Make Money With Affiliate Programs

Wanna let you guys know that I’m highly pleased with the new Macro Tool
from articlessubmissionservices.com

I use this service on a regular basis. Mainly because of this tool mentioned. Other services do not offer this (yet). Let’s face the facts. Most of the people just mass-submit their article and don’t change anything (It’s quite time-consuming to make 1 article unique for every directory isn’t it) so it may be true that you submit to 100s of directories but most of those articles never get indexed properly because they all look 100% identically.

However with this tool you can basically write one article with variables like {{Hello Sir||Dear Visitor||Heyhey!||Nice to meet you}} and create 100s or even 1000s of combinations, thus alot (!) of unique versions of your article with very little effort - which results in less or almost zero indexed duplicate articles.
As a bonus for every submission you get your RSS feed submitted to 100 directories or something.
If anyone can recommend a cheaper service with some sort of macro tool, let me know! thanks

Lately I discovered a nice little but useful script to make a landing page even more dynamic. This script delivers the Google search string provided trough the HTTP_REFERER to a variable in order to put it on i.e. into the title or meta tags on your landing page. This can improve quality score or quality of user experience who are visiting your site, if done correctly.

<?php
// take the referer
$referer = strtolower($_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’]);
// see if it comes from google
if (strpos($referer,”google”)) {
// delete all before q=
$a = substr($referer, strpos($referer,”q=”));
// delete q=
$a = substr($a,2);
// delete all FROM the next & onwards
if (strpos($a,”&”)) {
$a = substr($a, 0,strpos($a,”&”));
}
// we have the results.
$googlekeywords = urldecode($a);
}
?>

and then put <?= $googlekeywords ?> whereever you want to integrate the keyword in your landing page.

I created a customized one for Yahoo just for you guys:

<?php
// take the referer
$referer = strtolower($_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’]);
// see if it comes from yahoo
if (strpos($referer,”yahoo”)) {
// delete all before p=
$a = substr($referer, strpos($referer,”p=”));
// delete p=
$a = substr($a,2);
// delete all FROM the next & onwards
if (strpos($a,”&”)) {
$a = substr($a, 0,strpos($a,”&”));
}
// we have the results.
$yahookeywords = urldecode($a);
}
?>

call it by placing <?= $yahookeywords ?>

and last but not least MSN:

<?php
// take the referer
$referer = strtolower($_SERVER[’HTTP_REFERER’]);
// see if it comes from MSN
if (strpos($referer,”msn”)) {
// delete all before q=
$a = substr($referer, strpos($referer,”q=”));
// delete q=
$a = substr($a,2);
// delete all FROM the next & onwards
if (strpos($a,”&”)) {
$a = substr($a, 0,strpos($a,”&”));
}
// we have the results.
$msnkeywords = urldecode($a);
}
?>

call with <?= $msnkeywords ?>

feel free to customize this stuff even more

Listen up …

1. Please, co not try to reinvent the wheel. Go and research what your competition’s doing and get to know what’s working for them. Try different keyword tools to get a glimpse how you could build your campaign. This will get you on a competing level with them right from the get go. Copying your competition is not the right way to get your campaigns into making profit from the start even some may tell you that. Try something else, try to beat them not by raising the bid prices but improving your ad copy i.e. Once you start making consistent sales, then you’d get more playful and tweak the things step by step.

2. Try to go go after buyer-type keywords. These are the keywords like “name of product” or “name of product+review” or “buy name of product” etc. This will this make your conversion rates higher than just raising the bid price all the time. There are many other variations, but the point is to make sure you target the buyers, not the lookers.

3. Test and Track. I failed to do this from the start, and I lost a lot of money because of it. Track your keywords, landing/squeeze pages, etc. If you don’t know where your traffic and sales are coming from, you will lose a lot of money.

4. Use opt-in E-Mail. Many people are not in the mood to read in the moment visiting your site but generally interested in the topic you deliver, so they may leave their e-mail address. It’s a small effort to implement aWeber i.e. but great success giving you the key to get them back to your site using a good autoresponder.

