Posted by peter on May 30, 2009 | No Comments
Affiliate marketing is by far the easiest way to start making money on the internet. The benefits are just enourmous, no product, no customer service, no after-sale support, no research costs and so on. You make a sale, earn a cut (often up to 75% of the product price) and focus on making more sales. You don’t get sidetracked with questions and everything else involved with selling your own product.
Infact, affiliate marketing is so powerful, I’d say that all the major internet marketers that you know and love (well, at least know) are doing it. Everytime you get one of their emails in your inbox, chances are they are trying to sell you one of their buddy’s products.
While affiliate marketing can be lucrative if it is done correctly, either through article marketing, email marketing or setting up numerous review sites, there are some people that try and take a short cut and use unethical methods to earn affiliate commissions.
One such method is called Cookie Stuffing. Since nearly all the affiliate programs are based on cookies (cookies are little bits of information that is held on the users computer and gives a website some details about them, in this case, it tells the website who referred the user and when) to track affiliate sales, controlling the adding of cookies to people that visit your site could be very lucrative.
Consider this scenario:
You set up a review website, which is indepth and contains a great amount of information on the products being reviewed. You spent hundreds of dollars buying and testing the products to give the best review possible. You spend time and effort doing SEO to get it to the top of the search engines.
You are now getting plenty of traffic, but not converting very well. What could be the problem? Well, it could be one of dozens, but perhaps people like to see more than one review so that they know your review isn’t just a one off, so they click the back button and read the next review available on the site below you. Or maybe they already know the website URL and are just doing some research to get a feeling of what others are saying about the product. They then go back to the original website without clicking on your affiliate link - even though you spent a lot of time trying to help these people, you won’t get any credit.
This is where cookie stuffing comes in.
There are many methods you can use to stuff cookies on to someones computer, but I’m not going to go in to details about that now - Google will give you more than enough resources for this.
What it does is secretly place a cookie on the visitors computer, they don’t even have to click on your affiliate link. Now, regardless of whether they leave your site, your cookie is ’set’ and when they buy, you are virtually guaranteed to get the commission.
Is it ethical? I personally don’t think so, but many marketers feel otherwise and think it is quite legitimate to get credit for the time and effort put in to their review sites.
But a word of warning…
Cookie stuffing is against the terms of virtually every single network (for obvious reasons, they will be unnecessarily paying out commissions, which hurts their bottom line), if they catch you doing it they will immediately delete your account and you will lose any commissions that you may have made.
Posted by peter on December 1, 2008 | No Comments
This is an extremely common question from newbie Webmasters (and alarmingly, sometimes more experienced ones too!).
The problem arises due to the lack of understanding on what Pagerank is, and how it works.
So often we see people in the webmaster forums asking questions like
- I’ve done so much promotion, why hasn’t my pagerank updated?
- HELP! I’ve got loads of backlinks, but no pagerank
- Is there a problem with pagerank? Mine hasn’t been updated in the last few weeks
More worrying is when you see statements like…
- I got a pagerank 2 after just 3 weeks!
- My new site went from 0 to PR 3 in a month, hope to get pr 5 next month!
So, back to the question, why isn’t your pagerank updated in the last few months, despite doing loads of promotion?
The answer is extremely simple:
Google only updates the pagerank that you see on the toolbar 3 or 4 times a year. That means if Google last updated their pagerank in April, and you started your site in May, you might not see an update until August or even September!
However, this pagerank that we see in the toolbar is a snapshot of what Google had several months ago. Their internal pagerank updates each day for all the pages on your site, but they don’t make this data public. Instead, they just export a ’snapshot’ a few times a year.
So, stop fretting over the fact that you don’t have that magic green stuff in the little bar yet. The next pagerank is just a few months away!
Posted by peter on April 16, 2008 | No Comments
I guess if you read my previous posts where I often rubbish or belittle various internet marketing products, or take a side swipe about the intentions of people, you might think I’m an old internet marketing cynic with no place in this industry.
Infact, the opposite is true, well, sort of. Yes, I am cynical, but only about certain things. I’m always on the look out for new products and people that are making money. Often it’s the people that are quietly making money hand over fist that I’m most attracted to.
True, not everyone is making millions, but you don’t have to make millions to be successful. Making enough to get by and then some is successful by my standards, that’s why I’m always interested in reading the stories or buying the products from everyday people like me and you who are making a success of themselves from dedication, motivation and hard work.
I’ve recently come across two of these types of people from the Warrior Forum, and am extra pleased because they are both from the UK (sidenote: Support your country’s internet marketers!).
So, if you are looking for some guys that really are making money, but not shouting about it, then go and check out Tony Shepherd’s blog not only does he provide some great content and entertaining stories, he also has a number of ebooks available for free, nada, no strings attached. I srtongly recommend the You, The Guru and Blog Your Wage ebooks, I can’t believe he’s just giving it away for free.
