Small Time Affiliate Marketing
Posted on October 24, 2007
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We’ve been over affiliate marketing already, but from a blogging perspective there is much to be said for including some affiliate links in and around a blog.
This is small time affiliate marketing and don’t expect one blog to make money by the truckload in doing it. Who said you have to stick with just one blog?
I’ve been looking at this from a slightly different angle lately and have realized that you have to think in terms of a bigger vista. One blog is fine if you only want to tick over money wise to begin with and see where your promotional efforts take you. There are plenty of successful bloggers out there who only run one blog. A big part of that success comes down to building that blog up so that it has a huge readership and then you can make money by charging advertisers a small fortune for you valuable high traffic space.
But when your blog hasn’t got that kind of grunt and you need to start pulling in the dollars, there is an alternative to get things moving, although it does entail a lot of work. Doesn’t it always?
It means finding several niches and doing the required keyword research work and then setting up several blogs to cater for each niche. Then using the affiliate programs you already belong to (join more if you need to), put up affiliate links on all of your blogs.
The method in this madness is by rationalizing that if one blog makes you “x” amount of dollars from it’s affiliate sales, then ten blogs will make ten times as much. Give or take depending on the popularity of the niche. That’s where your research will pay off of you’ve found some good niches to begin with.
It won’t work if you don’t. Plain and simple.
So depending upon how ready you are to take on a whole load more work, you can turn small time affiliate marketing into a big time business.
Because if ten blogs make you ten times as much, think how much money you could make with twenty, thirty or more blogs… if you can manage that many!
Here’s to your success!
Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0
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Reviewing Affiliate Products
Posted on October 19, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments
Following on from my last post about Clickbank, I was asked about whether it’s better to actually purchase a product yourself before promoting and reviewing it on your own site (see comments).
When I first started to promote affiliate products, I wondered about this dilemma too. I believe the jury is still out on whether it’s really necessary to purchase a product yourself before selling it. Of course, if you do have the product, then you can give an in-depth and unbiased review and possibly make more sales because you can state that you have bought the product yourself making your review more believable.
The flip side is that if you don’t want to buy the product, you can find other affiliates who are promoting it and see what they say in their reviews. If you can find several different reviews that all give a reasonable amount of pros and cons then you can base your own review on their findings. In that case, it’s worth mentioning that your review is based on the recommendation of several reliable sources - something that newspaper reporters do all the time and get away with it!
Whatever you decide to do, one thing you should never do is try to mislead you readers.
If a product has been given the thumbs down from several reliable sources, chances are it’s a lemon and you shouldn’t promote it anyway. You’d be committing professional suicide by promoting any product that turned out to be a scam, so be careful!
A good place to find out about many different Internet Marketing products is the WhyDoWork forum, as the members are constantly digging up new products and questioning the merits of them, to which other members who have tried the products can answer truthfully. This is an excellent source of product review material and one that should be consulted on every affiliate product that you decide to promote yourself.
So you do have a choice whether to actually buy a product yourself or not before promoting it as an affiliate. Just make sure that before you do anything, you research the product first - you don’t want to promote a scam product any more than you’d want to buy one yourself.
Terry Didcott
Author and Creator of Blogging Web 2.0
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ClickBank
Posted on October 18, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 5 Comments
Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money from blogging when it’s done properly.
One of the easiest ways of getting into affiliate marketing is by signing up with ClickBank and making use of their extensive database of digital products and services that can easily be downloaded by the customers that the affiliate marketer sends to the vendors’ sales pages. Of course, there are two sides to Clickbank - that of the vendor who has a digital product or products to sell and that of the affiliate marketer who will promote those products in order to earn commission from all sales that are generated from customers they introduced. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you’re going to be working as an affiliate in order to make money from those commissions.
Signing up with Clickbank is the easy part. It’s a straightforward form to fill in and you create your own user name and password. Then the fun begins…
To get the best from Clickbank, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing is to focus on niches that are nothing to do with Internet Marketing (IM). The niches you choose will depend entirely upon your own choices. These will be topics that you know enough about to be able to work with enthusiasm and drive in order to promote the products effectively. You will also need to have done your homework by researching keywords, consumer trends and other factors that will affect the potential of your chosen niche to make money for you.
You don’t actually need your own website to be an effective and highly profitable affiliate marketer. Many have done very well by using free hosted blogs and Squidoo lenses, so that choice is also yours.
One thing about having your own professionally hosted website is that you have total control on the content that will appear on your site, plus you will have the advantages of large storage and bandwidth as well as excellent guaranteed uptime that your host will provide.
