You’ve seen the e-mails, and all the hype surrounding affiliate marketing without using an e-mail list or having your own product – in other words, you’re pimping someone elses products. Nothing wrong with this but what a lot of the ebooks don’t tell you is how to get real traffic to make this a worthwhile opportunity.
So how can you make boatloads of cash without having your own list or product?
Traffic is the key.
First off – traffic through content is possible, but it will take time to build up. If you read the $5.00 Per Day on Adsense post I made a little while ago and you downloaded the e-book and read it you would have learned that you need to push articles to dozens of content networks … oh, by the way a “content network” is just a fancy term for article directory. It just sounds better when you call it a content network.
So how can you get thousands of visitors to your site per day in order to convert a small percentage (and when we talk small, we’re talking 1% in most cases – unless they are very targetted leads)? Easy. It’s called CPC advertising, or cost-per-click advertising – again another fancy term for using something like Google AdWords.
This is how it works.
- Find good paying affiliate programs, perhaps they pay per lead or action (such as giving your e-mail address, phone number or other information) or a highly popular affiliate program through something like ClickBank (we’ll talk about that later and some of the pitfalls and warnings to watch for).
- Find hundreds or thousands of related keywords for the product(s).
- Bid on them via AdWords or another CPC network.
- Drive traffic to your landing page
That’s how it’s done in a nutshell.
Of course, the difficult part is understanding all the steps in detail and putting what you’ve learned to action.
I’ve tried CPC/Adwords in the past and while I didn’t loose money, I didn’t do it well enough so only had moderate success at it. This was also the same time that I jumped from program to program, thinking that the next thing is the sure thing – check my About page or read this post – Are you a forum junkie?.
Over the years, I’ve learned quite a bit more about how to advertise without loosing money but at the same time ensuring that I can convert the visits (convert means to get the visitor to perform a specific action so that I can collect the commission for that action).
This time around I’ve done my research, and am working with two competing programs — I’m not yet ready to disclose which programs I am working with right now but will do so soon enough.
So far I’ve been pretty impressed by both of these programs. One program is VERY expensive – around $$$$ and the other is like the little brother to it costing considerably less (only $$). Sorry that’s the only hint I will provide right now.
The one thing both systems provide are small case studies, along with the websites that were created for them. The one thing I noticed right away, is that the sites are UGLY. I’m serious, they are very, very ugly but the affiliate marketers claim to make phenomenal amounts of money with them.
These are called landing pages. A landing page can be something simple with nothing more than the offer and some other information or it can be a small mini-site (do you remember a product called mini-site profits from a few years ago – apparently it’s no longer available, but don’t worry you can find similar information on the web for free — in fact this $5.00 Per Day on Adsense gives you similar information to build a mini-site). Phil Wiley had a product about mini-sites, as did Michael Rasmussen (if I remember correctly).
There is another system available called The Mini Site Formula that sells for $97.00 or a $1,997.00 option. Yes, there is a price difference… but when you read their sales page you see that they will give you one of their profitable sites for that price.
So what is a mini-site, just what it sounds like. A mini-site is like a full-blown site but on a much smaller scale. There may be perhaps 8-10 well written articles that provide useful information, along with a short sales pitch plus an opt-in box along with the regular pages (Privacy Policy, Contact Us and About). The idea is to use CPC to lead people to either a very generic landing page or a mini-site.
Combine CPC + CPA + landing pages OR mini-sites + e-mail captures and you can achieve the following:
CAPTIVE AUDIENCE – by capturing their e-mail you have a VERY HIGH probability of being able to sell them on future offers. Think about it, they were looking for something, found your site and were willing to give you their e-mail address.
MONEY – chances are they will also click through on your advertising and purchase or give up some information.
As I go through more of the material, I’ll combine what I know with what’s presented (I won’t give you the details of HOW but high-level WHAT) and post here. Please, don’t expect regular posts on the topic – and I won’t give the dirty details because that would be unethical. What I will do is package the information into informative posts, you can already find a lot of it FREELY out there but I will put my own spin onto it.
Mohamed
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Craigslist, it seems has been around forever. I just finished reading a great article about the company and got a little insight into how things operate. 
Guys, guys, guys… stop what you’re doing RIGHT NOW. This very instant. Stop. Seriously.
