Internet Marketing Blog - Flop Idle

Affiliate Challenge – First Sale $8.40

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:01:55 +0000

Yesterday right after I published my previous post, I went back to check my Clickbank account only to find a sale made! This sale did not come from an article, it actually came from an email broadcast to an old list that I left for dead. That will teach me!

But I guess you don’t really see how important a list is until you get results like that. It happened almost instantly as soon as I sent out the email!

Even though this sale did not come directly from an article, I can still show you where you can find your tracking id’s in Clickbank.

The most simple way to get to the transactions screen within Clickbank is to click on the colored bar right next to your earnings for that day…

Click the bar that’s circled in red, which will then take you to this next screen.

This screenshot shows you the time of the transaction as well as the date. But the important part is outlined in red, that just happens to be your tracking id(TID).

I used an id of AWEBLINK which was to let me know that it came from an AWEBer LINK, however this would have been a pretty poor tracking id had I sent out many broadcasts to different lists for the same product.

But as this was the only email broadcast I was sending, and because it got a sale so quickly after I sent it, I knew exactly where it came from.

Had I been sending this broadcast to many lists at the same time I probably would have used AWBRLI4 as a tracking id, which would have let me know this information…

AW = Aweber
BR = Broadcast
LI = List Initials
4 = Number Of Broadcast Email

If I made a sale from one of my broadcasts using the tracking code above, I would not only know that this came from a broadcast email, but I would also be able to tell what list it came from, and what broadcast number it was as well.

This would allow me to realize that this particular list my prefer a certain type of email content, so then I could modify follow up emails with a similar approach.

So a big lesson learned about the power of a list!

Affiliate Challenge – Subdomains And Opt-ins

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:48:37 +0000

GOOD NEWS: No sale, but my first opt-in for this challenge! This was a nice boost because it practically happened just a few hours after I created my landing pages for my products. So now I at least have one person going through my follow up email sequence.

I spent today building links to my articles in the hope that this would improve on their search engine positions, meaning more traffic and views, and hopefully opt-ins for me? I think I’m going to make Monday link building day;)

What I wanted to do today is cover where I stored my 2 new landing pages, and why I did it.

Subdomains Not Submarines

For some strange reason a while ago I bought a boat load of domain names with the intention of actually using them for something. That “something” never really materialized, and neither did content for those domains either. So they just sit there unused and under appreciated like my bank manager;)

Anyway it dawned on me that I could use the abandoned domains for a good cause, which would be my affiliate challenge landing page cause.

But I had 2 problems….

I didn’t want to use them all for this challenge, just in case I needed them for something else.
Their domain names were not exactly optimized for my products.

My solution…….

Submarines!!!!

Subdomains!!!!, sorry about that;)

What’s a subdomain? Well here is a regular domain…

www.yourmaindomain.com

And here is a subdomain….

www.SUBDOMAIN.yourmaindomain.com

Most of the time you see sites use a subdomain for their support or customer service side.

www.support.someBIGsite.com

I however use them for my landing pages on the same domain, which allowed me to add a targeted keyword into my domain name, even though the main domain name is not really related.

www.product1keyword.mydomain.com

www.product2keyword.mydomian.com

I thought that this would be a little more SEO friendly than a completely unrelated domain name to pass visitors too.

What this method allows me to do is create as many landing pages as I want on one domain, which saves me buying even more domain names. And it also allows me to add related keywords into the domain name URL. So if this method takes off I can apply it many times over to more products without it costing me anything.

Using my hosts HostGator I can use unlimited subdomains, but you should check your own host to see if you can also set up a submarine;)

How To Set Up A Subdomain

Log into your websites CPANEL -> www.yoursite.com/cpanel <- Notice you only need main domain name for this.

Once inside your cpanel(control panel) what you want to look for is this…

Yours may look a little different, but just keep an eye out for SubDomains then click on it.

All that’s left to do is enter your products related keyword where it says “enter subdomain” above. Now this will be blank on your screen, I just added the text above to show you where it all goes.

