So, WTF is CPA?? CPA as you may or may not know stands for Cost Per Action. This means that if you get someone to do something, like submit an email address or give up their post code (zip code) you get somewhere in the region of $1USD. Totally sweet. What happens to that lead once they give up that info is entirely inconsequential to you as you have already been paid. However if you send some shit traffic to that offer and the advertiser cant make any of that $1USD back from any of them, they will start to investigate why.

I have tried this before and didn’t really have much success, probably cos i just jumped right into it and registered for a couple of networks and was caught out not being prepared. The only network that accepted me was probably the easiest one to register with and the biggest, Commission Junction. I did register for Advaliant also but never woke up when they called me at 4am to do a phone interview. This I was absolutely not expecting so i failed. I have heard many good things about them, and their affiliate managers do seem quite friendly (from voice messages and AIM chats!) so i will be trying again with them during my experiments.

So what now? Well, in order to get accepted to the various CPA networks out there, i am going to make a website. This website will be used solely for the purpose of applying for networks. Most of them will not really take you seriously if you look like a bit of a noob. Imagine if you were kind of a dork at school, and you wanted into the cool club. You can’t just rock up and ask if you can be part of it, as the cool kids will simply laugh in your face and say “piss off you weird red headed weirdo” and that girl you fancy from up the street will laugh at you too and you will be forced into becoming somewhat of a recluse for the rest of the term. Ahem. Sorry about that.

So to avoid any embarrassment you need to look like you know what you are doing. You don’t actually have to know what you are doing tho as you can simply bluff your way in. This is where the dummy site comes into play. I wont go into this any more in this post as i don’t actually have one setup yet huhuh :$. So I will go off and build one and come back and show you what I have created.

The next update will probably be in a weeks time hah!

Firstly, apologies to anyone that reads my blog for the lack of updates. Kind of haven’t been in the writing mood lately for some reason, this doesn’t mean that i stopped doing stuff tho!

Secondly, with my review blog plugging away nicely all by itself  one thing i have decided to embark on with a bit more enthusiasm is CPA promotions. Over the next few months i hope to fully establish myself as a fully qualified CPA expert huhu. I will go through the sign up process with a few more networks and report back with my experiences and any tips for anyone out there in my current situation.

So stay tuned for the next update! Which will be i dont know when. Maybe in a week! Who knows!?

Till then!

Oh, if you want to know what i am up to at any particular time, the best way to to that is to follow me on twitter @HughMc. Also as i am not regularly updating the site as much as i once was, subscribing to my RSS Feed is the easiest way of you to see what’s new here without having to visit!

Over the last couple of weeks i have been split testing 2 landing pages. Long time i know but i kinda forgot about it haha. Anyway, this is the result.

As you can see one of them outdoes the other by almost 2x. I think its obvious what i’ll be doing now! Just goes to show the importance of split testing your landing pages. You could be throwing quite a bit of money down the drain.

How many times have you sat there knowing exactly what you need to do but can’t seem to actually get anything done? This happens to me and im sure it happens to you. The other day I was trying to create a mini site for a new niche and I could picture everything, I had the whole layout I had all the graphics I even had most of the copy, yet I just sat there and stared at the computer thinking “wtf am I doing?”

Action paralysis is when someone in his or her actions feels as if they are paralyzed. Information overload is when the amount of information is so huge making it almost impossible to absorb.

I guess it is kind of like writers block in a way, you know you are capable of it but you just cant get anything down. Why does it happen and  how do you overcome it? This, I am still trying to figure out. It happens to me quite a lot, enough for it to be extremely debilitating where some days i just cant get much done at all. That mini site will probably never get done now as i have just thrown together something to get it out there!

What needs to happen is to focus on one action at a time and sticking to it until it is done. I have a bad habit of taking on too much at once which is a massive problem as I just don’t know where to start, so I end up playing computer games much to my girlfriends lament hah!

Focus is definitely the number 1 key to success. You have to make use of the information you have and not to overload yourself with a whole lot more. If you have focus then you will see results.

Care to comment on your own experiences with this?

I saw this post on Digital Point a while back and i thought it was some great info so i post it here for you all.

One of the hardest (and most important) parts of affiliate marketing for me is actually finding a niche market to target in the first place. Some people are just naturally good at thinking of wacky and creative markets to target, while others – like me – find it very difficult to come up with an idea for a niche that is not already overcrowded. I have been in the affiliate game for just over a year now, and in that time I have found these five things to help dramatically when trying to spark ideas for a new niche market to target.

Think about not just your own interests, but the interests of people you know. What are your friends and family interested in? Could there be a market for their interests? For example, maybe you have a friend who loves collecting video game related action figures. That is a potential niche market!

Watch television and read magazines or the newspaper – I have had lots of ideas come to me from seeing a product on a TV show or reading about it in a magazine. Look out for things that might not be so obvious at first on TV; for example, you could be watching an episode of Family Guy and see a waffle maker in the background – there’s another potential niche market!

eBay & eBay Pulse

Browse eBay! Take a look through specific categories like ‘odd stuff’ or look at the sub categories within the major categories. For example, midi instruments are a sub category of instruments – that is yet another potential niche market to look in to! Another invaluable tool is eBay pulse, which shows the hottest searches on eBay for the day.

Froogle & Google Trends

Google! Google is yet another invaluable tool for helping with niche ideas. First of all, there is Froogle which shows recent searches at the bottom of the page. As I write this post, one of those searches is “camping lantern” – there is yet another potential niche! Another Google service which is great for finding niche markets is Google Trends, which shows the days hottest searches on Google.com or Google.co.uk (depending on which version you go to). As I write this, one of those searches is “chambers bay golf course”. See, another idea! Golf accessories!

