In days of old I’d spend a lot of money on PLR.  I’m sure you have as well.  Perhaps it was a monthly membership to something like Article Underground or anyone of the gurus out there selling monthly memberships or some such scheme to get you into their PLR distribution.  You don’t see a lot of that anymore, except for Article Underground that keeps trying to get people to buy into their “Fire Sales” (whatever that means).

You also find PLR through tons of spam offers from gurus that “once sold those very same articles for $47.00 per month” but are now giving them away for joining their mailing list or selling 100,000 articles (I kid you not) for $47.00 and if you happen to be smart enough to try and leave the site they try and grab you by reducing the price by another $30.00.

The problem with PLR is that is written for the masses - and by that I do not mean readers but for marketers.  Have you read some of the PLR out there?  It’s really crappy.  I mean seriously, it is very, very bad.  Broken english, no train of thought in the article at all, very disjointed and written to someone that has only a grade 8 education.

I don’t know about you but on many of my affiliate sites, the visitors are obviously more educated than that.

So you say “but I’ll rewrite the PLR, at least its given me a starting point”.  OK, if you say so.  I’ve tried to rewrite PLR recently by gorging on the hundreds of thousands of articles that I’ve accumulated – it was a fruitless task.  I ended up rewriting the article entirely to the point that there was no resemblance to the original article.  That’s how bad most of the articles are.  It took me twice as long to rewrite, and can honestly say that if I had written them from scratch it would have taken much less time.

You are much better off researching topics for articles in the niche your site(s) are in and writing well thought, logically flowing and informative articles instead of using PLR as a base or for anything.

Writing well researched articles using strong, long-tail keywords will also help you with your SEO – just take a look at this product Amazonian Profit Plan - they generate a 5-figure income (probably 6-figure by now) writing well thought articles and reviews.

There is a lot to SEO and writing good content is just one aspect.

Of course getting visitors to your site can be accomplished through other means as well, but content is the easiest and least expensive.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, article marketing, bum marketing, PLR Articles, Writing Articles

Mo and I didn’t realize that e-books are still popular, but this information is not new so we won’t go into a lot of details - beside the web is full of crappy posts on how to make money from a free e-book that we don’t want to continue adding to the crappy posts out there.

So how do you make money from a free e-book?

Step #1 – Write a fricking e-book.  If your niche is all about digital cameras, make the e-book all about digital cameras about 30-50 pages in length, use nice big fonts to keep it clean and easy to read.

Step #2 – Bombard it with your affiliate links.

Step #3 – Convert it to PDF format.

Step #4 – Post it on your niche blog and allow visitors to download it once they give you their name and e-mail address.

Step #5 – Sit back and let it make money for you.

Oh – doesn’t hurt to post the PDF to places like SCRIBD and other similar sites.  Maximum penetration for maximum results, and money.

Enough said.

Robert

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, make money on the internet with affiliate marketing, make money with free ebook

On the last post I talked to you about the two dozen or so aged domains that Mo and I have and how we put up autoblogs on each site and are making shitloads of money for doing absolutely nothing on them.  I’ll give you another hint as to what the sites are.  Product review sites.  And product review sites make shitloads of money.  Whoops.  I said shitloads of money twice.  Three times now, if you don’t count the title.

Why do product review sites make money?

Think about it.  Why did Hulk Hogan make a shitload of money while in the WWF?  OK, not a good example - but think about it.  When you’re out searching for the new Canon EOS Rebel XS 10.1MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Lens (Black) or the Canon PowerShot SD1100IS 8 MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Blue) or the popular – Canon PowerShot SD780IS 12.1 MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.5-inch LCD (Red) or whatever else you’re looking for, don’t you key in the main keywords for your product and hit Google to search for it?

Good product review will convert visitors to purchasers, but the reviews need to be good.  You want to list the features and functions of the product.  Go into details.  People love details.  What would you want to know about the product? 

