Affiliate Program and Martketing Blog

In my previous post I talked briefly about co registration, over the past month I have been using co registration to build my email list for www.affiliateprogrammarketing.net and now that I have had a month of messing around with it, I thought it was time to share the knowledge I have acquired with you my readers.

Lets have a recap on co registration. Co registration is when a customer is offered the opportunity to sign up to your list when they sign up to an similar list online. It has been an underground technique used by a few Internet marketers for years and has only come into the main stream over the past year or so. The reason those marketer using it were so secretive is because co registration was a way to build massive on demand email lists without having a website and knowledge like that is priceless.

So how does a co reg companies work? Well co reg companies will have access to hundreds if not thousands of websites that they can use to build your list. When a co reg campaign is set up the co reg company will match the type of compaign to the relevant website in their network and when someone signs up to one of those sites they are offered the opportunity to join your list also.

The next bit of information I am going to share with you I recommend you read a couple of times, you have to be very careful when selecting your co reg broker as due to co reg being such a new strategy and the few marketers who are using it are keeping the knowledge to themselves, it is very easy to get burned. There are quite a few dodgy brokers out there, even though they’re not doing anything illegal the service they offer is bad and the emails they provide are even worse.

When you are looking for a broker make sure you find out the following before parting with any money:

Are the leads posted to an auto-responder in real time?

This is a very important point and will make or break your campaign. You need to make sure the second someone opts into your list an email is sent to them. The reason for this is you need to capture the opt in when it is still hot and they can remember what they have opted into. If they receive your email a few days later you can guarantee they’ll would have forgotten who you are and will be too busy to read your emails.

Does the company offer an incentive to people for signing up?

If they do avoid them, people will be signing up for the incentive not to receive information on the subject your covering. These companies use such ads as “Sign up here to receive an free xbox 360″ and all they will do is waste your time and money.

Are the opt in boxes pre-checked?

You want your opt ins to choose to opt in to your list. A dodgy co reg company will have your opt in and everyone else’s pre checked as they know that most people don’t bother reading all the details and just click the continue button. Make sure that when people opt in to your list they have to physically check the box before continuing.

Are the leads targeted?

Make sure that you opt in will be running on website related to your subject. For example if you are building a list on ‘Internet marketing’ you don’t want your opt in on a clothes sites, the leads you get will produced minimal profits if any.  Ask the broker for market and demographic information, ask them if they can provide the addresses of some of the websites your ad might be advised on. Any good co reg company will be able and willing to provide such information, if they don’t avoid them.

Do they offer a cancellation period?

This is very important you don’t want to have to pay for thousands of leads that you don’t need or want. Make sure that you can cancel your order when you’ve reached your marketing budget limit. Another reason to make sure you can cancel is that some brokers will ask for an insertion order of $5000 and if you can’t cancel you’ll find yourself getting burnt. When contacting brokers make sure you find these details out and if you are asked for an full upfront payment avoid them.

If you follow these simple rules you should not go far wrong with co registration. When you are talking to a broker make sure your polite and honest about your needs. Co reg is still fairly new so there is room for bartering when it comes to placing an order, if your polite, honest and to the point you will get a good deal. Remember it’s people like you who are the lifeblood of the co reg business, if your not happy they don’t have a business.

Well it been a busy couple of weeks, my website has had some major changes and takes a new path. The way I am building my links for search engine ranking has evolved and I am trying out a new advertising idea. 

Due to the two months of reject my site suffered, the fact I now have a better understanding on how to use frontpage and my business partner has allowed me to use his free traffic seminar, I decided my site needed a make-over.  The first thing I did was make it similar looking to Virtual Affiliate Trainer, which is the site of my business partner. The reason I have done this is to make the transition from my site to theirs smoother and to give a more professional feel to the selling process. 

The purpose of the site has been changed; it used to be a warm up review page for Virtual Affiliate Trainer.  A simple asset that I was going to get ranked for some medium volume keywords, now that I can give away an hour long seminar on ‘Getting traffic to your website’ I have turned it into a list building site, which is a far better asset.

In my opinion list building has far more money making potential over the internet. As a popular online saying goes ’The moneys in the list’ , which is totally true.  Lets have a think about this for a minute, when you are building an online business you have to advertise to get traffic, the problem with this is potential customers are dubious about buying of sites they don’t know, thats why a 3% conversion rate on a site is classed as good.  With list marketing, if you have built an good relationship with the list you can expect a conversion rate of 15% plus, over and over again.

