Issue #1001 – Finding Profitable Affiliate Offers
Action Today: Finding Profitable Affiliate Offers
_________________________________________________
Friday September 30th, 2011: Issue #1001
Action Today is published twice a week for opted-in subscribers only.
New subscribers join every day thanks to the power of www.listcrew.net
Published by Trevor Greenfield.
I always welcome your comments.
__________________________________________________
Hi,
I mentioned last time that I’ve decided to get back to basics and
am working through the Unstoppable Affiliate course from Andrew
Hansen and Josh Stanton. I’ve been making money as an affiliate
for quite a long time but am still learning a lot from this course so
don’t think that there isn’t anything new in there if you’ve been
around for a while because there is.
The course is broken down into 5 main activity areas. They are;
* Research
* Site Strategies
* Conversion Strategy
* Traffic Mastery
* Outsourcing
This week I’m working through Research. The first stage of
putting together a profitable affiliate offer is research, more
specifically it’s Niche & Affiliate research. To begin putting
affiliate offers together we need to sign up for some of the
affiliate networks.
Generally when people come online and decide to try affiliate
marketing they tend to go for the ‘making money on the Internet’
market because this is what most people already online are
telling them to do. The affiliate network of choice here is
Clickbank, the largest digital product network online. The next
biggest is PayDotCom which is very similar to Clickbank.
However there are lots of other affiliate networks to go for
where you can make good affiliate commissions from physical
products, or CPA where you get paid when someone clicking your
affiliate link takes some action or other, like signing up for a quote
for example.
Some that I recommend and which are included in the course are
Commission Junction (cj.com), Offervault and oDigger. They are
all free to join. Don’t be discouraged, by the way, if you get turned
down the first time you apply. It isn’t necessarily any reflection on you
or your ability to be a good affiliate.
Look experienced
What they do look for is someone that appears to have some
experience. They don’t want affiliates that are going to be
asking for help all of the time so before you apply make sure
that you have a website of your own. It doesn’t have to be
focused on an affiliate offer, it can be your own site showcasing
you. The key is to give the impression that you are comfortable
with working online as an affiliate so create a nice neat site
with some content on it.
It’s also important for this site that you don’t use a free site like
wordpress.com or Google Blogger website. The best site to have is
a WordPress site that you host yourself on a hosting service like
Nichemarkethosting.co.uk or Hostgator.
Having signed up for an affiliate network you then select an
affiliate offer that ticks the boxes in terms of monthly
searches, competition and payout. The first step is to look
through the network for something that just looks interesting,
something that sparks your curiosity. As an affiliate you should
develop an antenna for potential affiliate ideas.
By that I mean keep a little notebook with you at all times and
when you’re out and about just jot down things that you see.
Browse the news stands for magazines and jot down the titles, all
of these are potential niches that may have an affiliate program.
Look for ads on billboards or public transport. Magazines of all
sorts carry adverts for products which may open up a good
affiliate offer.
As you work on this you will become tuned into picking up clues
for research.
Analyzing whether something is a good potential niche or not is a
process. The course goes into a lot of detail on all of the ways
to research an offer that you can build into a system.
First take the idea that you came up with and search in the
affiliate networks for a potential offer. When you find a product
in the affiliate network that ties in with your original idea, go
to the Google Keyword tool and
search on the product name using exact match.
More than 3000 global searches indicates a good
potential offer. Next we need to look at the potential
profitability which we do by typing the product name into the
google search engine to see if there are many paid advertisers
for it. If there are it indicates that there is money being made with
it.
If you are using Firefox and install the SEO plugin you will be
able to see how many backlinks the top ranking result has. Again,
if there are a lot of backlinks it has to be profitable.
There isn’t room here to go into any more detail on this research
phase but I hope I have given you an idea or two to use. The
course, which I highly recommend, covers every detail of what to do
and how to do it. It’s the best value affiliate training I’ve
seen. I’ve included a link to it at the bottom of this newsletter
for those that want to check it out.
+ + | | | + +
Will the affiliate offer convert?
A key part of whether you will make money with an affiliate offer
is how well the merchants page converts. You can do everything right at
your end but if the merchants site isn’t up to scratch then you
have wasted your time. So before you finally decide to market an
affiliate product, check out the merchants landing page.
There are a number of key elements that give you an indication of
how well it will convert. They include;
* How easy is the offer to take up? Does the visitor have to
go through too many steps to take up the offer? How many
clicks from landing to acceptance are there?
* Are there any inducements like bonuses, discounts or coupons?
* Are the benefits clearly spelled out?
* Does the site look professional, clean, lively and inviting?
* Are there any testimonials, social proof, endorsements?
* Is there a good guarantee?
These are just some of the things to look for. Read through the
site carefully. Would you buy the product based on what you see
here? If it doesn’t make you want to buy maybe it won’t encourage
anyone else to buy either.
+ + | | | + +
Do you read or just look?
Like you and just about everybody else online, I buy quite a lot
of reports that I feel will help me with some aspect of my
business. What I also do is print them off and put them in a
binder for future reference. Then from time to time I go back and
read something that I received some time before but that I feel
will add insights to something that I’m working on at the time.
I was reading one of these reports recently and it struck me that
I couldn’t really remember anything from the first time I read
it. And this brought home to me how much we skim read these days.
