Having said that, a while back I bought The Keyword Crash Course. This is a course that Mark Butler and Courtney Tuttle have developed. The whole course was about starting Niche sites, monetizing them and getting free traffic from search egnines like Google. Although I was sure I knew 99% of the stuff they were going to teach (afterall, I make a good income from this stuff already!), I was hoping to learn a few tricks that would make me more money or save me time. I wasn’t disappointed in the course. In fact, I felt like the Course paid for itself within the first 30 minutes of watching the first video. By the way, the course cost $597. I’ve spent a lot more on courses that didn’t have near the amount of information in them.

If you know Court and Mark, then you know that they are honest and helpful. In fact, they’re some of the most honest and helpful people I’ve ever met on the Internet. Everything is laid out for you and they don’t hold anything back. (unlike a lot of courses I’ve bought!) In fact, I’ll go as far as saying the Keyword Crash Course is the most legitimate and easy to follow course I’ve bought. It’s a nuts and bolts Course that nearly anyone can follow and make money with. You can take a look at it by clicking here.

Within the first 30 minutes of the first video, Court describes how to find profitable keywords using “The Formula“. This was the bombshell that I had been looking for. Every once in a while, something will come along that makes you set back and take a deep breath, all the while thinking “Damn, this is what I’ve been searching for!” That is how I felt when Court showed me The Formula for evaluating profitable keywords.

I’ll tell you this also, when you start finding those little Gold nuggets of Keywords, it won’t take you long to figure out that you can use them to build Affiliate Sites rather than Adsense sites if that is what you want to do. If more people would use The Formula, there would be a lot less people failing at this game.

Before this, I had my own system for finding good Keywords, but it was hit and miss. Some keywords paid very well, while others fizzled. I still get some keywords that don’t pay when I use The Formula, but a lot less. By using Court’s Formula, I’ve been able to amass about 90 keywords that will turn into some very nice Niche sites.

Now Court and Mark have opened up the site to the Public and you can see everthing in the original Course for only $1 (yeah, the same Course I paid $597 for!)

Learn How To Make Money Online With The Keyword Crash Course

Whether you’re a beginner just starting out, or an advanced marketer, The Keyword Crash Course has something for you.

What You’ll Get For $1

You’ll be able to see the original course including the 10 training video’s. These video’s will take you step by step and show you how to pick profitable keywords for your niche site (using The Formula), setting WordPress, how and where to find backlinks, how to obtain content for your niche sites and how to set up Adsense and other advertising to make money from your sites.

Plus there is a little video at the end that will show you how to flip your new sites for Money. I found this one to be very interesting and something I may try down the road.

Why Are They Only Charging $1?

Court and Mark feel that once you’ve seen the quality of the training material, you’ll want to subscribe to their monthly service where they’ll be bringing you more information about building and ranking websites, live Webinars and live Q&A sessions. This subscription is $29 per month and totally optional. You can sign up for $1, get all the information that was in the original course for $597 and forget about the rest if you want to. They’re fine with that. They only want people who are serious about making money online.

People, if I could stear you to another course that I thought was better, one that taught you how to make money online with Niche sites, I would. But there is simply nothing out there as thorough and easy to follow that Court and Mark’s Keyword Crash Course. If you’re serious about learning how to make money online, this is one course you need to take. If after the course, you can’t make money online, then this business is probably not for you. That’s how good I believe this course is. And for only $1, you sure as hell won’t find a better bargain. Click here if you want to learn more and take advantage of this opportunity.

While most web host will pay you between $25 and $100 per sign up, there are many Credit Card affiliate programs that will pay you $50 to $300 per sign up. Some of these affiliate programs will pay you every time someone fills out a credit card application while others just pay you whenever someonen you refer qualifies for a credit card.

Why Credit Card Affiliate Programs Can Be More Lucrative Than Web Hosting Affiliate Programs

Well, it’s simple really. How many people do you know need Web Hosting? Now how many people do you know need a Credit Card? Yeah, now you’re seeing the potential.

While you may have a hard time getting people to sign up under your webhosting affiliate program, simply because most people don’t need it, most credit card programs work well simply because you’ll be steering people to the sign up page with your affiliate link. Most of these programs have multiple cards to choose from, so if your Customer has bad credit, no problem, there’s a card for that. Do the want a credit card with reward points? No problem, most programs have those cards available. Have someone who wants a credit card with balance transfer? You guessed it, most programs have cards available for that also.

If you choose a Credit Card affiliate program that pays you per applications filled out, (which they pay around $2 to $5 per application), you may find that you can get more people filling out CC applications than are approved for the Cards. It just depends on what type of traffic you’re targeting.

Once you realize that it’s quite easy to steer people through your affiliate link, you start to realize the potential available to you to make money with these programs. In many cases, it’s as easy as putting your affiliate links where people who need credit cards will find them.

How To Get Started Making Money With Credit Card Affiliate Programs

There are a lot of credit card affiliate programs out there today. Due to the credit crisis we’ve fast over the last year or so, the number of credit card companies using affiliate programs has declined, but there are still plenty of others out there to make this a profitable venture.

One program that Beginners can get started in the Credit Card Affiliate business with is My Credit Card Cash. When you sign up with them, they give you a website already pre-populated with nearly 100 card offers. All that you must due is to promote your affiliate website url. Since they’ve already made the site for you, there’s no site building or other technical knowledge required.

