New Affiliate Discoveries

I’ve only viewed the first two lessons on Traffic Secrets…had a hell of a regular work week last week, four 24 hour shifts in 8 days…one was actually 26 hours!  Now you can see why I want this to work…

In spite of a bunch of EPN “beheadings” in which ebay terminated many affiliates for apparently no good (stated) reason, I am continuing to develop my BANS sites.  This is my best month yet, with about $280 of earnings, mostly  from 2 stores.  If I could take the success of those 2 stores and multiply it, even by just 5…that’s my mortage and student loan payment monthly!

Of course, no one wants all their eggs in one ebay basket.  For a new site I’m workign on, I’ve found 2 good affiliate programs in the industry on Comission Junction…both physical retail stores with a large online presense and affiliate programs of about 8% sales for items retailing for around $300 or more.  That’s about $24 per sale which is fine with me if I can get the traffic.

Currently, in addition to developing a few domains that I have laying around, I’m trying to add content to existing BANS stores, to keep up the good SEO traffic rankings.  I have a few different methodologies and trying to figure if one works better than the others.  The best performing site is a basic BANS site, in a hot market, with no fancy integration with wordpress or fancy BANS mods at all.

The next best site is an ugly WordPress integration…but people love to browse the ebay listings and I’ve got about $150 commissions from that store alone this month.

The remainder are BANS/Wordpress integrations with some havning BANS in the root folder, and others having WordPress in the root folder.  My newest site has been really slow to get traction off the ground…I think I picked some bad keywords.  Well, I’ll keep plugging away, and today posted another new content item…hopefully the traffic will start coming!

Maybe I need to read up more on Traffic Secrets…

Popularity: 3% [?]

Well I did it.  After the flood of emails by folks like Frank Kern, Ed Dale, Mike Rasmussen and Stompernet, I chose the best bonus and ordered Traffic Secrets 2.0 by John Reese.

I heard so much good stuff about Traffic Secrets 1.0 from people that I have come to know in the IM world, that I just had to go for it.  It was expensive…my biggest single expense yet.  But his free video previews seemed solid, and despite the delay in shipping, I am thouroughly impressed with what I received in the mail today.

Here is the contents of the box:

Sturdy Plastic bifold container…12 CDs in the left side, and 1 paperback book, a spiral bound book and several loose leaf sheets of paper in the right, with a nice foam spacer in the middle.

The 12 CDs I’ll go over as I view them.  The loose leaf sheets included a “getting started”, including login information for the website, as well as teh following:

• Mission Control Blueprint
• Market Spy Blueprint
• Opportunity Analyzer Blueprint
• Social Director Blueprint
• ADwords Attack Blueprint
• Advertising Expansion Blueprint
• Content Factory Blueprint (I’m looking forward to this one)

And in addition to all of that, both of Frank Kern’s bonus CDs were included.

Now I havn’t ordered a TON of guru products, I’m pretty stingy with my money, but so far, this looks great, and I think it’s going to be a good value.

So far I watched the Intro CD, and even just a basic framing of the “Core Principals” of Internet Marketing has got me excited…

• Competitive Research
• Piggybacking (Don’t reinvent the wheel)
• The 80/20 rule
• Do More of What Works
• Own More of the Internet
• Focus on Building Assets, including:
  • content
  • jproducts
  • email subscribers
  • distribution channels
  • test data
  • relationships

The biggest takeaway for tonight is that every week, you should have more content than last week.  That means a new blog post, new article, new store page, etc.  Of course you can do more than one per site per week, and leveraging content generation will become vital as you only have so much time.

I’m looking forward to learning how to outsource and create “content factories” for my multitude of projects…and I’m also realizing that at the end of every new project, I should go back through the old ones and be sure I’m adding new content regularly.

Popularity: 8% [?]

A fellow Wealthy Affiliate member gently nudged me that I have yet to poast June and July income reports… I will do so in the next few days.  Thanks shortsale blogger!

Popularity: 8% [?]

Hey guys, I know the gurus say not to apologize for not posting in awhile, but I feel like I’ve let my regulars down.  I have been a little distracted by working on some of my campaigns that I havn’t been posting here.

I wish that I had taken the opportunity to share with you guys in real time what I’ve been learning, but in  retrospect, you don’t always know what it is that your learning, and what portions of it are valuable.

Here is a brief update:

I am workign on a PPC campaign for a clickbank product.  This is my 3rd iteration of the campaign.  It is pretty much break even so far between sales and adspend.  You see this in a lot of the posts on wealthy affiliate…someone has made $2000 in sales, but also spent $2000 in adspend.

The secret to turning a profit is learning how to make your campaign more effective on a number of different aspects…

-reducing advertising costs

-obtaining more leads

-increasing the conversion rate of each lead

-increaseing the number of sales to each prospect or customer.

