Erich Stauffer

Tag: Affiliate Marketing

  • Affiliate Marketing with Mini-Sites

    Andrew Hansen says he maintains 20 mini-sites that make anywhere from $300 to $3000 a month and together they make him “5 figures a month”. Lets assume that one site is making $300 and one is making $3000 and “5 figures” means $10K a month. That would mean that the other 18 sites would be making $373 on average a month or to put it another way, all 20 sites are averaging $500 a month (this is where averages really skew things).

    In order to do this, Andrew follows a fairly easy process:

    1. Find high traffic keywords with low competition that is something he can sell – this is a ‘go with the flow’ method where you go where everyone already is searching for something they want, but they can’t find it – and then sell it to them.
    A. Use Wordtracker’s keyword tool and search for “does work” to find things that people say works or other phrases like this
    B. Determine if any of the keyword results are products that you could sell as an affiliate
    C. Use the normal due diligence to vett a keyword and competition.
    2. Write 5-10 pages of original content and then build up to 10-20 pages AND backlink OVER TIME.
    A. The 5-10 pages includes the home page (1), which should have no ads ‘above the fold’, the about page (2) – which should be a sales page as well, and 3 to 8 articles to begin (3-10). They should all contain original content and each page should be backlinked to, not just the home page.
    B. Post one more article a week and backlink to the new article each week until you have 5 to 10 more articles (5 to 10 weeks). This does two things: matches what Google expects as far as backlink growth and site growth AND shows Google that your site is growing and therefore can be trusted.
    Ideas for the about page: use this area to write about things like “how [your product] works” – stuff that isn’t sales keywords, but can grab traffic. You can also write about secondary (cousin) keywords here by saying how your product is like this other product and if you monitor your analytics you might see a desire for one of those other products, which could become another site for you.

    Ideas for Blog Posts

    If you have multiple affiliate vendors then you could make a post for each such as “Top 10 [Products] at Wal-Mart.com” and “Top 10 [Products] at Amazon” and on down the line. For products that overlap, you could compare affiliates and get paid either way, for example, “Compare [Product] at Wal-Mart.com to Amazon – Which is Cheaper, Faster, and Has a better Refund”. Basically what you want to do is mix and match, compare and contrast. Another example is to make categories that Amazon or Wal-Mart aren’t willing to do. For example, the retailer might just have a category for flashlights, but you run a flashlight mini-site so you have posts about LED flash lights, camping lights, pocket lights, and hand-crank lights.

    Oh, I forgot to mention that Andrew’s goal is not to just earn money – he says there are easier ways to make more money. What he’s interested in is the amount of money he can make for the least amount of work because what he is interested in is traveling. Affiliate marketing allows him to travel one week a month so in essence he makes at least $10K a month by only working 3 of those weeks finding good keyword, low competition niches, developing original content, and backlinking it. That’s essentially what I’d like to do both with product marketing and app development. I like the freedom and the work-to-income ratio it has the possiblity to provide.

    I believe that I can do this by pursuing a profession in Internet marketing and app development, which is a field of digital content creation and marketing that I call “niche publishing.”

    Niche publishing has a lifestyle that can free me from the burdens (security) of a 8-5, office job and a traditional ‘boss’. Even self-employed service businesses like computer repair or web design involve bosses – the customer. Although niche publishing has customers, they are much more passive.

    Digital content has the advantage of ‘build it and forget it’, ‘asset building’, and ‘multiple streams of income’, which service industries and typical 8-5 jobs do not provide. Imagine if every report or function you built at your 8-5 job would continue to pay you money over time and the more things you made for your job, the more money you made over time. That’s how Internet marketing and app development can work.

  • Affiliate Marketing in Indianapolis

    I’ve written about my meetup experiences here in the past so those who read my website may know I’m a member of the Indianapolis Affiliate Meetup hosted by Affiliate Summit. In the last meeting, I spoke about how to get started in affiliate marketing, but I was feeling bad because my site about nook covers was not doing so hot. Now part of this because demand in general was down, but part of it was because of duplication of content, Google put me in the sandbox for three months. The good news is I’m out now and the site is performing better, which makes me feel better about being an Indianapolis web designer and Internet marketer.

