Although I tried many times, I was an unsuccessful Clickbank junky who promoted everything from the now obsolete Data Entry Pro to Affiliate Cash Vault.
While these products ranked very high in the Clickbank marketplace and converted well I was unable to turn a profit. I didn't understand the market well enough to get targeted traffic to my affiliate link.
At the time I was using the long term strategy of organic search and looking for short term results which is impossible unless there is little or no competition for your keyphrases. In hindsight it was obvious that this would not work either long term nor short term because the website was only going to attract traffic that consisted of a small percentage of opportunity seekers.
Not only was I trying to convert someone interested in selling vitamins to buy my downloadable work from home opportunity, I was also attracting visitors who wanted to buy vitamins.
This resulted in traffic not very targeted to my offers. Try making a car salesman out of someone trying to buy a boat. It doesn't work.
It was an overactive style website that consisted of Google Adsense ads, affiliate opportunities, and a free report that you had to jump through hoops to opt in for.
To this day the subscribers on that particular list are very unresponsive and each mailing I send out still results in an unusually high unsubscribe rate and spam complaints. Yet the SEO efforts were very successful as I rank very high for the keywords I targeted. As a result I continue to have many opt ins and each mailing to this particular list still nets around $300 in profit.
An affiliate website must be very specific in its purpose. If you are seeking subscribers it must be very clear what they are signing up to receive. If you are trying to promote an affiliate product directly from the site each bit of information you provide should steer your visitor closer to visiting the actual product website.
The faster you get them to go to the actual product website the better. You need to steer each visitor where you need them to go by providing an informative presell that carries them into the actual affiliate sales page to finalize the deal.
The Turning Point: How I Got Results
I was a failing affiliate marketer yet I realized the short comings of my efforts. I had locked in on a single type of product, marketed to the wrong people, and generated too little traffic to make any money.
This is the same formula for disaster that has driven tens of thousands to enter affiliate marketing and just as quickly disappear.
I decided I needed a better business model that included short term, intermediate, and long term strategies. I needed specific goals and techniques for finding, promoting, and profiting. And thus my basic business philosophy was formed.
EARLY SHORT TERM STRATEGIES (Completed):
Add a signature with my affiliate link to all forums I was a member of.
Add a signature line to all my outgoing email addresses.
Drive traffic through article marketing
Create blogs for marketing purposes
Develop highly targeted websites with very specific purposes
Concentrate SEO efforts on low competition keyphrases
Start link building for SEO
Locate a few niche money makers
Start learning Pay Per Click to generate traffic
Learn as much as possible to implement for list building
Learn email marketing tactics
Investigate other traffic generation methods
Start making contacts in Internet Marketing
If it's not profitable find out why before moving on
Learn to use word tracker (wordtracker.com) to conduct research
Purchase products based on my business needs and not on impulse
Spread my efforts across many niches and products simultaneously
Identify under sold markets and market to them
Promote products when they are first released and the market is not saturated
INTERMEDIATE STRATEGIES (Completed)
Continue everything from short term that proved beneficial
Develop my own informational products
Expand my Pay Per Click campaigns to dozens of niches
Start researching keyphrases for long term SEO strategy
Leverage my early success to help other marketers
Network with other marketers
Identify deficiencies in the Internet Marketing field for software development
If it's not profitable find out why before moving on
Research video multimedia options
Concentrate on building a responsive list
Outsource projects
LONG TERM STRATEGIES (Current and Continuous)
Continue implementation of refined short and intermediate strategies
Develop a complete product line
Develop joint ventures
Run my own affiliate program
Invest heavily in business tools/software as needed
Further expand adwords for traffic generation across a wide range of products
Move into Yahoo search marketing and MSN pay per click
Continue to heavily devote resources to list building
Improve email marketing skills
Acquire a place to conduct business beyond my home office
Continue SEO development for websites/organic search
Attend marketing events
Start participating in teleseminars or podcasts
Further develop and refine the overall business model
Start hiring full time employees as business grows
Map and stream line processes for continuous improvement
Obviously this strategic plan will be in a state of continuous refinement and implementation. I am currently well into implementing many of the long term strategies at this stage.
THE NICHE: A TURNING POINT IN TIME
NOTE: The following may contain some ignorant mistakes I made that were profitable but I in no way condone copying the instances where the terms of service were violated. Websites have been quite aggressive in pursuing those who violate the TOS.
