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Gather Success Challenge III – Affiliate Marketing

May 19

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Making Money | 5 Comments

affiliate marketing money

Earn Money with Affiliate Marketing

Tonight was call-in number 4 for Gather Success’ Blogger Reality Show.  Our challenge for the last week as centered around affiliate marketing, we were to promote, market, and ideally make a sale of Atomic Blogging 3.0 system.    At least one challenger had a sale.


I did not even attempt this challenge.  Last week was crazy busy with non-IM type of stuff.  So of course I did not get any points awarded.


Speaking of points,  Alvin made some good ones on how to choose your affiliates.  For the purpose of the call he used Clickbank as a good example of an affiliate directory.  Here is a step by step process on how to find a good affiliate:


  1. If you don’t already have an account set up go to Clickbank.com and set one up.  It’s easy and its quick

  2. To select a product click on Marketplace.  It seems that many of the challengers are in the make online income niche, which is very competitive and even though Alvin makes good money in that niche, his suggestion is that it is much easier to make money promoting affiliates that are not in the  blogging for money business.  The competition is significantly less

  3. Clickbank is really good at giving statistical information on the affiliate program.  One of the statistics that Alvin likes to look at is the gravity.  Gravity tells you how popular a product is so the higher the number, the more popular or demand there is for it.  There are several factors that contribute to the popularity of an affiliate program:- collateral support such as banners, sales page and ongoing marketing  including but not restricted to emails.

    -  conversion
    -  commission

  4. After selecting a program, check out the sales page and any other promotional material the affiliate publisher is offering.

  5. Where do all the screenshots come from?

  6. Transaction records

  7. Be sure the product has testimonials

  8. Get your link, button or banner and test it.

  9. Try the buy button to see whether it works or not

  10. Check the bottom of the page to make sure that the affiliate link is the same as your Clickbank ID.  If its not then don’t promote this product.  Go through the process with another.

From the submissions it seems that many of us have our own challenge with affiliate marketing.  How many times have you been told to promote a big ticket item because the amount of time and effort spent is  the same as for a small ticket item but the financial rewards are much greater even if you sell far less.


That might work if you already have your affiliate marketing chops down pat.  You really need to build your affiliate marketing muscles before going for the big game.  Alvin’s suggestion is to challenge yourself with small weekly goals, something like “… I am going to earn US$200 this week selling product XYZ  at $20 each…” and then set your whole campaign up for the week.  See what results you get at the end of the week.  Make small adjustments to the campaign for week 2.


Track everything.  You may hit your $200 mark the first week, maybe not.  The thing is now you have a goal and a method and as you continue to improve your marketing skills, the sales will begin to come in.  This takes practice.  As you get better you can start marketing higher priced products.


Affiliate marketing when mastered  is an easy  way to earn an online income.

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Affiliate Marketing: Plan Your Campaigns

Feb 18

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing | 2 Comments

Growing your blog income through affiliate marketing is an ongoing process.  Seasoned affiliate marketers plan their campaigns months and sometimes even years ahead and often have several running simultaneously for each of their niches or affiliates. It takes time to get to this level of expertise and efficiency – and money to automate and outsource.  Take a deep breath.  You do not need to start at that level but if you want to earn a healthy online income then start you must.

One of the easiest ways to plan affiliate marketing campaigns is to center them around events, seasons, celebrations etc. The obvious are Christmas, New Years, Valentine’s, Mother’/Fathers’s Day … and so on.  No matter what your niche is one you can definitely work one or two of these special days into your marketing campaigns.

But why not separate yourself from the pack?  Everyone is selling at Christmas and it’s not to say that you shouldn’t, but did you know that there are dedicated “days” or months to just about anything  and everything under the sky?  The narrower your niche, the more bizarre the relevant topic day, the more attention you can draw with your advertising.

An example might look something like this:

Niche:  Left handed people
Domain:  LeftHandedPeople.com

Is there a Left Hander’s Day? Yes.  August 13.

Now is the time to start preparing for an all out campaign that should launch sometime in July.  But you need to start to have all your tools in place and there is no better time to start than now.

