January 24th, 2008 — Affiliate Income, affiliate marketing
How much money did you make as an internet marketer over the last 8 months? What if I told you that over the next 2 months you could make double that entire amount and the following three months you could see your income grow by another 4 times?
Would you believe me? Sadly, I’m not telling my story but the tale of an UberAffiliate who used determination, testing , adaptation, & networking to do exactly what I just described.
Check out the graph he shares on his year anniversary post. What if he would have gotten discouraged and quit after that 8th month? Thanks to Paul for sharing his journey, a great example of how persistence is key to success. My latest affiliate promotion was rather unsuccessful, Paul’s post has reminded me to learn from the discouragement and press on.
If you’re looking for a little insight to his success, he shares a lot of the resources he’s used in his affiliate marketing guide. Nice work Paul!
January 7th, 2008 — Pay Per Click
Zac Johnson has done it again! His most popular article to date is the Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing where he goes step by step through setting up a Google AdWords campaign to promote affiliate offers. Several months before I signed up for and went through Amit’s Super Affiliate Accelerator program I stepped through Zac’s guide to get to know AdWords.
Now he’s put together a great tutorial article on getting started with pay per click marketing on Microsoft AdCenter, the Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing on Microsoft AdCenter. He even points you to a signup offer that can give you $50 to get started. Thanks Zac!
January 6th, 2008 — Finances, Information Products, Internet Marketing, Outsourcing, Pay Per Click, Time Management, affiliate marketing
Ever feel like you could make more money if you just had more time! That’s how I feel every day. December was tough with the holidays and long hours at my day job but I still managed to accomplish a few things.
Business Finances – I figured out my books for the business for 2007, happy to say it was a profit! One crazy thing, I just got my annual performance increase at my day job and my business earnings for 2007 were more than three times the amount of the increase. I can’t wait to get rid of this job so I can spend all my time growing my business! I still need to pay my estimated taxes for Q4 2007, due here in a week or so.
Affiliate Relationships – One of the things that Amit recommended was to build a good relationship with your affiliate manager. So I called up my affiliate manager at Never Blue Ads and had a productive first phone call. I got some insight into which campaigns to promote in my niche. One of the things she mentioned was that the Earnings Per Click numbers you see as you’re browsing campaigns factor in all different types of marketing, Web/Email/Search. When I told her my niche and that I was going to be promoting offers with Pay Per Click she gave me EPC numbers that were just from PPC traffic.
Pay Per Click Campaign – I used the techiques I learned from Amit’s Super Affilate Accelerator course to setup, upload, and launch an Adwords campaign for one of the offers my affiliate manager pointed out. I’m monitoring its progress now and will tweak as needed.
Information Products – I completed my first information product, Easy eBay Business. I’ve been working at it off and on for a while now so it was nice to get it finished. I haven’t begun promoting it yet, I’ll probably use an Adwords campaign once I have time to build one.
I also started exploring a partnership for an information product with one of my online buddies who is a subject matter expert in the niche. He’s going to write a free report to give away, I’ll build a landing page and create an Adwords campaign and we’ll see how much demand there is.
One of my business advisors and friends recently finished an information product that should see demand sky rocket due to a new government policy. I spent some time on some content promoting their product and will likely set up an Adwords campaign there as well.
Time Management – I got my FreshBooks account back up and running again. I set it up at the beginning of the year but didn’t use it much. My only New Year’s resolution at this point is to make better use of my time since I tend to try and work on too many things at once. I’m tracking everything in FreshBooks now and every two weeks or so I’ll go over how I’m spending my time.
I tried out Mechanical Turk to outsource some basic tasks to help get content on a new site for a niche I’ve been wanting to move into for some time. I listed the same task on both Mechanical Turk and eLance and so far the bids on Mechanical Turk have been much more reasonable and in line with the scope of the job.
Next Month – Not bad I guess for a busy month at work and the with holidays. I’m going to continue to balance my multitude of project for January, then revaluate with some numbers from FreshBooks at the end of the month to see which projects to put on hold and which to pursue.
