Affiliate Programs

A cool thing happened to me last week. I was sitting here one evening and my Wife hollers in from the Living Room, “Hun, who is Click Bank?”

“Umm, I don’t know why?” I half heartily replied because I was’t really listening.

“They sent us a check for $246.18. Are you sure you don’t know who they are”

Man, I was out of my chair quicker than Flash Gordon!

“Let me see, let me see it” I said. Halfway expecting it to be one of those phony checks you get in the mail from banks, mortgage companies and other Spammers of snail mail.

“Cool” I said.

“So you do know who Click Bank is” my Wife stared at me.

“Yeah, I may have heard of them.” I gingerly replied.

How I Used Blogger and ClickBank To Start A Profitable Blog Empire

Now, $246 isn’t going to set the world on fire, but when you’re not expecting it, it’s cool. And when you realize you can duplicate it over and over, you begin to see how you can that this technique has some power to it.

I’d like to tell you this was planned from day one, but I can’t. Here’s what happened.

Late last year I bought the eBook “Blogging To The Bank.” It’s about a technique of creating Blogger blogs and gaming MSN search, IMHO. MSN search use to have a loophole where you could quickly and easily take advantage of their love of Blogger blogs. You could easily outrank most any website with a blogger blog and some backlinks.

About the time I bought this ebook, MSN finally got around to closing this loophole, although I didn’t know it at the time.

I read the eBook. It sounded a lot like the author would use PLR articles and some RSS feeds for content on his Blogger blogs. I thought “Geez, if I pick a category I know something about and write some quality content, it should work better.”

Here’s How I Set My Blogger Network Up

I set up 5 or 6 Blogger blogs on a niche that I settled on.

To find the niche, I went to Google and searched for a niche that would have less than 1 million pages showing. I know this sounds like a big number, but trust me, not all those pages are about your niche.

For this example, I found a niche called Royal Copenhagen Glassware. As you can see, Google is showing 169,000 pages. This is a very small niche. (by the way, I love Royal Copenhagen glassware, but I don’t have a website about it)

I would then add content about Royal Copenhagen glassware to each of the Blogs. I would designate one as my Primary blog that would have the Affiliate links on it. The other blogs were designated Satellite blogs and have no affiliate links on them.

Use your main keyword for your Primary blog. Your Satellite blogs should be made up of relevant keywords to your Primary blog, but not the exact keyword. Make the network relevant to the Niche you choose. One niche blog network per Main keyword. This is where your network will get it power to generate profits from.

Each blog would have anywhere from 4 to 10 SEO keyword rich post on them. All the blogs would have links with the keyword in the anchor text pointing at the Primary Blog.

The last post on the Primary blog would be a review of the Clickbank product along with an affiliate link to the Clickbank product. “We’re pretending there is a Clickbank product about Copenhagen glassware, I have no idea if there really is”

TIP:Do not put ADSENSE ads on these blogs! In fact, do not every put Adsense ads on a Affiliate Marketing site. That site should be dedicated to selling the Affiliate product! Never give your visitor a reason to leave your site for a few cents! I’d rather have them leave and not make nothing rather than lose a potential sale because my Visitor left on an Adsense click! If you want Adsense money, build a Content site!

How To Find A Niche Product On ClickBank

One of the most important things that helped some of these sites achieve the high Click Thru Ratio that they achieved, which you need with a small niche, is the price of the ClickBank product. I chose products that had a price tag under $20. The product also had to pay me at least $9, preferably more!

The reason I look for something at or below the $20 threshold is because I believe people do not hesitate much, if any, on pulling out their credit card and buying something under $20. So far this has worked extremely well on these niche blogs.

Another important thing to do is go and look at the landing pages to see how well the Copywriting is. If you’re not compelled to order the product, chances are your Visitors won’t either.

Next, buy the product. Yes, you heard me right. You should never sell an info product if you’ve never read it or used it! If it’s crap, you’ll end up with a high return and all your hard work will be for nothing! ClickBank will not pay our for returns!

To find a good product on ClickBank, I look for a product in the marketplace that has a “gravity” of 60 or higher and a refer rate of around 75.

Gravity is the number of distinct affiliate’s who earned commission with this product. I really like products with a Gravity over 100, but that’s hard to find in some niches.

Refer rate(or Rdfd on Clickbank) is the fraction of the totals sales referred by Affiliates. The high the number, the better. This tells you that other people are having succes at selling this product.

Patience Is A Blog Empire Builder’s Best Friend

Once you have your product chosen and quality content on your site, you then need to get them indexed in Google. Just find some high PR relevant sites to link back to each of those blogs until they are indexed. It’s that easy! It usually takes a few days for my blogs to be indexed.

Next is the hard part. Wait! Have Patience! Expect your blogs to sit for 6 months to a year before they climb the SERPS and start bringing in the Search Engine traffic. You can work at driving traffic to the blogs, but I prefer the “Build ‘em and forget ‘em” approach. I have way too many other things going on!

You can help the SERP climb of each of the blogs by linking to them from other sites already indexed outside your network, but it’s not a “must-do”. The higher the PR, the better the link. Just remember to use keywords in your anchor text!

Where My Mini-Blog Empire Is At Today

What happened is that those networks that I built about 10 months ago finally started getting some PR and climbing their way up the SERP ladder in their little niches.

The Primary blog on one of these networks has only 3 post on it. Yet, somehow, it has a PR2 with no backlinks (go figure that one!). Apparently Google isn’t counting any of the backlinks to it, yet Yahoo shows 45 backlinks to the page. (backlinks I found for them)

The Primary blog is at #12 for the Primary keyword and two other lesser keywords are on the front page about halfway down in the Google SERPS. This is where the traffic is coming from for those sites.

The blog network worked it’s way into the Top SERPS positions sometime in late Aug. and early Sept. That’s when the orders started trickling in, unbeknown to me!

Build ‘Em and Forget ‘Em

I had forgotten all about these blog networks. Shortly after I built Blogger network #3, I started hearing that MSN had closed the loophole that allowed Blogger blogs to dominate its SERP’s. Sure enough, none of my Blogger blogs were indexed by MSN. So after a few weeks, I wrote off the project.

So you see how sweet it is that Google came to my rescue and started sending them traffic.

I have no doubt, that if I had used PLR articles and RSS feeds, they’d still be in SERP hell and no where near the top. The articles on those blog networks are quality how-to articles and I sincerely believe that’s why they are nearing the #1 spot in Google SERPS.

What I’m Doing Now To Boost The Blogs In The SE Rankings

In the last few days, I added more keyword anchor text pointing at my Primary blogs on the network, from high PR sites, this should be the final straw and those blogs should reach the top 3 within a month or less.

I’ve also added some more keyword rich articles to the Satellite blogs. This should help them continue upward in the SERPS.

This technique is not for everyone I understand. But it may be something you want to add for an additional stream of revenue, especially if you have a small niche! A small niche may not have enough traffic to support you by itself, but having a network of niches can provide you some good passive income!

Once you have your first network tweaked and running, wash, rinse and repeat!