Affiliate Marketing Success

Online Store??

2006-02-12T16:32:00.000+08:00

Have you ever think of starting a online store?

I launched one half year ago. It took me lot of time to develop this store even though I'm using 3rd party shopping cart system. I need to put up hundreds of product descriptions, images, and some contents pages. Plus some procrastination, it took me more than 6 months to develop. I even stopped doing anything for 3 months and thought of giving up.

Till now, my store still not making much money. Comparing with content sites, some of them even making money in the 1st month! Totally different world and tough business! But Amazon.com's story provide me lot of patience to continue. They lost so much money in the initial years... Of course I do not have intention to be as big as them. I enjoy being SMALL in my NICHE.

I just read through the below interesting thread. You may want to take a look if you would like to go into online wholesale or dropship business.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum22/4803.htm

It's easier to operate an online shop - if you niche.

Another Virtual Real Estate Article

2006-02-10T00:26:00.000+08:00

Below is the excerpt of one of the excellent email from John Reese when he sent out to promote one software program few months ago.

Today I am sending you this message that might be the most important email you ever receive.

Okay... That sounds kinda "hypey" doesn't it?

Well, maybe it does. But the fact of the matter is, I am about to tell you about something that very well may change your life -- especially if you are truly interested in building a solid income online.

As you probably know by now, I've been singing the praises of "VRE" (Virtual Real Estate creation) for over a year now. The online advertising industry has rebounded from the big "Dot Com" crash that happened just 5 years ago. More money than ever is being pumped into online advertising today than ever before. And setting up a VRE 'empire' is one of the best ways for you to make money online.

In fact, VRE is very much like the "gold rush" that happened with .COM domain names. Wouldn't you like to be able to go back to 1994 and buy almost any .COM domain name you wanted? Just think of how much money you would make by turning around and selling single domains for as much as $250,000
or more!

But, unfortunately, we can't go back in time and take advantage of that opportunity that has now passed. HOWEVER...

What we *can* do is take advantage of lucrative new opportunities. And VRE is one of the best I've seen since I've been marketing online since 1990.

That's right. One of the BEST in the history of the Internet.

And here's the greatest thing about this opportunity...

Unlike the .COM gold rush and other past opportunities, VRE is going to be around practically FOREVER. So it's not going to just go away and no longer make money.

BUT...

There's a very important reason that you ABSOLUTELY MUST take action *today* if you want to make a ton of money with your own VRE empire...

You see, as time goes on, more and more and more and more people are going to get into the VRE 'game'. Competition is going to get tougher. It will become harder and harder to get tons of free traffic
from the search engines. It is going to get MUCH harder to make easy profits.

Plain and simple. VRE will eventually become something that's very difficult to make a lot of money with. It doesn't mean that there won't always be a decent opportunity to create VRE type sites and make money (even 10 years from now) but single sites won't make as much money as they can today.

FACT: If you want to make as much money as possible online, there are certain things you must absolutely start doing RIGHT NOW.

As you probably know, one of the most critical components for getting free search engine traffic is to get
incoming links to your site from other sites. Because of this, the people that act NOW and start creating sites and getting these links together will have a MAJOR advantage over people that try to get into the VRE game in the future.

Why?

It's simple. Once you have a certain number of incoming links to your site and it gives you higher search engine rankings, your site will build STABILITY in the rankings.

In other words, it will be harder and harder for competition to beat your page rankings. AND since you will get more traffic than "newcomers" to your market, you'll be able to have links on your pages that invite other sites to TRADE LINKS with you -- giving you more incoming links and GROWING YOUR ADVANTAGE over future competition.

So it's critical that you get things going TODAY if you want to take advantage of this awesome opportunity.

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Yours For Online Profits,

John Reese

Virtual Real Estate...

2006-02-05T00:20:00.000+08:00

I came across an excellent article about building the virtual real estate.

Read it at Website Marketing Strategy.

PPCs

2005-01-25T17:00:00.000+08:00

No doubt, PPC is the really powerful marketing tool. I came across a guy from one of the famous forum that he and his partner spend US$2000 per day to get US$5000. This make them US$36000 per month in profit. This is really inspiring to me!

I decided to spend more time on developing PPC campaign. My advise is to focus on Adwords and Overture. Forget about small PPC search engine. I've tested Adwords, Overture and FindWhat. I find FindWhat has serious click fraud probloem and I'm totally stopping FindWhat and decided to focus on the BIG two - Adwords and Overture. It has been proven they are more targetted.

I came across one affiliate program that provide very good Adwords video training to their affiliate. The owner can easily sell it for US$50 - US$100. I you sign up their affiliate program, you will get it for FREE. Visit http://www.rapidforexsystem.com and click "affiliates". This is a fantastic program from traffic club member.

