Not much to say today. It seems, however, that my philosophy blog, and my health blog are gaining some regular visitors. Everyday I get a couple of page impressions from those two even though they are the ones that I've spent the least amount of time on. Oddly they are the ones that I care most about. I am passionate about both aspects of my life, more so than any others, and it seems that people are responding to that. Go figure, do what you love and you'll get ahead, odd that no one else has thought of that;)
I'll do a good post about affiliate marketing tomorrow, so stick around and get an earful.
Stay breezy,
Luke.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Christmas page impressions
I've got 70 page impressions today! Seems a little odd to me. I was snooping around some forum today and noticed other people noticing the same thing. A few people were saying that their page visits and CTR were seriously diminished for the last couple weeks leading up to Christmas. Strange. Maybe my CTR will start going up now. Wait and see I guess.
Simple Article Marketing
Hey there guys and gals.
I was just going over a few of my other blogs and checking out the page impressions and what not. Nothing really interesting to report today. I guess I'll just continue with my affiliate lesson.
Once you have a product that you feel will sell you have a few options open to you. You can start an AdWords campaign, start a website or blog, write articles, put out press releases, spam the hell out of forums, email lists, and I'm sure any number other ways. Unfortunately most of these aren't free and since I want every single person in the world (who has access to the net) to be able to do this I won't be focusing on any of them but the free ones yet. I will go into all of them eventually because I think the best way to be able to make a decent living from all of this is to be constantly reinvesting in yourself (like any good entrepreneur should), but until you've made a couple sales I'm going to assume you have absolutely no money.
Now I'm going to lay out a very simple, though somewhat time consuming, way to guarantee a regular income without having to spend a dime. Pick your products from clickbank. Make sure they're good enough that you might consider buying them yourself. Then start writing articles about them. Lots of articles. I'm talking at least 3 articles a day for a month. They don't have to be great works of art just make sure they seem professional, sincere, and give a real value to the reader. Focus on giving the reader real information, and not just a bunch of arguments for why they should be clicking your link.
Now, you can either write for search engines or article directories. To write for a search engine you need to pick the right keywords, have the right density, have a good niche, and submit to only one directory. Its a lot more work but it may very well be worth it (I haven't tested this method against the other method yet so I'm not sure. If anyone knows which way is better feel free to let us all know) because you'll be getting traffic from Google and not a directory. It is possible to rank quite high on Google if you submit to the right directory (I'll go into this more later). The other option is simply writing the article and submitting it to as many directories as you can. Many directories don't get very much traffic, or don't allow affiliate links, so there's a couple kinks in this method too. All in all though, I'm pretty convinced that just about anyone with a couple extra hours a day, and the will to succeed, could pull this off in a month or two, especially with the sales and persuasion techniques I'll be teaching here.
I'll be posting directories, details about keywords, and adding incentives to your articles in another post. For now though, start looking around the net for affiliate forums, or money making forums, there's a lot of good ones out there.
Luke
I was just going over a few of my other blogs and checking out the page impressions and what not. Nothing really interesting to report today. I guess I'll just continue with my affiliate lesson.
Once you have a product that you feel will sell you have a few options open to you. You can start an AdWords campaign, start a website or blog, write articles, put out press releases, spam the hell out of forums, email lists, and I'm sure any number other ways. Unfortunately most of these aren't free and since I want every single person in the world (who has access to the net) to be able to do this I won't be focusing on any of them but the free ones yet. I will go into all of them eventually because I think the best way to be able to make a decent living from all of this is to be constantly reinvesting in yourself (like any good entrepreneur should), but until you've made a couple sales I'm going to assume you have absolutely no money.
Now I'm going to lay out a very simple, though somewhat time consuming, way to guarantee a regular income without having to spend a dime. Pick your products from clickbank. Make sure they're good enough that you might consider buying them yourself. Then start writing articles about them. Lots of articles. I'm talking at least 3 articles a day for a month. They don't have to be great works of art just make sure they seem professional, sincere, and give a real value to the reader. Focus on giving the reader real information, and not just a bunch of arguments for why they should be clicking your link.
Now, you can either write for search engines or article directories. To write for a search engine you need to pick the right keywords, have the right density, have a good niche, and submit to only one directory. Its a lot more work but it may very well be worth it (I haven't tested this method against the other method yet so I'm not sure. If anyone knows which way is better feel free to let us all know) because you'll be getting traffic from Google and not a directory. It is possible to rank quite high on Google if you submit to the right directory (I'll go into this more later). The other option is simply writing the article and submitting it to as many directories as you can. Many directories don't get very much traffic, or don't allow affiliate links, so there's a couple kinks in this method too. All in all though, I'm pretty convinced that just about anyone with a couple extra hours a day, and the will to succeed, could pull this off in a month or two, especially with the sales and persuasion techniques I'll be teaching here.