Add a lot of relavent content for your review, but research, research and do more research.  Yes product reviews take time – but if you have a tightly focused niche and can write 20 – 50 very good reviews around 1,000 words in length you will attract buyers like flies to shit.  Unfortunately people don’t like being sold for whatever reason, so don’t write your review like a late night commercial spinner who wants you to part with $199.99 for a bottle of vitamins that will help your erectile dysfunction problem.  Write like you mean it.  Then nail them at the end with the links to the product page (with YOUR affiliate links, of course).

Your reviews should be honest, but come on – honesty will not put money in your pocket.  Being honest doesn’t mean you have to emphasize on all the negatives.  You can leave them out or add a few to keep your review look realistic.

Add value to your reviews, and you will make the sale.

…I know what you’re thinking.  But how do you think door-to-door vaccum sellers made money?  Do you think they told buyers how much the vaccum bags were?  Nope.  Do you think they told the buyers how much parts and labor will be if their vaccum breaks?  Nope.  And do you REALLY think the hocksters on late nite TV selling love in a bottle, or the latest kitchen, or weight loss gadget are telling you the truth?  If you can’t market – get out of the game and do something else.

Robert

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, making money on the internet

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.

1. 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).
2. Find hundreds or thousands of related keywords for the product(s).
3. Bid on them via AdWords or another CPC network.
4. 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

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, Internet Business, internet business opportunity, internet opportunities, make money online, make money with affiliate marketing

Over the course of the year Mo and I have gone from writing about making money on the internet to some practical advice from our own experiences.  Some of the topics we’ve written about get many responses, and others none.  Some topics even generate quite a bit of e-mail (how did YOU find our e-mail address anyways?!).

We received this question/comment a few days ago about affiliate marketing:

“Hi – I’ve tried affiliate marketing without any real success.  I spent money on advertising but did not see any return at all.  I doubt affiliate marketing works.  I tried affiliate marketing in about one dozen hot areas…” blah, blah, blah.

There is more, but that’s the gist of it.

In the end, the writer states that “affiliate marketing failed me“.  Uh, no – YOU failed in affiliate marketing.

Nobody said that affiliate marketing is easy, what is easy in life?  If everything were then we would all be millionaires (like me), right?

Affiliate marketing works – but it took me a few days to come up with “The Top 3 Reasons Most People Fail At Affiliate Marketing“.

Reason #3 – Why You SUCK and Failed At Affiliate Marketing

You’re a total ass and don’t have what it takes to get off of your ass, and stick to a plan, set goals or follow through with any of the procedures or processes that Affiliate Managers and their organizations provide.  Truth be told, you’ll always be sitting on your backside rubbing salt into your own wounds and being jealous and envious of others because you can’t learn from your mistakes.

Seriously affiliate marketing is so bloody easy that I’m sure if I told Mo’s 6-year old kid how to do it and gave him step-by-step instructions, he could.

It is simple – here are the basic steps:

• Pick an area of interest – say something goofy like chocolate covered tofu.
• Next pick a domain name that reflects your topic of interest – how about http://www.chocolatecoveredtofu.com and register it.
• Pick up a CHEAP, CHEAP host to host your domain, you can get it for under $10.00 per month at http://www.findmyhosting.com.
• Create a website – set-it up as a blog, most hosting packages have provisions to set-up a blog without any fuss.  If you need help – contact us and we’ll be glad to help set you up for $100.00 flat fee payable through PayPal.
• Write and advertise… OK, OK there is a bit more to it as you do need to have specific plug-ins loaded in your install but once the basics are there, there is nothing else to do except promote yourself!

Even if you can’t write daily – you can HIRE someone to write for you.  I am not going to go into hiring writers for your business in this post, there is just too much to talk about!  But either Mo or I will talk about it, OK?