Top 10 Tips To Avoiding Affiliate Program Glitches and Making More Money

2005-01-03T16:29:00.000+08:00

When it comes to making money with affiliate programs, tracking the sales and cutting the checks, glitches in the process often happen. Have you joined some affiliate programs? Guess what??? Glitch happens!

1) Its not tracking the way it should

I'm a big fan of being able to purchase through my own affiliate links. Its not the discount I care about. I want to use my credit card in a real time situation and be sure my affiliate sale got tracked.

Don't be surprised, this "fail to track" glitch happens more often than you may realize. Especially with new affiliate programs, new product releases, even new product releases on established tracking software.

Don't take THEIR word for it, that they put through some test orders. Usually test orders are done with an artificial credit card number and they do not test every aspect of an ecommerce system.

For example, I announced a product to my readers and sales started going through. I was getting email confirmations, but when I checked the real time stats they read zero sales.

Several phone calls were required to get things straightened out. They tried to blame me. They said it was the way I was redirecting the url. Lame excuse. It was their software all the way along and they fessed up to the fact later on.

The sad part is, I had to prove with email confirmations how many sales I actually generated.

Lesson to be learned, don't take their word for it. Prove it to yourself with a live credit card, before you tell your friends.

2) You have a custom commission

I'm often given a bigger commission than the average person when it comes to affiliate programs. It's a nice gesture by the affiliate manager, showing that they realize the value of top affiliates. Only problem is, not everyone in their office may be in on the deal.

Turns out one manager promised me a big commission and entered it into the system. A few days later, another manager saw the larger than normal commission, assumed something was wrong and reduced my commission to a normal level.

Hmmm, I complained to the first manager and it was reset back to the higher level. Next time I checked, I was set to ZERO commission. HUH?

This time I phoned the owner of the company. Turns out the second manager was never told about the higher commission. He assumed someone was trying to pull a fast one and set the commission for that affiliate number to zero.

All was not lost though. An hour later, a check for several hundred missing dollars was headed my way.

Moral of the story, check your stats and get what you are promised. Make sure they tell everyone in their office about any special deals or commissions.

3) They reset the counters

This is similar to the glitch above and happens most often with two tier programs. All sorts of people sign up for the first tier to get the sales commission. Then, they try to be sneaky and greedy, signing up as an subaffiliate under their own previous number.

That's not how two tier affiliate programs are supposed to work.

One program I belong to did a compete "reset" and nuked everyone not getting the standard 25% commission. Only problem was - as a super affiliate - I was supposed to get a 50% commission on sales. I got caught in the reset along with everyone else.

I only noticed because my paycheck was only half as much as usual. One call to the publisher got everything straightened out and I got a check for the missing commission.

Moral of the story... if commission checks suddenly drop in dollar value, log on to the publisher's tracking system and make sure your commission is what it's supposed to be.

4) You didn't read the affiliate agreement

How many of you actually read those long affiliate agreements? We just want to get our links and start selling right? Well, I got burned for more than $1,200 because I didn't read the agreement.

Turns out that the affiliate program is only open to people living in the USA. Since I'm in Canada, they refused to pay my commission.

My argument was, if I'm Canada, why on earth did they allow me sign up as an affiliate in the first place? Their response, you clicked that you agreed to the terms of our affiliate program, why didn't you read it.

Lesson learned, read the affiliate agreement and check the fine print before joining anything.

5) Dyslexia runs deep

I often have a bit of a problem with numbers. I'll switch them around without realizing it. I look at them, read them out loud, then two seconds later write them down backwards.

That's exactly what I did for one major affiliate program I belong to. Instead of recording 4535 into my affiliate code I typed 4353.

I kept getting emails from their system congratulating me for sales but the monthly paycheck was puny. Something didn't add up. I should have been getting checks for at least 10 times the amount.

I phoned the publisher and gave them my affiliate number and they asked if I was Bob Smith. I told them no, my name is Michael Campbell. They said sorry, but that's Bob's affiliate number. To quote Homer Simpson. "Doh!"

After finding out what my affiliate number really was, I muttered something about wondering how much money I'd lost. She quickly remarked that I lost over $2,000 in commission last month. Double Doh!

Moral of the story, if it seems like you are not getting a paycheck relative to the efforts you are putting in, check your affiliate codes and numbers to be sure they are correct. One simple typo can cost you thousands of dollars.

6) They can run but they can't hide

One way to check the relative health of any affiliate program is to look at the numbers on the paychecks they send you. This is the check ID number. Every bank check has one. It's usually in the upper right hand corner.

Snaky huh? You know exactly how many checks they cut and how much effort you are putting in. You can use that as a barometer and gage the success of the affiliate program.

If you are making only $100 a month and putting in an average effort, chances are everyone else is getting a similar amount. If they're cutting only 10 checks a month, it might mean the product is a dud or has a very low conversion ratio. If they're cutting hundreds of checks a month, the product is a hot seller.