Once you have decided on your medium, be it free hosted blogs or professionally hosted websites/blogs and you have found a potentially profitable niche, then you can start trawling through the vast database at Clickbank for products to promote.
There are some things you need to look out for when choosing which products to promote. Once you get the list of products displayed there is certain statistical information associated with each item that is of great value to you, if you know what each statistic means. Here is a summary of what you’ll see:
- $/Sale. An average of how much money is earned per sale. A product selling for $100 with a 50% commission should have a $/Sale of $50. If it is a lot lower than that, it means the product produces a lot of refunds, so you might want to avoid it.
- %/Sale. This is the percentage of commission given on each sale. Affiliates prefer the higher percentage commissions because it means more money in your bank account per sale.
- % Reffered. This gives the percentage of overall sales that are generated by affiliates. A very high figure, say over 80% will mean that most sales come from affiliates. That could mean a lot of competition making the product more difficult to sell.
- Gravity. This is a weighted number of how many affiliates are promoting the product and earning money doing so. The higher the gravity, the more affiliates are promoting a product, meaning more competition. The current top product at Clickbank has a gravity of over 700, meaning that over 700 affiliates are promoting it. That’s how many other affiliates you are going up against to sell a product.
These figures should influence your choice of products to sell, as you might find it difficult to get many sales from those with heavy competition, so it might be wiser to stick to products that have lower gravity and % referred figures.
Once you choose your product to sell, there is a link to “create hoplink”, which is your unique affiliate code for that product. The resulting link you are given is what you should enter in your own promotional review of the product that you will write and publish on your blog or website. This is how Clickbank tracks which customers were referred to a product by which affiliate. A cookie with your hoplink is placed on a customer’s computer, so when they come to make the purchase, even if it is several days after being referred from your site, you are credited with the sale and will receive your commission.
This has a downside in that many people now use anti-spyware software on their computers, some of which block cookies from being set, which effectively negates your sale. Many affiliate commissions have been lost because of this and at present, Clickbank have not come up with a solution to the problem.
Still, don’t be put off by this. There is still a lot of money to be made from affiliate marketing using the services of Clickbank and the beauty of it is that once you have your site up and running with your carefully reviewed affiliate products displayed, your energies can then be directed to promoting your own site in order to attract as many people as possible, any number of whom could be potential customers just waiting to buy one of the products that you are promoting.
Here’s to your success!
Terry Didcott
Author and creator of Blogging Web 2.0
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Affiliate Link Cloaking Part 1
Posted on September 24, 2007
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing | 1 Comment
If you are an affiliate marketer you probably wondering why you never make any sales. Maybe your are not even aware that some people steal them from right under your nose. But how can that be - it’s easy really. If you are like most people promoting clickbank as an affiliate marketer, then those in the know will simply replace your clickbank id with theirs when they are about to purchase a product from your site. What this means for you is two things.
- You won’t get a commission as the sale is officially going to the buyer who stole your link
- You will get very frustrated and eventually give up altogether on affiliate marketing
Either way it isn’t a very nice experience for you. But there is a way to cloak your links quite easily provided you have your own web hosting.
If you don’t, then there is still ways to circumnavigate this issue by cloaking your links with an URL shortener. Instead of having an ugly URL that would read like
http://www.vendor.com/12grus?=xxxx or similar, you could have one that reads
The following 4 sites allow you to cloak your link for free:
- Diop - you can cloak your link by choosing your keyword.
- Tiny URL - create a tiny URL from a long and ugly one, the downside of this site is that most good URL’s are already taken
- Read This URL - with this one you can even tag the links
- Memurl - Lets you create a mnemonic URL that looks like this http://memurl.com/kusipe
These cloaking helpers should however only be used, when you don’t have your own hosting - e.g. your site/blog is on a free platform.
A much better way to install a redirect link is via .htaccess. To do this, you will need to navigate through your CPanel to - File Manager - public_html - .htaccess - click on edit file - then put in the following code:
Redirect /recommends http://www.youraffiliatelink.com
What this will do in effect is to redirect the affiliate link from your website with the extension of the folder name you gave it. In my case the folder name is “recommends”. So the link I would advertise would be
http://www.bloggingweb20.com/recommends instead of the ugly looking affiliate link. Make sure that you leave one space between your “Redirect” and the backslash (/) as well as between your folder name and the beginning of the URL.
Naturally, there are even more ways to cloak your affiliate links, but for now we will leave it at that as it will keep you busy in learning new things. (For those who didn’t know this)
Keep your eyes out for Part 2 of this series.
To your Success
Monika Mundell Creator and Author of Blogging Web 2.0
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