So besides the fact that You SUCK and Failed At Affiliate Marketing…

Reason #2 – You Couldn’t Focus An Auto-Focus Camera, Let Alone Focus On Your Business

True, true true.  You are so dense you can’t even figure out what to do next.  FOCUS is the keyword.  Focus on your goals and develop plans to get there.  One of Mo’s goals is to ensure his kid has enough to go to univeristy.  He’s focused on this, so does what he can to ensure his kid is prepared – from sending him to a private montessori, to a private school so that he gets a good education, to ensuring the toys he has helps build his skills and brain AND have fun! 

That’s what I mean by FOCUS.  You have a goal in mind, and you work towards that goal.  Not some pansy pie-in-the-sky dream that will take you a gazillion dollars inside of a week.

Pick ONE product that you can promote effectively.  Work at it until you’ve developed a system that works so well you could hire someone to do it (hey… there is another topic that we will be talking about soon) then repeat the process with another product and keep going until you’ve got 5 or 10 or 50 products. 

Think about this, if one product gets you say $1,000 per month and you can successfully duplicate the process for another product 10 times – that could put $10,000 into your pocket each and every month.  WOW.  You would almost be making as much as I do – almost.

Reason #1 – You Are Clueless About Target Marketing

Seen this all the time in the consultations that Mo and I have undertaken (we do only a few per year due to both of our time committments to family and enjoying the good life – we charge $1,500.00 per consultation which includes up to 30 hours of support).

You start selling a hot product, instead of targetting that market.  Yes these are TWO different things.  Stores like Wal-Mart can sell hot products, they don’t care about targetting the market – if they did they would be like a EB GAMES or other niche player.  Wal-Mart sells anything and everything; their clerks in Electronics don’t know shit about shit.

Try selling chocolate covered tofu if you know shit about chocolate covered tofu.  You don’t have to be an expert, but you should know enough to target the products appropriately.  HINT: Hang out where people talk about chocolate covered tofu.

So there yah have it – the Top 3 Reasons Why You Suck And Failed At Affiliate Marketing or some thing else…

Oh yah, I am back…

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing is easy, chocolate covered tofu, making money with affiliate marketing, you know shit about affiliate marketing

Is it reliable ???

A lot of confusion people are saying u can earn bucks with affiliates but in my opinion its not that easy to earn the bucks from affiliate …

Friends – it all depends on the effort that you are willing to put into affiliate marketing, or for that matter ANY type of business opportunity you decide to undertake.  This could be an online business, or offline business – regardless of the type of business you need people to drive your business forward (or should I say customers).

Consider an offline business that’s in the service industry.  You spend $100,000.00 to set-up shop.  That includes the cost of leasing a space, purchasing equipment and supplies, purchasing the raw material (food) to prepare your products.  BUT you forget about placing ads in the newspaper, and local community papers about your upcoming grand opening.  You neglect to contact community centers, or even media outlets about your new business – in fact you don’t even tell your friends or family!!!  Instead you stick up a few “grand opening” flyers on windows, toss in some balloons and hope for the best.

As a result, your first day is a total flop.  Sure you sell some products – but only to passers by; even then hundreds of people didn’t even notice your new shop because you failed to… ADVERTISE.  You never even thought of putting up a board to direct people into the shop.

Affiliate marketing is not easy.  You need to stay with it.  But how can you attract visitors to your site in some highly competetive areas?  I can think of a few ways:

Be DIFFERENT.  Yes, it’s hard to be different but you should look at the offline world and look at what the big companies are doing and put your own twist onto the promotion and try it online.

For example, suppose you are setting up a website for coffee or tea affiliate programs (trust me, they are BIG business).  You need visitors, and need visitors that will come back often.  You want to do all the right things first:

• Set-up an RSS feed through FeedBurner or another RSS aggregator.  This will capture the more advanced visitors/readers who know all about RSS and how it works.
• Set-up an e-mail alerts system.  This will capture less advanced visitors/readers, that don’t understand RSS and prefer to get e-mail alerts and then visit your site (this is a GOOD thing).

Next you need to drive visitors to your site.  How will you do that?