Once you are done hit CREATE.

You should then be able to enter your new subdmain URL into the browser bar…

www.newsubdomain.maindomain.com

This should now bring up your new subdomain page waiting for you to add files and content to it just like you would a regular domain. But that’s for another post soon;)

Give it a try! If you get stuck, let me know below.

Affiliate Challenge Plan Update

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:14:33 +0000

A new plan of action is now underway in this $200 per week affiliate challenge. From the picture above you can see my new course of action in planning stages, that picture represents the layout of a simple website that I will link to from my articles, with the goal of capturing the emails of interested prospects.

With my old plan I was writing articles for 5 separate products targeting related keywords in each one of them. In the articles I would use a target keyword as a link out directly to that products sales page via my affiliate link hoping to make a sale from then on.

However despite what I’ve read about “people needing at least 7 communications on average to become a buyer”, and “the money is in the list”, I failed to really try it out. So with this new plan I’m going to do just that, try and build a list of buying customers(hopefully:)

So Plan #2 Is Born

The concept behind plan 2 is to pick just 2 products this time and focus on them. DONE!
Build each product a simple site that contains and opt-in email list option for each. DONE!
Continue writing articles as before(plan 1), only this time link out via keywords to the landing page. DONE!
Write several killer content giving follow-up emails for each product that contain my affiliate links. DONE!
Write 50 articles for each product.
Build links to articles to push them up the rankings.
Track EVERYTHING!

I built the sites yesterday and set up the Aweber account for each product, so they are now ready to be linked to. I then went in to edit some older articles to include the new link to my landing pages, and the rest of today will be spent writing more articles for each product.

Product Selection – How I Did It

From 5 products to 2 was pretty easy, I just dropped the products that I did not have as much knowledge about, which will probably help when writing all those articles.

The other thing I wanted as an affiliate for those products was something free that I could offer on my landing pages to get the visitor to sign up for. Once they hit the landing pages I could then use the headline and text on the page highlighting the free gift offer.

Then in the follow up emails I would place affiliate links within the content of the emails I send out, which I think will be a total of 10-15 emails in sequence.

One of the products is a Clickbank product, and the other has its own tracking and checkout system. I still have the articles for the other 3 products live, so I will be able to compare results over time.

Anyway I’m off to spend my Saturday writing more articles for my products. Have a good weekend!

Affiliate Challenge Update – Still No Change

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:38:26 +0000

Things are slooooooow, I would show you other affiliate accounts but they look pretty much the same right now. I may need to re-think my tactics and adjust as needed to actually make this $200 per week by the New Year.

My article views are still on the rise which is a good sign in the right direction ->

The totals above are spread out between all my articles, but at least three of them are getting more views than the others, this is probably because the article topics are in competitive markets which would probably be the reason for the high numbers.

But i’m also noticing really good CTR(Click Through Rates) for a couple of the not so popular topic markets, these products I picked because they were more specialized with less broad appeal. My CTR on these articles even with the lower viewing numbers have been far greater than my most popular articles, almost as much as 50%.

Conversions are yet to be tested until I make a sale from my current articles;)

What I might decide to do is only concentrate on just two products rather than spread my time over 4-5. My initial thought was to let the articles do the talking, meaning that if I had a couple of article that kept on a making sales I would then focus my attention on those products alone, dropping some of the others that are not performing the same.

I have now switched over from Wal-Mart Ads to USFreeAds, this is because I was unable to see any real numbers hit some of my Wal-Mart ads, and I’ve used US Free Ads before and had some good results with them. But I will still give Wal Mart ads more research time now and again.

I’m thinking I may need to increase my article count and maybe even build a simple landing page to capture the emails of those that are not quite ready to buy. I will probably start with the specialized products first to see how that converts, then I may build a small site for each particular product itself.

This would be a lot of work because I would also have to write follow up emails for each product, as well as carry on with article creation, which is why I may need to limit my promotional products to just two for now, at least until they start to convert and make a profit then I will just rinse and repeat for the rest.