So instead of spending money on advertising your site, spend that money on building your list, build a good relationship with the list by giving them free reports, audio, videos, ebooks, programs, newsletters and so on. Then after a while you will have a couple of thousand highly responsive customers that will buy when you recommend a product or service.

Sounds easy doesn’t it?  Well to be honest it is, admittedelly at the start it can be hard going but thats true of most internet businesses.  So what I going to do is cover how I have set up my website for list building, I know I’m not an expert but hopefully it will give you the general idea.

My site is set up as simple as possible.  I have the main page where I describe why 99% of affiliate programs fail and that the free seminar I offer will solve that problem. When someone registers for my list they are taken to a confirmation page informing them to check their email to confirm the subscription.  Once done they are then taken to my free seminar page where there is a link to Virtual Affiliate Trainer. I have an follow up email series in place which encourages my list to watch the seminar and visit Virtual Affiliate Trainer.

All you need is a domain name, hosting and an autoresponder and you are away.  How I am going to get subscribers you might ask?  Well apart from my SEO efforts, which I will be covering in abit,  I am going to try co-registation. Co-registation is when customers are offered the oportunity to sign up to your list when they sign up to an related list or product. MSN is an good example, when you sign up for an free email account you get offered loads of free newsletter, products and application to sign up to aswell. I am using an company that will update my autoresponder as soon as I get subscriptions, so I can send the seminar information straight away, which is very important when using co-registation.  I will cover co-registeration fully in a later post.

To build ranking with the search engines I have been writing articles to get one way links and using this blog. In my first post I stated ‘for the SEO I will be using the products ‘Stomping The Search Engine 2′ from Stompernet and ‘The SEO Mindset’ by Brad Callen’. Although these products are very good they both only cover getting links to a website for ranking briefly and unfortunately getting links to a site is the most important factor for SEO as ‘contents plus links equals ranking’ always remember that.

After some searching through the hundreds of email I get from the American gurus (lightly phrased), I found the two websites I was looking for 1waylinks and 3waylinks by Jonathan Leger. These sites were created last year but at the time I didn’t take much notice, as I was not aware of the importance of links. Both sites provided quality ‘one way links’ to a website, one way links are seen like a thumbs up by the search engines, they are the best kind of links for SEO.

The idea behind both sites is to build natural one way links to your website, 1waylinks uses blogs to achieve this and 3waylinks uses a link page on an websites. Due to the way they are implemented the search engines love these links and reward you with ranking. So if you understand the importance of links I strongly recommend you check those two sites out.

I have just learnt, the hard way, the most important factor to running an online business. This is to concentrate on just one project at a time and not to let yourself get side-tracked. You see, for the past two months I have been learning front page and setting up another website when I should have been putting that effort into my virtual affiliate trainer project.

 

The time I spent on my new website could have been used getting virtual affiliate trainer running smoothly.  I could of then made enough money to pay someone else to do the hard work for me, which should be one of your goals if you’re serious about making money online.

 

Even through learning front page is going to make my work easier in the long run and having another website will supply me with another income stream.  This does not really matter when virtual affiliate marketing will be supplying my main income. When working on a project you should try to give it your full attention until it is at the stage when it’s either running itself or you only have to spend a couple of hours a week on it. 

 

Learn from my mistake; if you are starting out on an internet venture don’t let yourself get districted from your project. Stop reading emails, stop buying products, stop reading sales letters, stop listening to new ideas and if you come up with a new idea write the details down for a later date. The most important thing to remember is to plan what you are doing and keep to that plan.

 

While I am cleaning out the closet I through I might cover another one of the mistakes people make when starting an online business, which is learning to much. Yes learning to much, what a lot of people do is spend all their time taking in as much information on a subject as they can but they never get going with their online project due to this. You need to get your ideas and plans sorted, then get your head down and get cracking. Below is an interesting article I found relating to this:

 

Reverse The Flow For Profits

 

Information comes to you in multiple formats. You’re listening to teleseminars, replays, watching webinars, reading email, ebooks and articles. There is rarely a moment when you are not consuming some type of information. 

 

Information coming in is great when you are just starting. All of us have had the experience of getting excited about a new topic - then consuming everything we can get our hands on new puppy, your new car or your new computer. Regardless of the topic, you recognize the symptoms - insatiable curiosity and appetite for information.