For example, let's say last month you received check number 6250. (You do record them don't you?) This month your check number is 6273. That means, this affiliate program cut a mere 23 checks this month for its entire affiliate force.

Lesson learned... Fewer checks means the program is highly specialized, or its pathetic, or they're trying to pull a fast one by not paying affiliates. Unless its one of those multi tier programs (explained below), you might be better off focusing your efforts elsewhere.

7) It's a life time - multi tier affiliate program

There are about 10 people on the internet who are fans of life time multi tier commissions. They are the ones that got to announce the product in the first place.

Think about it. If you see ads plastered everywhere saying you'll get lifetime commissions, they really Really REALLY want you to join. That's because if you - or anyone you sign up - ever buy anything from that program, the original person gets most or all of the commission, not you.

Lesson learned, unless you are first to announce a multi tier life time program and have a big mailing list, be very careful you're not making someone else rich with your advertising efforts.

8) Getting the runaround

Be sure the checks are signed and dated or you may as well be getting checks from space aliens. Double check everything, before you try to deposit the checks in the bank.

This was a favorite tactic of an affiliate program that was having financial difficulty. Eventually they went out of business owing me a lot of money.

They'd "forget" to sign the check. Then they'd send next month's check, but not a replacement for the original one that wasn't signed. Grrrrr!

Finally, two months later I'd get a replacement. Then they'd "forget" to send a check for the current month, or make it out to the wrong name. It was a sorry song and dance.

Lesson learned, if you're getting the run around, run away to a different program. Life's to short and precious to waste your time being a bill collector for money that you've rightly earned.

9) They shut it off without telling you

Almost every day I get notices from Commission Junction about companies that get discontinued from the program. Hmmm, strange how some of these companies have a habit of "running out of money" just in time for the long weekend.

Four days go by with no commission and I'm left wondering if they'll ever come back. Well, at least CJ.com gives notices.

A few of the smaller internet marketing programs I've promoted in the past were shut off without notice. I was linking to dead air space and didn't know it until one of you pointed it out to me. Thank you.

Lesson... if you have a lot of sites and a lot of pages, test for link rot at least once a month. You may have dead links and frustrated users, when you could have been making money instead.

10) What you're linking to sucks ;-)

Not really a glitch but a very common mistake.

After reading Clickin' it Rich and learning how much money was to be made from selling professional music gear, a client of mine decided (without consulting me) to put up several sites on ukuleles. Yes, that four string thing kids play in grade two.

Yeesh! She thought that, because no one could spell it, she could optimize pages for typos, as well as correct spellings. Good idea, wrong product.

A ukulele is not professional music gear! I told her to put up sites dealing with reverb units and digital recorders. $1000 items that earn $100 commission per sale, not $40 ukuleles that pay $4 commission.

She thought that maybe the digital gear would be damaged in shipping.

Dude! Professional music gear is meant to go on the road, be bashed about by burly roadies and have beer spilled on it nightly. Shipping in a cushioned package is the best it will ever get treated.

Moral of the story, make sure what you're linking to doesn't suck and has big enough commissions to warrant doing the work - building web sites - in the first place.

Conclusion

That's a wrap for this article. If you keep your eyes peeled for the top 10 affiliate glitches, you'll be making a lot more money from your affiliate programs.

by Michael Campbell

Learn how to harness the power of simultaneous internet revenue streams, by reading Michael Campbell's Internet Marketing Secrets Newsletter. Providing successful online marketing strategies since 1988. http://www.internetmarketingsecrets.com

Building A Content Site

2005-01-02T19:52:00.000+08:00

As a marketer, we have to leverage our time as well as other people skills. We can pay for the writer to do the content for us. With this method, we can complete the site within two months or less. If you are good at the topic, you can write for the content. For me, I'm more interested to do the marketing and planning.

You can put up the Adsense after you finished the content. Actually, it doesn't matter how many pages you have but Google tends to favour content site over single sales page.

About the earning ratio, I got about 1:1 - 1:3 from affiliations vs Adsense. I find out lot of people got their major income from Adsense. If you read the previous two issue of Fortune magazine, http://www.mobiletracker.net/ receive monthly average of US$5000 cheque from Google. The owner, Jon Gales is only 19.

You can see the power of Adsense. However, I think we shouldn't fully rely on Adsense as it is highly depend on those publisher using PPC. If they find the ads from content site is not targeted enough, they can disable their ads to show in Adsense network. The best is to focus more to presell the merchant products.

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The $300 a month target is very conservative. If that's all you earn, you've done something "wrong". You haven't chosen profitable keywords carefully enough, you haven't built enough attractive, keyword-rich pages, you haven't learned the basics of optimizing pages for search engines, or you haven't attracted enough good quality links to your site.That's the wonderful thing about this business. You can make lots of mistakes and still earn useful money. Just don't make TOO many mistakes.