    This morning I met a lady at the Carmel, Indiana BNI chapter who was interested in creating affiliate marketing relationships with local vendors so I invited her to the Indianapolis Affiliate Summit meeting. She didn’t know about it and was excited to come. The group has a good mix of seasoned affiliate marketers, those learning about it for the first time, and those with other related skill sets like copyrighting, authors, and web designers. There was also interest from a printing company out of Kokomo that has recently opened up an Indianapolis office in Fletcher Park near the old Indianapolis airport.

    The last Affiliate Summit meeting was about how to start an Internet marketing business where I went through the 6 steps to making money online, but I didn’t go into how to find a niche or keyword metrics for success.  The next meeting will be about the Internet tax looming in Indiana and what we can do to stop it. We’re meeting at Buca di Beppo in Castleton and although most meetups don’t require you to buy food, the arrangement we made with the restaurant requires each person to pay $12 for a meal. This is not the norm, but if you’re coming for the first time this month, know what to expect.

    Thanks to Affiliate Summit for the free pass to Affiliate Summit West 2012 in Las Vegas. I can’t wait to learn more about Affiliate Marketing, but in the mean time, I’m watching Affiliate Summit videos with Blake from Blaze Communications in Carmel, Indiana. Blake runs Blaze Communications as a creative marketing firm and BS&T as a business strategy and technology forum in Carmel. The BS&T forum has a sub-group of member who also attend the affiliate marketing group in Indianapolis, which is how I first met Blake. Thanks to Blake for sharing the DVDs he won from Affiliate Summit.

  • Internet Marketing Major Players

    Here are my Internet Marketing heroes:

    • Ed Dale – Australian; started 30 day challenge; convinced Dan Raine to cash out all of his websites for millions
    • Dan Raine – British; runs Immediate Edge with help from Ed Dale; male yeast infection guy
    • Trey Smith – American; Internet marketer who recently started iOS app training business; friends with Ed Dale
    • Matt Carter – the other Australian; not associated with Ed Dale; runs most popular Internet marketing blog; the beta fish guy
    • Carey Bergeron – American; friends with Matt Carter; makes money from Adsense; runs Adsense Guild
    • Ryan Lee – American; known for being a millionaire Internet marketer; starts out promoting other products, then makes his own versions to sell
    • Greg Jacobs – Mage Monster, millionaire
    • Mark Ling – known for Traffic Travis
    • Andrew Hansen – online entrepreneur originally from Queensland, Australia – now living in London, known for his Affiliate Mini Site Strategy
    • Frank Kern – started out creating information products for pets (mostly dogs) and now trains Internet Marketers

    By the way, I just finished reading The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandingo. It’s pretty good.

  • 12 Ways to Make Money Online

    How to Make Money Online

    Making money online is not always easy.  It’s work just like any job, but it seems to have this allure to it.  I think that allure has a lot to do with a feeling of being your own boss or getting as much out of something as you put into it.  At your job, no matter how hard you work, the pay is the same (in the short term), but when you work for yourself, the dynamics are different.  Making money online is essentially like running your own business.  Where “people have dreamed about owning their own business and have not followed through because of the investment in resources,” says Jim Griffith, head of eBay University, “the Internet allows people to at least try without making a large initial investment.”

    Here are 12 ways you can make money online

    1. Online Ads – Pay-per-click (PPC) links are ads that display on your site, served up by advertising programs like Google AdSense or Chitika are a great way to get started, but don’t expect to get rich off of it unless your site has a lot of traffic. The good thing is you get paid regardless of if the advertiser makes a sale, but the bad thing is they don’t usually pay that much for the click. You don’t have to pick out what ads will display. Google will detect the type of content on your site and show relevant ads automatically. Chitika works a little differently. It goes by what a visitor searched for in order to find your site, not your site’s actual content. Although they may be one in the same, they don’t have to be. Also, Chitika ads will not show up if you browse to your site, but Google Adsense ads will. You’ll want to have good, original content either way to attract visitors and the best ads. Google saves its best paying ads for sites that rank higher and have better traffic. Google also requires that you have a privacy policy on any website displaying their ads or you could risk losing your account. If you don’t know what to write, you can use our privacy policy as an example.

    google-adsenseOnce you have an account setup, you can start to add the code to your blog, which serves up the ads.  When people click on the ads, you make money.  The more content you write and the more promotion you do, the more people will come to your web site, which increases the chance that someone will want to click on an ad.