Then, each time someone goes through your website and is approved for a credit card, you earn a commission. Some of these cards have a payout as much as $121. Most are in the $30 to $75 range. It doesn’t take long to see that there is a lot of potential here.

As of this writing, they’re offering a 14  day trial for $1. After that, they’ll charge you $37 per month until 4 people have been approved for credit cards through your website, then it’s free. I was able to get 4 sign ups easily within the 14 day trial so my website was free. Click here to learn more about this program.

Most of these types of programs will charge a fee until you have a certain number of sign ups through your website. This is in part to keep people from signing up for their affiliate program and then doing nothing. They only want Affiliate Marketers who will be promoting their affiliate sites. This is why most will give you the website after you’ve signed up a certain number of people that are approved for a credit card.

Ways To Promot Your Own Credit Card Website

The nice thing that I like with credit card affiliate programs is that offline promotion is very effective. Once I had my website, I went and had some free business cards made up. The first batch simply said “Bad Credit? Need A Credit Card?” across the middle of the business card in bold print. Below that my Website url.  I had 500 business cards made up the first time and left these everywhere I went. Grocery stores, drive-in’s, bulletin boards around various  businesses (especially cafe’s) and so on. This is how I managed to get 7 sign-ups within my 14 day trial.

And that’s the trick to making credit card affiliate programs pay off, just as with any affiliate program, get your affiliate link in front people who want what you have to offer.

You could try having some free biz cards made up with your affiliate URL on them and then leaving them every place around your town. Laundry Mats, C Stores, Cafe’s…a lot of these places have community bulletin boards and would be worth a try.

Although I haven’t tried it yet, a Classified Ad in small Local and Regional newspapers may also do just as good. In my area, I could take out one ad and have it placed in 8 different local community newspapers for about $90 per month.

Ways To Promote Your Credit Card Website Online

Now that I’ve showed you a few effective ways to market you credit card affiliate website offline, let me show you a few ways to do it online.

Basically, the way I started out marketing my own credit card affiliate website was the same method I used in the January $2500 Challenge. I signed up in several forums and answered questions about debt, finance, family related questions and questions about credit cards. My signature had a link to my site in it. In some post, where it was relevant, I left a link to my site.

I also promoted my affiliate website on Yahoo Answers and Wiki’s whenever I answered a question and where a link made sense and was helpful. If you go in and start throwing links all over the place, you’ll be banned in no time flat for spamming, as you should be.

Another good way to promote your affiliate link is through article marketing as well as building a network of sites over family and personal finance. Although this will take a while, once you have the traffic coming in, this could be a very good money earner.

And that’s how I make money with Credit Card Affiliate Programs. I did it for a while and once you get your system down, I think you’ll find that this is a pretty good way to earn income. I find it a lot easier than promoting some other affiliate programs, but everyone is different. You may find it more difficult or easier. If nothing else, sign up for a trial and give it a try to see if you’ll like it. You never know, you might have a big earner on your hands.

The System I Used To Make Money In Two Weeks

If you read the mid-month Challenge update, you know up to that point I had made only approximately $200. So I’ll pick up from there.

Since I was really strapped for time, I had to change the way I would try and reach $2500 in two weeks. What I finally decided on was to build two simple WordPress blogs and 2 Blogger blogs.

I then searched for two different products or service affiliate programs that I could make anywhere from $9 or more from each sale. I chose products in the Health Care and Pets niches. My other offers were in the $20 to $35 range.

One thing you want to keep in mind when choosing an affiliate products is whether or not it has appeal to people who are desperate for solutions. The more desperate, the better the product. For example, Gamblers and Smokers are two desperate groups of people. One group wants to learn quick tips for making money with Gambling, the other wants to learn how to stop smoking. Addicts are a great group of people to target.

I started building a Network of profiles on Social Media sites. I’m not a big fan of Social Media, but for this system, I needed some eyeballs on my offers and I needed them quick! So I made multiple profiles on places like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers and others. For example, for this Challenge, I made 17 MySpace profiles and 8 Yahoo profiles.

In order for all your profiles to be effectice, they have to look like real profiles. If you get lazy and create a bunch of spammy profiles, you’ll get them banned very quickly.

Another thing I did (which proved to be the most profitable) was find 8 forums that were relevant for my Health Care offer and 5 forums that were relevant for my Pet care offer. Again, I made a profile on each forums and made it look good. This takes time but will pay off if you don’t get greedy and try to spam the forums.

How To Set Up WordPress and Blogger Blogs To Use This System

To be effective, once again your blogs need to look legitimate. So I set up each WordPress blog with 5 to 7 pages of Content, an About page along with Privacy and TOS pages. I did the same with my Blogger blogs.

The only two plugins I used with the WordPress blogs were Redirection (this is an important one) and All In One SEO pack.

I didn’t worry about getting them indexed quickly. They wouldn’t be live long enough to bring in the organic traffic I needed to make these offers pay off. I needed them as Sales pages to divert traffic to so I could pitch them my offers.

On each WordPress blog, I used the main index page as my landing/sales page and all the additional content pages were redirected to my affiliate link to the Merchants. The important thing here is that these index pages looked like normal blog post, not those long spammy looking sales page most of us are used to seeing. Each sales/landing page was written like a review or as a product info page. You just need to make it irresistible for them to go and sign up once they’ve finished reading it!