• Advertising. Think Google, Yahoo all the BIG search engines advertising programs.  But don’t stop there!  Look at like minded sites and see if you can strike up advertising with them.  It could be as simple as swapping ads in e-zines or swapping button/banners on each others site.  Why like minded?  Why would you advertise for tea or coffee on a site selling plants or BBQ’s?  Doesn’t make a lot of sense – right?
• Article marketing.  Friends – THIS WORKS!  But you need to be consistent.  Draw up a list of topics that would be of interest to coffee or tea drinkers (trust me, there are A LOT of topics) and write about them.  Write each article in such a way that it could be a blog post (or two, or three – you get the idea).  Post to your blog first, then a few days later post to the major article repositories on the web (I will provide these in an upcoming post).

Once you have visitors, you want them to “stick”.  How will you do that?

• Contests.  Everyone loves a contest, and if you can get coffee/tea suppliers (equipment, specialty products) to sponsor your contest you could give away some grand prizes!
• Freebies.  This works very well, though could cost you a lot of money but consider how much advertising would cost you.  It could work something like this.  For the first 100 sign-ups to your e-mail alerts or RSS feed (you need them to send you their mailing address) you send them a small bag of coffee or some speciality teas.  Why would you want to do this?  Well, for one you’ve captured their e-mail address AND their mailing address.  Think DIRECT MARKETING.  It still works, especially if it is targetted!

People LOVE free stuff.

Think about all the types of things you can give away, that people would appreciate.  Several years ago, I helped someone run a promotion for free pedometers on their site (it worked so good, I did the same thing).  I found a supplier willing to sell me around 1,000 pedometers for about $1.00 each, the condition was that we had to leave his company label on the pedometer – it was like one of those “made in China” stickers.  The trade off was great. 

Then he ran a promotion on his site to get people to sign up to his e-mail alerts.  The condition of course was that they had to provide a valid e-mail address, and provide a mailing address so that he could send the pedometer to them.

Now you may be thinking that that was expensive, if I remember correctly it ended up costing him about $3,000 to get 1,000 visitors.  I never dug past that, so don’t know what type of attrition rate he had – but consider that some keywords in health and fitness can sell for WELL OVER $3.00 each he ended up getting highly targetted visitors legitimate e-mail address AND mailing address for only $3,000.00 – you can’t get that anywhere.

He used the mailing address to send out other freebies randomly.  Sometimes he’d pick 5 or 10 people and send out a $20.00 book.  One time he got a good deal on those big pilates balls and sent out three.  As a result of these random gifts, he didn’t loose many readers because they never knew what they’d get.  In fact he found that he got more sign-ups over time as the initial bunch told friends which expected that they may get something as well.

The money he was making from affiliate sales was helping drive these types of promotions.  And did he make money – treadmills pay up to $200.00 per sale, he could sell (through his affiliate promotions) 5 to 10 per month.  But he also knew the peak times to be “pushing” these types of products (think early-mid new year; after everyone has had their feasts over Christmas and New Years).

Definately earning money as an affiliate is a numbers game – the more visitors you have, the greater the chance that they purchase through your affiliate link.  The more sites you have the greater the chance of each site earning some money.  When you decide to concentrate on a specific area, whether that be sports (such as golf, hockey, soccer, baseball, basketball), health and fitness, lifestyle or any other area you quickly move away from “affiliate” sales and moving into more of a business.

Now don’t think that this is the end of things – in fact, you can still move into other area to make even more money.  Think about creating your own product or products:

• E-books
• Online courses
• Video courses
• MP3
  • You can get these transcribed
• Teleseminars
  • Which can be turned into MP3s

You only need to look at the offline world, plus what other sites are doing to get more ideas on how you can take a hobby or interest and turn it into a business making you anything from a few hundred dollars per month to thousands of dollars per month!

Do you have other ideas that you would like to share that perhaps I’ve not covered?  Why not participate and leave us your comment!

Take care!

Technorati Tags: affiliate links, affiliate marketing, affiliate sales, affiliate site