    2. Affiliate Programs – Pay-per-purchase (PPP) links are affiliate ads that display links to products or programs where you get a percentage of the sale whenever a purchase is made. Percentages vary based on the product, manufacturer, and affiliate program. Amazon Associates, an affiliate program from Amazon, goes from 4% to 15%, but it’s a tiered scale that requires making sales at lower percentages before you can make sales at higher percentages and it resets every month. LinkShare, another affiliate advertising program, lets you choose what advertisers to work with. Once you find one you would like to promote, you can apply to add them as a product. If you run more than one site you’ll want to set up channels for each site under your account settings. Each channel will have to apply for it’s own advertiser programs even if you’ve already been approved on another channel. Commission Junction and Google Affiliate Network are two other good examples of affiliate advertising networks like LinkShare. While clicks and purchases can be less for PPP links, the payouts can be higher per purchase, making this a good next step for those who want more than just PPC links on their website.

    3. Direct Sales – If you’ve got a product to sell, whether it is something you’ve made or something you have bought to resell, if you are selling it on your site you are doing direct sales. You may also have to fulfill your own orders unless you work with an order fulfillment service. The advantage of direct sales are that you get to control how much mark-up you add to the product, but the down-side is that you are on your own for dealing directly with payment processing systems, shipping, returns, and other logistical issues that may come up. If you’ve got a good product to sell, and you’re just starting out, you might want to partner with an already established distribution company like Amazon.com, ClickBank, CafePress, Zazzle, or Threadless, depending on your product. This is a form of commissioned sales, which is the next way to make money online.

    4. Commission Sales – If you’ve created a product to sell, but don’t want the hassle of selling directly, commissioned sales is the way to go. For a share of the revenue, the distributer will handle the store front, the payment processing, and returns. All you have to do is ship the item and cash the checks. Some distributers will even store your items for you or make them on-demand. For example, ClickBank will store your ebook for distribution and CafePress, Zazzle, and Spreadshirt prints your items on t-shirts or other merchandise at the point of order. This is kind of like micro-manufacturing or on-demand manufacturing, but essentially it means very low inventory costs, which allows them to charge a decent amount and still give you a cut. You create the idea, they sell it, and give you a commission. If you want more of a commission over time, you can open your own web site, which would be a step back into direct sales. Examples of distributors include Amazon.com, iStockPhoto.com, ClickBank, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, and CafePress.

    5. Online Ad Sales – Once your site has enough traffic, you can start to sell ads directly to advertisers. This is a form of direct sales, but the product is ad space on your site that you would normally give to Google Adsense, Chitika, or an affiliate link. The upside is that you can potentially charge more for the space than Google or Chitika would give you for the same space, but you risk not making any direct ad sales at all. But if you have a large enough following and can prove visitor counts, then you may have a good chance in selling ad space to an advertiser interested in marketing to your readers. Again, the key is good content. That’s how it all starts.

    6. Domain Flipping – For those who are great at finding niches, can fill a site with content easily, know how to promote a site, and not get too emotionally attached, domain flipping is for you. It has great potential to make a lot of money and can be quite profitable if you know what you are doing. There are sites out there like Flippa or Sedo which specialize in flipping domains and there are are many tutorials out there to teach you the best way to do so. Selling a domain is equivalent to cashing out of a business you’ve started and can be a good feeling, but it’s not for everyone. Sometimes you’ll wish you never sold and then there are just those who like the slow and steady, latent income over the hussle of constantly buying and selling domains.

    7. Convert Your Content – Turn your blog into a book or your site into a magazine or your Twitter account into a television show – yes, all these things have been done before.

    While the last seven examples have been about your own content or site, the next five focus on other things you can do online to make money:

    8. Online Auctions – Sell things on Ebay or Craigslist. This can only last so long unless you go out and get more to sell, however if you get good at it, you can help other people sell things online as well, charging up to 33% commission on the sale.