Where The Money Came From

Since I was strapped for time, I started pushing the offers before I had all my networks set up. I normally would have cultivated those profiles for a few weeks or months before using the links. But I just didn’t have to time so I had to do the best I could.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to make your Profiles and your post look normal and not spammy. If you don’t know how to write a good blog or forum post recommending a product and not make it look spammy, then go to your favorite forums and start reading. If you’ve been in this business long enough, you’ll soon be able to spot the spammers from the regular posters.

Another area where some of you get hung up at is the nofollow vs do follow links on some Social Media sites and forums. It doesn’t matter! You’re looking for traffic here, not backlinks that push link juice to your sites. Leave links to your blogs everywhere you can without making them look spammy and forget about whether or not they pass PR.

My most profitable avenues for income were from the Forums and Yahoo Answers.

My conversion rate on the Health Care product was around 4 percent and my conversion rates for the Pet Care products ranged from 3 to 6 percent. The highest converting of these was one Forum and Yahoo Answers.

I ended the month earning $562 for the Health Care products from Forums and Yahoo Answers and $157 from other Social Media.

For my Pet Care products, I ended the month at $781 from Forums and Yahoo Answers traffic and $117 from other Social Media.

The grand total of these came out to be $1617. When you add the $200.43 I had already made, the total for the month comes out to be $1817.43. About $700 short of my goal but pretty darn good in the small amount of time I had to make it.

Once again I have to tell you that in those last two weeks, I spent an enormous amount of time making this money. I worked from 2 to 4 hours in the evenings and a lot of weekend time.

Although you can make money with this system, I wouldn’t advise it for long term income. It’s just too tedious and time consuming for me. For the amount of time I spent on this project, I could have set up 6 blogs, wrote content for each and started building backlinks to them for long term growth and income.

Using Social Media To Make Money

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat it here. Social Media doesn’t convert well. The reason I believe is because these people are not looking to buy anything. They are also Internet Savvy. In order for your affiliate programs to do well, you really need to target people who are looking to buy what you have to sell. Simple technique but one that many people fail to implement. That’s the real secret to making money on the Internet!

The reason the Forums and Yahoo Answers did so well is because I targeted my post to people looking for what I had to sell.

Another important thing to remember is not to spam the Forums or Yahoo Answers. For every post I put a link in, I had made around 10 to 15 helpful and informative post without a link in them. Many of you get greedy or impatient and use short, spammy comments to leave a link in and then wonder why you get banned or or links removed. You have to make your profiles and comments look real!

With this Challenge, I only had 4 MySpace profiles banned. Which is very good considering the time I had.

The Giveaway

As promised, I’ve decided to give something away for the followers of this Challenge. Even though I built several Squidoo lenses, I’ll be keeping those for further use. I can’t stress enough how important it is to build good Squidoo lenses for making money and backlinks. The best resource I’ve found for building high quality Squidoo lenses is an ebook from Tiffany Dow titled “Flip That Lens“.

What I decided to give away to 3 readers is 3 of my domains. These don’t have sites on them and you’ll have to be registered with NameCheap in order to get them. It’s free to sign up for an account at NameCheap, so 3 of you can expect emails from me in the next few days. If you haven’t signed up for a free account at NameCheap, you might want to do it now.

Final Thoughts

For now, I’ve got to get back to my sites that make me money. The way I earn money online is by building sites and getting them ranked in the Search Engines. Once built and ranked, these sites are pretty much hands off except for building links to them and adding content once a month or so. This is long term work and I don’t expect to make money with any of these sites for at least 6 months and most likely a year or more. Many people don’t have the patience to make sites like these! I love free targeted search engine traffic!

If you decide to try the system I used, take your time doing it. Don’t get impatient and spend some time building believable profiles. Add pictures (you can get them at Istockphoto.com) and other stuff that real users add to their profiles. Don’t spam other people. Build friends slowly and don’t blast them with alerts.

Now you know that it is possible to make decent money in a short amount of time. The question is, do you have the will power it takes to spend the time and effort doing it!?

To be successful in affiliate marketing, you have to find a product that many people want. Not only that, you have to find one that they are likely to purchase over the Internet. Sure, a few people will buy a car or boat online, but not many. There are some products that people want to see, touch and evaluate in person before buying. You can’t do that online! Find a popular product that you believe in and then see if they have an affiliate program and find out the terms.

Start by making a list of the things you like and are passionate about. It has always been said that you can sell something you believe in. That’s true. It’s also true that it’s very hard to sell something you know nothing about or have no experience in. This is why it’s critical in finding something that you enjoy or are passionate about.

Both Yahoo and Google have sections where you can go and look to see what the most searched terms are for the previous week, month or year. This will tell you what people are searching for online. Google also has a section called “Hot Trends” that is updated throughout the day to show you the most searched for terms. This can be a huge benefit if you follow it over time.

The other section in Google you want to do research in is Google Trends. This tool will tell you how well the product you’re interested in has been searched for in the past. Google trends is a free tool and one you should not overlook. You want to see the line on the grapch either fairly steady across the graph or rising. A downward line on the graph tells you that interest in the product is tapering off.

The section you want to look for in Yahoo is Yahoo Buzz. This section tracks the most searched for terms of the previoius week or month. It will also tell you whether or not your term is on the rise or tapering off. Personally, I prefer Google Trends for seeing if the product is on fire or cooling off. To find it, go to buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com. Play around with it a while to really find the best niche products that are hot.

