Boooooo. My linkwheeling had been funneling quite a nice amount of quite responsive traffic to my money page for the last 2 months. Then this morning i check my email and found that the keystone in the wheel had been “been flagged by our system as a violation of our Terms of Use.” Booo.

I’m guessing it was this particular section of the rules that it was violating.

* You must have no more than 1-2 links to any one domain on a page of original content (tinyurl and other cloakers are considered wildcards).  Note that this means that you may not have any promotional links on hubs that appear elsewhere on the internet.

So i have removed all the links bar 2. One back to the money site and the other one which extends the wheel to a different blog with more information about the product on it.

All the big web 2.0 sites seem to be cracking down hard on affiliates pages lately. Squidoo have some new ultra sensitive spam detection in place on certain keywords and topics. Forex being one of them which is a shame. This means you have to start to really put up some quality content when you are using these sites. They can be a very important part of your marketing plan, especially if you mainly use bum, so we have to respect them or we will lose the use of them.

Off the fix up the hub in question!

Quite a few of you out there (myself included) might be having a hard time building up a list. I used to buy traffic and drive them through to a squeeze page to get leads but this turns out to be a) rather expensive and b) pretty useless as most of that PPC traffic is not very responsive once they are on your list. I found this technique that helps you build a list and at the same time make quite a bit of money with affiliate sales. I want to share this with you because anyone can do it and it is really not a lot of work.

Well when i say not a lot of work i mean not a lot in comparison to most other marketing methods. You still have to do some work of course!

What i am talking about is borrowing someone else’s list to sell a product, so you and whoever’s list you are borrowing can both profit and build your lists.

How do you do it?

First off, let me give you an overview of what needs to be done to accomplish this.

Go and search the ClickBank marketplace for suitable products. There are 3 criteria that these products have to meet to be eligable.

1. Of course they need to be in your niche.
2. High affiliate payout (minimum 50% but go for 75% or anything above $50)
3. Has to include a back end recurring payment (membership sites etc)

Now if you have a list of your own, even if it is very small like 50 or so, do a test campaign of just 3 emails to that list and see if it converts. If you get any response at all from a list that size then you’re in business. I ran a test email campaign for a product that paid $75 plus more on some back end up sells to a related list of 70 and it converted at almost 10%. Bingo.

Now go and find someone in your niche with a list of 2500 leads at least and build up a relationship with them. This part i will leave up to you as we are all different and what works for me might not work for you. This might also take quite a while as not everyone will be willing to play ball. But here are some tips to make this easier and more attractive for them.

• Offer to write the emails for the campaign, show them the emails and let them have some input etc.
• Offer to answer any support queries so they are not bothered at all.
• Agree to split the profits (50/50 plus 100% recurring or whatever).

This is all about building relationships and getting the list that everyone wants: one that BUYS.

Building YOUR list.

If you use ClickBank, when you make a sale you will know you get the buyers email address. So send a thank you email for the purchase and offer something for free (in exchange for opt in) that compliments the product they have just bought. Then you start to build a list of your own, leveraged from your promotion partner’s list! Genius! Why didn’t i think of this before?

Dealing with support queries also helps you to build a rapport with buyer and potential buyers. After all, if you help someone they are going to remember your name – right?

Instead of just offering an email address for support, you could (if you can be bothered, but it is a good idea so do it) set up a website that has a list of FAQs on that particular product. Put that url on the email campaign instead of the email addy. Make sure you either buy the product or ask for a review copy (most publishers are more than happy to give you a review copy). You can’t give support without some knowledge.

You can also put an opt-in on the support page giving away the freebie that you will offer in the thank you email. The more chances to capture their emails via opt-in the better.

Results

Now this is what can happen:

• My tiny list of 70 converted at 10%
• The email campaign to the larger list (2500) converted at 5%
• It grossed $9836 of which I get 50%
• I also get recurring monthly of $770 for next 11 months

So a list of 70 has leveraged an income of over $14,000 in the next year.

Now if you go with a larger list owner, you have room to negotiate, so long as there is a recurring element to the product. You could give 100% commission to the list owner and you keep the recurring income for example. Just work out something that you are both happy with. You can do this over and over again if you want to. Going by my numbers, if I do this again another 5 times I will get nearly $100,000 purely from that first time on a borrowed list. And now because i am building a list of my own, there is the prospect of even more being squeezed out of it. You can see how this is a very good idea if you are just starting out.