    9. Online Surveys – If you know where to find them, there are plenty of sites out there that will pay you to fill out surveys. You may have to fit into a certain type of income or age group, but eventually you will find one that you can fill out for cash or gifts. This certainly won’t replace your day job, but some enjoy doing it on the side for fun money.

    10. Micro-Jobs – This is another low-on-the-totem pole idea that is worth mentioning, but will not make you rich or allow you to quit your day job. Sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk will allow you to bid for jobs that pay very small amounts. The upside here is speed. If you can do the jobs in a short amount of time, then your rate of pay can increase. It’s hit or miss on getting accepted to do the job though so you take a risk on how you spend your time. Try and do an opportunity cost analysis first to see if there are better ways to spend your time to make money – online or off.

    11. Freelancing – There are lots of freelancing sites out there to find work to do, but one of the most popular sites is Elance. They all pretty much work the same, though. People who need to get stuff done can post their wants or needs up on the site and people like you can then bid on doing the work. If your bid is accepted, you do the work, get paid, and the connecting site takes a commission off the sale. If you do enough, you might be able to shake the commissioned sales model and go direct, essentially starting your own business, which is the next example of how to make money online.

    12. Start Your Own Business – This is part of the American dream and very easy to do online. You can even get incorporated online, depending on your state. Whether your business idea is to become a consultant, sell a product, offer a service, or just blog for profit, starting your own business has tax benefits as well as making you feel a sense of pride. I’d recommend it to anybody who wants to experience the free enterprise system to the fullest.

    Read Forbe’s Eight Ways to Make Money Online for more tips on how to make money online.

  • Blogging for Profit

    How to Find a Profitable Micro-Niche to Market Online

    This is an article based on a similar article I wrote about traffic conversion in 2009. Using proven, repeatable techniques there is little risk and great rewards involved in blogging for profit. Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles writes, “Entrepreneurship, it is commonly believed, is enourmously risky…[but]…entrepreneurship should be the least risky rather than the most risky course,” because of how entrepreneurship, “by definition, shifts resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.” Much work has already been done for us in the form of innovating processes and software tools, which eliminates risk. There are two key phases to the process:

    1. Research and Analysis – Identify a micro-niche inside a penetrable market that has profitable products that people are already selling.
    2. Marketing and Testing – Promote the products and test the results. If the traffic and/or conversions do not meet thresholds in a given time, start over.

    The rate of success with this method is anywhere between 1 in 6 to 1 in 10 and marketing and testing can take anywhere from 1 to 30 days. Success is defined as more money coming in than is going out each month and that includes all opportunity costs (time that could have been spent making money in other activities). Tracking is critical not only with the data of the results, but with the finances and time spent.

    Rules and Metrics of Phase 1 – Research and Analysis

    According to The Thirty Day Challenge (now called simply, “The Challenge“) micro-niches are identified as the #1 keyword receiving at least 80 clicks per day and websites containing that keyword being less than 30,000 globally. At least 3 keywords other keywords within the micro-niche with similar criteria must also be identified, if not, start over.

    The top 10 search results for the top 4 keywords has to be penetrable within the time allowed. Metrics to consider are:

    Test 1: If the competition has a young domain age, a low number of back-links, and does not exist in any of these directories, then the market is penetrable. If the opposite is true, stop and start over.

    Test 2: Check to see that related products are both available to be sold and are being sold by others. If either is not true, stop and start over.

    If both of those tests pass, then make sure the products are giving a referral amount that you deem acceptable. If not, stop and start over. You now have products in a penetrable micro-niche that are profitable to sell. Move on to Phase II – Marketing and Testing.