 

The problem with that behavior comes when you don’t step out of the learning mode into the action mode. You see the symptoms in every area of interest - someone becomes a Learner - but never seems to take action. Particularly in money-making endeavors like real-estate investing, business opportunities and making money online, this is a self-defeating pattern seen in a lot of frustrated would-be entrepreneurs. 

 

So what is the cause of this problem - which someone continues to learn but never earns? In fact, it seems that the longer they are in a topic, the less action they take. 

Their information pipeline is full. And until they can clean it out and “reverse the flow” they are stuck.

 

Your information pipe is a certain size. When you first start learning a topic, new information is flowing in. But it doesn’t fill the pipe, so you still have some information trickling out in the form of action.

 

But when your actions don’t yield the results you want as soon as you like, you go looking for more information. The cycle repeats until your pipeline is so full of incoming information - that there is no space for outgoing information.

 

The best thing you can do is stop the input! Stop reading emails, stop buying products, stop reading sales letters, stop listening to new ideas - just until you reverse the flow. You cannot move forward until you have stopped the influx of new information.

 

Once you have stopped the flow inward, start the outward flow. Write an article. Write a blog post. Post to a forum. Answer a question. Get into the habit of sharing *your* information with others. The information doesn’t have to be perfect - it just needs to be outgoing information.

 

When you begin to practice flowing information out, you will be amazed at the results. You’ll get more traffic to your website, generate more leads, and find people who want to do business with you. You’ll start to make money.

 

The key to this process is to step out of your comfort zone. You are comfortable learning and absorbing information because you’ve been conditioned for years to be a good student. You’re in the learning zone.

 

But no one pays you to learn. No one pays you for being a walking encyclopedia of knowledge on a topic. It’s only when you begin to share your knowledge that you get the recognition you deserve - and the money along with it.

 

Clean out your Information Pipeline and watch the profits flow.

 

About The Author

 

Dr. Jeanette Cates is an Internet strategist who works with new and intermediate online business owners who are ready to create Online Success.

In my last post I had a section regarding on page SEO and in particular some information on controlling how ranking is passed from a website. I have decided to do a post on the importance of controlling the ranking flow of a website and various methods you can use to achieve this.

The ranking or authority of a website is determined on such aspects as popularity of the website (amount of traffic), number of income links and their quality, number of pages and on page SEO factors. Before I carry on, when I talk about ranking I am not referring to google page ranking, I am referring to the general ranking of a website for all search engines.   

As all search engines have their own algorithm’s for ranking websites and unfortunately they don’t share that with the general public, it is impossible to determine exactly how website ranking is worked out. The only thing that is known for certain is onpage SEO, incoming links and amount of pages of a website,  play a big part in a websites ranking.

The ranking of a website is probably the most valuable asset to a site owner, it can mean the difference between making a fortune on the Internet or just making some pocket change. Why is it so important? Well the ranking determines where a website is displayed in the search engines, a better ranking equals better placement and in turn better placement equals more clicks.

Like I explained in the previous post, imagine a website main webpage is a bucket which is filled with ranking from SEO effects and there are holes at the bottom of the bucket were the ranking flows out. As ranking is such a valuable asset it’s wise to direct the ranking to were you want it to go by blocking off those holes were the rankings not needed. I am talking about such pages as contact us, terms and condition, disclaimer, category pages, terms of use and pages along those lines. As those kind of pages are designed to improve the customer experience they won’t need SEO on them, so why waste the precious ranking on them.

The two methods I am going to use to control the ranking flow on my website are the html statement ‘nofollow’ and robots.txt. Both of these methods are very simple but very powerful in helping search engines figure out how you want them to see your website and were to direct the ranking.

The ‘nofollow’ statement tells the search engine to ignore the link it is associated with and not to pass any ranking through it. It was first created to help tackle spam comments on blogs but was quickly taken up by website owners when it became common knowledge that it was significant in controlling the flow of ranking on a website.

robots.txt is used to control the spiders that visit a website. A large part of a website traffic comes from programs called spiders, these spiders are used by thousands of companies for many different reasons on the Internet. So if a website is just left open for spiders they can eat up the bandwidth, slow a site down, look at and log information which a site owner may not want to publish and at the very worse mess up a site completely. How does robots.txt help with ranking control? Well it can be used to block off areas of a website were site owners don’t want the spiders to go and by doing so stops the flow of ranking to those areas.

The two methods above are not difficult to implement and are a good way to control the flow of ranking on a website, yet so many website owners overlook this when designing their sites. Having the power to shift ranking around a website will enable a site owner to rank the pages of their choosing with alot less work and hassle.

