The Archives

Allan Gardyne Lessons

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on July 20, 2009

Allan Gardyne Lessons (Image Source: sxc.hu)

1. 10-point list building cheat sheet: This nice little cheat-sheet is from Fabian Lim. The 10 tactics listed here range from the obvious article marketing to Get Response Power Leads. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to build a list i.e. all affiliate and Internet marketers.
2. Differences between rich and poor affiliate marketers: This particular article is by Jay Stockwell and is about the mindset of a rich affiliate marketer. Main takeaway: You want your affiliate business to really fly, don’t treat it like a hobby.
3. Easy way to increase commissions: This article is actually a pitch on a video creation service for affiliates but the underlying message is that video is important for conversions.
4. Affiliate turns his life around:An article by John Gibb on how he turned his life around using Dan Ho’s http://www.affiliatearticlewriters.com/. The main takeaways are that article marketing still works and copywriting in an important skill in the affiliate marketing industry.
5. Learn from affiliates who keep it simple: This is an article that is a follow-up from the above one. The main message is not to complicate things and to keep it simple. Especially, a good message for me as I am still learning to appreciate the power of simplicity.

Needless to say, I’ll update these lessons as I read further.

What I Have Learned From Affilorama

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on July 17, 2009

Mark Ling From Affilorama

1. Praise where praise is due: In this post from 3 August, 2006, Mark talks about the importance of giving praise where it is due and gives a shout-out to three Internet Marketers he sees as mentors:
   

   • John Reese: http://www.jrreport.com/ (You’ll be able to download a free copy of his Reese report here, along with how he made $500,000 in his first year in Adsense. I’m a member of the Reese Report and strongly recommend it, even if it’s not for you right now, you should download your free copy and keep it in mind for the future)
   • Brad Callen: Visit http://www.affilorama.com/downloads/seomadeeasy.pdf to download and print out his free book on search engine optimization (Simply fantastic).
   • Ken Evoy: Visit http://aff-masters.sitesell.com/download9.html for his free Affiliate Masters Course ebook. This is even more great free information for you about how to make money from affiliate programs.

2. Viral e-books: This post on 25 August 2006 is about a lesson in creating a viral e-book and takes the example of an Affilorama student who created a viral e-book http://wealthywal.com/Resources/wealthywal.pdf that was informative, engaging, not particularly “salesy” and it’s definitely something you would pass around to your friends in the make money online niche. A niche he doesn’t particularly recommend for beginners. Good informative post and related material, in any case.
3. An Easy Way to Earn More From AdSense: This post from 29 September 2006, Mark talks about how to maximize earnings from AdSense via ad placement (above the fold) and how the use of tables in a web page determines the way content will be read (and the quality of the ads displayed). My takeaway was not to use tables (when I can) and to make ads look like an important resource rather than an irritating distraction.
4. Finding Profitable Niches – “HELP ME! WHERE DO I START?”: This post on 13 October 2006 talks about how to systematically find a profitable niche. The basic points of this post is to do the following:
   • Keyword research: Do research to determine there is a market for what you intend to promote.
   • Payouts: Products paying 60 – 75% commission or a high-price, low commission physical products to promote that earns you the same amount.
   • Merchant Sales Page: Is it compelling to you as a potential customer. If it is not then you’ll have to spend a lot of time on pre-selling.
   • Competitive Analysis: Analyze the competition and if you are a beginner then stay away from the ‘make money online’ crowd. Are people already making money in this niche?
   • Contextual Advertising: Determine whether you should use an PPC ads to drive traffic. If yes, whether it should be Yahoo or Google. Note: I prefer free traffic sources so I ignored this part but maybe I’ll use PPC in the future. Who knows.