The past few weeks I’ve been focusing on obtaining more leads (for teh same adspend), and increasing the coversion rate of my sales.  I’ve done this be totally redesigning my autoresponder sequence to invoke more curiousity, and making more frequent promotions of the back end product.

At the same time, I try to engage my list by being personable and offering good advice.  It’s amazing the responses that I get from people on my list…even those who have not purchased from me, still thanking me for helping them with their problem!  (which makes me think that maybe I helped too much…and solved their problem without them buying teh product).

The second MAJOR thing that I’ve been working on is a partnership with several members of Wealthy Affiliate.  We had all been helping one another on the forums there and realzied that we all had talents that were mutually beneficial.  So we formed a real business entity and are currently working on developing a product that we discovered a demand for by doing research in our niche.

We have really high hopes that this will do well because it is a frequent topic in the news and we are devoping something that just isn’t out there yet.  I can’t say what it is yet, but in addition to the product itself, we are developing an amazing affiliate support package that will teach our affiliates everything they need to know about how to promote the product, track and test their results and increase our affiliates profits…which will naturally boost our own profits.

So stay tuned  for more updates!

Popularity: 12% [?]

How to Write a Love Note

Suppose you are trying to rank highly on google for a broad search term like “love letter”. You would have to have some pretty major page rank or serious incoming links to get to page one. Wanna know why?

Click on the image above. “Love Letter” has nearly 7 million competing pages in Google.

How to Write a Love Note - Step 2

OK, so “love letter” is out if you want to get on page one. Let’s try a longer keyword, suggested by Fender85, “How to Write a Love Letter”. Sounds like a much better term to try and rank with.

I’ll let you do the search on google this time, “How to Write a Love Letter“. If you click on that link, you’ll see only 26,000 competing pages. Much, much better.

But I bet we can do better still. Let’s get even more specific…

How to Write a Love Note - Step 3

At the bottom of the search page for “How to Write a Love Letter“, we see that google gives us some more ideas, namely, How to Write a Love Note.

What do you see when you click on that link? That’s right, only 43 competing pages! (well, hopefully it will be 44 by the time you read this post).

How to Write a Love Note - Step 4

So now we know how we get a first page spot on google…not for our original idea, “love letter”, but for our more defined phrase, How to Write a Love Note.

We do so by writing a short article, 300-500 words, with a keyword density of 3-5% using our chosen phrase, How to Write a Love Note.

Once our little How to Write a Love Note article is written, we post it to our blog, ping the article using Pingoat.com, Digg it, Stumble it, Delicious It, Reddit it, etc, etc.

Some services you can use for this include onlywire.com and socialposter.com

After all of that work above is done, we sit tight and keep on checking How to Write a Love Note. on Google…looking for our number 1 spot!

How’d we do?

P.S. Since posting this about 20 minutes ago, I now rank #2 for our search phrase…that was fast!

P.P.S. If you want to stay on top of tricks like this, sign up for my newsletter over on the right there, and I’ll send you all my best ideas!

P.P.P.S. If you’d prefer to just go straight to the source of where I learn these tricks, head over to Wealthy Affiliate…I’ve been a member there now for 2 months and it’s the greatest IM investment I’ve made so far!

Popularity: 27% [?]

May was a good month, both for earning and for learning.

Here’s the lowdown:

Text Link Ads (yep, still using them): $57.91

Build a Niche Store: $221.33

Wealthy Affiliate Commissions: $70

Clickbank (from my LEARNING at Wealthy Affiliate): $232.50

Adsense (havn’t even checked…)

Total: $581!!!

The downside: expenses! In May, much of my clickbank earnings came from direct linking campaigns to my merchant (and some bum marketing). Ad campaigns have costs…I’m not proud of my adspend, but I’m learning how to put a good campaing together. So my expenses for May’s

adwords were: $196.03

Wealthy Affiliate: $29 

Total profit: $356.71

Better and better each month. 

Popularity: 26% [?]

Last week in my inbox I had several urgent emails from the big name internet marketers for Mike Filsame’s 7 Figure secrets DVD and manual. I had never heard of it before, but I was intrigued, and actually ordered a hard copy of some of Mike Filsame’s paid seminars. Here is one of the descriptions:

My good friend Mike Filsaime had a seminar a while
back called 'The 7 Figure Code'. It was designed to
show people how to create their own 7 figure business
just like Mike has.

Over 100 people paid $5,000 to attend the seminar. He
turned it into a DVD product (which now sells for
$1,297) and to this date, over 3,000 people have
purchased those DVDs.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, and for $7 shipping, I was willing to take a look.