Another excellent place to find hot selling products is ebay. Ebay has a section that will show you the most popular selling products. This can also give you ideas on what to sell on ebay and on the Internet as well. The section you want to look for is called Ebay Pulse. You can also drill down to find which specfic prodcuts are hot. For example, iPods are always hot on Ebay. But which color? Use Ebay Pulse to find which color or which model is hot.

Finding a hot selling product is not hard. You just have to know where to look in order to find them. Picking an affiliate product just because it has a high payout is a sure fire way to fail. Pick something you know about and then research it to see if there is a demand for it. This way you’ll have the confidence to stay the course until you see the fruits of your labor pay off.

I’ve been experimenting for a few months on my Build A Niche Stores to see what would increase traffic and rankings. Other than building links to the BANS store. Don’t get me wrong, without links, your BANS store is dead in the water.

What I wanted was a way to increase my SERPS rankings, traffic and get more pages indexed in Google. I tried several things, but this is what I’ve come up with so far it is working like gangbusters.

Increasing Your Build A Niche Store Rankings and Traffic

What I started to do with my Build A Niche Store sites is add a WordPress blog to them. I choose a main keyword that I’ve been targeting the search engines with then I add a sub-domain onto my site. Then I install WordPress.

For example, let’s say you have a BANS site about Watches. Let’s say your site name is mybanswatchsite.com. When you add a sub-domain, it would look something like this: watchblog.mybanswatchsite.com.

Now, you also have another keyword in your domain name!

There are many advantages to adding a sub-domain to your Build A Niche Store site. Here are just a few.

1. Increased rankings. Google loves blogs, especially WordPress blogs. Expect your post to get indexed faster with a blog.
2. Easier Content Creation. What I started doing was featuring some products from my BANS site on my blog. I then link from my blog back to the page on my main BANS site where they find many of the products for sale. Let’s say you had a post about fake Rolex watches. You’d create the post on your WordPress blog then link back to the category on your Build A Niche Store site that had all the auctions for fake Rolex watches. Now you’ve also created one way links with anchor text AND directed visitors to a place where they can by fake Rolex watches.
3. Easy link building. Blogs just naturally attract backlinks if the content is anywhere near informative. But the real advantage of having a blog as a sub-domain is that you can create one way anchor text links from the blog back to your BANS site. This will give your BANS site a boost in the Google SERPS.
4. More income streams. With WordPress, you can add a few plugins and actually increase the income your Build A Niche Store is capable of making. For example, on my Build A Niche Store blogs, I use the PopShops WordPress plugin and PHPBay plugin. I have several BANS sites where the sub-domain actually makes more than the main site. Let’s go back to your Watch blog. With PopShops plugin, you can feature new Watches from merchants on any affiliate network where you’re a member. (don’t forget to sign up with the merchant first!) Then at the end of the post, you can add ebay auctions from PHPBay. Your giving your customer many ways to buy from you and little reason to click off of your website!

Think this out. With WordPress as a blog on your Build A Niche Store sub-domain, you can do many, many things that will enhance your main site. Don’t be surprised to see your sub-domain actually make more than your main site. The sites I have PHPBay on are really outpacing my Build A Niche Store only sites.

What do I blog about on my Build A Niche Store Blog?

Anything I want!

Seriously, I will do product reviews, special deals from merchants, hot auctions on eBay, coupons and I even search article directories about articles relevant to the content on my BANS site. At the end of the article, I put the PHPBay auction in and sometimes even some new products with PopShops. This is all good stuff! 

PopShops is also adding a nice stream of income for those Customers who come to my sites but want to buy something new rather than play the eBay game.

Currently I’m playing with 3 other plugins to see if they can help my Build A Niche Store or not. I’ll keep you updated on those results!

Tools Used In This Strategy

• Build A Niche Store Program
• PHPBay WordPress Plugin
• PopShops WordPress Plugin

I’ve been watching the situation with the Ebay Partner Network unfold for about the last month. It seems to have settled down some, but most ebay affiliates aren’t breathing a sigh of relief yet.

What’s Going On At Ebay Partner Network?

Some of you may have not heard about the latest news concerning the Ebay Partner Network (or EPN as it’s more commonly known) and its affiliates.

What happened was about a month ago Ebay decided to dump some of its EPN affiliates. Then, a few weeks later, it dumped more. From what I can tell, there have been around 300 to 400 affiliates dumped.

The “Official” reason for dumping many of these affiliates without warning was: “we determined that the traffic generated from your account is significantly less engaged with the eBay site as compared to the standards set by our other affiliates.”

Luckily, knock on wood, I haven’t received such a notice.

However, many affiliates who rely on Ebay for their income have received these notices. Some of these affiliates were bringing down $10k to $30k per month!

The real reason behind the Ebay bans?

There are many speculations about the reason for the bans by Ebay. The most popular is that Ebay is running some type of metric on incoming traffic and comparing those metrics across all affiliates sites. Apparently if the traffic you send Ebay does not behave in a certain way, the feel it’s junk traffic generated by black hat methods.

That being said, I know many of the people who had their accounts pulled out from under them who were doing nothing wrong and relying on organic traffic only.

It would seem that this “metric” Ebay is running generates quite a few “false positives” and Ebay just dumps everyone who falls below a certain threshold in order to try and remove black hat sites that are sending junk traffic.