   How to find topics: The key to finding good, profitable niches is brainstorming, lateral thinking, and research. Visit lots of sites to get those brain juices going. Remember that most good sites are getting money from somewhere. For each site you visit, as yourself: how are they making money? Here are some good places to start your brainstorming:

   • Search affiliate program directories.
   • Get ideas for B2B sites from B2B directories. The good thing here is that it’s all categorized for you already. Take some of these topics and plug them into the “view bids” tool in Overture to see what people are willing to pay, then use inventory.overture.com to see what the traffic is like. You might need to have a dig around until you find something suitable.
   • Visit sites like About.com to get ideas. About.com gets money from advertisers paying for listing on their site, so they’re not likely to create articles/topics that aren’t profitable?
   • Visit eBay and have a dig through their categories to get ideas for products/niche topics that people might be interested in. For instance, dolls. There are people bidding big dollars for dolls — there’s probably a doll-geek community that you could market to. (You could place eBay product ads on your site and earn a percentage of eBays revenue from successful sales, or for referring people who become eBay members.)

5. How to Make Money From Affiliate Programs – Your Questions Answered: This was the first post of 2007 and I need not elaborate more as the title says it all. The audio as at http://www.affilorama.com/blog/blog_content/audio_blog1.zip and PDF notes are at http://www.affilorama.com/blog/blog_content/how_to_make_money_from_affiliate_programs.zip.

That;s what I have learned about affiliate marketingfrom the Affilorama blog. I’ll update the list as I go along and find notable posts.

Mark Ling Of Affilorama Webinar Lessons

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on May 5, 2009

Who Is Mark Ling and What Is Affilorama?

Mark Ling from Affilorama is a well-respected affiliate marketer from New Zealand who recently opened up doors for his AffiloBlueprint Training. In conjunction to the launch, he taught a webinar hosted wonderfully by Reena Shohet at Associate Programs (who are giving away 7 valuable bonuses) which had great takeaways for affiliate marketers.

Mark’s affiliate marketing adventures started in 1999 when his friend Charlie put up a website on GeoCities. This lead to Charlie putting up an affiliate link for a dating site and earning commissions for about US$50 per month. This prompted Mark to ask the question, “How do I link up people with products and earn commissions?” and like they say the rest is history.

Mark is based in New Zealand which shows time and time again that you can be successful on the Internet even from outside of the US as location generally has no impact on online business. What’s inspirational about Mark is that he started out small (like the most of us) and had a student loan to pay. He juggled his Internet business with a part-time job at Pizza Hut. His early success came from free search engines and for the first 4 years online, he did not but any products by gurus for making money online. He had a simple formula that worked and he simply rinsed and repeated it.

Affilorama is a training and community site for affiliate marketers founded in 2006 by Mark Ling. It has two tier membership (basic and premium – I’m a basic member) with lots of video lessons, interviews, tools, blog and a forum.

Starting Out With Affiliate Marketing

A question was asked about what is the bare minimum required when starting out on a shoestring budget? Mark’s recommendation was:

1. Website hosting account: I’m glad Mark is not like one of those gurus who state that you can make bucketloads of money without a website. He prefers Hostgator but for me personally, I prefer BlueHost.
2. Domain name registrations: Mark prefers GoDaddy (all my domains are registered via GoDaddy) but lately I have found NameCheap to be quite good as well.
3. Optional: Mark said that other than your own domain and a web host, all other things are optional. However, outsourcing work like article writing and link building can definitely accelerate the process. A view I concur with.

Newbie Mistakes In Affiliate Marketing?

Another great question that was posed was what mistakes newbies make in affiliate marketing. Mark’s views were as follows:

1. Monetization: Newbies often do not monetize their pages, they don’t put in their affiliate links. Giving an example of his website, www.wowblackbook.com, Mark encouraged newbies to put in their affiliate links above the fold, have an call to action in the graphic instead of just a plain graphic and put in affiliate links at the bottom of the page.
2. Keyword Research: Mark said newbies do not tend to think closely about the search terms. for instance, a lot of people just go wholesale with their PLR articles instead of tweaking it and using the proper keywords.

The second point of Mark’s response brought in another relevant question “How does Mark research his markets?”. This was the part I was waiting for eagerly.