1.  Do you have a mechanism to capture leads?
If not think about what it might be that would entice your blog reader to register and leave their name and email.  Here are some possible options:

- weekly or monthly newsletter
-  e.report on being left handed: 17 – 20 pages on what it means to be left handed
-  e.book on famous left handed people – write one yourself, or check around to see if there is one that is available for PLR(Private Label Rights): 50 – 70 pages.

2. Decide what your offer is going to be.
What about left handed mugs – message on the mug appears to the right of the handle.  Or left handed scissors?  Left handed golf clubs.  The list is endless.

3.  Dedicated domain name.
You do not need to buy new domain name, you can have a sub-domain that would look like this:

LeftHandedPeople.com/August-golf
LeftHandedPeople.com/August-mugs
LeftHandedPeople.com/August-scissors

4.  Contact your affiliate vendor.
See if you can work out a one time offer for their top selling product.  Now you have a special price  for your unique market: the lefties.  It is estimated that 7% – 10% of adults are left handed.  That is a narrow niche yet a significant market.

5.  Write your ad:
 Write your copy for the sales letter – this is the long sales letter telling your prospects why they need a new set of left handed golf clubs. Check and see if your affiliate vendor already has one.  If you are going for more than one item have a separate sales letter for each one, as in example  #3 above, it should be a different sales letter and domain for  golf clubs, the mugs and the scissors.  Not everything has to be different, just a few words and phrases to reflect the offer.   Have these ready to go for first week of August.

6.  Marketing blueprint:
Decide how you are going to market this.  Start warming up your prospects.  Pre-write a set of autoresponder messages that will start going out mid-July.  Space the messages by several days, decrease the spacing as August 1st approaches.

7.  D-Day
August 01:   the mass promo goes out to everyone on your list. Put up banners on all your relevant sites.  Put out a press release :  “Lefties Rule August 13″ and submit to all press release directories.  If you have the budget by all means submit to those that are fee based, but if dollars are scarce use the free directories service.

8. Daily Activity:
Have something happening on the net every day until the 13th – newsletters, blog posts, forums, see if you can get guest blog space on some of the more popular blogs.

9.  August 14:
Tally up your sales.  You may still have some straggle in after the date but the majority of your sales should be in by the 14th.  Review everything:  what sold, what promo delivered most traffic, what venue converted most, which gave the biggest return on your time/investment.  Make immediate notes and make the tweaks to next year’s promotion while they are still fresh in your mind.

File away till January or February of the following year.  Dust it off then, make changes, add new things you may have learned in the interval.

For a list of holidays/bizarre dedicated days etc. go to:

http://www.brownielocks.com/month2.html

For example, did you know that February is National Start a Business Month?  I didn’t either.  This morning I was pleasantly surprised when while  doing  my blog rounds I read this post on Pat’s  Smart Passive Income blog.  The article is on whether you should form an LLC for your business.    You will notice that this is part I.  Now Pat is a real savvy blogger who pulls in significantly more than just coffee change from his blogging.  Dollars to donuts he has shingled several posts and put a small campaign together that will garner him some extra sheckels, I mean, who isn’t interested in starting a business these days?

Chances are that the first year you do this, the results may be less than sterling. Here is what you will have achieved:

-  an affiliate marketing model centered around specific holidays
-  established control(s) campaign for your left handed market niche

For a list of holidays/dedicated days etc. go to:

http://holidayinsights.com/moreholidays/index.htm

Don’t go hogwild now.  You probably want to mix them up – you know, the odd ball days with the more mainstream ones, don’t forget Christmas or Mother’s & Father’s Day!

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

Growing

-

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Affiliate Marketing: Write the Ad

Feb 15

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing | No Comments

Today’s blog income post will be a follow up to last weeks Affiliate Marketing: Establishing A Control .  I will examine the process to step 1 in establishing a control: advertising.

But first Today’s Olympic Moment! Brought to you by Blog Income!(another benefit to owning a blog – being your own sponsor!) – Smell of Gold Turns to Taste of Gold!
bilodeau

Canadians across the nation are doing the rain dance, whooping, hollering and stomping it up as they celebrate  “Alexandre the Great” in winning the first gold for the host nation at Vancouver’s Olympics thus ending the country’s drought of winning gold on home turf.  I mean Canadians are known to be nice and hospitable but we have to draw the line somewhere!   Sweet!  Congratulations Alexandre!