Off you go!

I came across ClickTale quite a while ago but until recently had not taken full advantage of it. I had it setup on one of my websites and it is very very cool, i even get a mention on their media buzz page! It actually records a video of your visitors so you can see exactly how they interact with your websites.

Check out some of the other stuff they report on:

Heatmaps
Form Analytics (beta)

Dimensions
Screen Resolutions
Window Sizes
Window Resizing
Window Sizes PDF

Demographics
Countries
Languages
Browsers
Platforms

Intervals
Page Open Period and ActiveTime
Load Times

Visitor Activity
Pages/Visitor
Mouse Moves vs. Mouse Clicks
JavaScript Errors
Tags

Seriously this is gold if you are setting up landing pages and want to know exactly how they are seen and what effect they have on your visitors. All it takes is two tiny bits of code and you’re set. Just come back the next day, login and start watching videos. You can see if your copy is being read, what links/ads they click on etc.

It is free for 100 recordings a week on 1 domain, so if you get quite a bit of traffic you should consider purchasing a subscription. The basic plan is $9 USD a month and gives you 40 recordings a day and 2 domains which is more than enough to figure out what is going on.

I cant recommend this more. If you’re not using this you are wasting a lot of your time it can give you some really eye opening results.

I have a campaign for a weight loss product that is about to kick off soon and seeing tho it is coming up to summer here i thought i would try some offline marketing tactics. Here in Melbourne we have notice boards ALL OVER THE PLACE so I’m going to make use of those and also some other forms of offline advertising for my website.

I think i will start with stickers and posters and move onto some in store promotions etc. I am lucky that i work in an industry where i have access to quite a bit of gear to help me out here and i plan to use it to its full potential!

I will keep a log of everything i do and post it up here once i get it all underway. The product is due to launch at the end of the month, all you IMers reading this will probably know exactly what product i am talking about! I have never done this kind of thing before so I will be very interested in how things work out!

I am expecting good things as i have seen quite a few tubby peeps walking around (and in front of the mirror) and i am sure i can convince them to check out what i have to show them!

So I think it is about time i attempted to create my own product. What are the questions I need to ask myself?

What research do I need to do?
What is my niche?
What volume of traffic do I need?
Where will this traffic come from?
What will my adspend be?
How much money do i want to make?
What network will I use?
How do I find all this out?

Well to be honest I’m not entirely sure but I want to find out so here we go. Now this wont be happening over night so expect posts from time to time as i start to figure things out!

I have done a little bit of YouTube marketing but not really in any great depth. I decided to do a few experiments with some of the new tools that YouTube have provided and see what the results were using the awesome integrated google insights.

Here are the stats for two videos i put up recently in the xbox repair niche.

Video 1

Video 2

Both videos have been up for just over a month. My tactic here was to get them viewed as much as possible as quickly as possible without any effort. 

What i did was grab a couple of vids that were supplied as affiliate tools and just uploaded them as is. I then purchased 5000 views for both videos at a total cost of $3. What this did, was get my featured as being one of the most viewed users. Having that many views in such a short period of time also gives people the impression that your video has some authority meaning they are more likely to watch it.

As you can see by the stats both of them were slowly gaining in popularity with video 2 having more overall hits. This is probably due to the fact that video 1 was actually a little bit shit. You can see that after a while they both took a bit of a hit and views gradually started to decline. On video 2, as it was far more popular that the other, i decided to have a play around with the annotations feature. All i did was put a little box up the top right with my website URL in it.

Now of course i already had my URL in the comments box as you do, and was getting a great deal of click throughs already, so i thought why not draw attention to the site even more? As soon as i did this the views dropped quite significantly on both videos, even tho i only added it to the 2nd video. I’m not really sure why this would affect the views but it seemed to so i removed the box and views started to creep back up.

I think adding that small annotation box was not a good idea. Overall the popularity has dropped and it looks like the videos are going to fizzle out. This was an interesting and eye opening experiment with video marketing. I have learned quite a bit from it.

If you are interested here are some more stats from insights.

Intersting stats for age groups. Maybe parents trying to fix their kids xboxes on the cheap!?

Not at all surprised by this graph huhuh.