From Allan Gardyne, Associateprograms.com
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Make Your Content PREsell!

2005-01-02T19:42:00.000+08:00

Make Your Content PREsell! is the only book of its kind. It shows you exactly how to...

- write to communicate
- develop your own "voice" with flair and substance
- honestly convince people to trust and like you

... and much, much more.

MYCPS! is all about preselling with lot of samples. Best of all, it is a unique fit for any audience interested in earning a living online.

After learning how to presell, it is good to learn how to "sell" and Ken Evoy has another ebook to teach us - Make Your Words Sell!.

Ken Evoy has another free course - The Netwriting Master Course. You can download it at http://nycsolutions.net/netwritingmasters.zip

The thing I like Ken Evoy is he always price his ebook with very low price and his fantastic writing style. All his info is based on fundamental and actually this is what work in longer term.

Spend $1 to Make $3 - $5

2005-01-02T19:38:00.000+08:00

Yes, I mainly refer to PPC.

Before this, I always look for the free stuff. Waiting for something amazing happen to my site and my result was just like that - without earning much money.

I start seeing some result after working on PPC. I've made few times more than my cost of two new mini sites backwithin 1-2 months with PPC.

Working on organic SE ranking is good but it will take sometime to seethe results and I can't wait for that.

"Treat it as a business, spend $1 to make $3 - $5" or more - this isthe lesson I learn from John Reese, a highly successful marketer.

The Power of Site Build It!

2005-01-02T19:31:00.000+08:00

SBI work!

I've been using it for more than a year for my online stock trading site. Although I can switch this site to other hosting provider, but I still decide to leave my stock trading site with SBI because I like the SBI community very much. There are lot of experience and successful marketer using the SBI from very early till now and I really learn a lot from them.

Look at http://www.cheap-computers-guide.com/, built by a guy who don't have any experience in internet marketing. He used SBI to complete the site about two year ago. Some time ago, he earned more than US$3K a month. Then, he leave it for 9 months without doing anything and he still make about US$1K per month. Recently, the site was modified a bit on the layout and relocate the Adsense ad from right to left, the profit jump up to US$2,363.59 in Nov.

SBI system work!

For those who had already gotton your site running and would like to make more money, I strongly suggest you to take a look at Make Your Content PREsell! Excellent ebook from Ken Evoy, CEO of SBI.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

PS. I was away for few days in S'pore. Checked my email this morning and found out my online stock trading site made more than US$100 in commission during these three days. This is the interesting part of internet business - residual income.

Free Adsense Monitor Tool

2005-01-02T19:29:00.000+08:00

I find this little cool Adsense monitoring tool is very helpful. You can get it from :-

http://www.singerscreations.com/AboutSysSense.asp

Thank you.

2005-01-02T19:25:00.000+08:00

Let see how Google Adsense change the life of young netpreneur....

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Jon Gales loves Google, but not for the reason you might think. It's aterrific search engine, sure, but what Gales really likes is thatGoogle is making him money. Gales's website, Mobiletracker.net, is acompendium of news and reviews about cellphones that after a year anda half attracts about 200,000 users a month. Google supplies the adsfor the site, visitors click on the ads, and because of the site'spopularity, Google sends Gales monthly checks of $5,000 or more.That's a decent chunk of change for any sole proprietor. But forGales, the numbers are eye-popping. He's only 19 and livesexpense-free at home with his parents in Tampa, posting four or fiveitems in the course of the day while parked on the living room couchwith his laptop. Says Gales: "If things keep going the way they aregoing, I'll be making more money than my dad next year."

- from Fortune megazine
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Cheers!

PPC - Adsense Strategy

2005-01-02T18:49:00.000+08:00

I've been using PPC to drive traffic to my sites and spent about average US$400 per month. And, all this cost is fully funded by Adsense and I still manage to earn few hundreds dollars extra per month. Plus affiliate commission, I can earn about US$1K in net profit per month.

For those of you involve in affiliate marketing, you may consider this strategy. But you need to position your Adsense ads properly. Try to place it at the beginning of your page. Change the default setting to borderless and background to your body colour.

Don't worry about your visitors leave your site through the ads. Most of your visitors are only "window shopping" on your site. And you still able to earn some income from them. If your site presell well, you still able to earn some commission through affiliate program that you participate.

In order to profitable, I think you should look for keywords that provide at least US$0.50 EPC from Adsense.

The reason I use PPC is I do not want to wait for free traffic from organic SEs. My site focus on high competition keywords, I do not know when I will get some of my keywords listed in the first page of organic SEs. By using PPC, I get the traffic immediately and I will know how my site perform. Furthermore, with PPC the traffic and profit is more predictable.

And now, I started to relook into SEO seriously and re-analyze my sites.

Kindly share your comment if you have any.