Affiliate Marketing E-Course
Course Content
Lesson 1 - Introduction
Lesson 2 - Campaign Outline
Lesson 3 - Product And Keyword Selection
Lesson 4 - Building a Squidoo Lens With Relevance
Lesson 5 - Promoting Your Squidoo Lens
Lesson 6 - Article Marketing
Lesson 7 - Cashing In With Cheap Traffic
Lesson 8 - Blogging for Dollars
Lesson 9 - Mailing List Windfall
Q&A Video/mp3 #1
Q&A Video/mp3 #2
Lesson 2 - Campaign Outline
Welcome back!
Today I want to give you a whirlwind tour of the campaign and steps I took to pull down that $7K so quickly. As well, you'll see the campaign diagram put together piece by piece.
Then, over the next few installments, I'll go into some further details of the steps shown here.
Conventional Wisdom
Most affiliate marketers are niche marketers. They look for a niche that's not being filled and they fill it. The theory is that the niche is too small for the big guys to bother with, but big enough for the small independent marketer to make a healthy living.
So, the theory goes, if you look for a group of people with a problem then all you need to do is find a product or service that solves their problem and market it to the group. On one side you have people with problems, on the other products and services. All you need to do is bring them together.
Given this, it makes sense to start your product search by searching for groups of people with a problem. And the list is truly endless once you start thinking about it. Once you've found a group with a problem you need to find a solution and market it to them.
That's the more conventional approach, which I do believe makes a lot of sense so I would certainly never disagree with it. But it's not the only approach as my e-course will demonstrate.
Marketing Warfare
The approach I decided to take was a little different. I had just finished reading a book called Marketing Warfare
I decided rather than looking for a niche that wasn't being serviced, I would instead look for a niche that was being serviced, but one that I thought I could "edge" in on. Before I put in a huge effort I wanted to KNOW my product was sellable. I wanted to KNOW there was a group hungry for it. I wanted to know the actual product pitch page was converting sales. I wanted a product that was selling, but with no clear marketer taking home most of the money.
My plan was to find a product that was being marketed, but not dominated by a single marketer. I would then be prolific in my writing and work at building an incoming link creation network until I had solid organic listings.
To do this, I decided to focus on the later part of the buying life cycle. This means the people I was targeting already knew about the product and were in their research phase or nearing the end of this phase.
One nice thing about targeting the later part of the buying cycle is that it allowed me to have a very narrow set of keywords to focus on in my articles and other marketing material. Basically my keywords were product name words and other important words from the product literature that was fairly specific to the product. The people I was targeting already know about the product so any searches they're doing as part of their due diligence research most likely contains the product name.
<product name> Scam
<product name> Review
Buy <product name>
... etc
The Campaign Outline - Step by Step
OK, with my campaign philosophy out of the way let's get on with the step by step of this beast. As mentioned, further details and statistics will be provided for each of these steps as we move through the course. Today I want provide the outline in a step by step fashion so you can see the progression of the campaign development.
Step 1 - Find A Product
As mentioned previously, I started by finding a product rather than a niche in need. Most people starting out in affiliate marketing seem to begin marketing ClickBank products so that's what I did, I followed the herd. I started browsing the ClickBank products looking for products with the following criteria
- Decent payout, over $25/sale
- I want to know it sells so a gravity over 100 and rising (although this also means there's more competition too)
- A low level of refunds since I wanted to market a quality product. Refund rate should be under 15-20%. ClickBank claims most products have about 5% refund simply due to fraud so 15% refund probably means 10% unhappy people.
- The %refd number you see at ClickBank is NOT the refund rate (refund rate to be discussed later). It is the referred rate, the % of total product sales that come from affiliate referrals. I wanted this number to be at least 60%. If the number is too low this means the product maker is selling most of the products themselves. I wanted my marketing efforts to compete with other affiliate marketers rather than the product maker who may have deep marketing pockets.
- The product had to be something I could write about so it had to be related to something I knew a bit about (I was broke so I knew I'd be article marketing right from the start). Of course I still had to do some research for my writing, but it's always easier to start from what you know.
Step 2 - Build A Squidoo Lens (Landing Page)
With a product in hand I needed to build a landing page. The fastest way for me to do this was by building a squidoo lens. From this lens I could place affiliate links to my product. Squidoo has a high Google page rank and having a lens on Squidoo will help you get listed in Google. The lens also provides an excellent proving ground for your marketing copy.
Be sure to use the free pingoat.com service after making the lens and after changes to your lens. Note that you can only use pingoat.com once a day per url.
Step 3 - Write Articles
Aside from the way I used PPC, discussed next , there really was no other PPC for this campaign. The campaign was going to rely on articles to drive the money to my bank so I needed to start writing articles.
