Myeprofits.com

Skinning the Affiliate Marketing Cat

If you’re trying to make money with affiliate marketing, you may have found out that it is not as easy as some have claimed. If you’ve been using pay per click for any amount of time, you’ve realized that you can lose your shirt pretty fast if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you usually have to burn some cash up front. Often, you’ll burn that cash only to find out that the campaign you chose wasn’t for the best offer, and you’ll have to start over.

If you have a website, you may have found that getting traffic is hard work, and getting quality traffic is even harder. If you’ve been trying the affiliate marketing route and it’s not getting you where you want to go, consider this…

Allan Gardyne had a great piece of advice in one of his newsletters once. He said that success in affiliate marketing comes down to only two things. Yup, just two.

One method of affiliate marketing that Allan subscribes to involves bringing people to a content website, and then monetizing the traffic with Adsense ads and affiliate links.

In order to be successful at this, he says to do only two things every day. One, create unique content for your site. Two, get a link back to your site.

That’s it! Or is it? Well, it’s not that simple, but it’s so easy to get caught up in the complexities of how to make money on the web, that this advice really makes sense in a big way.

There are so many ways to skin the affiliate marketing cat it’s not funny. For a while, I was buying info-products left and right. Each one had some great ideas, and I learned something from almost all of them.

But if you try to chase after all these separate techniques and systems, you’ll just be chasing your tail. The 80/20 rule takes over and it just becomes totally unproductive. In addition, most of the info-marketing products hold something back. Well, actually, some of them hold a lot back. Sometimes, this is by design, and sometimes it’s simply the nature of the beast.

You NEED focus.

After a while, if you don’t get down to basics, you won’t have a viable business. All you have are a bunch of half done tasks and half baked failures that don’t amount to any real traffic, or any real money.

What you need to do is plug into systems that are already working for others. Without buying any courses, without buying any tools, and without getting distracted by anything else, plug yourself into a system. A very simple system is the one that Allan describes. Create content, and get a link.

So, if your traffic is not where it needs to be, or your visitors are not converting into cash, try this. For 30 days, focus on nothing but these two things, every day…

1. Create unique content for publication on your website. By that I mean write on-topic, keyword rich articles for the most profitable keywords in your niche.

2. Get a link back to your site. This can be from a directory, or a related website, or by submitting an article to the article directories. It could even be by blogging and pinging, and/or using trackbacks. If you can guest blog on someone else’s blog, even better.

I used to work on getting listed in directories, but I’ve found that for the most part, it doesn’t give me that much benefit. The exception might be some niche specific directories. You’ll have to decide whether you think it’s worth it in your niche.

Seriously focus on this and try this for 30 days, and your business will improve. It usually takes me two to three months to really see the effectiveness of my efforts on this, but it will come.

Tips:

1. I highly recommend submitting articles to get links. That should be your primary method of getting links back to your site.
2. Use an article for your site as the seed to write the articles to be submitted.
3. Use the Unique Article Wizard to submit your articles to the directories to ensure unique content throughout.
4. Submit to ezinearticles.com manually.
5. Rinse/repeat.

One last thought. I highly recommend that you start thinking web-centric rather than site-centric. Start thinking in terms of setting up web-based profit centers, and don’t marry yourself to any particular website, theme, or product. Do what works, and fine tune and refine other people’s working systems to suit your needs. I’ll talk more about what it means to be web-centric as opposed to site-centric in upcoming posts. For now, follow Allan’s advice for 30 days and see your results improve. Enjoy.

I’m a little miffed! Today, dealdotcom is offering SEO Elite. I own that product already… I don’t like the interface all that much, and I could do without a couple of the features, but it’s good. And, Brad Callen has a way of showing you in video and in writing some pretty interesting ways of using his software to get exactly the kind of success your looking for on the web.

What I’m not happy about is that deaddotcom is selling it so cheaply. If you haven’t checked it out yet, they actually have some pretty good pricing over there. Hey, I figure if I’m gonna buy it anyway, why not? Plus, you can refer customers and affiliates and get paid, and, if you refer someone who contributes their own product, all the better. Check it out.

And, speaking of cheaper prices, how about free?

Weatherman Todd Gross offers Free Monthly Gift, where you can get, at least once a month, a free product that helps you with your Internet marketing efforts. I’ve been a member of this free site for a while, and while I can’t use every product he offers, some of them are useful. In addition, Todd offers deap discounts on products that he thinks you might be interested in. Also, he offers a way to actually joint venture with him. Since Todd is hooked up with some top marketers, this might offer some interesting advantages.

Try it out, it’s free.

I’ve gotten several emails recently about using mind mapping to aid in productivity. These have come from top marketers who use it for newsletters or website concepts. You can use mind maps to plan out pretty much everything from cleaning the house to starting a business.

I’ve been using mind maps to get a good handle on what the various types of Internet marketing businesses can look like. There are many different marketing models that will work on the Internet, and many variations of them can be used together. Using a mind map makes it easy to see how things fit together.

Up until now, I’ve been hand drawing my mind maps on white boards. But that is time consuming and a bit difficult to share. It also takes up white board real estate that I could use for something else. So, I started using Free Mind.

Some of the top marketers are recommending MindJet, but let me show you what I created with Free Mind. Here is the collapsed version of my “Website Profit Center Model.”