Sounds good on the surface, but I have a problem with that theory. Most black/grey hat guys I know, wouldn’t waste their time sending hoards of traffic to ebay if it didn’t pay off. They’re about making money just like the rest of us. They’re not about wasting a lot of time sending traffic just for the hell of it.

It’s more likely some geeks at Ebay developed this “metric” and refuses to tweak it or to do manual reviews like Google does. This would have prevented a lot of this mess from happening.

What you can do if you’ve been banned by Ebay Partner Network

If you’re one of the unlucky ones who has had you account terminated by the EPN, you’re only other option is to use PepperJam Network.

Is that a final solution? Probably not. Who’s to say that Ebay won’t terminate their agreement with PepperJam like they did with CJ?

Both BANS and PHPBay have the ability to use Ebay listings through the PepperJam network.  With the Build A Niche Store program, you can download a “patch” at their site. With PHPBay, there is a field under your WordPress settings for PHPBay where you can input your PepperJam ID number.

On another note, I have heard about ebay affiliates who have emailed Ebay and have had their accounts reinstated. Although this seems as a last ditch hail marry technique because many were still rejected. But hey, if your house note depends on it, it’s better than sitting on your butt doing nothing!

What to do if you haven’t been banned from EPN

If you’re one of the lucky ones who still has an account with EPN, you should be thinking about your next move should Ebay throw you out in the cold.

Remember Enron? Remember how the employees lost everything they had because all their savings were in Enron stock? Enron? Ebay?

This should be a lesson for us all. I’ve been burnt a few times in the past by merchants who either stopped their affiliate programs or went belly up, owing me thousands of dollars.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket! I can’t stress this enough!

If you’re with EPN now, you might want to consider signing up under PepperJam, just in case.

Otherwise, you should be working on diversifying you affiliate marketing efforts. Yeah, I know it’s hard to work on other affiliate programs when you have one or two that are really raking in the money. But if you’re going to survive with affiliate marketing, you’re going to have to learn how to diversify.

I sincerely hope Ebay will come to its senses and stop this nonsense and start appreciating all the hard work that the Ebay affiliates are doing. But it wouldn’t be the first time a large dot com corporation screwed itself and its affiliates to the point they went out of business.

Stay calm but be vigilant and diversify!

I’m not a sales letter writing Guru, but I have wrote my fair share for my online as well as my offline businesses. Here’s the way I go about writing a sales letter.

First off, I gather up other sales letters that speak to me. Yeah, it sounds corny, but I figure if a sales letter can make me buy something, when I know it’s a sales letter, then it’s pretty good. Whenever I come across such a sales letter, I either save it in my bookmarks or print it out and keep it in a file. If it can make a sale to me, then it can make sales to most other people.

Whether you like them or not, those sales letters that are rampant in the Internet Marketing industry sell products over and over. I hear people say they hate those “spammy” looking sales pages, yet it’s some of these same people who buy products from them, myself included. Face the fact, those sales letter type pages sell products or no one would use them.

Another important point to keep in mind when writing a sales letter is to put yourself in your potential customers shoes and ask “What’s In It For Me?” Forget about yourself for a moment. Your sales letter should be all about the benefits the customer will get when buying your product.

The Title of Your Sales Letter Will Make You or Break You

Once you start pouring over those sales letters, read through them all and see which Title really speaks to you. Which one really gets your attention? Which one makes you want to continue reading the rest of the copy? This is probably the one you’ll want to pay attention to.

I also keep the crappy sales letters. I try and determine where the ad copy lost me. Was it the title? or the ad copy itself? When you can answer these questions, you’ll have a good understanding of how a sales letter works.

A good title, or header, should grab your customers attention and make them want to read the sales letter. Writing an attention grabbing title takes some work. As with many things, the more you practice it, the better you’ll become.

The 4 Basic Building Blocks of A Sales Letter

When writing a sales letter, there are 4 basic things you must keep in mind and address if you hope to convert readers into buyers.

1. What problem does your product solve?
2. What does your product do?
3. What makes it better than anyone else’s product?
4. Finally, how much will this cost?

Now that you have a good foundation to start with, it’s time to put some meat into your sales letter.

There are an additional 4 things you must convey in order to make your sales letter do its job.

These are:

• Create hope: Its been said that people buy hope. A person with a tooth ache will stop at nothing to get it taken care of. The same is true for someone who needs quick cash for whatever reason. Whatever problem your product or service cures, make sure you show your customer that there is hope when purchasing from you
• Relate to your customer: Talk to your customer as if they were a long lost friend. Become personal with the customer so they feel that you can relate to their problem. People feel secure with someone they can relate with and they buy when they feel secure. Two of the best ways to do this is to tell a personal story and add a photo of yourself to the ad copy.
• It’s all about the FUD: Create FUD in your ad copy. FUD, or Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, is a time tested technique to get people to buy. It’s been used by both large corporations and small companies alike. It’s in nearly every ad you see in one form or another. It takes practice and experience when using FUD in an ad copy. It must be subtle or you risk turning off the more experienced buyers. This is where those good sales letters you kept will pay off. Pour over them and see how the Copywriter used FUD to sell.
• Ask for the sale: No, wait, DEMAND the sale! When you’re looking over those ad copies you’ve saved, you probably notice that there are several call to actions in the body of the sales letter. Don’t assume that your customer will just get up and order from you. Tell them to do it now! Create a sense or urgency. One good way to do this is by giving them a deadline or give them a bonus if they act now. People hate to lose out on an opportunity! Make sure you tell them why they must act and explain what they’ll be losing if they don’t act NOW!