With ezinearticles.com being very well regarded by Google I started there. I wrote in total 9 articles for my campaign. All of them focused on keywords that were product words, because, like I said earlier, I was targeting buyers late in the buying cycle. I wrote the articles over a 3 week period. Your campaign structure should now look something like this
Another great way to promote your new lens, which isn't shown explicitly on the diagram, is USFreeAds.com. They're a free classified service which you can use to create one way incoming links to your lens. They have an excellent Google page rank and Google crawls them quite freuently. They do have a premium service as well which is popular with many marketers. You may want to have a look at this.
Step 4 - Promote Lens with 2nd Tier PPC (Optional)
This step is optional (if you're on the no money budget), but will speed up the whole process. The traffic from these 2nd tier PPC engines is not very high quality, but it is cheap! That's OK though, because I'm not using this traffic for sales ... I have other things in mind for these clicks (more detail on this will follow in a future lesson). There are many 2nd tier PPC engines, but my favorite at the moment is Findology.com. Your new campaign structure should now look something like this
Step 5 - Build A Blog
Articles alone are not going to drive enough traffic to get rich. And, unless I have many more articles spread across the web at sites with high page rank, I'm going to need more to solidify my organic listings on Google's front page.
I built a blog at blogger.com and made sure I posted to it every day or every second day. Be sure to use pingoat.com after each blog post.
I also considered my blog to be a landing page in that I had an affiliate link directly to the product page. I do NOT link to Squidoo.com from here. The last thing I want to do here is send a captive audience to a Squidoo page where they can get distracted by other links I don't own! The campaign structure now looks like this
Note the RSS feed module I've added to my lens. This will create links from Squidoo to my blog which is a good thing. Moving people from a less captive place to a more captive place is a good thing. Also, my blog gets a boost from incoming links from the high Google page rank of Squidoo.
Step 6 - Add an Opt-In
This is one of the most important steps in any campaign. In fact I've moved it up to near the beginning of my new campaigns. An opt-in list is basically building a mailing list. One of the biggest mistakes new marketers make is waiting too long before starting this. From what I've read in the Wealthy Affiliate forums, nearly every person there who reported quick success did it with the help of a mailing list. And even those who didn't do it in record speed but are now very successful will all tell you it's crucial. Don't wait do it as soon as possible!
In my campaign nearly 40% of my sales came from readers on my list! Think about it, why settle for the chance to get in front of a potential customer only once when you can get in front of them a dozen or more times?!?! Get it?
To manage your list you'll need what is known as an auto-responder. There are many, but the one most of the pros use is called Aweber.com. Again if you're on a budget there are free auto-responders out there and I'm sure a Google search will turn up many. This is going to become a major part of your future revenue so it's important to choose wisely. I've indicated opt-in on the diagram with a new asterisk.
Step 7 - Build A Website
With my ezine articles, Squidoo lens, and blog in place I had a few sources of incoming links that could be used to help build traffic for a website so it was time to build a simple website. With incoming links from my ezine, Squidoo and my blog it took under a week before my website was showing up on the first page of Google!
Step 8 - Submit to Website Directories
Although this is listed as a last step, I certainly did submit my work to some directories earlier on than this. Previously I submitted my lens and blog to a few directories here and there but not many. For one thing it's very time consuming. But it is worth it because these directories provide an excellent source of one way incoming links to the fine web real estate I created. And one way incoming links is a HUGE factor in getting front page Google listings.
This is actually another step that I've since moved to an earlier spot in my new campaigns. Many directories will accept not only your website, but also your Squidoo lens and your blog. So now I submit all three to the directories.
Which directories? Well there are literally thousands of them that are free to submit to so choose the ones with the highest page rank to start with then move your way down.
Although these directories are free to submit to, it can become very time consuming. I'll let you know a secret of mine ... Directorymaximizer.com is a directory submission service that is like gold for me. These guys will submit your site for $0.14 a directory! $28 will get you 200 directory listings. If your landing page is converting traffic then this $28 will be well spent money!
One thing to note is that some website directories will not allow deep linking, some will, and some will do it only with a small fee. Deep linking is where you submit a link that is not a top level domain. For instance, http://www.squidoo.com/JoeBlow is a deep link. While http://JoeBlow.blogspot.com is not deep linking and will be accepted everywhere.
And here we arrive at my final campaign structure
What's Next?
This should give you an overview of my campaign and probably just enough info to drive you nuts with questions!
No worries, I'm going to expand on a number of sections above and explain some of my thinking behind those steps I had taken. Also, I'll provide some statistics for you to chew on too. Then when we're though with the numbers I'll ramble a bit about what I think was good and bad about the whole campaign and where I am now with my new campaigns.
cheers,
Todd Ariss