As this is all in the name of research I’ve decided that’s what I’ll do. I will build a mini-site for the product I feel will do the best, and I know more about. If I am going to write a lot of material I better know what im taking about at least. I will then direct article links to my landing page and not directly to the vendors sales page for each article I create.

Looks like I am going to be busy:)

Tracking My Article Ranking

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:03:54 +0000

Market Samurai is KILLER! Without this tool I’d be old,gray haired, and probably pee myself 17 times in the time it would have taken me to track all my articles without this program!

Ok that was a bit overkill, but you know what I mean!

So I’m at the point now where I have about 35 articles spreading their love all over the web, so I really need to track each and every one of them to see if, and what I need to do to boost my articles up the rankings to where I want them to be.

The Answer came in the form of Rank Checker within good ol’ Market Samurai. The way it works is as soon as I’m done with an article and it gets published, I then grab the URL and enter it into Rank Checker.

Once I enter the URL of the article as well as the keyword I’m targeting with it, I then hit a magic button called “Update Rank Data”.

Rank Checker will then go out into the web and pull up a vast amount of stats which include ->

Broad And Phrase Match Ranking Position In Google, Yahoo And Bing.
The Exact Page That Ranks For That Keyword.
Page/Site Backlinks.
Page Rank Of The Page/Site.
All Stats Can Be Viewed On A Time Line Graph.
Color Coded Changes In Ranking – Easily See If You Tank Or Crank.

This sort of information is pure gold to be able to see in an instant if your current seo ranking methods are paying off! If not, then you will see those awful red indicators that let you know you are falling faster than a one-hit-wonders second album!

This is the layout that you will become familiar with ->

And this is the screen that gives you a visual graph on increases and decreases over a period of time ->

Without this kind of information at my fingertips, most of my time instead of writing articles and content would probably be spent on manually checking each and every article myself! Which would be a complete pain in the – AS $ you have seen above, this is no longer necessary;)

I check each article every other day to see what is working or what is not. The good thing about having many different sources to track is, you start to develop trends and methods that you can then apply to other seo boosting campaigns, which will hopefully pay off overtime too.

If you are not yet a user of Market Samurai, you can sign up for a FREE trail here ->

Market Samurai FREE Trail Offer

It has so much more to it than Rank Checker, but I’ll also cover them in future posts also. Until then – Happy Tracking!

Affiliate Challenge Update

admin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:39:07 +0000

$3.73 from Tuesday which was unrelated to any articles, but I’ll take it anyway;) In another Clickbank account I also made a sale of $23 for The Kindle King which has actually been its first sale since the product went live!

My articles this week seemed to all get a big boost in views over the later part of this week ->

Now what I can do is track my CTR(Click Through Rate) by using the trackingID’s I assigned to the articles when I created my Hoplink, and because every article I write has a unique id I can then find out which type of article I write gets the most clicks.

Once I get that first sale via an article, I will create a post showing you how to track by tracking id where it came from. But first I need that SALE!;)

Another good thing to happen this week was being able to get my articles submitted and live right away in ArticlesBase, once you get to a certain number which I believe to be around 20, you then do not have to wait for approval anymore.

In the next post I will spend some time on Market Samurai and how I use it to track the rank of my articles. Until then, fingers crossed for the first article sale!

Using A PHP Redirect

admin — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 01:17:38 +0000

PHP is a scripting language that is very common in web development. PHP originally meant Personal Home Page, but soon changed to – their is no way I will bore you anymore with this stuff! All you need to know is that we can use PHP to redirect our article links to affiliate products;)

What’s A Redirect?.

You walk up to your favorite store to try and enter, but notice the sign on the door telling you that they moved down the street, so that’s where you head toward.

A PHP redirect for websites work the same, you may lead people to your site via a link, but when you insert some simple PHP code, once they get to your site they are immediately sent to another website, your affiliate products website.

Why Do I Need To Redirect?