Learning how to write a sales letter takes a little time. You should also test, test and test more until you get that sales letter that pulls in the customers!

Aggressive Sales Letters Are The Best

The argument against aggressive sales letters has been going on since the first ad copy was written. It’s a proven point, aggressive sales letters sell better than passive sales letters. I don’t like to write aggressive sales letters, but they work.

A long aggressive sales letter will put more money in your pocket than a sales letter that sounds like you’re talking to your Mom. People are lazy by nature and you have to make them act. That’s what writing a good sales letter is all about, making the people you’re reaching out to order from you!

Start looking over those ebook sales letters and begin writing some of your own. Keep at it until you think you have it down. Put the ad copy away for a few days and come back and reread it. Keep making changes until it’s as good as you can get. Send it out and then write another one, send it out and see how it fares against the first. Keep doing this until you see one sales letter converting better than the others. This will be your money maker and you’ll be glad you learned how to write a sales letter!

The Affiliate Marketers Prayer

O Lord, you know I have a website that is small
and my traffic numbers are low
I ask for a little favor because this affiliate marketing is tough.
No money am I making and I have a Web Host that is slow.

O Lord I’ve tried Overstock, Wal-Mart, JC Whitney and Bass Pro
and a host of others that didn’t pay.
They all left me disappointed and flat broke
Oh, I almost forgot, I did make some money with Ebay

O Lord, just give me an Affiliate Manager that is honest
and the network is parasite free,
Where all my clicks are counted,
and my commissions come straight to me.

I’ve got the latest custom WordPress theme
I bought some those expensive custom graphics
I didn’t spam and I didn’t cheat
I even resisted trying some Black Hat tactics

My website is SEO Optimized and I’ve built backlinks galore
I’m waiting on traffic so I can head off to the bank
So if You decide to look down on me today,
I’d sure appreciate that #1 Google Rank

O Lord, if you don’t mind me asking one more thing
I’m grateful for the chances I’ve had and I really don’t mean to complain
But if You could see fit to give me favor
Could you Bless my PPC Campaign?

Okay Lord, soon I’ll be headed for my computer
to pull up my stats with Google Analytics
I’m hoping to see big numbers that translate into orders
Oh what is this I see? I’ve sold a dozen books and two hammocks!

Okay, there you go. I was feeling a little silly this morning. You have my 8th grade English Teacher to thank for that. She used to make us write poems all the time. I hated it and as you can tell, not very good. Besides, she never like my poems very much any how!

I’m going to start off by telling all you people who are new to affiliate marketing about a 30 Day Challenge you really need to be taking part of. Especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing or have had trouble making money from affiliate marketing.

I’ve told you in the past about the 30 Day Challenge. This year, it starts August 1st and the “pre season” has already started.

If you’re beginning in affiliate marketing, it’s worth your time to go over and sign up. Even if you’ve been around a while, watch the video’s. I’m sure you’ll pick up some good money making ideas.

Dan Raines and Ed Dales have been showing people how to make money with affiliate marketing for many years now.

It was only a few years ago that Dan ran the 15 day challenge, where he tried to make 15 thousand dollars in 15 days. And he almost succeeded! I learned a lot of useful tricks from that challenge.

The 30 Day Challenge site already has some very good videos up. You’ll get instant access to these video’s as soon as you sign up. For you that are just starting, I’d suggest starting at the beginning. For those of you who need a few tips, just browse through the lessons until you find the subject you need to brush up on.

The goal, as usual, is to take you from nothing and show you the basics of affiliate marketing. They’ll be taking you by the hands and teaching you every step. The lessons available will take you from nothing to showing you how to make your first $10 within 30 days.

I know, $10 dollars doesn’t sound like much. But you have to start somewhere. This is the problem with many new affiliate marketers. They want to start one day and think they should be earning $1000 per day by the end of the week!

The truth is, if you don’t have the skills to legitimately make $10 with affiliate programs, you’ll never make your first $1000. And that is what the 30 Day Challenge is all about, giving you the skills to make your first $10 which then gives you the confidence and skills to make much more.

I can’t tell you how many emails I get from people who want to know the “secret” of making money with affiliate marketing. If you suggest they try to make $10 in 30 days, they come back with something like “Oh, I can do that, but what I need to know how to make enough to live on.”

When asked further questions, I find out that they haven’t even taken the first step in building a website or choosing an affiliate program. These are the people who will more than likely never make it in affiliate marketing.

In my opinion, the best thing about the 30 Day Challenge is the members forums. Here you have many like minded people, many who are already successful in affiliate marketing, helping beginners and throwing out ideas. You’ll be exposed so many different ways to make money with affiliate programs it will make your head spin.

Go ahead and sign up for the 30 Day Challenge by going to http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com. Give it an honest try and I’ll think it will answer many of your questions and open your eyes to some of the “secrets” to affiliate marketing.

The inspiration for this method came one day when I asked myself “Self, I wonder what would happen if I created a product page from a big Merchant with one item on it and threw a bunch of relevant anchor text links at it?” To which myself replied “Well Don, I don’t know. Let’s try it and see what happens.” (Yeah, I have these little chats with myself all the time.)