Recently I applied for the Shareasale affiliate network and got approved, almost instantly.

I immediately set up a campaign promoting EfficientPPC. A nice gadget for every PPC marketer. You can set up adwords campaigns fast as hell. Well then. After struggling with CJ and Linkshare for years, I was surprised to have sales flowing right away

That’s what I experienced so far:

• Shareasale gives Affiliates/Publishers access to product databases upon a merchant’s acceptance into a program. There’s no surcharge for product databases!

• Direct Deposit is available for Affiliates/Publishers ($50 minimum). But not to all countries, most though!

• They require merchants to have a certain amount of money “on their account” to pay Affiliates, (YOU!) - they periodically take merchants offline having “low funds”. Good to know you get paid end of month.

• Their merchants do provide a lot of banners and codes for your usage

Shareasale is one of the biggest network programs available at the moment. They have some good niche merchants and Brian, the owner, is a really cool guy. Everyone who’s not performing that well with CJ i.e. should definitively check out Shareasale.

Take following steps, if you don’t want to spend any money:

1. Create a blog on http://www.blogspot.com on the subject of your choice (preferably choose a subject which interests you).
2. Use some neat and clean template and put your Google Adsense code on it to earn the dollars.
3. Give one hour every day to your blog and try to write two GOOD posts (current events, news, reviews etc) on the topic.
4. Submit each of your post to all the famous bookmarking sites like digg, netscape etc. (this will take extra 10 mins)
5. Go everyday to http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65 and see the NEW DIRECTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS in the section. Submit your site to two new directories every day free of cost.
6. Register with some forums in your niche and put your website URL in your signature. Use the forum everyday for half an hour and interact with people in the forum
7. When you start getting some traffic from bookmarking sites or forum threads or search engines, you will be making some money out of it in Google Adsense.
8. When you get your first $10, start hunting for cheap links for your blog. Remember to get ONLY related links. Please remember to put all your money back into the site (promoting it) for quite some long time. Then will only it will rise.
9. Get more and more links when you get more and more money. That will give you more and more traffic. Which means more and more money.

So these are the steps I think I can tell you. Do let me know if you actually plan to follow them.

So the main points here were to get some free traffic first, which will make you some money, use that money to get some paid links, which will increase your traffic further.


Yesterday I was discussing with him like how is his project going. So he showed me his Google Adsense for the last month (6th month). In his 6th month he made around $502. But he has put in all the money he has earned back into his blogs promotion.

Today his 300+ post strong blog (niche: cars specs and news) gets around 1200 uniques per day and make him around $500/month. He says, he still does not need any money right now, so he will be using all his money back into his blog for next 6 months.:)

To continue this story, after suceeding with a blog, in means that you get more than 500 UV a day and actually having returning visitors the next natural thing would be to join an affiliate network, looking for products related to the blog topic, i.e. Shareasale or Azoogle are having good programs and various offers. They earn earn you some additional money to the PPC income and maybe you even create a downline of affiliates earning you more passively.

Well done.

This morning I checked the stats for one of my programs and suddenly an idea popped up: Since most of the sub affiliates are just signing up but not promoting a lot you could buy a product trough them so they have a sale, what motivates their attitude promoting your product -> leverage effect

The easiest way to earn money with affiliate marketing is by using Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising.
To pay the advertising costs you need some cash at hands, but revenue is only a matter of hard work and time.
Remember: If you want to make money you need to spend money mostly up front you earn some.

