What to Expect From AffiliateHat this 2010
Ok, the last post was September 25. The blog obviously was kinda on a hiatus, doing nothing, having planned nothing and going nowhere. I don’t want to make any excuses. It’s my fault because I’m lame and lazy.
Second, if I am about to promise anything again here don’t believe me. During mid 2009 when this blog had it going, I promised that I would provide free high quality articles and that never happened. So consider me a liar.
Anyways enough on talking. This year we would try to back this site up, provide occasional good tips for affiliate marketing and web news and many more. As you may now this blog was purchased by Melvin and no offense but ever since then its a downward spiral. Melvin is a very busy person, a student and an entrepreneur.
He hired 3 writers and one of them is me, the other two had written couple articles here before and just vanished. So altogether it was all our fault too.
This year, I (or we) will try my best to resuscitate this blog by posting more. As what this blog is about, I would hand out several affiliate marketing tips for newcomers and hopefully get them started and see how it goes then.
The blog would also showcase some case studies to really increase the value of the content that it would hand out to you, readers.
If there’s still a reader of this blog, see you then. 
Promoting Email Submits With Free Traffic
This is one of the winning entry on ML’s Share Your Secret Contest that was held last year.
So not everyone has the cash when starting out affiliate marketing, as you know affiliate marketing requires some hefty cash from our side even when starting out. Although, there are free coupons from AdWords, Yahoo and MSN occasionally, the truth is its hard to time it because all the coupons are already used up even before you know there’s a coupon available. Here is what I normally do with it. I utilize easy converting e-mail submit offers and use free traffic. Let me explain.
First, take a look at the MarketLeverage Offers.You see there are over 10 offers of this kind. For those who do not know, e-mail submits are offers that you get paid for a valid e-mail address from customers. It costs nothing to consumers and the pixel is fired on the first page of an offer. Easy money, eh?
Now we head on to the landing page. Basically we cannot direct link here because we’re not using pay per click. Now I know building a landing page seems to be frightful experience for newbies but here’s a tip that I think will make sense. In some point of time last January, I used it and I can say it worked and is definitely working. First let’s use the iPod Nano e-mail submit offer. Take a look:
So read the description of the campaigns properly because some offers are strict and most are not. Do also take note of what country does the offer accepts traffic from. In this case it’s the United States. Now back to the landing page… most people don’t use this and I’m sure others will find it silly to do it but one easy way of building a landing page is just getting the e-mail creative for that and putting it into your site. Take a look at this:
What I do is just try to copy the e-mail HTML content and put it into my site. Again, most people will find it silly but actually if you look at the codes it’s actually search engine optimized and you just need to do a little tweaking in it. You can basically add a title to the title tag and such stuff. Looking with what it looks like here it goes:
Not bad, eh? I believe the site looks good enough to attract readers. Of course, you can do your own landing page if you have more skills but again for those who know virtually nothing, that is definitely a quick way.
So we’re now into getting traffic. At the start we said we’re not gonna use pay per click and we will try to squeeze anything using free methods. Although the income potential are definitely lower with free traffic, it’s still possible to make money from it. First make sure you install Google Analytics to your site so you could split test your pages, see the data and make adjustments. Now how do I promote it? Here it goes:
- Forum Marketing – Everyone knows exactly the power of forums but how do they utilize it? It depends. Now I assume you are a quality member of a certain forum, meaning you’re not just signed up yesterday. In my case, I’m a big fan of basketball and I am a member of some famous forums about basketball for a long time which means I have the reputation. So I try to put the landing page URL in my signature and of course I try to use an attractive anchor to attract clicks. Another secret I do is I pawn the off topic section of forums with the offer itself. In the off topic section I post something like “I heard this site gives Nanos upon completion of surveys so I signed up, what do you guys think?” Be careful though with this because it can get you banned! Freebies forums tend to also do well with it. Want some freebies forums, then here’s the list of sites that normally have 2000 uniques a day.
http://www.freestuffhotdeals.com/freebies/
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/free-stuff/
http://www.bobsfreestuffforum.co.uk/
http://www.totallyfreestuff.com/submit.asp?m=0
- Blog Catalog – Now this has got to be something most people don’t do. Blog Catalog is a known directory for blogs and while its known to be a site that has some serious 100,000 visitors a day, I don’t see a lot of marketers using the discussion page for it. The discussion page is great for traffic as well. But the main key here is putting up a discussion that can intrigue a lot of people. One for example is when I tried promoting the “Coke or Pepsi” offer from ML before. Look:
The discussion got about 110 replies, 50% of them clicked the link and 7 have actually made conversions. So you see it makes sense considering all you need to do is type. It varies depending on the type of offer though, as some tend to perform really well as opposed to others.
