My site AmazingPopper.com is currently for sale on Sitepoint.  The auction includes the domain, full ownership of my trademarked brand, and the remaining inventory.  If anyone’s interested, check it out…here’s your chance to own your own business!

SitePoint Listing:

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/63613

AmazingPopper.com - unique bottle opener ~$1000/m

(own your very own trademarked product)

• URL: http://www.amazingpopper.com/
• Established: Fri Feb 29 2008
• Page views/month: 300
• Monthly Revenue (USD): 1,000
• Uniques/Month: 100
• Listed: Today 12:31

Description:

This auction is for the domain  www.amazingpopper.com as well as the ownership of the Amazing Popper trademarked product.  The Amazing Popper is a unique japanese bottle opener similar to The Bottle Popper, Sapporo bottle opener, Sentol bottle opener, Zap Cap, Push-n-Pop, etc. 

I am letting go of my baby in order to fund my bankroll for stocks as it is more lucrative for me at this time.  Also, I am very busy with a ton of other projects, so I just need to offload this one so I can have a little bit of breathing room. 

With this auction, the winning bidder will also receive:

1) full ownership of the domain AmazingPopper.com 

2) ownership of the Amazing Popper trademark

3) the remaining inventory that is in stock by the end of the auction (~4500 pieces)

4) the contact information to the manufacturer

5) free technical assistance (domain transfer, site setup, etc.)

Revenue Details:

AmazingPopper.com has been operational since March 2008, with average monthly sales of $800-1000.  Online sales are generated from  ebay and related niche verticals such as realbeer.com and probrewer.com.

Offline sales are generated from consignment to mom-and-pop stores as well as flea markets.  The poppers do especially well during holidays such as St. Paddy’s Day and Mardi Gras, or at events like beer festivals and concerts.  If I had more time, I’d target beer distributors for another stream of revenue.

The reserve has been set to about 5x the average monthly revenue which will barely cover the cost of the inventory that you will be receiving (my cost ~.75/each).  I’m currently selling them for $4.99 each online and $5.99 each offline, but you can increase the price if you’d like…some competitors are selling for $9+shipping each!  As for bulk sales, I just make up the prices for each order as the number of units always vary from buyer to buyer, and I want to leave room for negotiation of price/unit.

I built the site myself and it’s not pretty, but it gets the job done.  If you make some improvements to it, I’m sure you can drastically increase sales.  Also, I have not even explored other traffic sources such as google adwords, facebook, etc., but these channels can provide additional streams of income for anyone who knows what they are doing.

I’ve also previously sold an Acai Bery site http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/55290 for $1250 and the buyer was very happy as he recooped his investment within the first month.  Keep in mind that you are not only purchasing a site, but you are investing in a long-term business!

Traffic Details:

Traffic sources are ebay, realbeer.com, probrewer.com and direct type-ins from repeat customers or word-of-mouth as the domain name is stamped right on the product.

~100 uniques/m

~300 pageview/m

even though the site’s traffic is not that big, keep in mind that the conversion rate is very high as the audience is very targeted. 

Please don’t hesitate to contact me should you have any questions.

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I just sold my combo Acai review site and 30-day success story blog on Sitepoint for $1250.  Even though it generated $834 within 3 weeks with about ~$500 profit, and only a $20/day ppc budget, I decided to offload it in order to fund my other projects.  This is the site that helped me break my $100/day milestone.  Currently working on the domain transfer process and zipping up the files/install scripts for the new owner. 

Below is the listing:

• URL: http://reviews.acaiberryexperiment.info/
• Established: Sun Nov 30 2008
• Page views/month: 1,500
• Monthly Revenue (USD): 834
• Uniques/Month: 1,000
• Listed: Fri Jan 9 2009

Description:

This is an established Acai Berry Review site that has generated $834 in 3 weeks (12/20/08-1/9/09) through Yahoo! and some organic traffic.  It includes a bonus success story blog that you can promote for additional revenue, and is perfect for seasoned marketers or the noob who doesn’t know how to get started. 

acaiberryexperiment.info reviews.acaiberryexperiment.info

I don’t have time for it, so I need to get it off my plate for bigger projects.  If I were to hold onto it, I don’t doubt that it could easily do $1500/m with the scaling methods that I mention in the revenue section below.