Here’s the fascinating part of all this…I received the same promo from two different A-list marketers, Michael Rasmussen and Frank Kern. Each one used radically different marketing methods that are worth dissecting and studying to learn how to apply their techniques to your own marketing efforts.  In this post, I analyze both promotions, disucuss the Laws of Persuasion used by each marketer and discussed their differences.

Check this out…I’ve posted both emails below…and then analyzed them for you. See what you can learn from this…

Mike Rasmussen’s Promotion 

Here is Mike Rasmussen’s email, skim through it if you like, then read my analysis:

Hey Suzanne, Michael Rasmussen here with a VERY time
sensitive announcement. This will only take a minute,
so make sure you read this short email right away.

There’s an incredible free offer available for you,
but only if you take action right away. There’s
nothing to buy. You’re about to get an unbelievably
valuable PRINTED course for nothing, so don’t put this
off. Read it now.

*************************************************
If you’re in a hurry, just go ahead and take a
look at this web page to see what I’m talking
about in this email.

http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/YourFreeDVD
*************************************************

Here’s the deal:

My good friend Mike Filsaime had a seminar a while
back called ‘The 7 Figure Code’. It was designed to
show people how to create their own 7 figure business
just like Mike has.

Over 100 people paid $5,000 to attend the seminar. He
turned it into a DVD product (which now sells for
$1,297) and to this date, over 3,000 people have
purchased those DVDs.

*************************************************
WHY DOES THIS MATTER TO YOU?
*************************************************

Because Mike paid a professional copywriter $25,000 to
watch the DVDs from that seminar and turn it into a
tightly packed, 85 page report that distills all the
wisdom from that seminar into something you can read
in one sitting.

That means you are literally going to get the same
content that people paid $5,000 for… and you’re
going to get it for free!

Originally, Mike was planning to sell it for $297.00,
and as soon as he sold 3,000 copies, he was going to
pull it off the market. The manuals are already
printed, spiral bound, and sitting at the warehouse
ready to be shipped to your door for free.

*************************************************
BUT ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST
*************************************************

Remember, you don’t have to pay anything for this free
report. All Mike asks is that you pay around 8 dollars
for shipping and handling, but other than that… you
just simply tell him where to ship your free report.
It’s as simple as that.

Go ahead and watch the special video that Mike has
created for you to explain exactly what you’ll be
getting. Do that now, because this offer is only good
until all the reports have been shipped.

Considering that almost every marketing guru alive is
telling their readers about this, you should hurry and
watch the video right now. Here’s the URL:

http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/YourFreeDVD

All the best,

Michael Rasmussen

P.S. - By the way, Mike is also going to send you two
additional items along with the report. These items
are actually worth more than the report itself, but
you’ll get them along with the report. Go watch Mike’s
video for full details on the report itself and the
extra goodies you’ll get. Here’s the link one last
time:

http://www.michaelrasmussen.com/YourFreeDVD

Mike’s Laws of Persuasion

Mike’s email uses two primary Laws of Persuasion along with a common marketing tactic. Can you pick them out? He uses the Law of Scarcity and the Law of Social Proof. Notice how right from the beginning, he hits hard with how quickly you need to act because supplies are limited, and he urges you to take action now. Reread the first 2 paragraphs, he hammers this Law several times in just a few sentances. Do you find this compelling? (I didn’t).

Later he describes the source of this content:

Over 100 people paid $5,000 to attend the seminar. He
turned it into a DVD product (which now sells for
$1,297) and to this date, over 3,000 people have
purchased those DVDs.

This is an example of Social Proof…Other people are doing it, so you should too! Really, 3000 people have purchosed those DVDs, so here’s a chance to get it FREE!

Again, consider how persuasive this is…is it making you want to buy? Maybe, maybe not. It didn’t do much for me.

Frank Kern’s Promotion

Now here is Frank Kern’s version of the same promotion. For those of you who don’t know Frank Kern, he’s a hippie-surfer who has great (free) content on his website and is very entertaining.

Hey - you know all the promos you're getting about
Mike Filsaime’s “free” offer?

Do you think anyone took the time to actually GET the stuff
and investigate it before they sent you blatant promos for it?

Well, I got it …and I went through the offer with a fine tooth
comb. And I made this video for you that reveals the “catch”.

It’s here on my blog:
http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=ljhv,a94e,ax5,334q,jkmr,h27h,b1vn

Have a good weekend,
Frank

P.S. Don’t hassle me about how bad I look in this video!
I didn’t have time to get my professional team of stylists
in to bring me up to our usual “hollywood” standards  

Here’s the video.
http://www.elabs7.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=ljhv,a94e,ax5,334q,jkmr,h27h,b1vn

Frank’s Laws of Persuasion 

Frank is using a different set of Persuasion Laws here, namely, the Law of Liking, and the Law of Reciprocity. You see in this email, Frank has done us a favor first of all…he’s ordered the product and gone through it with a fine toothed comb to find out what the “catch” is in the Free Promotion. (Keep reading and I’ll tell you at the end).