Some article directories I’ve been using will not allow you to link directly to your affiliate sales page, so I thought it might be a good idea to share with you the method I use that allows me to link to an affiliate product, and does not take hours or lines of code to pull off.

This is what EzineArticles require…

EzineArticles.com Editorial Guidelines: (AFFILIATE PROGRAMS):

Affiliate links will be allowed if the link is a domain name you own which forward/redirects to the affiliate link from the top-level of the domain name. For example, it is permissible to forward to an affiliate link from:

http://your-company-name.com/

…but it would not be permissible to forward to an affiliate link from:

http://your-company-name.com/page.html
http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/
http://your-company-name.com/subdirectory/page.html
http://sub-domain.your-company-name.com/

Any article with an affiliate link that does not adhere to this guideline will cause the article to be rejected.

Also ArticlesBase will not allow direct affiliate links within articles posted on their site, how rude! GoArticles on the other hand does;)

How Do I Redirect?

Let’s get started.

I have a site that I use all my redirects on, this is an example of my redirection process. This would be my site….

www.redirectmephplease.com

Now if I sent someone to that site via a link as it is now, they would just end up at the site above and nothing would happen. But if I add some PHP code into the index file of that site with my affiliate link included, as soon as the visitor hit the site above they would then be redirected to my affiliate page.

Here is the code…

header(”Location: http://www.myaffiliateproduct.com/myaffiliatetrackingcode”);
?>

Just three lines of code!

If you understand what and where your index.html file is, then all you need to do is add that code above (with your own affiliate link included) into your index.html file BUT……… rather than save that file as a .html file, you need to now change it to .php -> index.php and not index.html and save it.

To make it even easier for you…

header(”Location: PASTE YOUR CLICKBANK LINK HERE STARTING WITH THE HTTP:// “);
?>

Just paste in your Clickbank affiliate link into the section in bold above removing everything from PASTE, right up to, but not including the “); <- leave that part where it is.

So you should now have a file called index.php with only the three lines of code above in it.

But Can I Only Use One Redirect Per Article Or Website?

Well yes and no. Using EzineArticles you are only allowed just one redirect, and it must come from your main top-level domain, which would be…

www.redirectmephplease.com

But because we added that index.php PHP redirect code above, this would now divert people to your affiliate link which is what we want, but then if you decide to write another article using Ezine, then you have to add that PHP index.php redirect file to anther one of your domains using the same process!!

However if you use ArticlesBase you can use more than one redirect per domain. I hear you saying “Yes, but we just used our index file to send people somewhere else, how can we use another?” My method here is to add a new folder to my site.

Like this example…

www.redirectmephplease.com/articletwo/

So I added the folder articletwo and uploaded it into my public_html directory for that domain. Remember to use a new folder, and not just a file. Using a folder means we can again use our redirect index.php file but this time with a different affiliate link included.

Like this….

www.redirectmephplease.com/articletwo/index.php

You can do this time and time again making sure every time you write a new article, you add a new folder and a new index.php file.

Tip Time – I always name my new folders using my main keyword that I’m targeting for that article, so if I was writing an article that targets the keyword-> fuzzy ferrets <- then the folder and redirect link I would create would look like…

www.redirectmephplease.com/fuzzyferrets/index.php

I do this for SEO purposes myself, but you can name your folders whatever you want, even fuzzy ferrets;)

Where Do I Paste My PHP Redirected URL?

Now you have it saved on your domain always check to make sure it works by redirecting you over to your affiliate page, if it works then you can get started adding this link into your articles.

Some article directories only allow you to post just one link in your author bio at the end of your article, but others will let you post it where you want, whatever one you use just make sure you read the guidelines so that your article does not get rejected.

Another thing to take notice of is that if you can use keyword links in your article rather than just pasting the entire link in like this..

http://www.redirectmephplease.com/fuzzyferrets/index.php

Instead you might be allowed to use a like this…

http://www.redirectmephplease.com/fuzzyferrets/index.php”>Fuzzy Ferrets

I colored the link that people will see if you can use a in blue, because that is what they will only be able to see from that code above, which is also great for SEO by being able to use you main keyword in the link text.

