First, don’t get bent out of shape; people have been stealing from each other ever since the first gang of theives said “let’s form a government.”

Instead, capitalize on it and get some backlinks to your site by doing three things:

1. Go get a copy of the RSS Footer plugin for Wordpress by Joost de Valk, and install it.
2. Go into ‘Settings’ > ‘RSS Footer’ and put a little blurb in the footer box; tell it to display after the post; and check the box that says “include a link back to the post…”
3. Go into ‘Settings’ > ‘Reading’ and in the ‘For each article in a feed show’ section set it to “Full Text”

After your next post, check your FeedBurner feed (you DO use FeedBurner…don’t you?), notice the way that there is a link back to the post at the bottom of each full-text article?

Now, when your content shows up in unusual places around the net, you’ll be getting a backlink to your individual posts as well (aka “deep link”).

Oh sure, a lot of sites will strip the html out of your posts. But a lot will not, and this is a numbers game. Besides, if your content doesn’t suck, the wider your dissemination, the more readers you’ll acquire.

Internet Marketing and My Ongoing Quest for Daily Profit...Learn affiliate marketing with me at The Daily Profit.

RSS Footer: Great for Backlinks

The Clickbank Merchant Perspective

If you  have digital products to sell (i.e. information, software, or other downloadable products), you would sign up for a Clickbank merchant account and let them handle all of the collection & payment processing. In the strictest sense of the word, Clickbank provides 3rd party payment processing services. But because of their added-value services (affiliate tracking and payment); they are much more.

One of the benefits to a Clickbank account is that you can enlist an army of other website owners to market your products to their site visitors. You do this by offering a  healthy percentage of every sale they refer to you. Usually the best results are had by offering 50% to 75%; it may sound like a lot, but they, not you incur all of the costs of promotion for every sale they refer. These website owners are your affiliates. And Clickbank handles collection & payment for them…which, if you are a low to medium volume merchant, is worth every single penny of Clickbank’s fees.

If you should find yourself with the “problem” of selling so many digital products that Clickbank fees become uncompetitive by comparison to other solutions, then you can worry about evaluating alternatives.

The Clickbank Affiliate Perspective

Put yourself in the position of the website owner…you go to the Clickbank marketplace and choose a product based on the criteria that you have established as important. I like the Commission Blueprint method because it’s broken down into a systematized process you can apply over and over again. But you’ll have to choose your own favorite method.

After you choose a product to promote based on whatever criteria you choose to apply, you’ll want to promote that product, make as many sales as you can; lather, rinse and repeat.

The common goal is to replace your full time income in order to spend more time at home with your family.

That is the 50,000 foot view of Affiliate marketing. Which, for many is an introductory step into the world of Internet Marketing, where selling your own products is the natural result of that introductory step.

There are, naturally, a few more complexities that don’t always get addressed in the typical “get rich with Clickbank ’systems.’”And, Clickbank is only one of many affiliate networks that you can get started with. But that is a great place to start.

One-by-one, we’ll address those complexities and break them down into bite-sized chunks that are more palatable, in the hopes that you will be able to approach the task without feeling overwhelmed.

Internet Marketing and My Ongoing Quest for Daily Profit...Learn affiliate marketing with me at The Daily Profit.

Introduction to Clickbank

It is listed in the Clickbank marketplace with the following statistics:

$/sale: $71.04 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $71.04 | %/sale: 60.0% | %refd: 79.0% | grav: 9.84

These statistics can be broken down like this:

• $/sale: $71.04 – for each sale made to someone you refer, you will receive $71.04
• Future $: – there is no recurring revenue on this product
• Total $/sale: $71.04 – the total amount you will make on each sale is $71.04
• %/sale: 60.0% – your affiliate commission is 60% of each sale
• %refd: 79% – of all the sales made by this site, 79% are made as a result of affiliate referrals
• grav: 9.84 – Gravity, is a formula devised by Clickbank to indicate the number of distinct affiliates who have made a sale in the last 8 weeks. This number, 9.84 indicates that at least 10 separate affiliates have made at least one sale each in the last 8 weeks. It’s more complex than that, See this post, and this post for a breakdown.

Most “guru” types recommend a much higher gravity for products that you are promoting. I’ve heard recommendations ranging from ‘20 – 70′, up through ‘over 100.’ However, I picked the child custody niche for this case study for two reasons:

1. While the lawyer space of the divorce/custody niche is hotly contested, this guidebook occupies what I think is an underserved sub-niche.
2. If the oft-quoted statistics are correct, and greater than 50% of today’s first marriages end in divorce (divorce stats for second marriages are even higher…must be buyer’s remorse), I don’t need to worry that giving away this niche will flood the market with competition.

Next, we’ll have a look at the nuts and bolts of how I analyzed the product, and the specifics of how I began promoting it.