He’s done us a favor, which automatically triggers a response in use to reciprocate the favor. in his email, Frank is asking us to take a look at his video, so we do…and we are entertained by it.

The second Law is the Law of Likability. Frank is just plain likable, and it comes through in this carefree email to his list. He’s not trying to sell us, he’s just sharing his video.

You know what got me to click on his link in the email to watch the video? It was the PS:

P.S. Don't hassle me about how bad I look in this video!
I didn't have time to get my professional team of stylists
in to bring me up to our usual "hollywood" standards  

I wanted to see how bad he looked here, so I clicked and watched his video.

These two emails are a great example of why you should consider subscribing to email lists or RSS feeds of the great marketers..so you can study their marketing methods and learn from them.

Which of the two marketers did you find more compelling? If you had to buy from one of them, which one would it be?

Would you buy from me?

PS OK, here’s the catch to the “free” offer. When you order, you are given a free issue of his membership magazine (I think it’s even a print copy). If you decide to keep it, you pay $29/month, but can cancel at any time by calling the phone number given. I imagine lots of people will forget, or will want to keep the magazine, and as a result, Mike Filsame will make a lot of money off of his “free” offer. Plus there are a lot of upsells after you click purchase.

PPS I ordered it too, and have not received the hard copy yet, but did look at the process maps, which I really like…I’ve written about process mapping in affiliate marketing before so this is really an interest of mine.

Popularity: 28% [?]

You don’t want to miss this. Ed Dale is a real giver.

Live broadcast right now on 30 day challenge tv…don’t worry, you can view it later as well.

Sign up free here:

http://www.ThirtyDayChallenge.com/challenge/11628

BTW, the aff link is just for “points” for which you can get prizes…like memberships to some of his other sites.

If you don’t want to use it, just type

www.thirtydaychallenge.com

Popularity: 39% [?]

I worked 2 12 hour shifts over the weekend, and overnight last night. The whole time all I could think about was my current campaign that I’ve been sharing with you guys. One of the members of the Wealthy Affiliate Forum challenged the members to lay out their entire campaign for the members to see…with a promise of public mentorship and guidance step by step.

All I can say is that so far it has been mind blowing! Myself and 3 others have taken him up on this challenge. THere are 4 different forum threads going, with each of us cross posting to one another, and hundreds of views of the threads by other members of the forum.

There is so much more to SUCCESSFUL affilaite marketing than just trying to sell. The keys to the vault are in tracking and improving what’s working and scrapping what isn’t…the real question is how and what do you track?

It seems simple on the surface, but it takes work, effort, the ability to make a plan and follow through, and a blueprint for where you are going. It doesn’t mean that you know where you will end up, but the PROCESS of getting there is the single most important aspect of success.

In one year, I will kiss my “day job” goodbye. Hold me up to this promise, OK?

PS You can check out the four thread’s of “C’s challenge” in the Forums at Wealthy Affiliate (sign up for a trial membership and see what you think)

Popularity: 42% [?]

I had a small taste of success last week, when I was selling about 1 clickbank book every 2-3 days.  I figured if I just tripled my adspend, I’d get a sale a day.

Not so much.

I was still getting clicks on my ads, and visits to my page, and even click throughs to my merchant’s page…but I have not sold a single ebook in that niche for about 10 days. Ugh.  And in the meantime have spent about $150 in ads, while selling 7 books @ $26 each.  So if I’ve done my math right, I”m still close to break even.

Before sending traffic to my landing page, I was getting a sale about every 15-20 clicks to the merchants page (via direct linking).  But since making my own landing page, not a single sale!  Something about my landing page is turning people off.

I’ve started threads on wealthy affilate, and PM’d both Kyle & Carson for help.  Each has given me great input to improve things, but something was still missing.

I contacted a forum member through the “Jobs” section who was offering free adwords advice.  What he really give me was free landing page advice, at least for starters.

I had paused my ad campaign, earlier, and over the last 2 days I added a few pages ot the mini-site (two of them suggested by him are no brainer ways to add relevancy to your mini-site…so simple that it’s easy to overlook!).

I started a new adgroup using identical keywords as my previous best performing adgroup, and I created 2 ads with only one word difference between the two.  I’ll run this test tomorrow to check for CPC, CTR and CTR to merchant.  I will make 1 change daily to either the adgroup, the keywords or the landing page to fine tune the response.

I feel like I am on the verge of “breaking through”…I have had success at selling ebooks via direct linking & PPC, and am now trying to do the same with my own landing page.

Then the opt in is a different beast all together.  I don’t want too many eggs in the basket at once, so stay tuned.

Popularity: 42% [?]