The Affiliate Networks used are Convert2Media, Motive Interactive and Copeac if you want to signup and continue the same offers.  The biggest earner has been Acai Berry Ultimate which pays $34.05/lead when the customer pays shipping for a free 14-day trial. 

With this site you’ll have a complete ready made tangible business and with your purchase you will receive:

1) Full ownership of domain name acaiberryexperiment.info and reviews.acaiberryexperiment.info

2) Full exclusive rights to the website design including the Wordpress blog

3) Data dump of keywords in my campaigns

4) Complete conversion tracking system which tracks ad, keywords, referrer, etc.

5) Free setup of the website on your own server and assistance with any technical questions.

Revenue Details:

This site has only been operational for about 3 weeks, and already it has generated $834 in revenue (see screenshot) .

The revenue sources are:

Convert2Media - $544.80

Motive Interactive - $232

Copeac $58

I’m far too busy with my other projects to realize the site’s full potential, but you can generate more revenue by scaling the campaign (more keywords, day-parting, negative match referrers, etc.), expanding to other traffic sources (google, msn, ask, social networks, etc.) and doing some more SEO for more organic hits.

You can easily recoup your investment next month if you put in the work I mentioned above.

Traffic Details:

Mostly ppc traffic and some organic. 

unique ~1000/m: combined review site and blog

views ~1500/m: combined review site and blog

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Hey guys, as an early Chinese New Year’s gift to you all, here’s $250 worth of Facebook Ads credits and a $100 Visa Voucher.  I didn’t try the voucher, but all 10 codes ($25 each) worked for me, so you’ll have to give them a try.

Facebook Codes

1652-YMF5-23XX-CM66
EVCT-54YH-K1V8-EKE1
TE8Y-46T7-NCRE-JX3C
EXEX-4P47-38JX-4W20
8CH1-5VW1-Y96N-2P94
XXWW-7JVC-3FH6-R61T
053K-H148-T1PE-98NC
21VT-RRNM-8RWN-2X1C
FCK0-T70X-HME3-FJ6C
XXEE-28X7-26NT-W4R8

Visa Voucher

http://www.new.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=24249628048

Now you have no excuses, so get off your butt and start experimenting with some campaigns already!  Hey, it’s $350 FREE money, so you got nuttin to lose!  Good luck, and Happy Chinese New Years.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

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Thank-you to all my loyal readers for a great year.  Merry Christmas, and may your 2009 be filled with much joy, luck and prosperity!

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Some of you may be wondering…Anthony, where’ve you been?  I know I haven’t been blogging much lately, but I’ve been busy learning and experimenting with affiliate marketing.  To tell you the truth, it’s a much more lucrative way of making money than just blogging, and you can make money much quicker too.  True, it’s also riskier too, but hey, no risk no reward right?

I started running my first campaign a couple months ago, and I was consistently losing money by blowing my budget daily.  Affiliate marketing is a fickle animal, and you just gotta keep trying because chances are, you will fail before you succeed.  Sure, you hear amazing stories of total noobs who are banking 5-figs within a week of starting, but they are few and far in between. 

Finally, yesterday I hit a major milestone, a goal that I’ve been chasing for 2 months now…my campaigns generated $100!  Some of you may be laughing and thinking that it’s not much, but hey, that’s an extra $3k/month if I can keep it up.  I was so excited that I decided to make my first video blog today on my way to work to tell you guys about it.  I used my phone cam, so you’ll have to excuse the poor quality.