    Phase II – Marketing and Testing

    Begin by setting up a place to place your products. This is where your marketing efforts will point back to. It can be a Squidoo page, a Blogspot Blog, or WordPress running on your own domain.  If you are using Blogspot or WordPress, install Google Analytics to track traffic. If using Squidoo, there are tracking mechanisms built into the site. Once you have a place to put your products, begin writing copy (content) for the site. You will need to write the following:

    • ‘About’ and ‘Privacy’ pages – use keywords and talk about the product. A privacy policy is required by many advertisers and affiliate programs including Google Adsense.
    • Ad copy for the products – if using Market Samurai, there are built-in features for helping with this, but you can do it manually too.
    • Create posts (or pages) about the keyword subject matter within the micro-niche.
    • Next, begin to create backlinks to your site by placing links to the domain, the blog posts, and the the product pages on social bookmarking, social media, and in blog comments in your related market. Be sure to add links from .edu and .gov domains. You can search Google specifically for blogs on those domains manually, but you can do this semi-automatically with Market Samurai too.

    Track the incoming page hits on Google Analytics. Testing for viability can begin only after your product’s page is receiving at least 200 hits per day. If you are not getting 200 hits per day, then try these things first:

    • Increase the number of blog posts on and off the site using other services like hubpages and squidoo – then promote all of the new posts again.
    • Make sure you are promoting on at least 30 different sites for each post – you can use services like ping.fm or trafficbug to assist with this task.
    • Pay to have your site listed in the Yahoo! Directory.
    • Pay for Google Adwords or Bing (Microsoft) AdCenter.
    • Add pictures with descriptive text to get hits from search engine’s image searches like Google Image search.
    • Add video to Youtube with links and comment on other videos in your micro-niche.
    • Make sure you are posting to Twitter and Facebook regularly and engaging in conversation, not just promoting.

    If after 30 days or at your own set threshold, you are still not receiving 200 hits or more per day, your product is not viable. Quit and start over. You have just found one of your 6 to 10 failures. If you do have over 200 hits per day, but are not getting conversions, first try changing out your ad copy, images of the products, and/or placement of the two on the page. Refer to Dan Kennedy’s sales letter technique. If after changing all three of these variables and still your revenue is below your expenses, then start over. If not, you have a profitable business. Consider selling it for ten times it’s worth and starting over using Flippa.

  • Sign up for LinkShare

    Signing up as a LinkShare publisher is quick, easy, and free! Just complete the info on this page and you’ll be able to start making money online in no time.

    What is a LinkShare publisher?

    Publisher is LinkShare’s term for an affiliate who is promoting other company’s (Advertisers) products and services in exchange for a commission.

    Who’s eligible to become a publisher?

    Anyone with a Web site, blog, or Internet presence can join LinkShare. You will also need to provide a valid mailing address (to receive payments) and tax information.

    Does it cost anything to apply?

    No, it is completely free to become a LinkShare publisher and there is no cost in joining any LinkShare advertiser program.

    How do I generate revenue?

    As a publisher, you will have access to links and banners that you can place on your Web site, blog, or in Emails. These links will drive traffic to advertisers’ Web sites. Advertisers will pay a commission for each purchase or qualifying action you generate for them. LinkShare acts as the trusted third-party that brings together both advertisers and publishers.

    What makes LinkShare different from other affiliate networks?

    There are many affiliate marketing networks to choose from and you want to spend your valuable time on the network that will generate the most commissions for your business. LinkShare maintains one of the most successful affiliate marketing networks in the world. Leading publishers and advertisers from almost every vertical have chosen LinkShare to help increase their online revenue. We stand apart from other affiliate marketing networks in terms of experience, technology, and network quality and integrity.

    LinkShare has signed on hundreds of advertisers including some of the most prestigious and well-known brands in the world such as Wal-Mart, Macy’s, Clinique, OfficeDepot, and Apple iTunes.

    LinkShare recently introduced a completely redesigned user interface for its Publishers: the LinkShare Publisher Dashboard, which is a simple, elegant design allows you to easily find and join advertiser programs and then locate the best links for your Web site. Plus, you can see how your commissions are stacking up at any given moment in time with our easy-to-understand and advanced reporting capabilities.

    LinkShare offers many innovative link technologies that help you keep your advertiser links fresh and up-to-date including Merchandiser Product Feeds; Dynamic Rich Media (DRM); Flex Links for video, widgets, and Flash content; and Mobile Links for those publishers on the cutting edge of the next e-commerce trend.

  • Strengths and Streams: Part II

    Identifying Strengths and Revenue Streams: Part II

    This is part II of the post Identifying Strengths and Revenue Streams.