Hopefully that cleared up using a PHP redirect to link to your own affiliate products in articles, the good thing about this php method is that it’s very simple to repeat many times over. However if you have questions or get stuck please let me know below and I’ll do my very best to help you through it.

$200 Per Week Affiliate Challenge

admin — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:43:23 +0000

Still waiting for that first sale in this affiliate challenge, if I had to pay bills doing this I’d be living in a tent! But not to get discouraged I’ll just increase what im doing, more articles, more niche blogging, it’s a lot of writing but the more you do it the easier it becomes.

A good sign today has been a big increase in traffic to a couple of my articles, I also checked the analytics in my Clickbank account to confirm an increase in my hops as well. At this rate surely even I can make a sale;)

For an experiment I’ve been using Wal-Mart classified ads, yes Wal-Mart are now in the online classified ads business, look out Craigslist right! For a couple of product ads I have received some decent traffic using the listings, no sales as of yet, but at least im starting to see some interest in them.

When posting a Wal-Mart Ad you have the same options as Craigslist, you have to select a region to post your free ad in. To narrow this down for me when selecting the best possible location to post in, I use Google Insights to enter the keyword for my product in the search box, then Google Insights will tell me by location the most popular places searching for my item.

Once I have a location idea for my Wal-Mart Ad, I then know where to post my listing, and this method seems to work pretty well for me. It’s also something you can do when using Craigslist too.

I wonder how much I’d get, and where I’d need to post a listing for my kidney?;0)

Approaching An Article

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:08:34 +0000

Pen And Paper By Eleaf - Flickr

In the previous post “my article topic finding process“, I went over how I am finding topics to write about in an article, this was basically the complete process I take when I need ideas for new material to write about. Now i`m going to go over the article itself because I now have a topic and a related affiliate product to work with.

My main objective when writing an article is not only to make sure it’s decent, but also to give out good information without giving everything away. I want someone to find the article after they search for a particular phrase in the search engines, then I want them to stay on the page reading the article in full leaving them with two options, click on the affiliate link to learn the final solution, or click off the page.

Obviously I want the person reading the article to click on the affiliate link rather than leave the page altogether, so in the article copy itself I want to make sure it’s engrossing enough to keep their attention right down to the bottom of the text!

A good tip I use here is to study the sales page of the affiliate product I want them to buy, its at this point I want to copy and paste the headline of the sales page, as well as any bullet points that may appear on the page into a separate text file.

The reason I keep a small text file like this for every article is because it gives me an idea of what the creators of the product are using to grab peoples attention on the main product page, after all they have done all the research for you to find an attention grabbing headline in the first place, so why re-invent the wheel?

I then re-write the headline in my own words and customize it for the article, but still keeping the theme of the headline the same.

I use the bullet points from the sales page in the same way, but I will also re-write and expand upon them creating an entire paragraph out of each to include in the article. Using this method means that I can write a decent article on a subject I don’t really have a great deal of knowledge about, and all without spending hours on research.

So I now know I have a pretty good headline, and the content is also solid. After all its the job of the products sales page author to keep the visitor engaged in order to make the sale, so they need an attention grabbing headline, and the bullet points will usually voice the greatest concerns/questions that the reader may need the solution for.

The length of my article is determined by other articles with a related topic, so if I search an article directory for similar topics I’ll be looking for two things, the first is how many words the author used, and the second is the amount of views/reads that article has. If I find a related article with 600 words and a ton of views, then I’ll be looking at writing around about that many words too.

Most of the articles I’ve been finding during this research are only at around 200-300 words, very short, good news for me right;)

Depending on the article directory and where you can place your link, you might only have one chance to add this important link right at the bottom of the page in the bio. If this is the case what you write here can be as important as your articles headline, as this is your last chance to ask the reader to take action(meaning click your affiliate link).

What I will generally do here is take what I believe to be the best and most appealing bullet point from the sales page, and then re-write it including my link in the bio.

example..