January 5th, 2008 — Copywriting, Marketing
The speeches by the Democratic presidential candidates after the recent Iowa caucuses were a great case study in the power of selling by emotion.
Political Hope
Barack Obama’s speech was by far the most energetic and inspiring delivery of the evening because he appealed to the emotions of the voters. Obama was selling hope. Not a political platform or a stand on issues, but an energetic promise of something better than we have now.
Selling the End Result
When we’re promoting a product, we should be selling the end result. We’re selling whatever it is our prospect is hoping the product will accomplish. The best way to sell hope is to appeal to their emotions. Understand the pain they’re feeling that caused them to search out a solution. They have a problem they’re trying to solve, we have to understand those problems and convince them that our product is the answer. We offer them hope for a better situation than they have now.
Examples of Selling Hope
How to Make Money eBook – The prospect’s goal isn’t to spend all their time selling on eBay, building affiliate sites, or running pay per click campaigns. Their goal is to have enough money to pay the bills, be able to quit their job, or get loaded so they can take big vacations and buy expensive cars. Their hope is freedom, sell them that.
Weight Loss Products – People buy Fat Loss for Idiots or Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle not because they want to diet and exercise but because they want to lose weight. Their hope is to be skinny again, sell them that.
How to Sell Hope
The famous saying tells us that people aren’t buying a drill, they’re buying a hole. They want their problem solved, they’re not particularly interested in how it’s accomplished, they just want to know it’s all going to work out and that their “pain” is going to go away. So how do we convey this message of hope, how do we appeal to their emotions? I think the answer is simple yet elusive. Write good copy. Easier said than done right?
Good Copywriting
Sales pages are vital to the success of an affiliate campaign. This is why great copy writers get paid the big bucks. If we can write copy that addresses the prospect’s “pain” and how much better things will be once our product solves the problem then we can appeal to their emotions and should get better conversions as a result.
How do we get quality copy? We can learn from case studies by the experts or hire a copywriter on eLance. If we can improve our copy to appeal to our prospects emotion and offer them hope we’ll have achieved a quality pre-sell and will likely experience higher conversions.
December 21st, 2007 — Mailing List, Pay Per Click
Marketing expert Jay Abraham points out that there are 3 ways to grow any business: sell to more customers, increase the dollar value of each transaction, and increase the frequency of customer purchases. As I reviewed my latest Adwords stats I realized his advice could be applied to pay per click marketing.
1) Sell to more Customers
- Optimize Ad Position (Quality Score, Keyword Bid, Keyword Research)
- Increase Click Through Rate (Specific, Targeted, Enticing Ad Copy)
- Optimize Landing Page Conversions (Split Test & Tweak)
2) Increase the $ Value of each Transaction
- Choose Higher Margin Products/Industry
- Promote Multiple Offers
- Upsell
3) Increase the Frequency of Customer Purchases
I don’t know the statistics of capturing repeat buyers through PPC marketing but I’m guessing they’re pretty low. Once someone clicks through to your landing page, the best way to increase your chances of getting a recurring sale from them is to capture an email lead with a tool like Aweber. Learn the optimal ways to build a relationship with your leads and offer them products they want.
Business Growth
As Jay points out, if you can improve one of these factors you can grow your business in a linear fasion, improve a combination of them and you can grow it exponentially. Of course in PPC marketing each person landing on your sales page costs you money and you want to at least cover the cost of the click by making an affiliate sale. If you can find a way to make the sale and then upsell or capture a lead without effecting your conversions, you could potentially increase your earnings exponentially.
What I’m learning is that the trick to finding the method that works best is to measure and then test like crazy. Thanks to Jay for pointing out the business theory, now we just have to figure out how to apply it!
December 5th, 2007 — Conferences
Christmas came early this year! It’s worked out that I’m able to attend Affiliate Summit West next February. I just now finished taking care of the conference pass, airline ticket, and room reservations, I’m psyched!