- Incentivizing – Now here it depends on the offer. Most likely there are few offers that allow incentivization of their offers. How do you incentivize then? The sky is the limit actually! I give Entrecard credits, I give free stuff, I tell them they will get a free domain for this and that, etc. Incentivizing is like “bribing” them to do something in your favor. In the end it benefits you both. Again you must first contact your affiliate manager with regards to these matters.
That’s it. Now if it builds you up a few hundred dollars, then maybe you could jump into bigger waters now and start doing pay per click without worrying about money to spend. Hope this helps!
How Do You Make a Quick Buck?
Anyone who tells you that to be able to make a quick buck online you have to have a business plan first is a complete retard! While the whole internet marketing thing can be considered as a business and should be treated as a business (depending on how serious you are), it doesn’t really mean you cannot make money the easy way (or the quick way).
Why would we want to have some small amount of money first? I don’t know about you but if we’re starting to do affiliate marketing, a little startup cash is always needed and wouldn’t harm. So today I made some research and here I am going to share to you what I have researched:
- Get Paid To – I am not talking about those paid to click sites which are completely a waste of time. I am talking about completing free offers and getting paid for doing so. Why are you paid? Let me explain. These sites are running incentivized offers. They are getting paid when people complete those offers. In return they share a small percentage of it to people (usually $.8 – $1+) Here are some posts from Dosh Dosh about these sites. Do note that it depends on your location on whether you can qualify on the offers.
- Data Entry Jobs – from the name itself, it’s simply a job where you would encode, enter data. This one is a little repetitive and so boring, but if you could make a quick $10 in a day with it, then why not? A simple Google search would yield data entry opps.
- Graphic Design – if you’re one heck good of a designer, then go to contest sections in the forums and showcase your talent! Every minute there are about 5 people looking for a logo. Problem is that there’s a very tight competition in it and if you’re not as good as most of them, then they’d just tune you out! Here’s Digital Point thread on contest
- Writing Articles – this one is better for you if you have a near-perfect grammar. You can either sign up to sites like elance.com, getafreelancer.com and etc. or cut the middleman and again head on to forums. The beauty of the former is that it has really some lucrative rates per jobs. Getting a job though might be a little harder.
- Selling pictures – assuming you have that penchant of getting good pictures then this one may just be for you. Selling pictures has become popular these days and why? Maybe because of the ease of making a quick buck! Sell it to sites like iStockPhoto and StockExpert
- Coding – Undoubtedly programmers are the lifelines of business for us, online marketers. Without them, our business is damn dead! So if you are good in VB, ASP, PHP, PERL, and whatever language, then give it a try! Head on to elance again or to some forums programming section and do a deal with someone!
- Forum Posting – Assuming you don’t want to write lengthy articles, you may want to just invade forums. New Forums usually need some activity and that’s why they hire fake posters. The key here is typing fast. If you are, then this may just be your quickest buck earner! Some random dude wrote a list of paid forum posting services
- Be someone’s slave – Well one thing I noticed in forums nowadays is the increasing trend of people sharing their dramatic story and looking for jobs! And for good because a lot of them I guess are successful. Ok, most marketers are preoccupied w/a lot of stuffs and that’s the time they look for slaves assistants. Go and head to forums (again) and share your own heart-capturing story.
- Create a Twitter account – Well with the way twitter is working, I bet this one can really be a very profitable area in the near future to come. Spend 2 days following people as most of them follow you back. If you followed over 100,000 persons, Im sure at least 80,000 will follow you back! Then maybe sell the account, or depends to you!