Discover Why Taking —– Can Actually Give You A Stroke – Learn The True —- —– —– Remedy

Remember to use your –keywords– in your text link;)

I now have an article written that should be enticing enough for the reader to want to click on my affiliate link, If they do, then I have done what I wanted to accomplish with the article.

Next post I will go over how I redirect links to affiliate pages using php, and what I then do to try and get the articles flying up the search engines.

My Article Topic Finding Process

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:30:36 +0000

This is the exact method im using to find article topics to write about. I thought I’d share the steps with you so that you get to see how I select a topic, check out the competition, and find a product to promote using that articles topic, all with the hope that I can drive that article to the top of the search engines for free traffic and clicks.

If I have no idea what to write an article about, I’ll use a few steps to find a great topic to base an article upon. The very first thing I do is open up Wordtracker and use the free keyword tool.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Once I open up Wordtracker I will be met with a blank search box just waiting for me to enter a term to search on. As I said before I don’t have any idea what I want to look up right now, so what I do now is use certain action words and make Wordtracker find interesting article topics for me instead.

By “action words” what I mean is using words that people will use in search engines when they want to perform and action, like “buy”, “order”, “purchase” or “how to”. They are all words used by people wanting to do, or find something in particular. The good thing is that you don’t have to guess when using Wordtracker, all you have to do is use your action word and Wordtracker will find related terms people use that include your action word.

This is my example…

finding action phrases with Wordtracker

So my action word for today was “how to”, that’s all you need for now. Once you are ready to grab your results click that “Hit Me” button to bring up some related phrases.

Wordtracker brings back results

The number on the left of this table represents the number of searches per day that people use to find that information. Then on the right side you are presented with the keyword they are using too, notice how they include your action word “how to”.

The next part is up to you to decide what one of the phrases above will have the best possible chance of a person coming to your article to find information, and once you present them with some information, you will then want them to click on a link in your article to find the solution to what they are looking for.

So the intent of your article is to have that person searching for your action word phrase to click on your article listed in the search engines, then read what you have written in that article, which will hopefully point them to your ultimate destination which is an affiliate product that they will purchase, making you a commission at the same time.

Two phrases above stick out to me in this example…

how to survive a depression
how to make a charcoal grill

Both of the words above are from people looking to take some action, in the first one they are looking for help/knowledge about how to survive depression, in the second they want to build a charcoal grill. Now we have a couple of options we want to find out if we can find them the answer to their problem in the form of an affiliate product.

The next step I take is to search through my affiliate programs to see if I can match an affiliate product to one of the previous searches. So I will go over to Clickbank and search in their marketplace for that exact keyword hoping to find a depression help, or charcoal grill building product that I can earn a commission on.

Hopefully I will find a great match for my action phrase, if not I’ll check other affiliate programs the same way to find a product. If I have no luck at all I’ll go back to the first step and start it all again.

If I find a great product my next step is to find out how much competition that search phrase has, so I’ll head over to Google and do this..

Make sure to put your phrase in ” ” to find out how much direct competition you have for that phrase. Then hit the Google Search button.

This is what you are looking for, the Results section which can be found just to the right of the search box that includes your phrase. So for the depression search you would have 796,000 sites competing for the same phrase!

This is what we get for the charcoal grill phrase..

So just 42!! Much better than 796k right!

There are other things to notice on this Google listings page apart from the number of competing sites, you might want to look to see if other articles have been listed in the search results too, and also check to see if any sponsored ads are present for that term, if people are paying for clicks then you can be pretty confident that it does convert from searchers into buyers.

If no sponsored ads are present then you might want to consider another action word altogether. But I say that if its not costing you money for people to click on your listing in the search engines, and as in the case of charcoal grills you would get around 500 searches a day, why not give it a try anyway?

So I picked “how to make a charcoal grill” as the keyword I will base an article on in this example. Next post I’ll go into writing an article, then matching my affiliate product to the searchers action word of “how to make a charcoal grill” hoping that I can persuade the reader to click on my affiliate link at the end.