In order to make this technique work, and it doesn’t work 100% of the time, you’ll need two basic things.

1. An affiliate account with a merchant that allows you create single product pages. The merchant must be an authority site such as Amazon.
2. A method to generate a good number of relevant links to your page with anchor text. You can use TNX, LinkVana, BacklinkSolutions or any number of other link networks out there. Article marketing is also a great way to generate the needed backlinks if you can mass produce some articles.

What we’re going to do here is use the Merchants authority site against itself to make our single product page outrank the main authority site’s page. Kinda underhanded but hey, all’s fair in love and affiliate marketing!

What you need to do is choose a product from your Merchant that is fairly new. This will reduce competition and increase your chances of getting the top SERPS rankings fairly quickly.

Let’s say you had created a single product page for the MacBook Air when it first came out. You would then take your single product page on the MacBook Air and create targeted backlinks to it.

It’s important that you do not use the same anchor text over and over. Change it up. Your keywords for anchor text would be something like.

• MacBook Air
• MacBook Air Review
• MacBook Air Reviews
• Buy MacBook Air
• MacBook Air vs IBM ThinkPad
• Apple MacBook Air

This way, you can still use the Merchants authority to rank well and avoid tipping Google off to what you’re doing. If you only use one or two targeted anchor text, Google could flag this as Googlebombing. That wouldn’t be good.

Another advantage to using a Merchant that has an authority site is that you can build a large amount of links to your product page without waking Google up. If you were to build massive amounts of links to a new site about the MacBook Air, they’d probably slam you pretty hard. It’s not natural to gain tons of new links to new sites and Google has this figured out now. (don’t ask me how I know ) However, Google is used to seeing a huge amounts of links going to these authority sites so you don’t alert them when you send all your targeted anchor links to your product page.

As I said earlier. This technique doesn’t always work 100% of the time, but it works pretty damn often for me. The trick is too be on the watch for new products coming down the pipe and be capable of producing quality one-way backlinks to your page.

In the future, I’ll try and post more articles on how to make money online without a website since I know a some of you are just starting out and do not have websites.

Yo Dawg, Check it Out. 5 Lessons Affiliate Marketers Can Learn From American Idol.

1. No matter how bad things seem, continue to persevere. American Idol Asia’h Epperson had every right to bow out of the competition when her father died two days before she was to audition. But Asia’h Epperson didn’t go back home. She staid put and won a trip to Hollywood.
2. No matter how big a Star you are, you can still make mistakes. Paula Abdul seems to put her foot in her mouth several times a season. Or she just shows up drunk. Doesn’t matter, you’d think she’d learn from her lessons after all this time, but apparently not. I’ve been doing Affiliate Marketing since the late 90′s. I look back in time to the big names on the Internet and have to wonder where they are now. Some couldn’t recover from huge mistakes while others followed rule #1.
3. Now matter how well the Powers-That-Be like you, if Consumers don’t like what you have to sell, you’re out. Carly Smithson was the obvious American Idol favorite. You could tell by how the Judges, especially Simon, kept carrying on about her. Didn’t help her in the end though, the audience decided to send her home. You can be the biggest, baddest Super Affiliate out there but if you peddle junk, you’ll soon find yourself without income.
4. Even if you do everything right, you can still lose if you can’t convert traffic into buyers. I think most everyone was shocked when Michael Johns was sent home. Heck, I even liked his singing. For some reason, he couldn’t convert watchers into callers. The same can be said for Affiliate marketers. You can be selling the best product on the market at the best price, but if you can’t convert crowds into buyers, you might as well be trying to sell ice cubes to Eskimos.
5. Being able to connect with your Customers is more important than choosing the right product. How many times have you heard the American Idol judges tell one of the contestants that they chose the wrong song? Yet, that person continues on while someone who supposedly had the right song choice was sent home? Affiliate marketing is in many ways the same. A good affiliate marketer can push a so-so product every now and then and make money. His customers will trust him/her and will buy from them again and again until they prove untrustworthy.

I thought about adding a sixth lesson, and using the saying that Black Hat techniques only produce have short term results and comparing it to Sanjiya Malakar’s little brush with fame last year. It was no secret that Sanjiya had the market cornered on teenage girls and call centers in India in last years American Idol competition. But, that wouldn’t make for a good list now would it?

So there you go. 5 quick and to the point lessons an affiliate marketer can learn from American Idol.

I know some of you are Linen N Things affiliates and you can do whatever you want. However, if I were a Linens N Things affiliate, I’d certainly be thinking about how much money they owed me and how many affiliate links I have pointing toward their store.

I worry about my money anytime a merchant is having financial trouble. Makes you wonder why they can’t learn to do basic budgeting and watch their cost, not to mention finding out where all their money is going.

For any of you who have been affiliates when a business went bankrupt, you know what I’m talking about. Try losing several thousand dollars worth of commissions when a company goes bankrupt and it doesn’t take long for you to become gun shy when a company starts talking bankruptcy!

As the old saying goes, “The chances of you getting paid are slim and none and Slim has left town”

Tactics For Dealing With A Company Filing Bankruptcy

There are several ways you can handle a company that is in financial trouble.

1. You can do nothing, cross your fingers and hope they’ll pull out of it. I know it’s tough to jump ship when you making good money on a company, just beware of the risk.
2. You can find another similar company and switch out all your affiliate links. This can be time consuming, but sometimes it’s the only option.
3. Option 3 is what I normally do. I try and pin down the top selling items that my customers were buying from this merchant. Then I go and find the highest paying commission on that product with a reputable company. Then I replace the old merchant store links with specific item affiliate links from the new merchant.