Now to the topic at hand: 5 steps to a successful ad.

1.  CREATE OFFER
What is the offer?  Speak Spanish in two weeks!  Travel in luxury on a pauper’s budget!  Whatever your offer is you need to capture the interest and curiosity of  the viewer so that the ad is clicked on.

2. WRITE THE AD
Obvious as it seems I have seen in the offline world where people just throw something up without giving much thought to what they are saying.  I suspect the same happens here in the online world. The shorter the ad, the more important it is to fine tune it as much as possible.  Good ads come in three parts:

The Headline.  Lets see what we can do with traveling in luxury on a pauper’s budget.  Here are some options:

- Broke Student Travels in Style:
OK.  Nothing terribly compelling but the general idea is intact

- Luxe Travel on Student’s BudgetGetting stronger. But what about

- Luxe Travel on Pauper’s Budget
I like the word  pauper more than student, I think it is stronger and more likely to arouse the curiosity.

The Body. This is where you write about the offer in two to three sentences at most.  Make it interesting and compelling.  Punch it up.

Call to Action: Download your free report now.

3. PLACE THE AD
Another obvious.  Look at your options.  Do you have a budget?  If so look at Google Adwords, Ezines and Newsletters that take advertising.  If you are new to affiliate marketing chances are that the budget is slim to none.  The first place is to put it up on your own site or blog.  A banner is more likely to attract attention than just text.  You can design a cool ad for free at http://www.addesigner.com/

4. TRACK RESULTS
There are lots of ad tracker services on the internet, many for free.  Just do a Google search for “free ad trackers”.  One that looks good to me is http://www.clickaudit.com/ .  Wordpress also has some free plugins that can help you track your ads.  I use Pretty Link which is proprietary to WordPress Direct.

Track your results. Congratulations, you have now established your first control.

5. REPEAT
Repeat the process.  Make a few small adjustments.  Don’t revamp the whole ad and its process unless it gave you zero results.  Success comes in fine tuning and fine tuning is not a re-haul.

To Your Success in Affiliate Marketing!

Valentina

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Affiliate Marketing: Establishing a Control

Feb 11

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing | 2 Comments

What is a control?

In its simplest form a control is that system, process or campaign that produces the desired result; in affiliate marketing that result is sales.  The campaign that delivers the best sales results becomes the control.

The dilemma that an affiliate marketer faces is do I first set up a system or do I first make the sales and build a system around that result?

Answer:  yes and yes.

Sales is the backbone of any successful business – you can have the best product in the world but without sales you have no business.  By now you have selected your affiliate product.  Here is what a typical marketing funnel looks like:flow chart

You now have the bare bone structure for a system. That is where you start.  Lets examine the flow of such a funnel:

  1. Advertising:
    First you have to create the offer.  With affiliate marketing, especially with information products, this is often already done for you. But remember if you send your prospects directly to the affiliate’s sales page, you do not capture the lead.
  2. Capture:
    The way to get around this is to create your own offer.  It can be a free newsletter, an e.book, an introductory 7-day course, a CD or some other ethical bribe.   The idea is that you give it away for free.  It should be something that is in alignment with what your affiliate product is.  Let’s take my affiliate Atomic Blogging which is advertised on this site as an example.

    My options are:

a)  Just put up the banner which when clicked goes directly to the vendor’s sales page.  If the visitor buys, I make a commission.  That is good.  That is the job of the banner to the right.

or

b) Develop my own ad.  I have done this with the ABC’s of Blogging banner which you see on this site.  This is a free PDF on blogging for money.  When a visitor clicks that banner, they are directed to a capture page which asks for their name and email.  This is needed so that the visitor can receive the link to the download.

When the visitor submits the information it is directed to my autoresponder which “captures” the visitor’s name and email and immediately sends out the link to the PDF download.