Amazon and other big shopping sites. Amazon is particularly useful due to the ‘sort by bestselling’ option they provide. Pick a category, and then click the “top sellers” option under the header. For the consumer electronics category, Sat Nav. Systems are currently the best selling items – yet another idea!
Do you have any tips for sparking ideas for new niche markets to target? Share them with us below!

I hope this will be useful to people looking to get started in Affiliate Marketing!

It all starts when some well-meaning (yet misdirected) person encourages a budding internet entrepreneur to “start in a niche they know alot about”, or base their business around “something they’re passionate about”…

As horrible as it may sound – they’ve unknowingly sent the hopeful entrepreneur down a path of false expectations, poor results and eventually – failure. In fact, the myth of “do what you love and the money will follow” has been responsible for more failure than likely any other influence – perhaps even more so than laziness or a lack of perseverance.

Because the simple truth of the matter is that the only way you’re going to make real money on the net is if your business is based around two crucial things:

1) Large Demand

2) Buyers

In other words – you aren’t going to get rich selling a $15 ebook about growing square watermelons – even though that might be a great passion of yours.

The demand just isn’t there. Maybe there’s a few searches a day on Google for the topic, and perhaps there’s some interest in the online “gardening enthusiast” communities – but you’d be hard-pressed to make even a few hundred dollars a month from ebook sales.

Similarly, you also aren’t going to have a particularly easy time getting rich by building websites about some seemingly “popular” topics like humor, jokes, funny pictures and so on. And while there are a few ways to “monetize” your site (with AdSense, CPA Offers, CPM Banners, etc.), it takes literally millions of website visitors to make even just a few thousand dollars in markets like that.

The demand is huge – but the visitor value is extremely low…

Instead, if you want to make it big online – pulling down an impressive six-figure income – you need to tap into markets with tons of demand, where the majority of the visitors are valuable.

You need to capture tons of traffic that wants to buy something. If you take this approach, you’d practically have to hijack your own order links (or affiliate links) not to make a sizeable income.

In fact – did you know that some affiliates make several thousand dollars daily just by promoting a single product in hot markets? (Just imagine what the merchant is making…)

In some markets there’s actually so much demand that the vendors are quite literally selling over a thousand units – or more – per day. Digital products, with practically zero overhead/delivery cost.

But it all comes back to tapping into valuable demand. In most cases, it takes no extra effort or “skill” to market to a valuable market than it does to struggle along with something you’re passionate about.

These two factors – demand and buying traffic – are what seperate the “wannabe” marketers from the millionaires. Because there’s no real secret – you just need to sell what thousands of people are already buying.

The ball is now officially in your court. Are you tapping into markets with massive, valuable demand?

Or are you struggling to simply make a few dollars occasionally with a business that’s based on your own passionate interests?

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Chris Rempel, author of “Confessions of a Lazy Super-Affiliate”, reveals 5 of his most effective traffic strategies and niche-targeting tactics in full detail at www.thelazymarketer.com

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!

I use Google Trends all the time. If you have a good idea and would like to see if that idea might be one that is going to be a very good idea indeed, then Google Trends can show you how.

Let me show you an example.

Here as you can see i searched for ‘iphone’. And as you would expect the trend for this keyword or topic is rapidly growing.  So you would think that if you were to start some kind of blog or affiliate site, very early on in the products life, then you can see that you would be at an advantage by starting early.

Let me know you one more example.

Here i searched for ‘swimsuit’. This has a seasonal trend as you can see. People seem to search for this keyword during the first quarter of the year. As you probably are aware, summer in the northern hemisphere is right in the middle of the year, so people are searching for swimsuits just before summer so they are ready to hit the beaches! So you can apply these two research tactics using Google Trends to prepare a campaign that is bound to be a success!

So one day a young English Uni student came up with an idea. His idea was to create a page, with a block of squares each with an area of 10×10 pixels. He would sell these blocks at $1 a pixel, with the minimum buy being one 10×10 block, so $100. His name is Alex Tew and his site, The Million Dollar Homepage sold out within 4 months netting him just over $1million US dollars.

Now being the savvy Internet Entrepreneur that i am, i decided to copy his page and start my own. Of course this was a bit of a gamble and a bit tongue in cheek but i did it anyway. So created The Australian Million Dollar Website.

At one point i was pulling in about $50 a day in adsense revenue and getting about 50 to 60 thousand visits a month. This was all purely organic Google search traffic. I was making no money on pixel sales as i was simply giving them away for free. The first version of the site was pretty full up and gained a Google PR of 4 within a few months. I have since relaunched the site with some updated software and started from scratch as a lot of the links were dead anyway.

Today,  PR has dropped to 2 but i am still getting roughly 50 hits a day, mostly from people still searching for “million dollar website!” Check the Google Analytics data.

15.10% – Direct Traffic

18.99% – Referring Sites

65.45% – Search Engines

This is almost completely on auto pilot now, people can upload their own ads so i don’t have to touch it aside from the odd blog post, and it nets me about $1000 a year from adsense.

You might think why is he telling us about this? Well from this i learned some very important lessons.

• Find other successful marketers.
• Analyze their success.
• Learn from their mistakes.

These were golden lessons that i stumbled across, right from the very start of my online ventures. I hope you found this post helpful!

Until next time,

Hugh