I'll be posting directories, details about keywords, and adding incentives to your articles in another post. For now though, start looking around the net for affiliate forums, or money making forums, there's a lot of good ones out there.
Luke
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
A brief post about article marketing.
Hey sports fans,
I was just checking the page impressions from yesterday and I noticed something interesting. I had a total of 25 page impressions and the majority of them were from this blog. Now that's pretty interesting considering that this blog is the one that I've done the least amount of advertising for. I've put the link at the bottom of a couple articles and told my mom about it and put out a bulletin on myspace but that's it. So what I'm figuring is that people are starting to visit here on a repeat basis. That's really neat because of the fact that this is the only blog of mine that I've consistently put whole-hearted effort into. Like I mentioned in a previous post, when you appreciate yourself and others they begin to appreciate you. I'm still not making much money from these blogs, but at least things are starting to pick up a bit of momentum.
Yesterday I talked a bit about affiliate marketing. I went over a couple of the better programmes and covered a bit of the basics. Now I want to give everyone a chance to get started immediately with absolutely no monetary investment. This techniques is great and opens up a lot of possibilities for those of you out there who are creative and willing to work.
I'll assume you've already set up you clickbank account (its the easiest and quickest way to start). Now you want to pick out a few products that you think will sell quite well. There's a few things to consider when choosing a product to promote. First of all I want all of you to realize that this is the most important step. If your product is garbage the majority of your sales will result in returns. No fun there.
So you need to go to clickbank and browse through the products. You'll want to arrange the list by "high gravity." Start off picking out the products that have a gravity between 30 and 70. This range ensures that the product has been successfully promoted by others but also that the market is not yet saturated. Get a list of 10-20 products within this range. Now, go look at their sales pages. A good sales page is crucial for selling. You'll want to look at the benefits offered, bonuses, discounts, basically any sort of added incentive is going to help the sales. Look for a sense of sincerity, a genuine value in the product. Ask yourself if you would buy it yourself. All this is going to narrow your list down a little bit, and you should end up with about 10 products on your short list. (NB about 80% of all internet purchases are made by women. Keep that in mind when choosing products. Recipe books and yoga manuals are good sellers. Not just because of the demographic but also because the information is usually pretty straight forward. A site that sells recipe books isn't making a bunch of promises that set off peoples "scam alarms.")
So once you have a short-list of products that you think are going to sell really well all you have to do is get your links out. There are a few different ways of doing this. A couple of free ones are blogs, and articles. You can set up a blog that deals with the same things your products do, put up a bunch of posts about this topic then throw in some recommendations or testimonials. This would certainly work if you are willing to put the time into it, but if you don't feel like maintaining all the work you can just write a few articles.
As far as articles are concerned there is literally endless possibilities for the creative marketer. The basics of article marketing, however, couldn't be simpler. Take a product, write an article from experience, or find out what other people say about it, then submit it to article publishers. Some people prefer to just submit the article to as many publishers as possible, others prefer to let the article get picked up by search engines. I'm still experimenting to see which method is more efficient, but it seems that either method has its advantages. I'll go into this in more detail in another post.
I think I'm going to cut it off right here for now. I'll come back later with more info. I'll be covering everything so don't worry about being left in the dark about anything, and, like always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.
I was just checking the page impressions from yesterday and I noticed something interesting. I had a total of 25 page impressions and the majority of them were from this blog. Now that's pretty interesting considering that this blog is the one that I've done the least amount of advertising for. I've put the link at the bottom of a couple articles and told my mom about it and put out a bulletin on myspace but that's it. So what I'm figuring is that people are starting to visit here on a repeat basis. That's really neat because of the fact that this is the only blog of mine that I've consistently put whole-hearted effort into. Like I mentioned in a previous post, when you appreciate yourself and others they begin to appreciate you. I'm still not making much money from these blogs, but at least things are starting to pick up a bit of momentum.
Yesterday I talked a bit about affiliate marketing. I went over a couple of the better programmes and covered a bit of the basics. Now I want to give everyone a chance to get started immediately with absolutely no monetary investment. This techniques is great and opens up a lot of possibilities for those of you out there who are creative and willing to work.