I now have a qualified lead.  I know that this person is interested in blogging. The name is loaded into my blogger prospects list. My loaded autoresponder follows up with an email within 24 hours inviting the prospect to purchase Atomic Blogging

3.  Follow Up:
I am currently working on another option. After clicking on the download link, a popup sales page will appear with the Atomic Blogging offer.  Why?  Because the visitor is in action mode and may be ready to make a purchase right then and there.

Because this involves some tech type stuff my goal is to have it all up and running by the end of the month with tracking implemented for each option.  The method that delivers the best results will become my control.

4.  Relationship Building
Not everyone that downloads the free PDF will buy the Atomic Blogging product.  These people will receive my pre-loaded, time spaced  emails with helpful information on blogging.  Some of the pre-loaded messages may include some information on Atomic Blogging which hopefully convert into a sale.

5. REPEAT.
Each option is a separate campaign.  Each will be tracked to the minutest detail.
The campaign that becomes the control will be the one that all other campaigns will be measured against.

It is best to run your control several times, tweaking where necessary.  Run the identical campaign but with two small differences and test to see which one pulls in the better results. It can be something as simple as the placement of a word.  This is called split testing or put another way it’s fine tuning the art of internet marketing and the way to building an enviable blog income.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

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Tools of the Trade

Jan 25

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing | 8 Comments

Now that you have selected an affiliate to promote and bought a unique domain name it is time to fill your box with some basic tools.

1. YOUR OWN SITE –  LANDING PAGE

The good thing about affiliate marketing is that the better affiliates already have collateral material ready for you including the “long sales letter” if you want to use it.  You could just redirect your new domain name to your affiliate URL – that way the traffic goes directly to the vendor’s site and buys the product.  You get the commission.  Easy as pie.

But you really want more.  You want to capture that buyer’s name and email address so that you can send your newsletters, emails, updates and valuable information to your customer.  That is where your own landing page …  alternately referred to as a squeeze, portal or capture page comes in. Now each of these have shades of difference, but basically their main job is to entice the visitor to give you their name and email address.

This is merely a mini site that is a page long – in this instance a “page” is not a designated size, it can be a short 5 x 8, a typical 8-1/2  x 11, or, go on and on like a roll of paper.  On this page you offer an ethical bribe so that the visitor gladly fills out her name and email address.  That ethical bribe can be in the form of a free ebook, a video or cd, a subscription to a free newsletter or if you can afford it a discounted price to the affiliate product (limited number, limited time), but in order to receive these they need to register through your landing page.

2. HOSTING

If your blog is already self hosted then that is where you host your new affiliate domain name.  I use Hostgator . This was the host that was recommend when I was going through the 30 Day Challenge last summer. I find their customer service to be excellent and their pricing is competitive with other hosting companies.  Another company I see cropping up more and more often is Blue Host.

3. AUTORESPONDER

An autoresponder manages your list.  It is a way to stay in touch with your prospects, to build rapport, establish credibility and promote new products and services.  You can program a thank you page to show up after a product has been purchased.  You can keep your prospects and customers updated on new developments in your business.  An autoresponder can have sub lists so that your customers are separated from your prospects, or perhaps they responded to different promotional material that way you can customize your messages to sync with their interests.

One of the most important features of an autoresponder is that about 90% of it is on autopilot – periodically you will want to interrupt pre-loaded messages with something new and fresh with a broadcast.  Use and abuse your autoresponder, it is there to serve you, your business and your subscribers – the more you know about how to use it, the stronger your business will be. A good autoresponder starts at about $10 per month and increases as your prospect list grows.  I use iContact . It was recommended to me by my mentor as a user friendly service and indeed I found that the learning curve was minimal.

4.  LINK TRACKING

Test, test & test again and make sure that everything you do to market your affiliate is tracked precisely.  What link tracking does is that it gives you information on every URL that you have published, whether it is by email, advertisement, articles, pay-per-click, even offline. A link tracking software is way over and above the statistics that your platform system or hosting company provide – those are just an overview of traffic and the source of that traffic. 

As you become more comfortable with your affiliate marketing efforts, you will want to mine deeper into which ad or words or  title drew the most traffic and converted in sales.  You can subscribe to a monthly link tracking software such as Website Gear from $10 a month or buy from about $300 upwards.