Mark Ling’s Market Research Methodology For A Profitable Niche

I found this part the most valuable where Mark candidly shared how he does market research to find profitable niches.

1. Mark goes to the ClickBank Marketplace and searches for a particular keyword or clicks on any category to see what is hot within that category.
2. He then looks at the ‘gravity’ which is a measure of how many separate affiliates made a sale of that product in the last week. He believes there is more to the formula for gravity than that and thinks that it also takes into account sales from other weeks but on a weighted scale. Mark says that a gravity over 30 can be a profitable niche.
3. He then tries to find at least 5 products within or outside of ClickBank for that niche as he believes in promoting more than one product.
4. Mark usually stays away from promoting dodgy products and services like ‘paid surveys’, ‘downloading DVDs from the Internet’ which are not only unethical but do not provide a base for a sustainable business.

This brought in a question of how someone can have their own product listed on ClickBank. Mark’s advice was to meet all of ClickBank’s requirements and submit it for approval. This was kind of obvious but he followed it up with a great tip that you have to actively promote your own product to push up the gravity and ensure that it becomes successful.

Affilorama And Mark Ling’s Approach To Keyword Research

1. Forum Research: Mark suggested that forums are a very valuable tool to find out what kind of keywords your potential buyers are using.
2. Create article topics based on the keywords found on the forum.
3. Use Traffic Travis (a free tool from Affilorama) to build a giant list of keywords, sort the keywords by search volume, remove duplicates, filter and categorize the search terms and save it as a set.
4. Pay attention to needs based keywords rather than want based keywords. Mark refers needs based keywords as crisis keywords.
5. Additionally, Mark also uses the Google keyword tool.
6. Product name review type search is an absolute needs based keyword. It is vital to focus on these type of keywords even if the keyword research tool shows low volume because the leads convert well.

How To Achieve High Search Engine Rankings?

To achieve high search engine rankings, Mark’s lesson was to focus on the following:

1. Onpage search optimization which he reckons weighs in about 20% for search engine rankings. He suggests paying attention to the following:
   • Title optimization
   • H1 tag
   • the keywords at least once in the first 50 words
   • Go for about 1% keyword density which can be checked from within Traffic Travis
2. Off page factors account for the remaining 80% for search engine rankings especially the links and anchor tags.
3. Get links but do not make it look unnatural. For instance, do not have the same anchor tags for all incoming links.
4. Submit to article websites like ezinearticles
5. Use the affordable services of www.submitedge.com
6. Use www.amautomation.com (which is a network of blogs). This allows you to reword articles and have up to 3 links. However, this method of link building seems potentially gray hat

PPC Versus Search Engines

Mark recommends using PPC or Pay Per Click advertising once the money starts rolling in because it is virtually impossible to rank for all different variations of search. Additionally, it is another way to generate traffic into the website. However, with PPC Mark recommends keeping the following pointers in mind.

• For PPC landing pages do not use menu bars as it distracts the user into clicking other parts of the site.
• Use a noindex nofollow tag for PPC landing pages so that Google doesn’t penalize you for duplicate content.
• Add links at the bottom of the page to other parts of your website so Google does not think that this is a one page website. This generally improves the Google quality score which means paying less for the clicks.
• For starters have 3 product name adgroups + 3 buyer adgroups (crisis or needs based keyword adgroups)
• Start with product name per click bid at $1 or needs based keyword bid at $0.60 to improve click through
• Reduce the bids about 20% for every 30 clicks until positions 4 or 5 is reached. Assess profitability only after 300 clicks

Email Marketing Tips

Last but not least, do not ignore capturing email addresses of prospects. Mark uses AWeber for email autoresponders and has about 2 million subscribers in his various lists. He usually gives a free 6 part mini course in exchange of an email address and uses what he calls a day 7 trick to give a free report if the user purchases the product.

In my opinion, AffiloBlueprint is really great for beginners and do checkout the bonuses they are giving. Also worth checking out is the Affilorama training portal and their keyword research tool, Traffic Travis.