    How you can brainstorm to find your “strengths and streams.”

    “Strengths” are the opposite of weaknesses.  Weaknesses make you feel weak, whereas strengths make you feel strong.  “Streams” refers to revenue streams, which is any and all the ways in which you can or have made money in the past.  Brainstorming is the act of recording as many different ideas as possible in a short time without criticizing them as you go.  Save the criticizing (analysis) for after the brainstorming session.  Sometimes bad ideas can help you think of good ideas, so write down any idea that comes to you during this time.  Ready? Here we go. Answer the following questions in order to help you identify your “strengths and streams”:

    Strengths Test – 10 Questions

    1. What makes you feel strong?
    2. What makes you feel weak?
    3. What activities are you not just good at, but also feel good doing?
    4. What revenue streams do you have, no matter how large or small?
    5. What are some ways you have made money in the past, which you no longer do?
    6. What are some areas or ideas of things you have thought of doing, but for one reason or another never got around to doing?
    7. Have you noticed any changes in technology lately that would make something easier for someone to do something?
    8. Have you noticed a change in the demographics around where you live that might open a possibility for a new product or service?
    9. Have you noticed any “cuckoos in the nest” where something that wasn’t supposed to happen did, or something was an unexpected success?
    10. Have you noticed any examples of something that was supposed to succeed, but didn’t? What could you do to adapt to this new reality?

    When I was young I used to collect aluminum cans to recycle for money.  As I got older I collected antiques to resell.  Later on I bought books to resell online or through local book dealers.  These were all retail activities which involved both labor and a product.  Eventually I started trading labor for revenue, which is called service.  I began doing computer repair and web design.  Eventually people began paying me for my advice and I became a business analyst.  Internet marketing is a mix of product and service because you are using your labor to help sell a product that you yourself do not deliver.  The service is in the promotion, marketing, and advertising of the product.  Anyone can do this using the free tools like the Thirty Day Challenge and other websites like Managing Actions which teach you how to be more effective by first changing how you think, in order to change how you act.

    Limiting Factors

    In order to be successful, you’ll need to overcome obstacles.  The first obstacle you’ll face is your own limiting thoughts so you’ll need to know how to deal with those right away.  An example of a negative thought is, “I can’t raise $8,000 to $10,000 in 2 to 4 weeks.  That’s impossible.” The first step is to realize that you are having a limiting thought, acknowledge it, then let it go.  Just because your brain creates a thought, doesn’t make it true.  Learn to manage your thoughts in order to manage your actions.

    The second factor is the people you associate with.  In the same way that you have a greater chance of smoking if you live or hang around smokers or that you have a greater chance of gaining weight if the person or people you live with or work around are already overweight, if the people you hang around or not successful, are not following their dreams, or do not have multiple streams of income, then they are a limiting factor.  If you want to change, then you’ll need to spend less time with these people.

    Next Steps

    Every meeting should have two things: minutes and action items.  We have just had a meeting here.  This article is our minutes.  The action items are as follows:

    Erich: use all available tools and resources to build and promote the identified websites in order to profit from Internet Marketing.

    You: take some time to define the problems you are having, where you want to go, and what you want to accomplish, this will become your goal.

    Erich: measure the success or failure of the Internet Marketing campaign, determined by the metric, revenue per man-hour.

    You: brainstorm to identify your “strengths and streams” – find what makes you strong and what makes you weak, then write down all forms of income past and present.

    Erich: update the personal finance measurements with increased net worth, revenue, profit, and savings from the Internet Marketing campaign.

    You: manage your thoughts in order to better manage your actions. Notice when you are having a limiting thought, acknowledge it, then let it go.

    Summary


    This is not a get rich quick scheme.  This is about how to set a goal, make a plan, and execute (ready, aim, fire).  There is no “thing” that can make you rich, if that is your goal.  There is only you.  Mitch Hedberg said it best when he joked, “I bought a jump rope — but man, that thing’s just a rope. You have to do the jump part yourself.” [Thanks, Johnny] No blog, no self-help book, and no business can help you succeed more than a determination and drive within yourself.  If that is missing, everything else is just a rope.