Since the goal of Affiliate Whispers is to learn from experienced marketers, I figured the best place to meet them is at Affiliate Summit. I’ve been learning a lot from Colin and am really looking forward to meeting him in person.
I’m also tuned in to many other affiliate marketing blogs and am excited to meet their authors; Amit, Zac, Jeremy, John, Paul, and Jonathan just to name a few.
I’ll be giving some thought as to the best way to prepare for the conference since it’s my maiden voyage, I’m looking forward to learning new things and meeting some cool people!
December 4th, 2007 — Lead Generation, Pay Per Click
I’m a cheapskate so I hate the thought of spending money on traffic for a one-time shot of making money. I decided to make my first foray into pay per click advertising with a landing page whose goal was to attract newsletter subscribers rather than just make one sale. The idea is that my initial PPC investment buys subscribers I can promote products to on a recurring basis over time.
Pay Per Click Setup
Since the concept of Affiliate Whispers is to learn and apply methods that other successful marketers use I leveraged the following resources when building a small pay per click campaign:
Thanks to those guys for putting together the great resources! Better yet they’re all free, with the exception of Super Affiliate Accelerator which I think is well worth the cost.
Landing Page
A simple Wordpress installation was perfect for hosting my landing page, associated articles, contact page, privacy policy, and about page. A free theme from Internet Marketing With Blogs gave me a great foundation for a sales page, I used Aweber to place a newsletter signup form above the fold and also at the end of the sales page.
I wrote my own copy, trying to take as many lessons as I could from CopyBlogger so we’ll see how that goes. Two theme appropriate images were used to help pull their eyes down the page and I stuck the first lead capture form close to the first image to help draw their eyes to it. One thing I debated was using eLance to create the articles for the site but ended up spending a few nights writing those myself as well.
Quality Score
Apparently the articles all inter-linked with the contact page, privacy policy, and about page did the trick for quality score. Thanks to Zac I knew how to check my quality score once I got my campaign loaded up and it was a green “Great”.
Domain Name
I’m not sure how great my domain name choice was. Since I’m not promoting a product on the sales page but rather an “end result” I tried to go with a name that would make people visualize that end goal. The thought is they’ll sign up for the newsletter with the intent of reaching that goal. It’s only a two word domain name with no dashes so it’s kind of brandable, if that’s a word.
The Offer
Who’s going to sign up for a newsletter without a little prompting right? I offer a niche specific free report for anyone that signs up. I also offer to point them to a bonus of a free product trial upon signup. I tried to work in some potential conversions right off the bat. Once they’ve confirmed their subscription they get access to the free report which is also a teaser for a Clickbank product and the free trial offers which are leads from Never Blue Ads.
Campaign Reflections
I just kicked off my Adwords campaign so we’ll see what my CTR, minimum bid, and newsletter signups turn out to be. Perhaps I tried to do too much for my first attempt at PPC marketing, I could have just tried Google Cash to get the hang of it, but Amit makes a good point when he discusses the research and patience required for a successful campaign.
It took me about two weeks of evenings after my day job to get the research done and the domain, articles, sales page, auto-responder, offers, and Adwords campaign setup. We’ll see how it goes. If nothing else, I learned a lot just going through the steps. I probably have more questions now than when I started; all part of the learning process.
Paying for Leads
As I setup my keyword bids, one thing I thought about was how it’s too bad you have to pay to learn. That’s one thing that I like about Jim Cockrum’s Silent Sales Machine, the prospect pays you (by buying something on eBay) to become a lead vs. you paying for a chance to market to them like with Adwords.
I guess one major thing that separates Adwords lead generation from eBay lead generation is the much larger volume that Adwords can drive, in addition to the fact you actually need to have your own product in order to generate the lead on eBay. We’ll see how my first test of PPC lead generation goes, stay tuned.
November 25th, 2007 — Pay Per Click
According to Ed Dale, you can now survey and market to your core audience for chump change with Facebook. In an audio recording with Yanik Silver, Ed raves about how you can target Facebook users in a very specific manner and gives some strategies for affiliate marketing on Facebook.