For example, let’s say your customers were buying J.A. Henckel Steak Knives through your Linens N Thingsaffiliate links. Just start a search of companies who carry Henckel Steak Knives, find a reputable one and replace your generic Linens N Things affiliate links with J.A. Henckel links from Amazon (or whoever is paying the best commission with competitive prices)

I much prefer this method over just throwing up another generic store banner. There is some reason that people coming to that page are buying Henckel knives so you might as well increase your CTR.

I do hope Linens N Things can pull out of their financial troubles. I love to shop there (yes, a Guy who likes Linens N Things…I just go there for the Kitchen Appliances and Cutlery though…honest )

Companies that go belly up are just another thing that us affiliate marketers have to deal with in this game. You learn to watch for the trouble signs and hope you can make a clean break before you lose commissions. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. If Linens N Things goes bankrupt, I hope you’re not left holding the bag!

This morning I was reviewing my logs as I do each week to see how people are finding AffiliateWatcher.Com when I kept noticing something strange. I then went to my Googl Webmaster account and checked over the last months analitics to verify what I was seeing on my logs.

I’m ranking pretty high in the Goggle SERPS for the term affliate programs.  Yes, affliate program is misspelled, it should be affiliate programs.

In the last month, the terms affliate program, affliate programs and top affliate program has accounted for over 2000 visits.

In another example, on one of my weight loss blogs, I discovered that it was being found wth a misspelling of a very competitive keyword. So I wrote a blog post about people finding my weight loos site by typing in the misspelled keyword. You know what happened? In a weeks time I took the #1 in Elgoog for that misspelled keyword and it increased my traffic to the bog as well as increased my RSS subscribers.

Why You Should Target Misspelled Keywords

To those who use PPC marketing to make money on the Internet, misspelled words are a goldmine. In many cases, misspelled keywords outperform some correctly spelled keywords. Not everyone is a perfuct speller and even the best typist hit the wrong keys everyonce in a while when performing searches.

How To Make Money With Misspelled Keywords

If you’re using Gogle Analytics, go into your contrl panel and and go to ”Trafffic Sources” then go to “Keywords”. This is where you’ll see the keywurds that people are finding your website.

If you’re using another program such as StatCounter, it’s just as easy. Just find the Keywoord button.

You should then add those misspelled words into your keyword list. Find someway to add them to your content of your websight. I think you’ll be pleasantly happy with the results.

Share with us what misspelled keywords web surfers find your site by!

Maximize Profits From Your Blog With PHPBay

PHPBay is a WP Plugin that pulls current ebay auctions off of ebay and puts them on your WordPress Blog. This Plugin works just like any other WP Plugin. You download it, upload it to your WP Blog, activate it in the Plugin Menu, choose the keywords you want the Plugin to pull from ebay and then publish the Post or Page.

It only takes a line of code to get this program up and running so you’re blog can start making money. This plugin is customizable. There are several parameters in the line of code that you can change to get PHPBay showing specific ebay product auctions on your individual blog post.

To insert the code into the blog post, all you do is switch from the Visual editing mode to the Code mode and just insert the line of code into the post. You can also modify Sidebar php and other php files if you’d prefer to have ebay auction results in other areas of your blog.

PHPBay’s Performance

PHPBay has been performing very good on the blogs that I’ve implemented it on. In fact, the targeted ebay auction results are pulling in more than Adsense! This is why both PHPBay and BANS are known as Adsense Killers.

PHPBay also increases the blog post’s SEO capability. 

Another excellent feature of PHPBay is that it comes in an API for PHP driven websites. This will be a huge boom for php driven websites, especially if they’re relying on Adsense for income.

PHPBay or BANS – Which One To Choose

I like and use both of these excellent programs.  If you have a network of blogs you should use PHPBay so you can monetize your blog with ebay auctions. Many PHPBay users are finding the commissions from ebay auctions pay a lot more than clicks on Adsense.

If you’re starting a new site, I would use the Build A Niche Store  program. If you’re a PHP programmer, look into using the PHPBay API version.

Unlike the BANS program where the program automatically installs the Main Category you choose with the option of also including sub-categories, PHPBay needs you to include the code into your blog post or other blog file.

I believe both of these programs should be in your arsenal if you’re serious about making money online using ebay auctions.

Special Offer For AffiliateWatcher.Com Readers

In my review of the Build A Niche Store, I mentioned a special offer for AffiliateWatcher.Com readers.

I’ve written a Special Report titled “How To Maximize Your Earnings With Ebay Affiliate Programs”

To get this FREE Special Report, all you do is send me an email through my Contact page after you purchased either BANS or PHPBay program. Include the transaction details so that I know you purchased the program. Once I’ve verified that you bought the program, I’ll send you this Special Report.

What’s in this Special Report?

This FREE Special Report will show you how to optimize your BANS or PHPBay site for maximum profits. I’ll show you how to SEO optimize your sites, where to find Free and low cost places to advertise your sites, what steps to take and what steps to avoid when setting up your sites and show you a few secrets that I use on my site.

Click here to learn more about PHPBay.

Click here to learn more about the Build A Niche Store.

Ebay affiliate program | PHPBay