Secrets of Affiliate Marketing Contest

Here's my tip: (This is not really offer specific, but how to go about choosing an offer to market based off others success/failures)

There is always people jumping the bandwagon to sell products/services of the established affiliate marketers. One of the best ways to get around this constant uphill struggle is to leverage other people and their hard work. There are ways to profit from this "publicity stunt":

1. When a new product is launched online, there will always be a period of huge search volumes. These searches come from people using all sorts of keywords to find the products and does their buyer research before handing over their cash. This is a great opportunity to get in front of these people as the new products are released to the market, and this works particularly well as keywords relating to new products have less competition in the search engines.

2. Secondly, you can make money off other successful marketers indirectly. This is done by looking at how they are making money and modeling their system. All you need to do is examine how they are making money and model your own business around a similar process (do not copy other people’s work however, as this could land you in court).

3. Post comments and add content to big sites. Spreading your content around the web is one of the most effective ways to get more traffic, but to truly take advantage of the success of others, your aim to get your content found on the big traffic sites where your target audience hangs out.

Also wrote about your contest: http://www.dailydollarreport.com/john-chow-secrets...

This is an entry into the "Secrets of Affiliate Marketing Contest".

Here's an Affiliate Marketing strategy that I've been fairly successful with recently. I'll use an offer available on Market Leverage as an example. Before I pick an offer, I'm going to talk about what I'll do first. I'm going to actually use one of the simplest affiliate marketing strategies out there - direct linking. Most people think that direct linking is dead, but I personally don't think so.

The secret to successful direct linking is to find offers that have websites that Google likes. For this strategy I look for offers which have a landing page with quite a bit of text on it and not just graphics. If the offer has a landing page which doesn't scroll, doesn't have any written text on it and lacks any type of keywords related to the offer, then it probably won't work with this strategy. However, if you use offers that have a fairly meaty landing page, then direct linking can be made to work.

For my example, I'll pick "Robert Allen Multiple Streams of Income". It's an offer that pays a $95.00/sale payout and allows Search traffic. This is important because we'll be using Google Adwords to send Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic to the offer.

So here is what I would do, step by step:

(1) Pick an offer that has a meaty landing page, with at least a few pages of scrolling text so that Google can establish a theme for the page for it's Quality Score. In my example, we picked "Robert Allen Multiple Streams of Income" as the offer. This is what the landing page looks like: http://www.robertallenmedia.com/campaigns/rga/inde... . As you can see there is a bit of content there for Google to index.

(2) Find the affiliate link on the offer page inside Market Leverage. In this case, the link looks something like this: http://bestshopsweb.com/a.php?a=CDxxxxx&b=2741...

(3) Next, you'll need to setup a Google AdWords account if you don't already have one. Then we need to create a PPC campaign to send traffic to the offer. To do that, you'll need three things:

a. You'll need to research and find keywords that you'll be bidding on for your campaign. You'll need to understand the offer first in order to be able to come up with a keyword list. This particular offer is all about creating passive income streams. Robert G. Allen is a personal development guru who has written many books on the topic of real estate and multiple streams of income. Some of the keywords people might search for when looking for something like this might be "passive income stream" or "passive income stream training" or "nothing down real estate business" or "buy real estate nothing down" etc.

b. I usually start with about 10-20 keywords as a starting point and expand out from there. Once you have your keywords, you might want to type them into Google and see what comes up. Check the paid advertising on the right to see what other competitive products you are competing against, and also start to take notice of the types of ads people write. Writing the ad for your campaign will be the next step. The simplest way to approach this is to take the Top 3-7 ads you see on the keywords you are bidding for and use them for ideas to write your own ad copy.

c. When you have your ad written and your keywords picked, Google will ask you where you want to link your campaign to. In the Display URL field you put the domain name of the offer, such as in this case "www.robertallenmedia.com", and in the Destination URL you put in your affiliate link from Market Leverage. That is the link that looks like this: "http://bestshopsweb.com/a.php?a=CDxxxxx&b=2741...". There is only one change you make to this link. At the very end, you'll want to add this text: "{keyword}", so now your Destination URL will look something like this: "http://bestshopsweb.com/a.php?a=CDxxxxx&b=2741...{keyword}". What that will do is it will tell Google to append the keyword that was searched for to the end of the Destination URL and it will pass that keyword string into the Market Leverage system under subID5. This will allow you to run subID reports in your account to see which keywords are converting for you.