5.  LINK CLOAKING SOFTWARE

You don’t always need link cloaking but it is a good practice to get into.  What does link cloaking do?  It changes the original URL to a different one, while still leading the visitor to the same destination – in other words, the original URL is cloaked, or hidden. One of the reasons you may want to cloak the original URL is for sheer appearance.  Have you seen URLs that take up a whole line, something like (not a real URL)

http://www.valentinasaffiliates.com/linktracking=img&affID12345

I have seen URLs that are twice the length of the above.  Not only does it look cumbersome but it is much easier for the link to break, or it can be so long that your prospect needs to cut and paste it into the browser bar – some just won’t bother and another sale is gone.

Another reason to cloak your affiliate URL is, well people can be funny.  Onliners are becoming insreasingly savvy and recognize an affiliate URL when they see one.    Sometimes, for whatever their reason might be they don’t want to have someone make a commission on their purchase so they eliminate that part of the URL that is affiliate sensitive and buy directly from the vendor… I know, the price is the same, go figure!

There are URL shortening services such a Tiny URL which are free.  The problem is that you have no control over how long the redirect will last.  Affiliate Cloner Software will do the job for a one time fee.

There will be other tools that you will want to add to your toolbox.  The five mentioned here are a good start and signal  your professionalism.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

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Five Basic Steps to Start Your Affiliate Marketing

Jan 21

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing | 11 Comments

Last week I had the honor of Mike Paetzold guesting here at Blog Income Life.  Mike’s posts were mostly directed to blogging yet the very same principles apply to affiliate marketing.  That’s how we get better and stronger  – reps at the gym build your body muscles, reps on the internet build your marketing muscles

Ewen Chia of Secret Affiliate Weapon says that when you master affiliate marketing you can your write own paycheck any time you want.  This self made mulit-millionaire made his first million focusing on affiliate marketing. In his book How I made My First Million on the Internet, Ewen sets out the step by step process that he employed to bring in the big bucks.

What is so powerful about affiliate marketing is that you do not need to have a product of your own.  You profit by someone else’s research, development, production and fulfillment.  All you need to do is promote and convert your promotion into sales. In other words you get to make money without the worry, stress and up front costs of developing a product.  You can even be choosy and take on products that are proven to convert well, its like betting on a sure horse.

Here are some basic tools that you will need to have:

#1.  HANG OUT YOUR SHINGLE

Tell the world you are open for business.  How are you going to promote your affiliate product?  Of course you can put up banner ads on the sidebar of your blog, as I have done here, but that of and on its own will not bring you many sales.  Have you ever noticed that in the offline world  big brand names appear in so many different media venues?  Coke ads  for example  appear in magazines, on billboards,  TV, as sponsors for major events, co-op with movie theaters, restaurants, and the list goes on and on.  That is marketing at its most.  As an affiliate marketer you need to do the same with your chosen product.

#2 – DIRECT MARKETING

One of the strongest methods of getting a message to your market is through direct opt-in marketing.  Strictly speaking direct marketing is the flyers and leaflets and “junk” mail that finds its way onto your porch or mailbox.  Internet marketing pioneers learned much from this method and with a few adjustments here and there developed a system that works.  So when I say “direct opt-in marketing” I am really referring to getting your message to your market’s inbox.  How do you do that without spamming?  You build an opt-in list.

#3 – OPT-IN LIST

This is a list of people in your market who have opted in to receive information from you.  It is permission based marketing by email that goes directly from your autoresponder to their inbox.  This is how you send them information about your product, about any specials that you may have, or an introduction to another similar type of product that may be a good add on to what they already have.  This works for both informational product as well as physical.

An example of this is the ABC’s of Blogging banner ad at the top of this page.  When you click that on you are taken to a long sales letter at the end of which you are invited to submit your name and email address and for that you will receive the link to a free PDF download of my e.book ABC’s of Blogging for Money.  Many marketers publish a newsletter and offer a free subscription – you may have seen such invites on other blogs.

#4 – VIRTUAL BILLBOARDS

Everything in the virtual world has a twin in the “real” world.  Virtual billboards  are mini sites and they are a full blown ad for the product that you are marketing.  Typically a good affiliate program will already have this type of collateral material ready for you,  and you can just go ahead and drive traffic to that mini-site, but it would be better if you could somehow manage to collect an opt-in before your prospect goes off to buy the product.  Don’t get me wrong, a sale is good but it’s better if in the process you can also add the name of the customer to your own list.  A future post will deal with how you can do this.