Basically, I’ve created a simple model here of an Internet profit center. In this case, I’m describing the landscape of the traffic flow into and out of a website profit center. In order to keep it as simple as possible, I’ve decided that I really only have two things going on. Traffic in, and traffic out. I also really only have two types of traffic coming in: traffic I pay to acquire, and traffic that I do not pay to acquire.

For the traffic outflow, there are only two types there as well: traffic that is monetized (earns me money), and traffic that is not monetized.

In reality, there is a lot more going on within and around my profit center than that, so I expand my mind map to include some of the possibilities for both the inflow and outflow of the traffic.

Let me show you what just one portion of the traffic in looks like so far. We’re not done yet, but we’ve got a lot of ideas sparked by the mind mapping exercise…

As you can see, I’ve defined a number of ways to get free traffic. The goal here when we mind map is to get as many ideas out as we can, starting from a simple concept. As you think of items and how they relate to the parent item, it will often spark a related idea that allows you to start a new node. Some of these ideas can grow into totally new mind maps. The possibilities are truly endless.

From here, we can refine our thoughts and create a process map by which we can execute strategies based on our goals. For example, let’s say that we have a goal of achieving 1000 visitors per day for a brand new site within 6 months. We can easily look at our mind map and determine which of the possible methods we want to use to generate those visitors, write out the process, and execute it.

I have found it extremely helpful to mind map. Before I would start an idea file, which is basically a text document. Then I would notice that my ideas in it were all over the place, and it would grow to like 10 pages in length. So I’d start a new file, and then another, and another. Pretty soon, I’ve got a bunch of folders with files in them with all kinds of ideas, and no way to relate them to my overall concept.

Without knowing where or how they fit in, I had no idea how to use them properly. Sometimes, I would draw out process maps, but they would get so cluttered and detailed I would lose focus on how to use them. With the mind mapping concept, you can see from a high level view as far down in detail as you want to go.

When I’ve got my mind map matured just a bit, I plan on exporting it to a PDF file. I’ll make that file available to my newsletter subscribers when it’s ready.

I highly encourage you to try it out for yourself!

John Reese has just released BlogRush, the first offering from his new income.com project. It seems like it might be promsing, so I’m going to try it out and see if it brings any additional traffic.

BlogRush is a viral marketing blog “widget” that works, in some ways, like many of the viral programs out there, but has a few twists to it. If you’d like to sign up for an account and try it out on your blog, head for the BlogRush site.

You can always utilize another method of generating traffic, and this one is totally passive after you set it up. I’m going to let it run for a while and see what happens.

I love ezinarticles.com. They send me traffic every single month, and they have a great set of stats. If you’re a platinum member, they even speed up your approval time. This, of course, helps you to get indexed faster, get backlinks faster, and hopefully, moves you up in the search engines.

I love the Unique Article Wizard. They send me traffic every single month, and they have a great set of stats. They get you approved quickly, and start submitting to the directories within a day or so. This, of course, gets your unique content spread all over the Internet world fairly quickly, brings traffic, backlinks, and rankings. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

One thing I don’t like about the Wizard is that they don’t submit to ezinarticles.com. Bummer. I wish they did, but I knew this all along.

So here is what I do to get the best of both worlds. I write an article with the idea of submitting it to the article directories. I format a resource box and rewrite my article based on instructions from the Unique Article Wizard so it is ready for submission.

Since the chances that my original article will ever appear in any directory are almost zero, I could then safely place this article on my website or submit it to ezinearticles.com in its original form. But, I usually go one step further.

I don’t want content on my website to be the same as what I submit (following a recommendation from Allan Gardyne I read a while ago). So, what I do next depends upon how anxious I am to get the material up on my site. If I’m anxious, I’ll put the original, or a slight rewrite, on my website and I’ll rewrite it just a little and submit to ezinearticles.com. 

If I can wait, what I’ll do is wait until my article shows up on uberarticles.com, and grab a unique copy. Then, I modify that unique version of the article just a bit for my website (if appropriate) and post it. Sometimes, I like some things about the original better, so I use that as my guide. Then, I grab another unique version from uberarticles.com, and reformat it just a tad for ezinearticles.com and submit it.

At this point, I can now grab unique versions, or just use the original, and send them to my newsletter subscribers, and post the content on forums if I’m in the mood. So, one article, thousands of unique versions, many uses. And, I get to submit unique content to ezinearticles.com, which is something I suspect very few people are doing.

Aurelius Tjin wrote an excellent article entitled 10 Unstoppable Conversion Tactics For Anyone Selling Anything Online.

It’s an excellent article with great tips for making more sales. His focus here was on process, and these tips will work well for someone who’s already got a marketing funnel in place, or someone who’s currently creating a sales process.

I would have to add, though, that the best conversion tactic of all is to consistently create something of value. All of the techniques mentioned in this article will only get you so far if you don’t offer perceived value to your customer.

Perceived value will create more sales than any other technique, since your customers will naturally recommend your product to others. Not only that, if you’ve built up trust and much of your information speaks to your audience, they’ll pre-sell themselves on the idea of buying something on your recommendation. I know that when someone I respect recommends a product and I think it fits in with my business model, I’m almost ready to buy it before I really know what it is.

In addition, the higher the perceived value, the less you need any of these conversion tactics. In fact, if you build a list and provide great value to that list all along, then your recommendations will naturally translate into sales. At that point, a sales page becomes more of a formality than anything.

What do you think?