I’m gonna let the campaign run for about a week.  After that, I plan on optimizing it by pruning and negative matching any non-converting keywords and domains that are eating up my profits.  Then I’ll scale it by throwing in more long and short-tailed keywords,  branching out onto other search engines such as MSN, Google and social networks to drive more traffic, increasing my bids to gain a higher ad position, and optimizing my adcopy and landing page.  If everything works out, all I have to do is wash, rinse and repeat the whole process in order to achieve the same success with other niches.

If you’re interested in getting started, I’ve listed the Affiliate Networks that I’ve been using for the past couple months below, so head on over and signup today!

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Going to ASW09 next month?  We Are Fantatics will be there, and so will I!  If you can’t make it, then tune into one of their many channels to stay posted with the events that will be going on at Affiliate Summit.

• Blog
• Twitter
• Flickr
• Youtube
• Facebook
• Myspace

Also, they will be hosting their first annual Football Fanatics Poker Tournament which will be held at the Palms Casino Resort on Monday, January 12th @7:30pm.  If you’re a flop whore like myself, then you’ll definitely want to win one of the 5 free seats to the tournament that they are giving away…poker and Affiliate Marketing, two of my most favorite things…what could be better?!  Here are the rules.

Football Fanatics Poker Tournament - Official Contest Rules

1. write a blog post containing a minimum of 100 words outlining the rules of the contest as I’ve done here

2. the post must contain a backlink to the We Are Fanatics contest page

3. email your post url to jrubacky[at]footballfanatics.com

The top 5 posts selected will be announced winners, and you must enter before the December 30th deadline.  If you don’t win but still wish to participate, then email Jason to reserve your spot.  There are only 50 seats available and prizes will be given to the top 3 players.  Good luck and see you at WEST!

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Yesterday, I attended the IANteract NJ Meetup: 2nd Edition at Panera Bread in Edison, NJ, and I had the pleasure of meeting some really cool affiliate masterminds in the flesh.  I’m really glad that I went because I walked away with some really good tips on how split test, track camps, and how to market by using polls, not to mention I made some invaluable contacts as well.  Afterwards, Ian, Peter Hall, Erik Ahlgren, Ad Hustler, Benny Tejada and myself headed on over to Champs to grab a bite, have some drinks, and to continue our discussion on affiliate marketing.

Here’s a shot of the gang, we actually had about 17 attendees, but this was taken towards the very end, so some people had already left.

(Ian Fernando, Ron, Ad Hustler, Erik Ahlgren, me, Kenrick, Thiago Prado, Peter Hall)

See everyone at the next meetup!

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A few weeks ago, I started running some campaigns on Myspace, and I noticed that my clicks weren’t tracking correctly as there was a disparity between the click counts that Myspace was reporting and what Market Leverage’s system was reporting.  I the contacted Chelsea Osoling, my affilate manager, who confirmed that they indeed were having issues with their tracking system.  After hearing this, I immediately became concerned because I was getting some decent CTR’s, but no conversions.  So, I asked Chelsea to check if the conversions where tracking correctly, and she assured me that everything was working fine with the conversions tracking system.

A couple days had passed, and I still wasn’t seeing any conversions, so I asked Chelsea if they could create a test lead to see if the campaign conversion was tracking correctly.  She said that they couldn’t do this on their end, but that I was more than welcome to run a test for myself if I wanted…and this is where the nightmare began!  The product I decided to test was “Easy Profit Shortcuts”.  I filled out the registration form, and even paid $2.97 shipping for a CD that was supposed to arrive in the mail in a few days.

After completing the purchase, it said that I could get started right away, and I was taken to http://www.easyprofitshortcuts.com where I was supposed to logon…but wait, there was a problem.   At no point during the registration process was I prompted to create a user account, nor was I automatically assigned one via email.  There wasn’t even a register or create account button, so I decided to try the “forgot password” link, but to no avail.  Instead of prompting for an email, it asked for a username, which I did not have.  I tried using my email anyway just in case, and instead of getting an error like “sorry, username does not exist”, the page completely errored out with some XML errors.  At this point, I was starting to question the legitimacy of this offer, so I pinged Chelsea on AIM, and she said that she would notify an Ad Manager who will look into it.