The time has come www.virtualaffiliatetrainer.com has been launched, there have been a few delays along the way but with such a sound idea with tons of potential, you expect the creator to be sure everything is up to standard and working properly before launching. The last outcome any new website needs is a bad start, that could cripple a website forever.

So what have I been doing since my last post? Well I have done quite a bit on my project, not as much as I wanted due to family life and work commitments but its definitely all taking shape now.  Lets have a look at what I have achieved since my last post and I will explain the reasoning behind what I have done.

I have spent the majority of my time getting my review site of www.virtualaffiliatetrainer.com up and running. Its located at the main domain of this blog www.affiliateprogrammarketing.net. I am going to be using the review site for the SEO part of my project, where I’m using stompernet’s and Brad Callen’s SEO products. I have design the site to be search engine friendly by using the techniques outlined in their SEO products. I have designed the website by using tables in front page, I did this so the first part of the website the search engine spiders crawls is the information that is relevant to the keywords I am aiming to rank with the search engines. I have also wrote my website title and description around my keywords so the search engines will know exactly what keywords I want to rank for.

What I have done to my website so far is referred to as on-page SEO by the experts. What I am basically doing is making my website search engine spider friendly, so when the search engine’s spiders my site they will find it easier to locate the relevant information they need to index my site.

I have design the website to control how the page ranking is filtered out through the link on the site. What do I mean? First let me explain how page ranking is shared between websites. When you link to another website some of the ranking of the web page your linking from is passed through that link. The ranking of a web page is shared evenly between all of the links on the page. So for example if you have a ranking of 100 and have 4 links from the web page, each link would carry a ranking of 25.

Stompernet explained it best in my opinion. Image your web page is a bucket, the water going into the bucket is from your SEO effects. The outgoing links are little holes at the bottom of the bucket that the water runs out of into other buckets, which are pages on both your site and other people’s.

So when I say “control how the page ranking is filtered”, I am referring to blocking those holes in the bucket were I don’t want the water to go. See, not as hard to understand as most of the Gurus would make you think. In later posts I will cover the techniques I am using to control the ranking flow on my site and if those techniques actually work.

I have also submitted 4 articles to various article and ezine sites. I wrote these articles around the keywords from my list of 40 targeted keywords. I have shared the outgoing links from the articles between this blog, my review site and the site I am promoting. The reason I am linking to this blog and my review site is so that I can build some one-way links for SEO purposes. When I am fully up and running I will be concentrating on getting link partners for one-way links, which will give me most of my ranking for the search engine.  “Every little helps” and those links from my articles could mean the difference between top ranking and 5th ranking.

Finally,  I have completed the research for my ezine advertising and have identified 10 ezines that I would like to advertise with and contacted the owners to find out more information about them.  I am making sure that the ezine owners have a good relationship with their subscribers as I do not want to waste my money with an ezine owner that will only try to sell to their list. If the ezine owner has a good relationship with their email list, my advert will have a better chance of being read. The key to ezine advertising is the more people reading my advert, the more people will click on my link meaning the more money I will make at the end of the day.

Articles marketing is probably the most reliable way to ensure affiliate profits for years to come. The idea is to write articles on your choosen niche, products, website or whatever you are promoting and to unload these articles to article directories with links to what your promoting in a resource box at the end of the article.

The two ways article directories work for you by sending visitors to your website when people click on your link after reading the article and allowing people to use your article as content on their site, ezine, magazine and so on, this helps spread your link over the internet.

To come up with ideas for articles that would attach targetted vistors I had to do some keyword research on the site I am promoting. I made a list of about 400 related keywords and using Google’s free keyword tool, I then used wordtracker free tool to extract about 40 targeted keywords from that list that had approximately 50 searchs a day.

As I will not be targetting the high volume keywords for the product the theory is there will be less competition for the search engine positions on the keywords I am targeting and with a little SEO I should be able to pick up some good targeted traffic. From the 40 keywords I expect to get about 35 articles and lets say I get on the first page of the search engine for just 10 of them, it would give me potentially 500 targeted visitors a day for free, not bad really when on average it only takes an hour per article.

Below is my first article, tell me what you think and please be kind…    writing is not one of my strongest strengths!

Why do over 95% affiliate programs fail?

The main two mistakes affiliate program owners make when starting their program is they recruit affiliate’s before their website is ready and they do not provide their affiliates with the right materials to advertise their site properly.