Some years ago I did some coaching with Jimmy D Brown and in it
he pointed out that there really isn’t anything new under the
sun – as King Solomon said.
The point being that every successful marketer online has
‘copied’ something that has been done before. That’s not to say
that they have taken someone else’s material and ripped it off,
they haven’t and neither should we. What they have done is
studied what other successful people have done and modeled what
they are doing on what those successful people are doing.
Now, it seems to me that with all of the stuff that we are being
hit with these days, we have gradually become skimmers or lookers
not readers. It’s important to weed out the rubbish from what we
receive (which will be the bulk of it unfortunately), and then read
what’s left, really read.
It’s important to select a few people that you respect for the
success they’ve had and their ethical approach to marketing
online and study what they do. Study their sales pages and
emails. Identify how they are structured, do they include
testimonials, how are they laid out, do they use bonuses, if so
how, study everything so that you can use the same principles in
your own work.
For me I have just a few people that I look forward to
getting stuff from and I study every bit of it. They include
Terry Dean, Jimmy D Brown, Marlon Sanders, Martin Avis, Phil
Wiley, Andrew Hansen, Daniel Turner & Marc Lindsay and Mark Ling.
You should build your own mastermind group and study what they
do. That’s the quickest route to success, identify successful
people that you would like to emulate, study what they have done
and ‘copy’ what they have done.
+ + | | | + +
We are currently having a late heatwave here in the UK with record
temperatures for the end of September. Last weekend my wife and
I had a very pleasant time visiting the Stratford-upon-Avon food festival.
There was every kind of food you can imagine. There were demonstrations
on how to make the perfect cup cakes, hog roasts, local wines and lots of crafts.
We don’t live far from Stratford-upon-Avon and it’s always nice to go
over there and spend some time by the river, wander around the shops
and generally let the world go by.
Today was continental market day when stall holders from France, Germany
and Italy come over to our town and set up a market. I’m ‘dieting’ at the
moment since I need to lose a few pounds but you really can’t resist
some of those French pastries when the opportunity arises.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Recommend Action Today To a Friend!
Don’t keep it to yourself – send them to
http://www.actiontodaynewsletter.com today!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
_________________________________________________________________
The Thought For Today
_________________________________________________________________
In order to hit a target, you need to see it clearly.
Simpleology Law #2 – The Law of Clear Vision
Imagine an archer shooting at the target. But before he shoots he
puts on a blindfold, turns around in place a few times then lifts
the bow and shoots. What do you think his chances of hitting the
bulls eye are? Pretty slim to none, right?
Before we can see our target clearly, we need to select our
target in the first place. Then as long as we keep that target
clearly in mind and practice the first law of Simpleology, the
law of straight lines, we will hit our target 100% of the time.
_________________________________________________________________
Action Help
_________________________________________________________________
The ultimate success formula is the most powerful formula that
will lead us to success, to achieving whatever we want. By
setting a clear and specific goal, planning a strategy to
achieving our goal and taking consistent action, we will get one
of two outcomes. Either we will achieve our goal or we won’t.
If we achieve our goal, great – we set another goal and move on
to more achievements. The secret is to avoid considering not
achieving our goal as a failure. We consider it as a learning
experience. We take that experience, adjust our strategy, take
more consistent action and review the outcome.
This is how we progress towards what we want. We know that
successful people are those who change failure into feedback.
Successful people also use feedback to change their strategy and
take action again. They will keep repeating those steps until they
achieve what they want.
When Thomas Edison was asked why he continued to carry out his
experiments when he always failed said that he hadn’t failed once –
he had just learned another way that did not work and that put him
one step closer to the way that would work.
So why is it that so few people do this? The answer is commitment
to goals. For the majority of people their ‘goals’ are really
just desires that they wish for, hope for and would like to
achieve. For the 5% who are successful, their goals are a must –
they have to achieve them.
“You’ll never achieve anything unless you make it a MUST – Adam Khoo”
When things don’t go according to plan, many of us need to blame
someone or something else for it. Successful people take 100%
responsibility for everything that happens in their life. They
know that the actions they took in the past have dictated the
life they are experiencing now.
So fortunately the past experiences do not equal the future. By
changing our actions and attitudes today we will get what we want
in the future. We have the choice to choose the life we want.
Choose to win.
_________________________________________________________________
Products and services to streamline your business
recommended by Trevor Greenfield
_________________________________________________________________
Reliable hosting for your niche blogs or website
http://www.nichemarkethosting.co.uk
Unstoppable Affiliate
http://www.actiontodaynewsletter.com/ua/index.html
#~#~#
Do you enjoy Action Today? Please tell your friends!
http://www.actiontodaynewsletter.com
Let me know what you think – about anything! To contact me,
please reply to this email and remember to put ‘Action Today’ in the subject line so that it doesn’t get filtered.
_________________________________________________________________
Contact details
_________________________________________________________________
Trevor Greenfield, Queens Rd, Kenilworth, Warwickshire,CV8 1JS,
UK.
To email, please reply to this message.
Please note that many of the links to 3rd-party products that
appear in Action Today may be affiliate links that will pay me a
commission if you buy, however, you will pay the same price.
_________________________________________________________________