I'll assume you've already set up you clickbank account (its the easiest and quickest way to start). Now you want to pick out a few products that you think will sell quite well. There's a few things to consider when choosing a product to promote. First of all I want all of you to realize that this is the most important step. If your product is garbage the majority of your sales will result in returns. No fun there.
So you need to go to clickbank and browse through the products. You'll want to arrange the list by "high gravity." Start off picking out the products that have a gravity between 30 and 70. This range ensures that the product has been successfully promoted by others but also that the market is not yet saturated. Get a list of 10-20 products within this range. Now, go look at their sales pages. A good sales page is crucial for selling. You'll want to look at the benefits offered, bonuses, discounts, basically any sort of added incentive is going to help the sales. Look for a sense of sincerity, a genuine value in the product. Ask yourself if you would buy it yourself. All this is going to narrow your list down a little bit, and you should end up with about 10 products on your short list. (NB about 80% of all internet purchases are made by women. Keep that in mind when choosing products. Recipe books and yoga manuals are good sellers. Not just because of the demographic but also because the information is usually pretty straight forward. A site that sells recipe books isn't making a bunch of promises that set off peoples "scam alarms.")
So once you have a short-list of products that you think are going to sell really well all you have to do is get your links out. There are a few different ways of doing this. A couple of free ones are blogs, and articles. You can set up a blog that deals with the same things your products do, put up a bunch of posts about this topic then throw in some recommendations or testimonials. This would certainly work if you are willing to put the time into it, but if you don't feel like maintaining all the work you can just write a few articles.
As far as articles are concerned there is literally endless possibilities for the creative marketer. The basics of article marketing, however, couldn't be simpler. Take a product, write an article from experience, or find out what other people say about it, then submit it to article publishers. Some people prefer to just submit the article to as many publishers as possible, others prefer to let the article get picked up by search engines. I'm still experimenting to see which method is more efficient, but it seems that either method has its advantages. I'll go into this in more detail in another post.
I think I'm going to cut it off right here for now. I'll come back later with more info. I'll be covering everything so don't worry about being left in the dark about anything, and, like always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Affilate marketing. (with a note on Christmas)
Greetings from the aftermath of the worlds most commercial holiday. I hope everyone had a good one with lots of hoarding and gluttony. But seriously Christmas is nice, I like the camaraderie between friends and family, and seeing people I haven't seen since last Christmas, but the blatant commercialism obscures any sort of religious under tones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, replacing sentimentality with greed, but I prefer to keep things a little more simple. I like the feeling I get from the day, and the long weekend, and the chance to be a bit more hedonistic, and spending time with people on one of the few days of the year when they are truly relaxed and pleased to be with me, even if only for a few hours. Its nice, I like it, and I would only wish it gone for the fact that it teaches kids how to be greedy and materialistic. If we could find a nice balance between the selflessness of giving and the pure pleasure of the whole holiday everything would be hunky dory. I propose that kids work for the entire month of December so that they can give gifts either from their own pocket or from their own ingenuity. That way they'd get the chance to feel true selflessness and get great gifts. Unfortunately the only way this would work would be if we forced them to work for December, and that would make their gift giving considerably less selfless. Oh well, whatcha gonna do?
I said a couple days ago that I would be dealing with making money from affiliate programs and even though its a couple days late I am a man of my word.
So the first thing we need is to find a good affiliate program to join. They're all free because essentially you are doing them a favour. You are literally advertising their products for them. You do the selling, they get more money, and you get commission. Its a nice, mutually beneficial relationship (something I think is absolutely necessary for any sort of business relationship).
You can find literally thousands of decent affiliate programs out there. Some are obviously better than others. Some have really shitty commission rates, some have fantastic commission. Some even have affiliate tiers (I think they call them tiers) where you can get other people to become affiliates and you get a percentage of all of their sales too (they don't make less, the merchant just ends up paying a bit more). Those are never that bad of an idea because of the residual income phenomena (I'll go into residual income streams in another post). But most programs are pretty straight forward. I'll go over a few more programmes in a later post but for now you should join clickbank and commission junction. These are the two best and most popular programmes right now.
Clickbank is one of the best because of the fact that it deals exclusively with digital products (stuff you can download immediately). A lot of people are looking on the net for instant gratification in one form or another, and if you're not into peddling porn or gambling then digital information products are the best way to go. By the way porn and gambling are very profitable if you have no moral objections. They are, however, very competitive for that very reason. So if you're clever with your marketing and don't have any objections I say go for it, try it out, then come back here and tell me what works for you.
