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Affiliate ID Golden Rule

Posted on June 8, 2008 by Donald in Clickbank, CPA Leave a comment

Okay so you started your affiliate marketing adventure. Say you started with Clickbank. One of the first things you do when creating your account is selecting your affiliate ID right? Now you think, it doesn’t matter what my ID is, so I’ll just use my usual handle. WRONG! You have to remember Affiliate networks like Clickbank show your ID within the URL. What would you think if you saw a URL like this:

RogerB

Most people will immediately know it’s an affiliate link, and if they buy they’ll know ‘roberB’ will get credit for the sale. You’ll lose 25% of your sales just because of this. Believe it or not most people do not like giving credit to affiliates. Sadly I do the same thing and I know tons of other people who simply chop off the ‘hop’, reset their cookies and buy without the affiliate. Sometimes I don’t do it, but if it can benefit me it’s too easy not to.

Okay now what do you think about IDs like these:

random

short

include

These IDs are random, and some look like they even belong there. That’s what you have to do. If you’re marketing to other affiliates be prepared to lose half your sales no matter what. But if your market is dog training you’ll most likely fool most people into thinking its just part of the URL and it belongs there.

You can also cloak your links, but watch out for browsers that don’t like cloaked links. IFrame cloaking can sometimes not work in IE, and some Affiliate networks have rules about cloaking links.

That’s about it, when selecting an ID don’t use your name or usual handle, go for the random jumbled letters and numbers and you might get surprised by the increase of sales. I increased my sales by at least 25% last year by doing this.

Good luck!


Blog Update – Clickbank, Kontera, Adsense, and other Crap!

Posted on September 5, 2007 by Donald in Clickbank, CPA, eBay, Intresting Stuff Leave a comment

I think I have too much going on. I have two forums, 60+ websites, several of which generate my main source of income, hordes of affiliate projects, testing, maintenance, updates and more! I don’t consider my self a workaholic, but geez… it seems the more traffic a website gets, the more it takes to maintain it. Which I guess comes with the territory. Other then working online, I workout at Golds Gym as much as possible and spend lots of time on my other hobbies, cars! I’m a Webmaster, Affiliate Marketer, Internet Marketer, and I guess a soon to be writer. (working on an eBook).

Which brings me to, what do I call my self. As a job title, I would like to say I’m an Internet Marketer. But whenever people hear that, they think I work for some crap company, trying to sell some crap product. At least that’s what I would think. Calling my self a webmaster seems a bit much. What am I so good at that I’m the master of?

What about Affiliate Marketer? That goes with Internet Marketer I guess. I’m finding more and more Affiliate Marketing is becoming a big chunk of my monthly income. It’s about 1/5 right now… which is nice! I should call my self a writer! Even though I consider my self a poor writer, I seem to write more then anything else. Internet Marketing requires being a decent copy writer.

Affiliate Marketing and other ways to create money is what I want to focus on from now on. I still love talking about SEO, and ways to build websites, but I think people want to know about making money online. I know that’s what keeps me going to my favorite blogs.

John Chow Dot Com and ShoeMoney.com

These guys have some great blogs that are updated a heck of a lot more then my blog (they make thousands off their blog a month). I wish I could focus more on my blog, as it’s producing better and better stats everyday, but until it starts producing real income, besides adsense and Kontera ($100-$200 a month), I can’t spend all my time on it and not on my real money makers. Maybe I should find a niche and stick with it! Lol. I talk about too much stuff with this blog and I can’t target any good affiliates with it. Even though this Blog is blowing up because of my eBay suspension guides and forums, I hate talking about eBay. Other then in the forums, I don’t want this blog to turn into another eBay hater. I want to talk about alternatives to eBay. And other ways people can make money. I think that’s the better route to take.

Well, another post about nothing. I seem to do that a lot! I guess its better then posting nothing at all?

What kind of value can I give off this post? Hmmm

Well, I talked about Kontera a bit.