The following day, I followed up with Chelsea on the issue, but she said that the advertiser has not responded yet.  7 days later, I received the CD.  There was an insert which said to logon at https://easyprofitshortcuts.com/Login.aspx, and to click on the “forgot password” link if you forgot your username or password.  I wasn’t surprised that this page didn’t even exist, and that I got an HTTP 404 error when I tried accessing it.  I continued reading the insert and a bit further down, it stated, “you received a 14 Day Free Trial Membership in the Easy Profits Shortcuts Club.  After your free trial ends, we’ll bill $39.99 for your membership fee each month, etc.”…WAIT, what?  I don’t remember reading that disclaimer anywhere when I registered!  I immediately inserted the CD to see if I could find any support email or phone number I could call to cancel my “membership” immediately, and you will never guess what happened…it FREAKIN hung my machine!

At this point, I was furious and my suspicion was pretty much confirmed, I HAD BEEN WAMBOOOOZLED!!  I messaged Chelsea to tell her everything that had happened, and this was her response:

[09:56] AThoDinh: this is an unacceptable offer, uve got to help me fix this issue!
[09:57] mktlvgchelsea: cancel it
[09:57] AThoDinh: i cant even login
[09:57] mktlvgchelsea: call them
[09:57] mktlvgchelsea: shouldnt there be a number with all of your stuff you received
[09:57] AThoDinh: theres no number
[09:57] mktlvgchelsea: email them
[09:57] mktlvgchelsea: there should be some kind of contact
[09:57] AThoDinh: heres my problem…u guys r supporting a bogus offer
[09:57] mktlvgchelsea: i reached out the ad manager but theyre traveling so if you have another alternative it might be quicker
[09:58] mktlvgchelsea: well i did my part i will follow up again
[09:58] mktlvgchelsea: but what else can i do?

What else can you do?  That’s when I demanded to speak to a manager, like pronto!  Kyle McCall, one of the Senior Affiliate Managers, hopped on.  Kyle provided me with an email as well as a link https://secure.secureorderpages.com/_includes/tos_profits.aspx to the advertiser’s terms and conditions, and asked me try contacting them.  He said that, “sometimes advertisers do some shady things”, so I asked him, then why would a reputable company like Market Leverage even conduct business with them and not just drop them from the network?  His response was, “well we have a legal team that goes through all of our offers but sometimes things can slip through the cracks, check in with the advertiser and let me know if you have any other questions”.  Later that day, I told Kyle that I had tried emailing the advertiser at support@easyprofitshortcuts.com, and you guessed it…it came back UNDELIVERABLE!  He requested that I email him my full contact information, and he was going to have the advertiser contact me directly.

The next day, I followed up with Kyle, and he said that the Ad Manager in charge of the account was away and that she’d be back in the office the following day.  He suggested that I send them a cancellation letter via snail mail to be safe…you’re kidding right?  Not only does the trial end in 4 days and I will be automatically charged the $39.99 monthly fee, but everything we’ve tried up to this point has lead to a dead end, so what makes you think that they will even reply to my letter?  In case you’ve lossed track by now, let me outline the number of RED flags that I’ve encountered with this whole offer:

1. cannot login, no username/password provided
2. “forgot password” feature is useless and returns XML errors
3. sneaky 14 Day Trial, and $39.99 automatic monthly charge
4. no telephone number/email provided to customer
5. support email provided by Market Leverage comes back undeliverable
6. login page provided with CD insert doesn’t even exist and returns HTTP 404 error
7. CD opens Flash but does absolutely nothing and even hangs my machine

Let’s see, I encountered 7 RED flags, and everywhere I looked was a dead end.  How on earth did this offer even make it through to your network?  So much for Market Leverage’s “Legal Team”, they’ve failed horribly on this one, they deserve a big fat “F” for Fucken Sucks!  Whoever reviewed this offer should be fired, how freakin incompetent can you be!?  This offer has SCAAAAMM written all over it!