If I wasn’t in the middle of learning the ins and outs of Google Pay Per Click I’d rush over and jump into Facebook marketing tonight. I have to resist internet marketer ADD and focus on one thing at a time but I’ll be sure to checkout the marketing opportunities on Facebook very soon.
One thing Ed talks about are the differences between advertising with Google Adwords and on Facebook. Apparently there are some things you have to watch out for to avoid having your account shutdown. The first time I read about advertising on Facebook was from Paul Bourque who managed to get about 500 different accounts created and banned. Now two months later Ed Dale has had time to play around with advertising on Facebook and offers some good insights into it’s potential.
November 22nd, 2007 — Outsourcing
What’s the most valuable asset for an online business? Some may say search engine rankings, others might say a brand, or you could argue a tightly focused/high dollar niche. I won’t argue with any of those but the one thing that I think trumps them all is time.
Time is Money
Time is a limited resource that is major constraint not just for your initiatives but all of your competitors as well. With enough time you could hit the front page of Google, create a brand, or find a killer niche. But who has enough time right? I definitely have more ideas and to-dos than I have time to act on them all. If I just had more time to pursue all those opportunities, I could be very wealthy : )
Using Leverage
As I learn more about internet marketing one of the skills I’m seeing as a must have is the ability to leverage resources. If you know what you’re doing, and I don’t yet, you can buy traffic and use it to sell products for more than you paid for the traffic. The right article can even leverage social media to get free traffic! If your affiliate tactics work well, you can leverage your success by documenting your methods in order to sell information or build your profile.
Leveraging Time
I was struggling to learn more about affiliate marketing since my main site, non-marketing, was taking up most of my free time. There was a lot I needed to learn but at the end of each day I simply didn’t have enough time. Even going to bed at 2–3 AM and up again at 6 AM for the J.O.B. wasn’t giving me enough hours in the day to learn what I needed.
I recently made the best business decision I’ve made in a long while and decided to hire someone on eLance to run my site for me. The income from the site more than pays the monthly rate for the freelancer and now I have time to focus on learning affiliate marketing. It’s the coolest feeling, the site is still cranking out content and bringing in cash and I don’t have to do a thing! Okay, so it’s no 4 Hour Work Week but it’s a start : )
Addicted to Outsourcing
Now I’m addicted to the thought of leveraging the time of others to help me create my affiliate sites. I’m considering hiring out parts of the market research, site design, and copywriting steps to help me get affiliate campaigns up and running. If I can reduce the amount of time it takes to test and launch a product promotion I should be able to increase my affiliate income and my results shouldn’t be limited by my availability.
Getting Started Outsourcing
I had been toying with the idea of hiring help for a long time but had put it off mainly because I’d never used eLance before and wasn’t sure how the whole process worked.
I got started simply by browsing all the current and past projects and finding one similar to what I needed. I used pretty much the same project description, changing only a few details, and had 6 interested providers by the end of the bidding process. I narrowed it down to three candidates based on their feedback, asked them all some questions via a private message feature, then just went with my gut.
If you’ve been looking for ways to make better use of your time I would reccomend giving outsourcing a try. If you can leverage other people’s time to increase your profits the sky’s the limit!
November 12th, 2007 — Market Research
I took Colin’s advice and decided to take a little break from the Web the other day and do a little alternative keyword research in the bookstore.
I headed to the section in Barnes & Noble covering the topic I’m researching and sure enough they had several shelves of books on my area. I started off with the Bestseller shelf so I could dig into what keywords are hot right now.
I didn’t even have to open a book, simply scanning the cover and back gave me enough keywords to work with. Not only did I find some good keywords but I saw some useful examples of enticing sales copy on the covers!
I’ve since used those keywords as Amit’s videos walked me through the process of setting up an Adwords campaign in his Super Affiliate Accelerator training.
It definitely helps me to get away from the computer for a few minutes every now and then, in this case, it helped me build a new keyword list!