1. Create a site. Use an own domain, get a cheap hosting account for it, put up a Wordpress blog and choose a free theme (takes the hassle out of creating a site) and you’re in business.
2. Depending on which niche you choose you have to pick an appropriate domain, one which makes sense the SEO-way. If you don’t have a clue, make the site around an affiliate marketing offer i.e. an ebook reviewed on this site (Have a look at the products listed with images on the right side of this page). It could be a product or a service in just any niche you want. Almost every niche got it’s affiliate program these days. Compare them and pick one. Don’t spend to much time researching, take action. I recommend you pick a niche you have a clue about and maybe can contribute some quality articles or blog posts (Regarding your your future blogs or sales pages)! There are no bad or good picks, everything can work out in it’s own right way if done correctly. If you are lazy super-affiliate like me, then choose a product that is attractive for the end user and serves some type of beneficial purpose. Affiliate networks like Clickbank, Azoogle, MoreNiche (promoting MakeingYouRicher.com) or NeverBlueAds have tons of offers, I’m sure you can find one. Try and keep out of the ringtones and finance/mortgage niches for now. Those are very busy and established niches with many super-affiliates in having years of experience and bringing in lots cash, making it difficult to compete with.
3. Good, having picked your product, make a blog post about it on your blog (You could have set up and own blog on your hosting account or an account on blogpost i.e.). If you don’t know that much about it, do some quick research on Wikipedia or bit G. It’s also a good idea to put a banner up or a full page ad for it if you aren’t going to write a blog post about it. Either way, make sure the theme of the blog is matching the product you are promoting. Using the same color scheme as the page the user will get forwarded to in order to buy something from you is obvious.
4. After you set up the hosting, the domain and blog packed with content, comes the next issue: traffic, the fun part though! You can either use Google Adwords, Yahoo SEM or MSN AdCenter to promote it on the big engines. Take $100 i.e. and deposit it into yahoo SEM. For Adwords you’ll preferably need a CC. With Adwords you can start off right away, but with MSN and Yahoo you may have to wait a few hours until they activate your account and approve your ads.
5. You don’t have to buy  every keyword tool under the sun, use the Google Keyword tool and have a look at Keyword Elite. It’s coty but nevertheless a class of it’s own. But in advance, let’s do a bit of manual work. First have a look at the affiliate publisher’s page and pull keywords off there by hand. You can search with the Google Keyword Tool using them as starting point. Use synonyms and your own mind (What would you type in looking for that certain product?). Primarily we focus on LONG TAIL KEYWORDS. We don’t want the one or two word keywords because they are very competitive and therefore expensive. Many people are using them for research purposes and mostly don’t a “buy now” - mindset.
6. After you successfully grabbed those long tail keywords, is what you should do first is to get a nice long list of longtail keywords of what you think people are using when they are in “buying mode” when searching on the engines for your product. So if the product is some kind of energy drink, your keywords would be: buy energy drinks, best energy drink, recommended energy drinks. Those are pretty good, and sure, they are nowhere near as robust as something like “energy drinks” or “energy drink” but they are more likely to be in buying mode than researching mode.
7. Great, we have our keywords, the site, the domain, the product. Wonderful, now on to getting some traffic finally! Take those groups of keywords and make one primary campaign for them in AdWords and the sub-campaigns for them based on which keyword theme they are.
8. Finally, when you’re done with all of the above steps mentioned it’s time for the next very important step, change the keywords so they are all EXACT and PHRASE matching. You can even go as far as to create a seperate ad group for every mother phrase, but sometimes this is an overkill and may also screw up your other campaigns.
9. Will it make you millions? We doubt that. Be realistic: Try things out and learn them for yourself before you can pass judgement on it or decide it’s “too hard”, it’s actually not hard at all. It’s easy shit compared to any job offline that you may have had to do for a pittance. Stop sitting on your lazy ass finished reading this, go out and do something about it! Luck is in your hands.

Recently we had a discussion on DP forums. This is what we go in the end to answer this particular question. Ways to promote your own affiliate program:

• Create a good sales page first (with own domain, SEO-optimized), Get feedbacks on on TFC or DP forums from more experienced fellow internet marketers.

• Create several Blogs covering your niche to increase your SE ranking. Link to your sales page. SEO fine tunning is important.