Internet Marketing and My Ongoing Quest for Daily Profit...Learn affiliate marketing with me at The Daily Profit.

Clickbank Affiliate Marketing

When I installed it, I thought it was yet another knock-off of the All In One SEO Pack, which is a perrenial favorite among bloggers who have a clue about SEO. But…on the Settings > Headspace page, it has several sub-pages with a wealth of configuration options on each.

The ’site module’ page lets you easily integrate a number of 3rd party analytics solutions with your wordpress install. Like Google Analytics, 103bees, feedburner stats pro, Hittail, Piwik…. and so on.

The ’site module’ page also lets you break frames, use Google section targeting, verify your installation for Gogle Webmaster & Yahoo Site Explorer.

You can also display a message for your first time viditors.

And since there are any number of meta-data managers out there…you can import settings from a number of them, like:

• All In One SEO
• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• Jerome’s Keywords
• SimpleTagging
• Lud.icro.us HeadMeta
• HeadMeta description
• SEO Title Tags

There are so many other features, that It is worth having a look for yourself to see if it fits into your needs.

Go to the Headspace2 page and check it out for yourself.

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Manage SEO & MetaData Easily

They will not have a direct effect on your traffic OR conversions. However, each of them will save you time, aggravation & possible heartache…

The first, and most important is WP-DBManager by Lester Chan. Sure, it lets you easily back up your MySQL database, any number of plugins do that. But what’s really cool is that it also allows you to optimize your database, repair it, restore it, delete the backups, run queries…AND…it supports automatic scheduling of backups and database optimization.

Of course, if you own your server, or have physical control, you can optimize your database by running a cron job that looks like the following:

 2 6 * * * mysqlcheck -Aao --auto-repair -u root --password=your-mysql-password >> /dev/null 2>&1

This little cron will run every day at 2 minutes past 6 (AM). and it repairs/optimizes your MySQL database. Since most people don’t have that kind of control, it’s much simpler just to use the WP-DBManager plugin.

The second wordpress plugin that you really shouldn’t be without is the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin available from Techie-Buzz.com. There are a couple of upgrade plugins out there, and I have only used this one. But, It has worked every time.

Once you install it, the plugin checks periodically to make sure you have the most current version of Wordpress. When it’s time to upgrade, you’ll get a gentle reminder. The upgrade process is quick and painless.

Not that the “old way” via ftp was painful…Wordpress prides itself on ease of installation & upgrade.

However, the Automatic Upgrade plugin takes ease of use to a whole new level. I’ve had three trouble-free upgrades so far, and each time, all it took was about five clicks from within the admin interface. George Jetson worked harder than that.

The last of the make-your-life-easier Wordpress plugins is the One Click Plugin Updater by Janis Elsts of w-shadow.com. This is one of the coolest plugins I have ever seen. Combined with the other two (above), it will actually simplify your life and give you more time to play with the kids.

The One Click Plugin Updater automatically checks to see if your plugins are the latest version. If not, it lets you know when a plugin needs to be updated to the newest version. When it’s time to upgrade, you get a gentle reminder just under the admin menu of your Wordpress installation. Click the button, and “presto!” Generally, it takes about 5 – 20 seconds to upgrade one (or more) plugins.

Since Akismet comes pre-installed with Wordpress, you don’t have to go out and look for it. However, before you start thinking about any other plugins, or which theme you want to use, go get set up with an account at Akismet.

These plugins are what I would consider basic minimum requirements for blog headache reduction. And best of all, they are zero cost items…though each developer does solicit (much deserved) donations. Akismet has a very generous “free for personal use” license. However, if you are making “mad paper” as they say on their site, they want you to buy a commercial API key. All in all, it’s not a bad deal.

Coming up next…we’ll go over some of the other plugins that I’ve tested, used, abused and certified.

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Basic Wordpress Plugins

There are three primary technical goals I have in mind here:

• Traffic!…isn’t that what we all want in a blog?
  • Because there are multiple variables that come into play, for this exercise I’m referring to the things that can be automated.
• A site structure that makes sense for You, the reader
  • Are the categories self-explanatory?
  • Are they popular?…Is there a worthwhile search volume on the keywords used to describe (and link to) the various categories.
• A theme that’s light, quick, and easy on the eyes.
  • I’ve narrowed it down to just a handful, and will test them each.

In the end, traffic comes as a result of the quality of your content, rather than the technical tricks you can pull off on the back end. So, I’ll provide the content. However, It never hurts to have effective technical wizardry on the back end to make the best of your efforts.

To that end, over the next couple of posts I’ll be documenting the plugins I’ve chosen, and why. Every one of them has been tested by yours truly in order to make sure that it provides a worthwhile service.

The ones that have made the cut are genuinely useful. But more on that later.

Internet Marketing and My Ongoing Quest for Daily Profit...Learn affiliate marketing with me at The Daily Profit.

Setting Up Wordpress for Maximum Effect