You see,  most affiliate program owners set up a website without any real testing, then post their websites at places like clickbank or paydotcom and expect the money to flow into their bank account from hundreds of affiliates promoting their website.  After a couple of weeks without any sales they wonder whats gone wrong? Well It goes wrong due to their website not being fine tuned for maximum conversion and at the end of the day conversion equals profits.

Before a site owner starts getting affiliates for their website they should have fine tuned their website to the best layout for conversion. Fine tuning aspects such as different titles, different colors, where to place the buy buttons, price of the product, different bonus for the product, layout of pictures and text, basically any aspect that would increase those sales.

Once the fine tuning is complete the site owner will have the conversion rate of the website which is a very important bit of information to have when trying to get affiliates to promote a website. If the site owner can turn around to their potential affiliates and say “From testing my website on average I have had 15 sales for every 500 vistors, giving me a 3% conversion rate” the affiliates will know what to expect from the affiliate program and feel more confortable promoting for the website owner.

When the website is up and running the owner should start supplying their affiliates with the materials to promote their website. What do I mean by materials? I mean the site owner should do all the hard work for their affiliates, so all they have to do is spead the material over the internet. Give them articles to post, pay per click ads, ezine ads, press releases, banner ads, viral reports, emails and even go as far as supplying keyword research for the website.

Seeing affiliate programs from the affiliate’s view is the key here. If you were an affiliate looking for a product to promote and had to choose from an affiliate program that offered you a free report, keyword research, prewriten ads, some banners, email series and a conversion rate of 3% or an affiliate program that is just listed in a affiliate directory with no materials, which one would you choose? 

Exactly, its human nature to go for the easier options in life and when it comes to affiliate marketing the first choice is definately the easiest option for an affiliate to succeed. When any site owner sets up an affiliate program they should be looking at their potential affiliates as potential employees and for employees to do their work properly they need the right information, training and materials. Imagine walking into a new job and there is only a table with a product on it and your told to sell it, it just would not happen, so why do over 95% of website owners set their affiliate programs up like this?

Welcome to my blog. I will be using this blog to document my journey (hopefully) to success with creating a business on the internet. I have found a very promising product that I am going to try and market in 2 different ways, also I am going to document the development of this blog.

The product I will be marketing is www.virtualaffiliatetrainer.com and was created by my business partner. The site will be launch in a couple of weeks and will be aimed at training site owners how to set up and run a successful affiliate program. Basically my partner is going to cover the day to day maintain of the website, sales and customer service, which leaving me the fun job of advertising the website, its an affiliate program with a twist.

I have decided to take two approaches for my advertising. Firstly I am going to create a review website and have information on a similar theme to www.virtalaffiliatetrainer.com and optimize it for the search engines. Secondly I am going to try direct affiliate marketing to the website.

For the SEO I will be using the products ‘Stomping The Search Engine 2′ from Stompernet and ‘The SEO Mindset’ by Brad Callen. The main reasons I am trying my hand at SEO is for the traffic and to create a lasting website to generate income for years to come.  Also I want to see if its true that anyone can get that top search engine spot for targeted keywords, as the Gurus always say and to see how long it really takes someone starting from scratch for the first time to achieve it.

For the affiliate marketing my partner has supplied training videos on how to market his website. I will be following this training to the letter and reporting back on this blog. I will be covering such areas as blog marketing, article marketing, press releases, pay per click advertising, ezine advertising and possible some more forms of advertising which I go into at a later date, when I finished watching the training videos.

I going to tell you a little bit about my current situation, mainly so I can look back in a couple of months and see how am doing and so you can see that what I am trying doesn’t take much money and time if it works. I work 35 hours a week lessoning to people on the phone, I have just had a second son who’s a little angle, apart when he is hungry and my wife and I earn enough to be comfortable with a little spare.

I am going to aim to do 15 hours a week on this project, plus a few hours a week documenting my progress for this blog. I will be spending 2 hours a day during the week and around 5 hours on Saturday, Sundays will be family day and to recover. To set up the project I have gone through all the SEO material mentioned early, by the end of the week watch the training video supplied and have my website up and running to start the SEO part of the project.

Finally a little bit on my experience, I have been interested in creating a online business for around 2 years now and have read a lot of the material available from the so called gurus. About a year ago I became a subscription to ‘Internet Income Detective’ newsletter that open my eye to some really opportunities online and the proper ways to do them. Unfortunately for me I was in a very demanding job and didn’t get the time to start anything until around 12 weeks ago when I was laid off. So to summarize I have the know how but not the experience, this should be an interest journey.