3 days left until the trial offer ends, and again I follow-up with Kyle on the status of what is starting to become a total headache.  He was busy, so I messaged Chelsea to see if they’ve made any progress in contacting the advertiser.  “Not yet, we are still waiting on a call back, we have called the advertiser several times”…surpise, surprise…NOT REALLY!  Geeee, I wonder why the advertiser isn’t answering your calls, hmmmm?!  Chelsea said that they’d definitely let me know as soon as they have any word from the advertiser.  I’m a very patient kinda person, but comon now, you’ve been giving me the same line for the past few days now!

I emphasized that the trial was ending in 3 days, and I wanted to know what recourse I would have if they started charging me $39.99 every month.  I felt if they did their due diligence and peformed the required checks, then they should be held accountable.  Chelsea asked me for a confirmation number, and I told her that I did not receive one, therefore I had no record of the sale.  I told her that I had the CD in hand and that my bank statement reflects the purchase, so I sent her a screenshot of that for proof.  She told me that they’d reimburse me if I were to get charged, and that they’ve a “good” relationship with the advertiser.  Well, think about it, they purposely give you no way of contacting them or any way to cancel your membership.  So, of course the poor customers who have been scammed have nowhere to turn, and that’s why you never hear of anything like this happening.  Fortunately, for me, I happen to be an ad publisher, so I know the correct channels to go through.  I know that Market Leverage will refund me, so I wasn’t really concerned with that aspect, but my frustration was the lack of due diligence by their legal team.  God knows how many poor people are being charged these obscene monthly fees because they don’t have any way of cancelling it.  To me, this is very unethical business conduct, and very BLACK HAT!

Today is day 14, the last day of my 14-day trial period.  I messaged Kyle, again he was busy and didn’t reply, so I checked with Chelsea to see if she had any updates.  Apparently, both the Ad Manager in charge of this account as well as a Senior Affiliate Manager have been making multiple attempts to contact the advertiser, but none of their calls have been returned.  I find it very ironic that this advertiser with whom you claim to have a “very good” relationship has been dodging you all of the sudden for the past 2 weeks.  I really hope that you will reconsider continuing your business relationship with them, and hopefully you will drop them from the network.  Personally, I can’t understand why a reputable company would want to even run the risk of hurting it’s image by associating with such a fraudulent advertiser.  They’re out there scamming people everyday, and by doing business with them, your basically enabling their efforts, therefore it makes you just as guilty and accountable!  Obviously, this issue is not going to be resolved today, so I guess I can look forward to a $39.99 monthly fee on my next credit card statement…thank’s Market Leverage!

Stay tuned guys, I’ll keep you posted with any updates and the final outcome of this whole ordeal…let me know if you’ve had any negative experiences with advertisers like this!  Here’s the advertiser’s info if you’re interested…STAY AWAY!

support@easyprofitshortcuts.com

Mining Gold Corporation
No. 348
3780 Old Norcross Road, Suite 103
Duluth, GA 30096

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First, I’d like to say thank-you and congratulate you for joining my Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program. You’ve taken the first step in the right direction towards building a successful online business and financial freedom. This 13-step program is your roadmap to wealth, and it’s jam-packed with invaluable information…no tricks or gimmicks here folks, just solid and proven methods that work! SEO (search engine optimization), copywriting and various internet marketing methods will be covered throughout the tutorial. I suggest that you read through it once, let it soak in, try it out, then go back and read it again because you’ll surely pick up something new that you missed the first time around.

