So i started a review blog a while back. In the last 30 days it has made $444.52 USD. This, at the time of writing, equates to $618.25 AUD. This is totally profit as i do not pay for any traffic to the blog. It almost pays my rent!

Oh look at that, as i was writing i just made another sale for $16.56. For a product ive never made a sale in too wtf. rad.

Anyway, it took a little bit of time and a i went thru a bit of drama with one particular post, but now i am reaping the rewards.

Review blogs are EASY.

You might be thinking that i just write up any old crap about a product and post it, well you’re wrong. I think the secret to a good review blog is to have plenty of negative reviews too. So _buy_ the product or even ask for a review copy so you can _actually review_ the thing.  If someone visits your site and checks out a few reviews and they are all beamingly positive 5 star reviews then i dunno about you, but i would probably think its all a load of crap.

I will continue to write up reviews for things and keep building the site up. Hopefully within a few months it can actually totally cover my rent and then some! What do you think might happen if i have a couple of these running? Hmmm.

Good.

This is the stats from Woopra. If you don’t know what Woopra is head on over there and check it out. Awesome real-time stats. You can even start a chat with anyone that is on your site!

As you can see i’ve had over 2000 hits today. Yesterday was a fair few and the day before was even more than that. but today is the best so far. You can see what post is getting the traffic. That post is 5 months old now and i stumbled it as soon as i posted it. 2 days ago it was a post about finding a niche that caught the SU bug and went a bit nuts. That was also a few months old. I think what might have happened is that post was made popular and then someone stumbled the website worth post which then caught on.

To be honest i really don’t have much idea how StumbleUpon works. Why would a post be so popular 5 months after it was initially posted? Does it take someone on Stumble Upon with a large following to stumble something in order to get the crazy traffic? Why doesn’t it work with everything? I guess there are answers to these questions out there but i haven’t looked for them yet. I would really like to reverse engineer what happened so i can make it happen again! I wonder if now the blog has started to get this traffic that it will continue. I guess i just need to keep posting interesting things and try to get visitors to view more than just that one page for 3 seconds. hah.

Anyway, i thought that was cool, at one point there was 53 people online at the same time. rad.

looking back over my last tweets. is it obvious to see why that happened. (?????) Maybe it was the thing about fax machines?

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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!

It really took off there hey! Once they get to even this relatively small fry stage they take a fair bit of maintenance. Deleting bad comments, replying to comments, replying to messages etc. All good though if they bring in the sales!

Hi! Long time no write. Sorry to all my millions of readers for the lack of posts. But as I have said before on here somewhere, i aint no writer.

Just something that has popped up again lately after i started to promote a new product. This product is in the gaming niche and if you are a bit of a nerd then you can find all that it tells you for $0 on the net (like pretty much all ebook packages but anyway). Being in the gaming niche there is a good chance that some hardcore gamers might find your review or whatever and proceed to try to tell you how much of an arsehole (I’m an aussie that’s how it’s spelt) you are for selling something that is freely available with about 10 seconds of pretty elementary Google…ing. (Googling?).

This happened again (has happened on many a youtube video) yesterday and continues today, when my review site was posted on a pretty high traffic gaming forum. When i checked this morning i had 7 comments waiting to be moderated and each and every one of them had some very colourfull language and a thoughtful link to a website where you can download everything for free.

I was kind of expecting this so in my review of the product i actually stated that you can indeed find all this info for nothing if you are prepared to look. This package actually is quite a nifty little bundle which offers quite a bit more which hardly anyone noticed it seems, but i think this is what saved me from more defamatory comments.

So i guess the point of this post is to remember, if you are promoting questionable products, don’t just copy the copy that the publisher offers you in their affiliate tools section, paste into an email or blog post and hope for the best. Have a think about what kind of people are likely to read it and how they might react. Not everyone is a stupid internet newbie and when they find you they will let you know which in turn can harm your sales if every one reads those comments.

Keep comments on but keep them moderated. Comments are an important part of blogs as they can offer testimonials on the products that you promote. I do sometimes let a few negative ones through but i like to respond to those and reassure anyone else that its not all a load of bullshit.

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.

Now you will see heaps of pages of which a fairly high percentage are affiliates landing pages. Just click that Stumble! button and view away.

To make some good use of that here is what you can do.

Just now a story popped up about ‘8 tips to make your home green’. If you are involved with ClickBank at all then you will know of a product called Earth4Energy which has been smashing the sales in the home made energy/renewable energy niche.

In order for a story to pop up down there i believe it needs to have had quite a few diggs in a very short time. So this means that not only it will be seen by anyone with these alerts enabled but also listed quite highly on the digg pages. So many more people who are browsing Digg will see it.

All you need to do now is jump on it with an affiliate link in the comments with a tinyurl or an actual domain (make it look less spammy) and make a comment with the link in it! If the story really takes off and your comment is up the top of the list (and doesnt get buried) then you will get bucket loads of free fairly targeted traffic to your hoplink!

EASY!

Just make sure you dont do this like mad and actually have some decent content in your comment and you will be fine.

VIDEO 1

VIDEO 2

Video 1 never really took off actually, and I’m not too sure why. Could be the music i think haha, i might change that. Video 2 has always been the better performer and after some tweaks on the info after some of the commenters pointed out a few contradictions (:$:$) it picked up even more.

I was concerned that they might fizzle out after i added an annotation box to the second video and the views took a hit almost straight away. After taking that out you can see that the views picked right back up again! Now the second vid is doing pretty well and I’m getting about a 15% CTR back to my landing page which has resulted in quite a few sales for the products which is nice.

If you can manage to get a video up to 500+ views a day with a decent affiliate program then you will be absolutely laughing. If you then duplicate this across the plethora of Tube sites then you will be laughing all the way to the bank! This is very achievable. These 2 vids are in a pretty random niche.

I think my next video marketing attempt is going to involve some sort of singles/dating service affiliate program ;). I’ll keep that one under my hat until i have some decent info to tell you guys!