recommend:

• Diggproof You WordPress Blog
• Quick tips to Increase Feed Subscribers to your Own Blog
• The Ultimate Guide to getting Links to your Website

Also, don’t be afraid to drop me a line using the contact tab or leave a comment if you have any questions (or suggestions) about this article

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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

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What can be frustrating however, is seeing a story get bumped to the front page then seemingly disappear into the depths of the Diggosphere never to be seen again. This has plagued many digg wannabes for months.

To put it simple, Diggers have the ability to bury your story if they believe it to be:

1. A Duplicate
2. Spam
3. Off Topic
4. Innacurate
5. Just Plain Lame

So how can you make sure that your story doesn’t get buried?

Well if someone else is submitting your story I guess there’s generally nothing you can do about it. However here are a few general rules that I like to go by:

SEO/Affiliate Marketing Stories: The Digg community loathes SEO blogs. Think of what Kryptonite does to Superman. These are a big nono & will most likely get nailed right away. The occassional few make it to the top but never really last the distance. Notable sites that were banned for submitting too many SEO Related stories were John Chow & Digitalpoint who have since been unbanned. If you want to submit these types of stories I strongly suggest that you get onto Bumpzee it rocks!

Ads on Website: Diggers hate advertising on websites. If your site is plastered with Adsense or possibly even has one tiny adsense ad on it, it will give them more reason to bury the story. They don’t want to see people “making money” from Digg.

Write about Ubuntu, Linux, Mac, Steve Jobs, Kevin Rose or a Top 50/100 list: I don’t know if it’s because they have a severe case of ADD or “Birds of a feather flock together” but these topics always seem to make it to the front page, even if they’ve been recycled 100 times over. If you look at the Top 10 in “Category” you’ll always notice a few of these stories. Take right now for example:

Yeah so at any given time about 4 of the top stories relate to this criteria you can be almost certain of not getting buried writing about them.

Making sure your server can handle a Digg: If your server goes down & can’t handle the traffic then chances are people will bury the story faster than you can curse blindly at your webhost. If you’re actively planning to do well on Digg at least be prepared for it. For example, I am not prepared because I never expect to get anywhere on digg with this blog. However if I had a blog about linux then I’d make sure I was.

Don’t be an Asshole in the Comments: Quite often if you submit a story & get some negative feedback Webmasters will do on the defensive & try to protect themselves or the article in the comments. If you attack the community your story will get buried. So try to take a step back & let them comment. I find the hot topics that are controversial do well as you get many more people actively participating in the commenting.

Paying for Diggs: If your story is so rubbish that you need to pay for diggs then you shouldn’t be upset that once it hits the front page the Digg Community will bury it faster than a Dog with a bone. They’ve been using the system long enough to know when someone is trying to game them or not & I guess thats part of the beauty of the Digg system. The downside is that the whole system is pinholed inside “specific topics that work (mac, digg, mac, mac)” rather than just the good cool stories making it to the front page. Although I’ve been seeing a lot more cool stuff hitting the front page recently.

Promoting a Product or Service: Digg is not the Yellow Pages. It’s not the place to go to promote your new Car Washing business website. Only products or services that strike a common interest with the people that use Digg will get voted. I guess even if they do bury the story it’s still good for a backlink :p

Don’t post your own stories: If you repeatedly post every blog post you make to Digg you’ll more than likely get banned. I post my own stories now & again to see how they’re received but I don’t take the piss. Users will notice this too, they’ll also look in your history to see what you’ve been digging & submitting to get an idea of you’re genuine or not.

That about wraps up this part of the Survival Guide. More to come

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When I say basic rules of practice I mean protecting your Affiliate Links & also protecting your Downloads Area.

An interesting case first happened on Thursday when someone spotted that the Day Job Killer website had left its downloads section opened to the Search Engines, meaning Google had cached & indexed the whole PDF.

If you’re selling a product or service that is as easily distrubuted as an ebook one would think that you’d keep the downloads section off limits to search engine spiders?

Another thing that I noticed is that many Vendors who run affiliate programs don’t protect their affiliate links from the search engine spiders either. Therefore the affiliate links can get indexed & end up outranking the main domain. Which is something we can see happening when you do a search for Comment Hut….in google.

What does this mean?

Well everytime someone searches for Comment Hut then goes to buy it from the real domain they are actually paying an affiliate half the commission. So technically the guys are losing $50 on EVERY Sale. Ouch.

Here’s the Earners Blog quick guide to making sure this doesn’t happen to you:

1. Use Options -Indexes in your .htaccess file

The command Options -Indexes will stop any virtual directory listing & give a 404 when someone tries to list a directory that you don’t have an index.php or index.html file in. This also stops search engine spiders from crawling through all those open directories.

Simply open up your .htaccess file in an ftp program & add the line anywhere:

Options -Indexes

2. Password Protect the Area with a .htaccess file

Firstly to do this you need to a create a file called .htpasswd, you may have trouble naming it this on your desktop so create htpasswd then upload it & rename it to .htpasswd. Now in this file you want to just put the username & password you want to use to get access to the folder in the format (you can have multiple users on mulitple lines):

user:pass

Once you’ve done that create a .htaccess file with the following code:

AuthUserFile /usr/local/you/protecteddir/.htpasswd

AuthGroupFile /dev/null

AuthName EnterPassword

AuthType Basic

require user yourusernamefromhtpasswd

The first line is the full server path to where your .htpasswd is located then the require user line is where you put the username that you allocated in .htpasswd. Now place the .htaccess file in the folder that you want protected & you should be asked for a Username & Password to give you access

3. Blocking off the folders with Robots.txt

Robots.txt is important as it helps you keep spiders out of important sections of your website. It’s important to remember with robots.txt is that it must always reside in the root of your domain. So here’s what a robots.txt would look like to keep people out of a directory called protected

User-agent: *
Disallow: /protected/

Robots.txt is one method to stop search engines from indexing your affiliate links like we saw with Comment Hut. However you would need to have the affiliate script in a /cgi-bin/ directory then restrict access to that directory:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This would stop any affiliate links getting indexed & would also prevent the affiliate link outranking the main site.