Here’s a breakdown of each lesson for your convenience:

Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal
Lesson 2 - Find Your Niche
Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs
Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword
Lesson 6 - Incorporate Affiliate Links in Your Posts
Lesson 7 - Build Quality Backlinks
Lesson 8 - Submit Your Site to Web Directories
Lesson 9 - Submit Your Post to Article Directories
Lesson 10 - Add More Content and Build More Backlinks
Lesson 11 - The Waiting Game
Lesson 12 - Tweak Your Site
Lesson 13 - Scale Your Campaign

Before we begin with “Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword“, please bookmark this page and subscribe to my full RSS feed as there are 13 steps, so you definitely won’t want to miss out!  If you are just joining us now, be sure to go back and read “Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal“.

Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program

Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword

After you’ve selected your niche and researched some affiliate products, it’s time to start building an interesting and informative site entirely around the keyword(s) that you’ve sniped from Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping to promote these products.  The structure of your site must be built correctly in order to achieve SEO optimization and higher ranking, so it’s important that you chose an SEO friendly template.  Courtney Tuttle offers a few nice ones that I would recommend.  Remember, a quality affiliate site should be rich with content and keywords, be SEO friendly, and should help the visitor make an informed decision between one of two products to purchase.

You will need to create and publish a minimum of 10 posts surrounding your keyword and product with some solid content that speaks with authority on the subject matter.  Before you do this, you will have to purchase a domain, preferably one which contains your keyword.  This will definitely help you rank higher for the keyword, not to mention it will be much easier to sell the domain in the future if you ever choose to do so.  If you’re able to find a used domain on TDNam.com that contains your keyword, it would make getting ranked significantly easier and much quicker as the domain has already been indexed and backlinked by other sites.  Additionally, a domain that’s been live for awhile will help you in avoiding Google’s notorious “sandbox effect”.  If budget is an issue, you can also opt to use a free Blogger sub-domain.  I currently register and host all my domains with IX Webhosting, so I would definitely recommend them for your hosting solutions.

Now that you’ve got your domain, the next step would be to either install Wordpress or create your page statically using straight HTML if you are proficient at coding.  Just remember that it is much easier to link build and make your site SEO friendly using Wordpress.  Though you probably will be using Wordpress blogging software and your site will look like a blog, the difference is that you won’t have to post regularly as you would with a typical blog.  As a matter of fact, I would suggest removing all post dates as the information you provide should not appear to be dated in the readers’ eyes.  Be sure to use a nice, clear headline that catches the reader’s attention and compels him or her to click on your product.  Also, including social proof, testimonials and screenshots will help in convincing the visitor that your solution works and it’s what they’re looking for.

Each of your 10 posts should be at least 300 words and contain a keyword anchor text link back to the homepage which also contains the keyword.  It may seem like a daunting task to write 10 posts about the keyword, but you can simply Google for the keyword to get some ideas, but don’t copy or steal the content!  Linking each of your posts back to the homepage with the keyword anchor will help your homepage rank by giving it more internal and external links with the keyword anchor text.  The external links come into play in the event that an aggregator or scraper site steals your content, there will always be a keyword anchor link which points back to your homepage.

Once you’ve installed your template, place your keyword in the following locations.  Doing so will ensure that your site will be well optimized. 

1. Page Title: This can be accomplished with the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin.  I prefer the “post title | site title” format.
2. H1 Tag: The keyword should appear in the H1 tag on all your site pages.
3. Footer: The footer should contain a link that points back to your homepage using the keyword as the anchor text.
4. Inpost Link: As mentioned above, each of your 10 posts should contain a link back to your homepage with the keyword as the achor text.
5. Homepage:  Ideally, your keyword should appear about 6-7 times on your homepage, but this is usually covered by virtue of the links that you’ve placed within each post.  Being the homepage, it will get ranked for your keyword, so be sure that your keyword appears on it enough times.  To avoid tripping off Google’s spam filter, your homepage should contain at least 1000 words, this should be covered if you have 4 posts with a minimum of 300 words each.

For those of you who are less technically inclined and wish to simplify things by automating that whole process, I would recommend using Ken Evoy’s Site Build It (SBI) software.