And here’s an extra big tip, sign up to his newsletter and you’ll get a discount on Naked Niches, which is a great book by his business partner Sara Brown. It’s a great, no fluff, ebook that’s really easy to follow.
I want to write a review on his products at some point because I was really impressed with them.
See, whoever said that if you write quality content, you will get natural links is right. These guys (ok, guy and girl) are providing excellent content and I know that by linking to them, I’m providing my visitors (yep, both of them, hey this is only a new blog after all) with great additional content.
Posted by peter on April 14, 2008 | No Comments
Right, so yesterday I looked at the key skills required for internet marketing success, and I promised that I would look at the skills everyone thinks they require, but really they don’t. Unfortunately, too many people focus on trying to gain these skills when there’s absolutely no need to.
So let’s take a look at the skills “you thought you really needed, but don’t really” (I’m working on the catchy title as we speak).
- Great Design and Photoshop Skills
Simply not true. You can get any number of graphic designers to make you an attractive mini site for less than $100. Alternatively, check out the free salesletter templates I’ve made for all the readers of this site. If you are worrying that you don’t have the design skills for becoming successful in internet marketing, don’t be. Some of the most successful salesletters have been bog standard black text on a white background.
- Copywriting Genius
No way, if you can write passionately about your product, you can write a salesletter, after that it’s just a matter of continuously tweaking and testing different things like headlines, features, bonuses etc. Alternatively you can out source the salesletter writing too 
- The Uber-Programmer
Let’s make one thing clear, of all the internet marketers, 99.9% don’t know their function from their class (that’s techno programmer geek speak to you and me). Programming is the hottest thing to outsource to companies like Agriya.com who can create your scripts for you on a budget.
- SEO Guru
Believe it or not (and being an SEO weanie, I can’t believe I’m about to say this), SEO is not important when it comes to internet marketing. Saywah? Yes, SEO is not an important factor for internet marketing. You need to learn how to sell and convert people that do come to your site. If you know how to sell, you can get people to come to your site
Well that’s my take on what skills you don’t need to become a successful internet marketer. Do you agree? Is there something that I missed? Do you have a different list of ’skills you don’t need’?
To be honest, to have any one of those skills would be nice, I’d love to be a designer and programmer, but I know I’ll never make it (well, maybe if I really had nothing else in the world to do I might try my hand at programming again).
Posted by peter on April 11, 2008 | No Comments
Yesterday, I talked about the need for taking action to make money from internet marketing, today I want to look in more general terms what the key ingredients are for success as an internet marketer or an online entreprenuer.
I feel that these skills are absolutely essential, you can’t have one or two, you need the whole kaboodle. If you don’t have all of them, you either need to learn them by routine and practice, find someone who complements your own skills and form a partnership (strictly business, of course!) or go back to your day job…but the last option sucks, so don’t do it!
So, let’s have a look at what I think the key skills are…
- Action
Yeah, pretty obvious, I know. I talked about it yesterday, but it’s so important I listed it as number one. You can read all the ebooks in the world, watch all the videos in the world and attend all the internet marketing conferences in the world, but if the knowledge that you learn just stays in your head, you might as well not bother.
Next time you read an ebook or buy a course, promise yourself that you will spend a minimum of 1-2 months trying out the stuff that they are teaching. If it gives a new great way of getting loads of traffic, try it, find out if it works for you.
- Passion
This is a big one. I was going to write motivation, but that’s not as strong as passion. If you are passionate about internet marketing, or making money online, it should be with you 24 hours a day from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed.
You should be eager to learn, but you must take the action to put the theory in to practice. You have to do this because you absolutely love it, given a choice, you’ll chat for ages with anyone that cares to listen.
- Perseverance
When you start doing your own projects, I’ll tell you now, the devil is in the detail. Trying to write that 120 page ebook? That’s the easy part. The final 20% of your project will take 80% of your time as you work with the details.
If you can overcome the resistance that builds up throughout a project and see it all the way through to completion and launch, you will be achieving more than most marketers can hope for.
- To Know When Your Product Is Ready
There are too many people that are perfectionists. Worse, there are even more people that just don’t seem to care about throwing out crap products. You need to aim for some where in between. The problem with being a perfectionist is that you’ll never think your product is ready. I know people that have been developing products for over two years and it’s yet to see the light of day.
Know when your product reaches the ‘good enough’ stage, and take it to launch, remember, 80% of the people will never read or watch your ebook/video, and the other 19.9% won’t take any action. It’s only 0.1% that you need to worry about - a much easier percentage to handle!
- Dedication
This is in relation to once you have made sales, or got traffic to your site through your action, passion and perseverance, you need to be dedicated to your customers. This means that emailing your list frequently, although a chore, a hassle, a pain and having a big resistance to doing it, it has to be done.
Only by your dedication can you take your business to the next level. Email marketing plays a big part of that, so if you suck at keeping in constant contact with your list, your business income will probably suck.
Have I missed off any important skills? If so, let me know!
Tomorrow I’ll see about writing about what skills you probably think you need, but you really don’t!