• Make a viral ebook

• Use affiliate directories where you can list your program on

• Search for email lists regarding your niche. You could use following methods to get into a newsletter without knowing the author pesonally:

1. Give him a preview of the product/service for free if they will review it in their newsletter
2. Offer him an extra incentive (i.e. more money) if they promote your product from beginning (launch).
3. Offer them to give his list members an extra bonus/discount
4. Pay for an ad

• Pay for advertising in places where webmasters gather

• Try forum advertising, Adwords, and in the end compare results.

Dear fellow marketers

Finally, being in the comfortable situation having quit the day job and only earning money online, working at beaches and internet-bars I had to notice, once again: Adwords campaign management is taking so much time. Having arrived on a level of managing about 30 campaigns with almost 100 ad-variations per campaign and struggling with slow internet connecitons here in Thailand, Testing and Tracking takes up to 4h daily.

Adjusting the min bid is the main task though. I like to set up the campaigns on paper first (If you just trial and error, it will be very time consuming to proper them afterwards)
I’m really considering hiring someone to manage the ads now.

Here a nice photo from last night (Koh Samui):

Lately I had the chance to put my hands on a review copy of the new version of Adwords TNT. I wanted to find out if it’s really that good or just an over-hyped small fish in the big sea of informational products. I actually know the author, Owen Lee, personally so I knew that he won’t release anything average. He’s a great internet marketer and has enormous knowledge in terms of PPC, especially Adwords. This Adwords TNT Review tries to give a brief glimpse. Adwords TNT where TNT stands for Tracking ‘N’ Testing is a set of brand new video courses on boosting Adwords click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rates.

Introduction

In the very first moment after getting the login informations from Owen I was very surprised because unless other Adwords products, the whole course is on video, using a slide format. Man I just love this way of education, watch and learn - lazy me

I’ve watched all the videos. Yes I did and it took me about 2 days. Two days that were followed by one night, when I turned the whole knowledge, injected by Adwords TNT, into action and customized all my Adwords campaigns, some of them I even wiped out.

What exactly offers Adwords TNT?

First of all, Adwords TNT is, very different from the other Adwords programs I’ve seen so far in the market. It does not deliver yet another “latest trick of Adwords”; nor does it require any latest “automatic” software. In fact, the whole course revolves around what even the beginner knows as important - tracking and testing.

What’s so special about Adwords TNT?

It focuses on the most important thing by using Adwords professionaly: Testing and Tracking in order to systematically improve the results and increase profits. Adwords TNT contains 10 quality videos that takes you by the hand through the art of science of tracking and testing Adwords (and YSM, Adcenter, too). I had to listen very carefully, some lessons I even watched more than twice because it was packed with useful informations to improve my “ordinary” campaigns.

Yes, Adwords TNT rocks

Indeed, I do admit that I know the author personally, but I’m a suspicious human being by nature. Let me give an objective and honest review here, and yes I also admit there is absolutely no hype or false promise in this product. In fact, they tell you right away that you will need money to earn more money with Adwords because it is a tough game (that’s why I’m into SEM, and I am improving on any product I review here, getting better and better with it, Kudos to to Adwords TNT Team here). Owen and Rachit are not the the type of persons who release sort of lame 10page products, which are mostly mash ups from the Google Learning Center.

How much can I earn from it?

Will it double your income within a week, like what so many other “hype-filled” products claimed? I don’t believe it can… just as I don’t believe any other product can. In fact, even Dayal and Lee said that’s “highly improbable”.

So, how can Adwords TNT earn me money?

I truly believe that anyone can follow the exact step-by-step methods outlined in Adwords TNT and make a killing within a short time. Indeed, constantly and systematically improving your Adwords efforts will sooner or later beat all your competitors, and Adwords TNT shows you exactly how to do it. As I mentioned above, after consuming Adwords TNT I immediately took it into action and now I just checked the stats and it looks like I actually cut my expenses by 50% the day after, and today by even 55%, with nearly the same CTR. (Before: 351 Clicks, Day after: 340 Clicks, Today: 366 Clicks).

After this intense time spending on TNT, I reckon that Adwords TNT must be something like the holy grail of how to master Adwords and there’s nothing else comparable in present times.