(4) Once you have Google Adwords setup to send traffic to the offer, it's all now just about tweaking. You'll need to adjust your bid amounts in order to get your ad onto the first page of Google. You don't need to or even want to be in the #1 spot. Try to aim in the middle around the 6th or 7th spot. Adjust your bids on your keywords to get you into that spot. If the bids to get you into that spot are too high, you may need to look for less competitive keywords.

If you can setup a campaign like this and break even, you're in good shape. Meaning if you end up spending $100 in PPC traffic fees and generate $100 in revenue from it, you're in good shape. This means that you're on the right track but you just need to do some tweaking, or some more research into less competitive keywords. I wouldn't try to go after a 100% profit margin right from the start. It's better to just start generating volume first and then by tweaking your bids and ad click-through rates, you'll be able to lower your costs while maintaining your revenues to produce a profit.

Although there is no rocket science behind what I just described, this very simple Direct Linking strategy is very often overlooked by other affiliates. Everyone is so focused on registering their own domain names, setting up massive content sites and spending a lot of time just to get a campaign going, I'm able to launch multiple campaigns using this Direct Linking strategy in the same amount of time. THEN, if I find an offer or niche that works with direct linking and I can at least break even with it or come close, I can then start looking at possibly building out a content website with my own domain and Blog related to the offer.

This method of Direct Linking as a way to test offers at the onset is something I've played with and have had some really good results with so far. Some affiliates will tell you that Direct Linking no longer works due to Google's strict rules on Quality Scores for websites, but I have not found this to be the case at all if you follow what I've described above.

Best of luck!

-Paul Piotrowski

If i win this contest, how do you gonna send the iPod if i live outside the US resident?

Good luck to everyone that enters!

John

Here is my entry I put on Zac's blog. If you can't run the same entry let me know and I will post another one.

Here are the steps I would take to start promoting an offer from Market Leverage, the offer I have chosen for this example is the AB Rocket offer. I choose this offer because I think anything related to health will always have a market online. Get ready though, this is not going to be a small comment but the over all outline I will be showing you here I personally know works as I use it myself.

Seeings how I am sure there are a lot of people like me who want to do PPC (pay per click) advertising but just don’t have the budget to get into it this is a great way to start to build a solid foundation for yourself online for making money. I personally believe if you want to succeed online you need to build your income stream on a few different levels. A great place to start is by building quality affiliate websites. As I mentioned above I am going to look at the offer from Market Leverage for the AB Rocket. I am going to assume that all my research is going to tell me that this should prove to be a good offer to run with, but for all of your reading this keep in mind this is only an example and if you try and copy this exact layout for the exact offer it may not work.

Step One.

First thing you are going to want to do is check out what type of domain names are available that you can get that are related to working out or mostly working out yourAB’s, seeings how the product we are working with or starting off with pertains to your AB’s, It would be good to get a name that fits are product. To do this research, I use Google’s keyword Tool. I will start off with a basic term like “working out” and see what other related keywords come up with the search. The goal behind doing this is to find a keyword phrase that fully relates to our product that has a steady amount of search traffic to it. Lets say we found a phrase using this tool that shows we have 2000 searches a month for it, and at a steady incline with a low AdWords competition. This term would be (example only) “working out abs”. Your next step would be to go to your hosting company ( I useBlueFur dot com) and see if that exact name is open in either a dot com or a dot net name. It’s not open but for the case of this example lets say that it is. Before you register that name you want to see who is all on the first page of Google for that term. Google it and take a look. I am going to assume you have the SEO plug in forFirefox so you can check the PR of sites, there back links and there domain ages. This information is important because if the first page of Google shows that all the sites are very old with high back links and PR, it is going to be very hard for you to rank that site and get a steady amount of organic traffic to it. So lets say everyone on the first page of Google are all lower then PR 3, less the 10000 back links and they are all younger then 3 years. When you were looking at the first age in Google you also noticed that all the sites that rank for the term “working out abs” all have some sort of weird name for there domain name. That is perfect and I will explain that in a second. Now I would register that name. While you are waiting for everything to go through and for your new site to be pointing to your server, its time to get some content.