Bypassing ClickBank Merchant’s Butt Ugly Sales Page

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on April 16, 2009

As an affiliate marketer, I am sure you have had the experience of wanting to promote a really good product from ClickBank but the merchant’s butt ugly sales page makes you cringe and think twice. Here’s a set of step-by-step instructions on how to bypass the ugly sales page and directly link it to the shopping cart without losing any commissions.

1. Go to ClickBank Marketplace and find the product you want to promote. In this example, I’m choosing “Ewen Chia – AutopilotProfits.com!” (not implying his sales page is butt ugly). Click on the “create hoplink” link (highlighted in red) and it opens up a new window.
   
   
   

   Create hoplink in ClickBank

2. In the new window, I enter my ClickBank username “kuzzuk” followed by an optional tracker “kuzzukblog” so I’ll know the origin of the sales and press the “Create” button.
   
   
   

   Create ClickBank Hop Window

3. This creates my ClickBank hoplink (highlighted in red). Essentially, hoplink in ClickBank language just means an affiliate link.
   
   
   

   ClickBank Hop Links

4. The hoplink created http://kuzzuk.autopilotp.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=KUZZUKBLOG will lead to the merchant’s sales page but this is what we want to avoid. In order to bypass the merchant’s sale page, change http://kuzzuk.autopilotp.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=KUZZUKBLOG to http://1.kuzzuk_autopilotp.pay.clickbank.net/
5. Breaking it down:
   • Add “1.” before your affiliate username.
   • Change the “.” to a “_” between the affiliate username and ClickBank product name.
   • Replace “hop” with “pay” and get rid of the tracking ID.
6. Test the difference, the link http://kuzzuk.autopilotp.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=KUZZUKBLOG will lead to the merchant’s sales page (usually butt ugly) but http://1.kuzzuk_autopilotp.pay.clickbank.net/ will directly lead to the payment page so you can write your own sales copy or review of the product and then directly send your reader to the payment page.

Tip: Create a simple A/B testing and see whether your copy or the merchant’s sale page converts better. You may be surprised as there are many people out there who clearly favor butt ugly sales letters.

Hide Affiliate Links With WordPress Redirection Plugin

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on April 9, 2009

Image Source: sxc.hu

As for terminology, people call it link cloaking, link masking or link redirection (see Shoemoney’s post for semantics) but to make it simple, I’ll refer to it as hiding affiliate links.

Many Ways To Skin A Cat Or Hide Affiliate Links

1. Link Shortening Services: Create a short URL with a click of a button using services like TinyURL or abbrr. Most of these services do not provide a way to save the list of URLs you have shortened so my recommendation is to create a simple spreadsheet to track all shortened affiliate links.
2. Professional Scripts: Buy paid scripts like Affiliate Redirector or Samurai Stealth Cloaker to hide affiliate links. By the way, I have hidden these affiliate links with the WordPress Redirection plugin.
3. Write Your Own Scripts: This is a little too technical for the layperson and I guess you wouldn’t be reading this post if you could write your own script. But if you really want to write your own script then Shoemoney’s post provides a good primer.

Cloaking Affiliate Links With WordPress Redirection Plugin

Obviously, there are many ways to hide affiliate links but I like using the WordPress Redirection Plugin because of its simplicity and basic tracking features.

1. Download, install and activate the WordPress Redirection Plugin
2. From your WordPress administrator dashboard, click “Tools” followed by the “Redirection” option on the left panel.
3. In the “Source URL” textbox add your masked URL. This page doesn’t have to be a valid page, for example, I added http://www.kuzzuk.net/go/AffiliateRedirector which does not exist in reality. In the “Target URL”, add your affiliate link and leave the other options as default. Click the “Add Redirection” button to save the changes.
   
4. Now place this masked URL in any of your blog posts and the reader will be directed accordingly. I normally do one more step when I’m linking using masked URLs, I add the rel=”nofollow” tag which means that search engines do not follow this link while indexing my site. This is an often ignored but important step.

Questions or comments. Please feel free to ask!