In future postings I’ll cover additional ways of growing your list.  As a point of clarification RSS feeds and email via Google does not contribute to your list.  Those are people who just want to know when you have fresh content on your blog or site – the contact information belongs to Google and you do not have access to it.

#5 – EZINE ADS

Look for online publications on your topic, be it a newsletter or an online magazine and place an ad.  This is going to cost money but you are advertising to a qualified target market.  Be sure to get the circulation numbers and other logistics such as the readership percentage and typical click through rate for each ezine broadcast.

These are some of the ways that you can promote your affiliate products.  As with anything it is starting, testing and tweaking.  It is best to start with one method, massage it till it starts to make money, then expand on the same method, when you get real good at it introduce another.  Indeed,  master affiliate marketing and you will be well on your way to living the big awesome on your blog income.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina


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Blog Income Org Chart

Jan 19

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing | 8 Comments

Expand your thinking and your blog income.  It’s time to think beyond just a blog.  If you have not already incorporated yourself as a business, you will definitely want to do so as your online earnings grow.  I like to see things and thought it would be fun to put up an org chart of what my internet marketing business looks like.  It also gives me a structure, one I can add on to – or make adjustments as needed.  Here is what my org chart looks like:

I’ve put INTERNET MARKETING as the holding company.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT  and BLOGGING  are each an “Internet Marketing” company.

BLOGGING is  the owner of each blog.  Each blog has its own set of affiliates.  Under Blog Income I have listed my affiliates for that blog.  This list will continue to grow as I add other affiliates.  I have a white board in my office and have drawn this chart on it – I see it every day and it gives me a better sense of business – it’s easy to lose sight of that fact when the commute is a scant minute and the dress code doesn’t stop at pajamas.

Just for the fun of it, put up your own org chart.  The good thing is that you can draw one any way you want.  Just imagine what you want your internet marketing business to look like in five years.  The parts that you can flesh out right now are the affiliates.

Select just one affiliate to start with and treat it much the same way that you did your blog.  Experts recommend that you have a domain name for each of your affiliates, or, at the very least, have each of your affiliates as a sub domain.

An example would be:

-  www.AllanasFavoriteAffiliates.com or
-  www.BestAffiliates.com

Both are fictitious.

Then for each affiliate you can have a sub domain without paying for a new one.  Here are some examples:

- www.AllanasFavoriteAffiliates.com/dogtraining
- www.AllanasFavoriteAffiliates.com/rawdogfood
- www.AllanasFovoriteAffiliates.com/puppytreats

Next stop for me is getting unique domain names for my affiliates.  I haven’t decided on how to organize them yet.  For the moment they are just being marketed directly to the vendor’s sales pages.

I’ve mentioned this before but it begs repeating – choose an affiliate that you are familiar with, whose service or product you are personally pleased with.  This is particularly important in the early stages of your affiliate marketing.  Later as you get to know your vendors well and trust them you can forego the third degree before promoting a new product of theirs.

Last week Mike Paetzold talked about  getting quality affiliates and pointed to some that are so obvious that they slipped right under my nose.   He said that the services you are currently using make for a good start – most online services have affiliate programs.  The only “service” I promote is Hostgator by just putting up a banner ad.  I just checked Go Daddy where I buy all my domains, and yes, they have a revenue sharing program as well but I think you really need to be a substantial internet marketer before going that route.

What are your thoughts about where your online business is going?  Do you see yourself  incorporating it into some sort of a legal entity?  How do you envision your chart?  What does it look like today?  In five years?

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Best……………valentina

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Golden Nuggets for Your Blog Income

Jan 18

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, List Building | 8 Comments

A very special THANK YOU to Mike Paetzold for guesting here at Blog Income Life for the past week.  The series gave me some golden nuggets and exposed areas where I can certainly do some tweaking.  Below are some things that I took away

#1.  LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT
Every little zig that should ‘ave  been a zag, when corrected leads to knowledge and better understanding.  Of course there was a zig – mine!  Little things like the difference between an author and an editor in your admin make a difference.  Note to self: pay close attention to detail.