Step two

Google your search term you want to get ranked for again, and get idea’s for original content. Get a few article’s together and also search for related news articles to your product. For now, just copy and paste the news articles links and titles and save them somewhere. You will use them later. Finish writing up your content articles (don’t forget to sprinkle your keyword phrase “working out abs” through your articles and do a complete review of your product “AB Rocket” with a few bad points but focus a lot on the good ones. Also grab some pictures for your product. Try and use a reporters view on your product, not a salesmen’s view.

Step Three

Now that your new site is pointing to your server and you can start building your site, install wordpress on it. Find a theme that fits with your site, but is clean. I like using the Flexx them from ithemes. Now that you have wordpress on your site and your ready to go, build your site, install your plug ins you like working with but also the wp-sticky post plugin. Your first article you are going to put up is going to be called “working out abs” and also post it under the category called “working out abs”and that post is also going to be your review of your product. With the sticky post plugin installed and activated, make that post the sticky one. It will always be the first post every visitor to your site sees first or your “sales page”. Your other articles just time stamp them to release over the coarse or a few months or so.

When your building your new wordpress affiliate site make sure you add a privacy policy page to the site as well as a contact page. You will also want to grab some other offers from Market Leverage that fit with the niche of your site. Seeings how you are building a site about working out “getting in shape type of thing” you would want to grab the ML offer for the nutrients pill they have. Do a small review of it and build a page for it, repeat this step if ML has a lot of related offers. The more pages your site has the better you will do. Do the same keyword research for that page that you did for your sites name. Now, you have an affiliate site focusing on two products or offers from ML and you are targeting traffic just with how you set things up. Regarding your news articles that you have links to and the headlines for you can either two do things with them. You can either build a page on your site called “related news” or something like that or you can hyperlink to the articles from a widget in your sidebar. The only reason why you want these links is to show Google that you are linking to other sites that are related to your product.

Step Four

Now that your site is built, you have links to your products, maybe a banner or two, 4 or 5 pages built of original content and everything is ready to go, bookmark the hell out of that site and every single article you have on it and the pages too. Do this over the coarse of a week. A good way to do this is to use “Social Marker dot com” After that is done just leave it for a while.

Did you pick up on the secret to ranking your site?

In a few days after you bookmarked your site you should see that you are on page one of Google for your chosen term “working out abs” The reason why you are on page one so fast is for two reasons. First is that your are using wordpress. Google loves wordpress! The Second is, your site is 100% relevant to your keyword of “working out abs”. Your sites name is your keyword, your first article’s title is your keyword which is under the category that is also your keyword, and you have used your keyword in your meta tags. Google loves you now because they know with out a doubt what your site is all about. I just used this exact method over this past weekend to take a 2 word (9 characters only) keyword phrase for a site name and place it on page one of google. I all ready have steady traffic to my site and clicks registering for my product I am promoting and one sale so far. Cool eh! The really cool thing about building a affiliate site this way is if you watch Google trends, you can have a site placed at the top of searches for term before everyone else and be ready for the wave of traffic.

What can you do after your site is built.

Build more sites! If you set a goal of building 20 sites this way covering all different niches you will spread out where your income is coming from so if one niche or product lines falls off your not stranded with out money coming in. When you do get money coming in for your affiliate sales, bank it and use it for your PPC budget. When the time comes you have 1000 or so saved up, which ever product you have that is doing the best with sales and converting build a PPC campaign around it. Now that you have a site with good page rank that is converting your quality score for your campaign should be good because your already ranked for that term with your site. Ahh Haa! You guessed it, because of how you built your site using the keyword phrase or phrases you have you are now paying less in AdWords so by using this method of building an affiliate site you were able to pull off more then just one thing.