Anyways, just go to ClickBank and get yourself signed up. It only takes a couple minutes and its absolutely free then you can start making money almost immediately. You'll be given a couple of links after you've settled on a good product (I'll go over choosing a product in another post). The top one is just the straight forward link, the bottom one is written in HTML so that you can embed it into your articles or whatnot (I'll go over this too eventually). You just copy and paste the whole thing into your text then replace the "Click Here!" with whatever you want to show up in the text. Make sure HTML is enabled or else your link will appear as is, instead of just the couple of words that you wanted. If this is at all confusing for you just go to clickbank and check it out, it should all become very clear very soon, but if not just come back here and ask your questions in the comment section. I'll answer any questions I can and if I don't know the answer I'll dig around until I find it.
Commission Junction is similar to clickbank but it serves more than just information products. Sign up is free and easy and you can literally choose just about any product you want to promote. Maybe start with stuff that you already have experiences with because it might be a little easier to sell your testimonial than a bunch of dry facts about the products.
I think I'll leave it here for now. I'll be returning, possibly later today, to talk more about the programs, how to sell, Google AdWords, writing articles, opt-in lists, link cloaking, how to choose good products, a few "secrets" that the gurus don't want you to know (at least not for free) and any old stray bit of info that comes to me as I'm writing.
I'll leave you with this thought: affiliate marketing is the only thing that I have come across that can make anyone a heap of money with little or no monetary investment, and that can be profitable the very first day you start. I think that if you are doing things without having any sort of monetary investment, like I'm doing, then it might take a bit longer, but it will still work, and probably faster than 90% of your other options.
If you want to be free of the burdens and worries of money this is a great place to start.
I said a couple days ago that I would be dealing with making money from affiliate programs and even though its a couple days late I am a man of my word.
So the first thing we need is to find a good affiliate program to join. They're all free because essentially you are doing them a favour. You are literally advertising their products for them. You do the selling, they get more money, and you get commission. Its a nice, mutually beneficial relationship (something I think is absolutely necessary for any sort of business relationship).
You can find literally thousands of decent affiliate programs out there. Some are obviously better than others. Some have really shitty commission rates, some have fantastic commission. Some even have affiliate tiers (I think they call them tiers) where you can get other people to become affiliates and you get a percentage of all of their sales too (they don't make less, the merchant just ends up paying a bit more). Those are never that bad of an idea because of the residual income phenomena (I'll go into residual income streams in another post). But most programs are pretty straight forward. I'll go over a few more programmes in a later post but for now you should join clickbank and commission junction. These are the two best and most popular programmes right now.
Clickbank is one of the best because of the fact that it deals exclusively with digital products (stuff you can download immediately). A lot of people are looking on the net for instant gratification in one form or another, and if you're not into peddling porn or gambling then digital information products are the best way to go. By the way porn and gambling are very profitable if you have no moral objections. They are, however, very competitive for that very reason. So if you're clever with your marketing and don't have any objections I say go for it, try it out, then come back here and tell me what works for you.
Anyways, just go to ClickBank and get yourself signed up. It only takes a couple minutes and its absolutely free then you can start making money almost immediately. You'll be given a couple of links after you've settled on a good product (I'll go over choosing a product in another post). The top one is just the straight forward link, the bottom one is written in HTML so that you can embed it into your articles or whatnot (I'll go over this too eventually). You just copy and paste the whole thing into your text then replace the "Click Here!" with whatever you want to show up in the text. Make sure HTML is enabled or else your link will appear as is, instead of just the couple of words that you wanted. If this is at all confusing for you just go to clickbank and check it out, it should all become very clear very soon, but if not just come back here and ask your questions in the comment section. I'll answer any questions I can and if I don't know the answer I'll dig around until I find it.
Commission Junction is similar to clickbank but it serves more than just information products. Sign up is free and easy and you can literally choose just about any product you want to promote. Maybe start with stuff that you already have experiences with because it might be a little easier to sell your testimonial than a bunch of dry facts about the products.
I think I'll leave it here for now. I'll be returning, possibly later today, to talk more about the programs, how to sell, Google AdWords, writing articles, opt-in lists, link cloaking, how to choose good products, a few "secrets" that the gurus don't want you to know (at least not for free) and any old stray bit of info that comes to me as I'm writing.
I'll leave you with this thought: affiliate marketing is the only thing that I have come across that can make anyone a heap of money with little or no monetary investment, and that can be profitable the very first day you start. I think that if you are doing things without having any sort of monetary investment, like I'm doing, then it might take a bit longer, but it will still work, and probably faster than 90% of your other options.
If you want to be free of the burdens and worries of money this is a great place to start.
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