#2.  BLOGGING & LIST BUILDING
List building is an important fundamental in internet marketing, particularly if you, like me, have affiliate marketing as the next step in building a blog income.  What I found interesting in Mike’s post is that the blog and the list can serve each other equally well.  Use the blog as a billboard for your own ad inviting people to sign up for a newsletter,  a free ebook or perhaps even a webinar.  As your list grows from this source and others, you can now email your subscribers to update them on your latest blog posting.  This may sound redundant but not necessarily so.  People are busy and may not have the time to visit your blog daily to check for fresh content and if you post only three times a week or even weekly, sending an email to your subscribers is just plain good service.

#3.  NICHE & KEYWORDS
I have never seen such a clear cut flow chart of how to organize your niche and  supportive keywords:

Niche
Category
Keywords

Assigning a value to each category and the supportive keywords is very interesting.  I like the idea of using a term with four words, getting that to page one quickly, then fight for the more competitive three words within that term – the two words become more difficult, but at least you’re on your way.  Do this with each category and sprinkle your post with other keywords that you want to tackle down the road.  Its all about planting seeds for your success.

#4.  POST REVIEWS

On the heels of affiliate marketing, doing a review post on your affiliate is a good way to drive traffic to the affiliate sales page.  Mike pointed out that a good first set of reviews could be about the services you are already using – for example, I use Hostgator as my host, I use iContact as my autoresponder, and my platform is Wordpress Direct There are other services that I use.  Some have affiliate programs.  Taking this bit of advice from Mike, I’ll be posting reviews on these products that way not only might the article result in a few affiliate sales if the my readers sign up for the service, but it will be useful information for others when deciding on which service to subscribe to.

#5.  FINDING QUALITY AFFILIATE PRODUCTS

Test. Test. Test.  As an affiliate you are promoting someone else’s product and the first step is to know that product.  I think that this is particularly true of courses and software.  Try it, if you like it, then become an affiliate.  Sometimes if you know the vendor very well and have already had a good experience with his previous products, you can go on reputation.  Another way is to check reviews on the product before you decide to promote it yourself.

Thank you, Mike. 

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

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Affiliate Marketing – Get The Fundamentals Right

Jan 8

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Making Money | 4 Comments

The three main stages for earning an online income are:

1. Blogging is the best introduction to internet marketing.
2. Affiliate Marketing is the best introduction to making serious money.
3. Developing your own product is THE best entry to online riches

Last year my focus was blogging – this year it will be on affiliate marketing. Stage three will be another year.

Just as with blogging there are fundamentals that you need to understand and implement if you want to be successful in promoting your selected affiliate products. There are people making serious income from affiliate marketing and you can too.

Blogging gives you a strong foundation and a basic understanding of how the world of the internet works.  As a recap, in the year that this blog has been up we have covered how to

- pick a niche topic for your blog
- choose a domain name
- select a platform for your blog
- set up set up hosting
- start posting
- submit articles to article directories
- get affiliates for your niche market
- set goals
….. more.  Those are just the main items.

Affiliate Marketing is one of those “disciplines” that internet marketers choose to specialize in and can be integrated with your blog – in fact blogging is often used as a marketing tool for affiliate marketing. In my view it is the natural progression as the next step in your online marketing career.

For a quick review on affiliate marketing please reference these posts:

Pump Up Your Blog Income with Affiliate Marketing – 04/11/09

How to Find Affiliate Programs for Physical Products- 12/11/09

Residual Income – The Holy Grail of Affiliate Marketing 13/11/09


You will notice that on this blog I have several banner ads – except for ABCs of Blogging (which is my own ebook), all the others are affiliates. What that means is that if anyone visiting this blog clicks on one of those ads and buys the product I will be paid a commission and that might happen from time to time, but to really maximize the potential income that these products offer, I will need to do more than just have them on this site.  I will need to market them.

The above articles should give you a basic understanding of why affiliate marketing is an excellent source of income.   If you have not read them yet I encourage you to hop on over and read them now.