Why would you want to make a quick buck again? It depends to you. If you think any of these can make you a consistent income stream then why not continue it? But as far as what this blog is all about, if you can make over $100 in one month, then that’s a pretty amicable amount to invest in affiliate marketing!
Questions are very much entertained!
Affiliate Marketing With No Startup Cost
So like what I have mentioned in my last post, I will show you the way on how to start affiliate marketing with absolutely no budget except for the food you will eat. so basically the more you invest in affiliate marketing, the higher the income potential can be. But again there are ways which costs you nothing and would probably help you get started. Just remember that in order to get the money you have to invest time since we don’t have the money we have to do what I call sweat work.
Here is how you get started:
Basically you need a site. A site’s domain and hosting normally would cost you $20. Since we don’t have a budget what we would do is sign with Blogger which hosts your site for free. The downside is that you will have to carry the name “blogspot” with your domain name. Now that you have a free blog/site, you can now choose your preferred template for it. Blogger has its own list of its template and I think the designs are professional enough to handle what product we are going to promote.
Now we have to choose what are the products that we are going to be promoting. In choosing this, I highly suggest you to stay away from the Internet Marketing Niche as I think its the hardest one to convert. Let’s say we pick Teeth Whiteners. Next is we have to choose the affiliate program to use. An affiliate network is basically the middleman between the merchant and us, the affiliate. I don’t really care what you would like to choose but personally for me Copeac, Pepperjam, and Azoogle do well. You may want to take good advantage with Pepperjam’s $10 signup bonus as I believe its a great deal for newbies.
Now we have a network that we will use to promote a certain product. The next part now is the content base. Review sites do well in this one and besides Google very much loves review site for its quality. What I would do is pick 2 different product in my niche and do a complete review of them. Just try to be transparent as possible and don’t just review it for the sake of hoping to get a sale. Try to put the things that you don’t want and like then insert your affiliate link into that. After doing the review, reread and then you can publish them now.
How are we going to promote? Simple, Article Marketing! Article Marketing is all about writing articles related to your niche and submitting it to high trafficked article directories. The directories are ezinearticles, go articles and etc. I have made a full list of all article directories here. Why is article marketina good way to promote sites? If you look at the list, you can see most of them have less than 100,000 Alexa ranking and almost over PR5 per each directory. It means the directories are well indexed by search engines and they have tons of traffic as well.
Now we’re gonna write an article anew right? Here’s the thing, you don’t really need a quality article to be posted. Remember we try to put our site as much as we can and we also try to build links and SERPS, so quantity is greater than quality. What I would do is search each directory for an article of the same topic. Try to get 10-20. After finding, you should REWRITE those articles in your own words/style and then submit it again. Yes, as long as its unique we’re gonna be alright. Remember we want a large volume of articles. Most people spend an hour thinking of an idea and another half an hour writing their article. If you’re quick and focused enough you can actually do 10-15 a day which means 70-100 a week.
How do those articles can lead people to our site? Simple, in every article there is an author box where you can put anything you want except for the affiliate link itself. So what we would do is put a link bait statement in that box that would eventually make a reader interested in visiting our review site. Besides clickthroughs, those link would also build our search engine rankings.
Back to our blogger site, we can just rinse and repeat what we did their. We can also submit our unique content to all social media directories to add exposure. This way we can have our site getting benefit three ways. First is the direct traffic. Basically because we have submitted a ton of articles in article directories, expect to get a ton in return. Second is the search engine benefits. This is also called Organic Traffic. Because we’ve built a lot of links facing our site we can easily get listed in major search engines for key terms. Third is improvement. The first few weeks/months is for testing and optimizing. You can always look in your Google Analytics to see what are the things to improve. Hopefully in the future I can make more advanced posts and more killer techniques so that it can help you out
That’s it. It’s a ton of work but as you progress more, you’re hardwork will eventually pay off with paychecks from affiliate companies. With my experience with this, it took me about 2 weeks before generating a sale. Of course, you can either do in shorter or longer period of time. It depends on your determination and other skills. You can ask questions in the comments section if you have some clarifications.
-theaffiliate™-