Kontera to me is okay. It does a little better then adsense, but the lag time for the text links to be created are a bit much. Kontera doesn’t work well in forums either, it seems to do okay in blog post. So far I added it to about 5 blogs, and it’s had about 500 clicks this week, the results aren’t impressive. I’m willing to wait a few more weeks to see what happens. The good thing about Kontera ads are they don’t take up any additional ad space. And they’re highly configurable.

I’ll talk more about this in a couple weeks when I can give more details stats on it.

Oh, and Clickbank affiliate program is working great still! I almost reached my second goal of $200 a day! The most I’ve made so far has been $187 in one day. The average I’m making is $60-$130 a day; which again is nice considering this is all free traffic through a couple blogs and email marketing. I’m definitely going to keep working on this. It’s more then just making money; it’s the progress I love to see.

Well, until the next egotistical post, have a great day!


Clickbank Update! Broke $100 today! Almost!

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Donald in Adventure, CPA, Recommends, To-Do Leave a comment

Quick update for you on Clickbank! Since I posted my Clickbank stats a couple days ago, the last couple days my stats have increased by almost 3X as much! I’m doing a little email marketing and tweaking and adding more ads to my websites, and it seems to be working. Out of 50+ websites I have access to; I’ve only monetized 3 with Clickbank ads! What if I do them all? I’m excited!

What steps will I take now?

  1. I want to monetize the remaining sites of mine. Using banners, and simple links as advertisements.
  2. I’ll continue working on a new auto responder I setup for affiliate commissions. So Far I’ve created 4 weekly emails with basic reviews and discounts on products. I’ll add this email sign up to all sites. So far I had 68 new signups today! Yay!
  3. I’ll create new content for more advertisement in the future. Niche content to products I’m promoting. I created a new forum today!
  4. I’ll start creating a review products page with competing products and advertise with adsense. I think this will make the big bucks.

clickbank72007That’s it for the next couple days. Once I get this done, I’ll let you know how Clickbank is doing again. I must say, I love Clickbank! This is the only affiliate network I’ve tried, it won’t be the last, and if it’s a taste of what’s to come, I’m game! I can’t wait to try other networks! Why break you back with eBay, your own store, or even creating your own products when you can sell someone else’s products and get half the profit? They do all the work, and you get paid? What’s not to love about that?

Okay that’s enough Clickbank today; I’ll update you when I break $200 a day! Hopefully soon!

 


How To Promote Clickbank!

Posted on July 17, 2007 by Donald in CPA, Intresting Stuff, PPC Leave a comment

Geez! I’ve been busy lately! Since I discovered Clickbank, I’ve been busy promoting products on my niche websites. Once I saw that Clickbank actually worked and made me money I’ve turned hardcore affiliate marketer. I mean I don’t leave anything unaffiliated if you’ve noticed. Every blog post, every forum signature; every email message now or sooner or later will have an affiliate link targeted to that audience. It’s a rush to see real results after running with adsense for so long and going no where.

Check out these stats with Clickbank:

 clickbank

I know it’s not much, but I’ve only been with Clickbank for a couple months now, I haven’t yet paid for any PPC advertising for these commissions; they’re all from a few websites of mine that have banner advertisements, nothing special. But it’s a heck of a lot better then adsense and the sky is the limit with what you can do to increase sales! I was lucky if I saw a couple dollars a day with Adsense.

I’ve been reading a lot about Clickbank and affiliate marketing the past month, and it seems all the top Clickbank gurus making $1000 or more a day are primarily using adwords to promote products.

For example, one way an affiliate marketer would promote via adwords is by creating a comparison site that would compare similar Clickbank products. This way you show what the visitor came to see, and their competition! You have a better chance of making a sale. If you’re going as far as this, you might as well capture an email and promote more products later as well.

Another way would be to create a simple website promoting a product with an affiliate link. A presale before the squeeze page? This doesn’t seem like it would work well, but people are doing it.

Then some people do direct linking into the sellers squeeze page. In adwords when you’re making your advertisement, you can use your affiliate link – and then “display” the actual URL of the website you are promoting. The only problem with this is that Google only displays one ad per website at one time. So you’ll ad will have a hard time being shown if there is competition.