The next post will cover five critical steps to successful affiliate marketing.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

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Review: Secret Affiliate Weapon

Nov 21

Posted by Valentina in Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Making Money, Reviews | 2 Comments

Every journey eventually comes to a fork in the road where we have to make a choice.  I wrote about that in the October 21 post, titled Fork in the Road as it applied to the journey of developing a blog income.  The choice was to repeat or take on something new.

There was no right or wrong answer.  In the past I have often repeated a course as I found that the second round gave me a stronger grounding and I picked up things that I missed the first time.

The next step I chose for Blog Income Life was to take on affiliate marketing.  This was already on my mind and earlier I had purchased several courses that would take me through the basics of affiliate marketing.  I knew that to be successful in affiliate marketing it meant more than just slapping on an affiliate banner or two and hope that the traffic that came to my website would click on the banner and buy that product.

I picked Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon to start with.  If previous material I bought from Ewen was anything to judge from, then this would be an easy to understand, follow and implement course.  I was right.

I like the way that Ewen makes everything so simple.  I like the way that his whole course follows the most basic of teachings:

- Tell them what you are going to tell them
- Tell it to them
- Tell them what you just told them.

His video tutorials show screenshots of everything, from forms to be completed, what to enter on the forms, how to submit to what to expect when you complete your task, and what that should look like.  He explains the importance of each step and how it will affect your marketing results.

As a reader of this blog you are probably aware that I have a grouping of dog related blogs.  I have several affiliates but one in particular has been paying me some income.  The plan is to apply this course to that affiliate on all the sites.  I figure that by the time I get all of them done they’ll be running on a “set it and leave it” mode … ok, close to it anyway.  It will be interesting to see the increase in sales and whether it will become a passive income.  I am also an affiliate of this course and will go through the same process to see what kind of dollars I can drum up.   Will you keep you updated via the Month in Review stats that I publish on this blog.

Some of the information covered is not new to me.  It won’t be for you either.  What I like about the course however is that it sets out a systemic approach to affiliate marketing which when followed thoroughly should drop paychecks into your mailbox with increasing regularity.

Something that was not new for me was how to set up an account with Ezine Articles.  I was going to skip this tutorial but thought that if I was going to review this course, I should go over everything with a fine tooth comb. I was surprised at how poorly I had set up my Ezine Articles account.  That was in the early stages of my internet marketing career and I did a poor job on the resource boxes and the bio.  This also underlines the importance of continuous tweaking – small changes can reap big rewards.

Affiliate Weapon leads you through the mechanics of autoresponders, web pages, thank you pages, how to use Squidoo, Tube Mogul and more.  I have to say that Ewen’s tutorial on installing Wordpress is by far  the easiest of tutorials  on this subject that I have ever watched (it was included in a previous course of Ewen’s that I bought) – even though all my blogs are now on Wordpress Direct I still occasionally refer to Ewen’s video when I need to tweak something in the admin area.

One item I was not completely crazy about.  There is an excellent interview with Stone Evans who is one of those super affiliate marketers.  The story is inspiring and I liked it.

Stone’s product is Plug In Profits and I must say the business model is brilliant.  The short of the long of it is that you sign up for five network marketing businesses and Plug In Profit takes you to well, profits.  I have over ten years of experience in network marketing and while I do not dispute that Stone and many others do indeed make money on these companies, none of the chosen ones would float my boat.

Aside from that one personal quirk, I found that Secret Affiliate Weapon is an excellent course.  It starts off gently easing you into the process.  Soon without your even noticing it your internet marketing literacy has taken on a significant upswing, your language now includes viral marketing and you actually know what that means!  The simplicity of the course is ideal for newbies, the content makes it a good buy for advanced internet marketers and at $27 it’s a bargain for everyone!

Happy Affiliate Marketing!

Valentina

PS. Secret Affiliate Weapon offers an affiliate.  You could open your affiliate account and apply the course to promoting it – and make a few dollars while learning “on the job”

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Disclosure:  I own and paid for my copy of the Secret Affiliate Weapon.  I did not receive any compensation for this review.  I am an affiliate and should you decide to buy it through my links, my Bank of Blog Income will thank you.

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