SBI is an all-in-one program that will enable you to build, host and promote your site all from a single location.  Once you’ve built your page(s), SBI will teach you how to optimize them so that they are SEO friendly simply by clicking on the “Analyze It” button.  Its comprehensive manual, step-by-step Action Guide and user forum are invaluable and will surely get you started on the right track to success.  SBI will help you simplify the process which will save you some valuable time so you can focus on the more important aspects of building your site, such as writing interesting and informative content. 

To learn more about Site Build It, I highly recommend watching the video tour below.

VIDEO TOUR

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First, I’d like to say thank-you and congratulate you for joining my Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program. You’ve taken the first step in the right direction towards building a successful online business and financial freedom. This 13-step program is your roadmap to wealth, and it’s jam-packed with invaluable information…no tricks or gimmicks here folks, just solid and proven methods that work! SEO (search engine optimization), copywriting and various internet marketing methods will be covered throughout the tutorial. I suggest that you read through it once, let it soak in, try it out, then go back and read it again because you’ll surely pick up something new that you missed the first time around.

Here’s a breakdown of each lesson for your convenience:

Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal
Lesson 2 - Find Your Niche
Lesson 3 - Keyword Sniping
Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs
Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword
Lesson 6 - Incorporate Affiliate Links in Your Posts
Lesson 7 - Build Quality Backlinks
Lesson 8 - Submit Your Site to Web Directories
Lesson 9 - Submit Your Post to Article Directories
Lesson 10 - Add More Content and Build More Backlinks
Lesson 11 - The Waiting Game
Lesson 12 - Tweak Your Site
Lesson 13 - Scale Your Campaign

Before we begin with “Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs“, please bookmark this page and subscribe to my full RSS feed as there are 13 steps, so you definitely won’t want to miss out!  If you are just joining us now, be sure to go back and read “Lesson 1 - Set Your Goal“.

Affiliate Marketing Apprenticeship Program

Lesson 4 - Research Affiliate Programs

Once you’ve selected the niche that you want to write about, you’ll need to research for some affiliate products which suit your topic.  When selecting an affiliate program, some things to consider are:

• variety of ads/product offerings
• merchant reputation
• sub-affiliate/publisher referral programs
• commission payout percentages; two merchants may offer the same product, but one might offer 10% commission while the other offers 30%
• payout minimum and frequency (weekly vs. quarterly, etc.)
• payment methods (paypal, check, bank transfer, etc.)
• timeliness of commission payments
• technical support and assistance in promoting products
• means of tracking sales/visitors referred through daily/weekly reports, dashboard, emails, etc.
• lifetime/residual commissions where you earn repeat commissions when your customer(s) make future purchases

For those of you who are unsure of where to start, I would recommend the following affiliate networks.  I’ve already done the research and am currently using these programs, so the hard part’s already done for you!

• Market Leverage - Ad Network
• ClickBank - digital products
• Commission Junction - Ad Network

Market Leverage is one of my favorites for many reasons.  Not only do they offer a huge ad inventory to choose from, but their no-hassle payments come quickly via FedEx on a weekly basis if the minimum is met.  Also, their affiliate managers are very responsive and will quickly answer any technical questions that you may have regarding the program or any of their products.  When you refer other publishers to the network, you will earn 5% of their commissions for life!

Just to give you an idea of the huge CPA (cost-per-action/lead) commissions offered by Market Leverage, here are some of the ads that they offer.  Often, the users don’t even have to make a purchase, they just need to simply complete the opt-in information and you get paid! 

1. Government Funding Solutions (grant offer that gives users a free CD on possible grant opportunities) - Pays $25 CPA

2. Tri Slim (weight loss product that will burn fat fast, suppress their appetite, boost their metabolism, increase energy, and begins working instantly! They pay only S&H on a 15 day supply free bottle) - Pays $28 CPA

3. Easy Google Cash (Google is where it’s at! Add this offer to your Biz-Op rotation today!) - Pays $25 CPA

…Next >> Lesson 5 - Build a Website Around Your Keyword

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