4. Using a 301 redirect on Affiliate Links

Say for example an affiliate link is outranking your main site, what can you do about it? Well the best way to tackle this problem would be to place a 301 redirect inside your affiliate script or even use .htaccess to 301 redirect all affiliate links to the homepage. This will mean that after a few weeks (sometimes sooner) the links won’t rank anymore & should disappear.

The reason the affiliate link outranks the main page is generally due to link popularity. When an affiliate program doesn’t redirect properly & the search engine spiders visit the referral link it actually generates a new page. An exact copy of the homepage. Without a 301 redirect in place the search engines will index this link & they’ll rank whichever one has the most link popularity. In this case, the affiliates. This can also lead to potential duplicate content issues.

5. Password Protect Your PDF Files

If you’re selling a pdf ebook it’s a no brainer really that you should be password protecting the content. That is the single easiest way to stop someone that you don’t want to read it from reading it.

Utilising these 5 simple steps could quite easily stop you from losing hundreds if not thousands of dollars in Affiliate Revenue.

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Then finally due to the large number of pages, my posts are taking much longer to make the main index because the Google Spiders are busy chewing up all the japanese or italian content that makes no sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I did see a traffic increase of about 200% & I did see an increase in revenue but I think I’ve reached the point now where I’m over it & I want all my main posts in the main index again.

Anyway, since I removed the plugin it’s going to leave me with a heap of pages that don’t exist anymore. This means anyone visiting one of the indexed pages will get thrown a 404 error. I’m going to talk briefly about how you can actually take advantage of these 404′s & generate a bit of extra revenue.

A 404 is an error page that gets shown when a page doesn’t exist. A 403 is similar except it shows up when you don’t have permission to view a certain page or part of a site. MOST people don’t take advantage of these error pages as an additional source of income. This post is going to show you how you can.

Firstly you need to create a 404 page. This can be any of static html page. If you’re using wordpress you’ll notice a file called 404.php in wp-content/themes/default/. That’s your 404 error page.

Simply fill that with any content that you wish, Adsense, other offers, & whenever an error is shown the visitor will get shown that page & potentially earn you some revenue. Placing Adsense on 404 pages used be against the TOS but you’re allowed to now If you are concerned just pop them an email for clarification.

Whilst the above is a fairly simple method you can also add rules in your .htaccess file in the root of your domain to redirect to wherever you wish.

For example I can redirect 403′s & 404′s to to agloco if I wish by using the following statements:

ErrorDocument 403 http://www.earnersblog.com/url/agloco.php

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.earnersblog.com/url/agloco.php

Now anyone that gets either of those errors is redirected to Agloco & potentially could sign up, how cool would it be getting a signup from someone who was potentially trying a view a part of your site they weren’t supposed to be? The more targeted you are with your redirecting the more conversions you’ll also be able to achieve. I’ll be touching more on this in a later post.

If you didn’t want to monetize the visitor & would prefer to redirect them to the homepage or perhaps your feed signup page you could do that too with the above statements.

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It’s so simple that you’ll kick yourself for not doing it first. Really, you will.

Sign into Adwords then click on Tools.

Next click on the Keyword Tool.Then click on the Site Related Keywords Tab.Now you need to start finding niches from sites with dynamic content. I’ve created a list of pretty Dynamic sites over the past year. These are sites ranging from things like Holidays, News, Sports, Financial, Religion, Technology, Health Insurance.

For this example I’m using Yahoo, so fire in www.yahoo.com as the site. Make sure you group the keywords by common terms & search by cost as shown below.

Now I have a list of around 100 keywords that range from about $8 up to a whopping $60 Average CPC. Ouch.

Bearing in mind that a lot of the keywords on the page are very competitive you can still find some real gems if you delve a little deeper.

I now start picking the more obscure terms & fire them into Google to see what the competition is like, for example Middletown Auto Insurance, this has a competition of around 3,000 terms or so when you target the title in quotes.

The competition heats up a bit when you remove the quotes however you can still see there’s not too many people who use the actual full term “Middletown Auto Insurance.”

So you have a term that’s paying around $28 a click on the Search Network & a half decent chance to rank for it if you’re willing to put the legwork in. Obviously there are millions of other niches out there that have much much less competition. I was able to find 20 in about an hour.

Whenever I find a nice list I then fire everything into Keyword Elite to see if the keyword gets traffic. Sometimes you can find keywords with NO COMPETITION that get over 1000 searches per month.

Now I simply create a blogger blog with the keywords in the domain i.e. middletownautoinsurance.blogspot.com then I’ll make a dedicated page that’s highly relevant & gives good information about Middletown Auto Insurance.

I’ll use Bookmarking Demon & some other programs to generate enough backlinks to get the domain indexed. Then I’ll figure out how I want to monetise it.

I’ve literally set up anywhere close to 500 blogger domains within the last year using this system & it works. Finding the niches with traffic & little competition are the best way to dominate that market.

Don’t forget that you can win an SEO Audit of your site by Reviewing Earners Blog on your Blog, I’ve had about 5 sent in so far so keep em coming!

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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

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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.

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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

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