There are many other ways to promote a Clickbank product. It’s best to do research on a product you are promoting, if you find that someone is continually promoting the product the same way week after week, then there’s a good chance they’re making money doing it.

If you want to do something that doesn’t have you dealing with customers or full time maintenance. You should check out affiliate marketing. I’m loving it so far!


To-DO: CPA, Affiliate, PPC

Posted on June 13, 2007 by Donald in CPA, PPC, To-Do 1 Comment

Too many ideas, too many projects, too many distractions!

Surprisingly my to-do list has shrunk these few weeks, but I still feel I’m being pulled in too many directions at one time. I can’t seem to do what I know needs to be done. I have things on my list that won’t go away. For example I have this upgrade I should have done to one of my sites months ago, still on my list! What’s stopping me from doing it? The fact that I know it will take me 2-3 hours to do it, and lots of trying to figure out what files need to be edited and what files are okay is the problem. It’s just a massive project that will take a lot of concentration to get it done within 2-3 hours. It’s the biggest thing to do, and the most important but yet I don’t do it.

Another thing on my list is a $500 charge on my VISA I need to dispute, but I haven’t done it yet. Time is running out and yet I haven’t called yet. I actually plan to do this the next time I pay the bill, hopefully within a couple days.

I guess I have been doing a few things. One of the items on my to-do list has been to cut back on unneeded monthly charges. I’ve so far saved: $558. That’s pretty awesome! That’s $558 I’m saving every month by canceling services I’m not using! That’s a car payment!

I’ve recently separated my to-do list by “One time projects” and “Long term projects”. I told my self to do one from each list, taking turns between and it seemed to work for the first couple of days. I haven’t done much from the long term list this week. One of my big things is to start doing more back linking. I’ve only been developing my sites recently and not any SEO, so backlinking is now a high priority for me. I tried to get a friend of mine to create backlinks for me, but that didn’t work out so well. So far the guy only created 15 links!?! I need somewhere around 150-200 links for my 80 sites. And I’m paying the guy I think it was 35 cents per link created. It’s not a hard job, just a lot of repetitiveness. Oh well…

Other then my lack of getting things done, I’ve been dong a lot of research on CPA affiliates. I’ve even found this blog run by a 14 year old where he talks about his CPA. I mean what the hell! This guy is making thousands a month easy doing CPA, and I haven’t really started to dive deep yet! I’ve been putting things in motion to start CPA (Cost Per Action) affiliation hardcore, I’m almost at that point and really want to do it! I tried clickbank as a test and I’m happy to say that it works pretty well. Without paying for traffic, or even creating any real squeeze pages, I’ve managed to generate about $150 within one week of messing about some affiliates. That’s pretty cool. That tells me that CPA works and it’s worth looking into further. I’ve been reading CPA forums at ewealth, digitalpoint, and even webmasterworld. I think I’ve learned a lot so far.

I guess the basic idea would be to first sign up as an affiliate from sites like, CJ, Click Bank, Azoogleads. Then find a product that seems to pay well and easy to promote. An easy way to promote would be to place your affiliate link of personal sites, forum signatures, articles you’ve written, etc and hang back and hope for a sale. Another way would be to create a squeeze page based on your product you’re promoting, and sending traffic to it by PPC advertising, SEO, and other internet marketing. Squeeze pages are huge money makers if you make them right. I’m new to the business and haven’t yet made squeeze pages, but I know how they work and I’m excited at the possibility. I mean I’ve been doing PPC for years now, so I know how I can get the most for my money at that point. I’ve created tons of websites on my own, and have graphics guys to help create squeeze pages; I now know how CPA works. I just have to do it! The only think holding me back is a bloody $900 balance left from a co-worker on my Google account; I’ll have to take care of that first before creating any new campaigns. My only other choice would be Yahoo overture, which is weak, compared to Google. I might just try Yahoo first, and then when things are doing well, shift to Google. That might be a better idea. If a bloody 14 year old kid can do CPA making thousands every month, I can certainly do it!

It’s on my to-do list anyways.