Cheers,
Peter
Posted by peter on April 10, 2008 | 1 Comment
People outside the internet marketing industry will often laugh or criticise various IM products and their claims with something along the lines of “if they can really make that much money, they would be spending their time doing it, not trying to sell you products that will let you copy them”.
I completely disagree with the above sentence. People are making big money everyday in internet marketing, and they can completely share their secrets and you know what? Very few people will take action on that information.
If the biggest names in internet marketing, lets say the top 10, based on revenue, got together and created an incredible product with videos, audios, interviews, step-by-step plans, blueprints, the full works, and then if they gave that product away for free to anyone who wanted it, do you know what will happen?
In 99.9% of cases a person will get it, probably go through some of the material, some may even go through most of the course, but only 0.01% will actually take any action.
That is why the internet marketing industry survives and continues to grow. That is why the guru’s can afford to tell you all their secrets for your $97, they know that you probably won’t take any action.
If you’ve been in the internet marketing industry for more than 6 months I can guarantee that you have at least one ebook on your hard drive that could make you a fortune, hell, even if you’ve never bought an ebook in your life, if you head over to www.ezinearticles.com there are thousands of articles that you can read to find out how to make money.
Trust me on this, if people take action instead of reading/listening/watching they’ll be 100x more successful.
Have you recently purchased an ebook that promised you that you could make thousands? Did you actually take any action?
Posted by peter on April 9, 2008 | 3 Comments
I was wondering about something the other day, and that was “Why can’t we all just be friends?”, or more specifically, why can’t we join together and help one another succeed, not just on a forum sharing comments, but really work together.
You might be someone that doesn’t have the resources to get fancy graphics, or you might be someone who doesn’t speak English well enough to write a good salesletter…why are people like this not getting together and helping one another?
The concept that I had in the back of my mind is fairly simple…
Get a group of people, internet marketers to be precise, that are struggling to make money either through lack or resources, lack of education or a mind set that says ‘I can’t do that because of this’.
Maybe have around 4-5 people in the group and one person who has the time resources to act as the project manager. Ideally the group would be compromised of a group of people with complementary skills, ie. copywriter, graphics, jv (people person) skills, email marketing, affiliate manager, the money man etc.
These groups of people interact with one another and create a framework:
- What theme a product is going to be created on
- What format the product is going to be delivered in (ebook, audio, video etc)
- The name of the product
- The features of the product to make it unique
- Whether to create and upsell and downsell
- Whether to outsource the work or create it within the group
- The road map to launch (what work needs to be done and by when)
- Creating the buzz about the product
- Identifying and contacting potential JV partners
- Which account the payment goes to and what payment processor to use
- Affiliate system
- The email marketing followup series
There’s probably a whole lot more that I have missed, but I’m writing this off the top of my head.
So, how about a website that is specifically designed for internet marketers looking to collaborate on projects? So you might not have the confidence to go it alone or the experience, or you are putting off doing a task because it seems like too much of a big chore.
Like I said, it’s just a post musing about how we can help one another.
Posted by peter on April 7, 2008 | 2 Comments
I first need to start this post by saying I respect Jonathan Leger and listen to what he has to say, I think he’s one of the few people in the industry that cares about the success of others, and this is more than obvious in his blog where he posts tonnes of free information.
However, with that said, I also consider myself to be a straight up marketer and will give my opinion on things that I think are bad as well as good.
Now, Jon has launched a new product called Instant Article Wizard Pro 2.0 which promises to take the pain out of writing articles yourself. and I will tell you now, from the videos I have seen, it’s really true, it does make article creation a snap.
Sidenote: Just incase you are not clear, I have not purchased this software for reasons laid out below.
I’m all for tools that make menial things more exciting or easier to manage, but I’m also for ethical marketing, and in my opinion Jon’s new software blurs the line between ethical and unethical.
You see, the software has a huge database of pre-written articles - articles written by other people which they are using to market their own products and services.
The software scans the articles based on the keywords you enter and builds articles by taking sentences from related articles. Don’t get me wrong, the way it does this to create good readable content is amazing and hats go off to the programmer, but is it really ethical to use content from other peoples articles to automatically build your own articles?
Update: Thanks, Jonathan for pointing out to me that the results are pulled from search results, not from articles.
There’s nothing wrong with getting a collection of articles written by other people on a subject you want to write about and re-working different parts from the collection you have made. But there are ethical issues with simply using entire sentences in an unmodified form.
Legally I think you are OK if you use this software, as copyright laws don’t apply if you use only a small percentage of someone elses work (but even then it’s considered good form to reference or cite the source you have used). From what I can see, there’s no opportunity to reference or cite your sources.
So in effect, you are creating articles by ’stealing’ other peoples content - even though it’s legal in the eyes of the law, can it ever be considered ethical?
Disclaimer: This opinion is based on the video tutorials provided on the Instant Article Wizard Pro 2.0 website, I will retract my comments if anything I have stated as fact is incorrect.