Another Strong Tip!!!

Don’t be stupid by putting adsense on your site. All you are doing is sending your traffic to MY AFFILIATE OFFER! Adsense is the absolute last resort for making money on a website. If you are going to promote affiliate offers, stick with them.

If you like this method and need some help with it, by all means ask me. I will be glad t help!

Hey John good to see you’re feeling better.
This looks like a great contest with some great prizes lines up.

I will surely have a go soon.

Best of luck to everyone else that enters, and Merry Christmas :-)

Great contest John, although I am not yet looking to monetize my blog as of yet I would join if I was in the market to.

I am running a contest of my own giving away $800 in cash prizes, the details can be found here; http://agreedygenius.com/ebay-elite-perfect-ebay-i...

Regards,
Greedy

I don't get it, It dosent make sense to me. If you truly have a succesful secret to affliliate marketing, you wont enter because you would have enough money to buy your own luxuries. People who enter are not really sucessful are they? Would anyone really give away a secret for pretty much nothing?

Nice to see you back to marketing.

good to see you back John

Hi John, are you allowed to use the same presentation for the contests that are similar to this that are going around? I'm just wondering, if not I'll write my entry for this contest soon.

Kind regards,
Carl

NICE!

Welcome back John,

Nothing can keep an 'Ultimate Blogger' down! Great contest!

Respectfully,

Nicholas Chase 'the video guy' from BlogWorld Expo
Twitter/nachase

Interesting Contest, I'm going to enter Me thinks

Best of luck to everybody that enters.

Interesting contest. Good luck everyone!

Nice information..the prize also :mrgreen:

Glad you're back! I like the prizes so I'll check out the contest. Thanks!

Hm, there are loads to learn from that website!

Hey John when u post your income for November ? www.you-v.com

thanks for great information.........still learn

Hi! Market Leverage does reject my application. Is there any way i could join the market leverage networks?

John, I'm glad you are out of the hospital. Cut down on the fatty foods and the high density carbohydrates and get yourself healthier. As for the contest, I haven't been impressed with anything Market Leverage has to offer in terms of affiliate programs so far and all my efforts have been in vain. Good luck with it though. I guess some people do really well since Tyler Cruz had an affiliate generate nearly $100k USD in affiliate sales in his last contest.

nothing stops john chow it seems...this contest seems appealing, not just the prizes but to see the various types of bloggers out there plotting the win..i myself will give this a try as well...good luck to everyone doing it as well.

Gotta get into the lab and see what evil plan I come up to win this contest. Sex still sells, right?

Hey John, glad to hear you're back from the hospital. I hate hospitals. As a person who's taken many nutrition courses I would strongly suggest you look into implementing natural nutritional changes to prevent further problems with gallstones.

You might want to consult a Naturopathic doctor as they can often shed some light on alternative views from traditional western medicine. Just looking at one of my nutrition books it says that regular physical activity can reduce the risk of gallstones by 20 to 40 percent. It also says to avoid processed sugars, and to avoid all animal fats. An EFA supplement (Omega 3 & 6) is highly helpful too. Personally I like Udo's EFA products. You can buy them locally at the malls at Nutrition House and some GNC outlets.

If you want the name of a good Naturopath I've been to locally here in the Lower Mainland, let me know I can send you his info.

Good to see ML sponsoring this contest to help us all learn more about the secrets to affiliate marketing. I'm running the contest on my Blog as well. I wonder if I'm allowed to enter your contest since I'm a host too....I'll have to ask them.

-Paul

This should be interesting...looking forward to seeing all the super affiliates reveal their secrets!

I saw Zac advertise this contest on his blog, so already wrote up a quick entry. Here's the entry I whipped up for it:
http://www.roryhansen.ca/2008/12/03/market-leverag...

You never rest. Even when you're sick. Keep up the great work!

Hey John good to see you're feeling better and back in action. Another contest huh, these are always fun. Looks like you've got a couple great prizes lines up. Best of luck to everyone that enters, and happy holidays!