Over the last several weeks you may have noticed that the US economy is a little pear shaped. The media is hyping this up to be the beginning of the worst recession since the 1930′s. This is bad news for affilates as when the media is scaring people like this they tend to hold onto their wallets and stop the spending.

All this talk of a recession of course has coincided with quite a significant drop is sales. After reading countless threads on Digital Point about how people usually convert at 1:75 but now they haven’t converted in over 500 hops indicates that there is indeed something amiss somewhere. But where?

Not everyone is being hit by this latest buyer scarcity however, some are reporting record sales during this time. My stats have been far too erratic lately to even begin to understand what may be happening. If you check the CB Index as provided by the ever so handy cb-analytics site it does indicate that lately there has been quite a significant drop in sales across the board.

So, what is the problem? Clickbank stated themselves in their system log that they were having processing issues at the exact time that the sales started to drop.

2008-09-10

On 2008-09-10 from 1:46 a.m. PST to 7:14 a.m. PST our credit card processor experienced intermittent outages, resulting in the inability to consistently process credit card orders. Other payment types worked during this time. The system status page was updated to reflect the issue. We have been assured from our credit card processor that the problem is now resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this interruption may have caused.

This has been backed up by numerous publishers stating they had received many emails from prospective clients saying how they would very much like to purchase their wares however this is proving difficult due to payment processing errors. Emails I might add, that are continuing to this very day.

So it seems obvious to me that people are still wanting to spend their money, they are trying to spend their money, but ClickBank or something is holding them back.

Well, it seems I am (according to my girlfriend) becoming slightly addicted to Internet Marketing. In particular AdWords. I don’t really have an addictive nature and would usually argue the fact, she has accused me of being addicted to a few other things in the past(all internet/computer related mind you!) however i would probably have to agree with her on this one.

So what do you do if you are addicted to Internet Marketing and how might you tell if you are or not? I guess my girlfriend ticked when i suggested we spend the weekend together… at a conference. That went down well hah! She did stay for a few hours to begin with tho!

AdWords is an especially dangerous addiction to have as it can cost you quite a bit of money, i would almost say this is like a gambling addiction as it is most of the time, especially if you are dealing with affiliate marketing, a bit of a gamble. It’s almost like you have stumbled drunkenly onto the table with the highest stakes and you cant seem to get off.

Some people might check their adwords account every few days, whereas i will be checking it every few minutes to see what is going on. This can be bad as it temps you to tweak your ads and your click budget etc meaning it never really gets a chance to get rolling therefore making it harder to test your campaigns. So a good thing to do is to do a lot of your keyword research before you setup the campaign so you dont waste any time, and are not tempted to change them once you start checking them every 30 seconds!

So i am not entirely sure weather this is something to be too concerned about or not. I mean if you are just starting out then sure it might seem like you are a little bit obsessed but isn’t this the same for almost any hobby or if you are lucky, job?

Are you addicted to IM? How is it affecting your life? Are you making enough to be able to justify your addiction? Let me know!

1. Find a niche market FIRST!

What is a niche you might ask? A niche is simply a group of people who are looking for a solution to something. You could find a niche anywhere, watch morning TV, reading covers of women’s magazines, news websites from around the world and so on. Think about not just your own interests, but the interests of people you know. There is a potential niche market almost everywhere you look!

2. Create a product that gives your market what they want.

Create a survey page and ask people what is their most burning question about such and such. This way you not only have a whole lot of questions to answer for your product but you can also build a list! Take survey questions to www.elance.com / www.rentacoder.com etc and get a book ghost-written. If you don’t really know a whole lot about a particular topic then don’t waste your time trying to write it yourself. Outsource it!

3. Create a powerful, compelling sales message.

This is possibly the most important part. You know, one of those ordinary sales letter type pages you see everywhere. One important thing to remember here is UGLY SITES SELL.

4. Design a simple website that converts people to buyers.

Black text on white background, ask for only one action – BUY. Too many options will only scare them off.

5. Bring traffic to your site by any means necessary.

PPC, press releases (www.prweb.com), publish articles online to article sites such as www.ezinearticles.com & www.guruknowledge.org. Post on forums related to your niche.

6. Capture email wherever possible for a second chance, a second bite.

Without an email capture device in your marketing funnel then you are missing out on a huge number of potential leads.

7. Create an army of affiliates to sell your product for you!

By having affiliates sell your product for you obviously is quite a handy thing indeed. They do all the hard work for you!