It all started with a simple ad. I found that although quite time consuming using high traffic classified ads sites can be effective for a beginning affiliate marketer. After all, most beginning marketers have more time than money when starting out.
I visited a very well known website known as craigslist and before reading the terms of service posted ads in the community pets section for dog training. In fact I did this across many cities never knowing I was actually breaking the TOS of both craigslist and clickbank. I figured since my affiliate product was digital it would be OK to offer it nationwide.
I used a simply redirect through a domain I owned and wrote about my first hand experience with several clickbank dog training programs.
I was shocked at how responsive this niche is. I checked my clickbank account a few hours later to find over several hundred dollars in affiliate sales.
I knew I was sitting on something big.
At the time I was promoting several different programs including dogproblems.com (no longer offered through clickbank) and the more popular Sit Stay Fetch now under the domain kingdomofpets.com Dog problems payed over $33.90 a sale while Sit Stay Fetch pays $24.92 for a basic sale and $44.84 if the buyer upgrades to the video option.
I searched clickbank and found several other dog training programs in this niche which resulted in more sales as well. Within just a few weeks I had profited over $1200 from forums and classifieds sites alone.
I next expanded into Adwords. I started with 1 campaign and 1 keyword for each program. This was an absolute must in order to effectively track where the click thrus were coming from.
The keyword for each campaign was name brand only in brackets i.e. [sit stay fetch] [dogproblems.com]. This has since become ineffective due to the release of several recent products that were sold in mass and recommend name brand keyword bidding. However, the effectiveness of name brand keyword bidding in this niche will return and be very profitable in the near future when the current failing Adwords marketers have hundreds of losing keywords and fail to realize [name brand] bidding actually works.
I have seen my name brand costs go from under $1.00 or so a click converting 1 in 10 from top placement on Google to easily as much as $3.50 a click.
Name brand [exact match] bidding can still very effective especially if a new product is released on clickbank. Mass mailings that occur during a launch or new release send people to Google to research a product. Check clickbank often for new releases and cash in on the much higher conversions a new release will have.
If your ad is effective enough to maintain a high click thru rate your profitability can be very high. Your visitor is already presold and needs a simple validation. This equals a high conversion rate.
Just as important for me was choosing to receive traffic only from Google. I absolutely never wanted then or want now to receive traffic from AOL or other search partners.
I also never used the content network so my ads would show up on someones page as an Adsense ad.
Google search is the only place I will ever pay for traffic in this niche.
Getting traffic only from Google was and is absolutely vital for me.
After I realized the TOS of craigslist did not allow affiliate products or nationwide advertising my Adwords campaigns were already pulling in more sales for the upgraded version of Sit Stay Fetch at $44.84 a sale as well as dogproblems.com at over $33.90 a sale.
More importantly I had tracked and studied what cities I had been posting to on craigslist that had higher higher conversion rates. I heavily use the premium version of web-stat.com to track where my visitors are coming from and conversion rates. You could use another program or even Google Analytics but you must use something to refine and track your campaigns.
Clickbank offers a very effective string that can be added for affiliate conversion tracking for free.
A standard clickbank hoplink looks like this: http://yourid.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net
The tracking code can be inserted to the end by adding this string:
/?tid=yourtrackingcode
Therefore your hoplink would look like this instead:
http://yourid.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net / ?tid=yourtrackingcode
For more information, click here
TIP: Use a different tracking code for each keyword, article, forum, or other marketing methods you use. Start a spreadsheet or use a simple word document to record where each tracking code is receiving hits from. If you know what keywords, articles, classified, or email ads are converting into sales you can highly concentrate your marketing efforts in that area.
Processing Information for Profitability
It's true. However, I never would have believed an entire city could have a much higher conversion rate than another city for a generic clickbank product.
At this point my refinement continued until I was only allowing my Adwords ads to show in specific cities and locations.
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By using this option Google displays city specific adwords ads based on the IP address of the ISP the computer initiating the search query is connected to.
This can be a little tricky as AOL and many other ISPs show an IP address that may be remotely located in another state. Such as AOL in North Carolina shows a Virginia address. Cox cable in NC shows an Atlanta Georgia IP address. Overall all this is still a very effective tactic.
