We’re back with another great episode of Affiliate Marketing Today for your listening pleasure! In this episode, Dush and I interview Mark McRae, a successful ClickBank vendor in the foreign exchange niche.
Mark recently had an extraordinarily successful launch of his new product, Forex Master Method, and he shares with us some great tips on planning and executing a successful launch, selling higher-priced “premium” products, working with physical products, and delivering a fantastic customer experience that keeps customers coming back for more. Mark even gives tips for affiliates on how to successfully promote these kinds of products and earn big profits!
Whether you’re a vendor or an affiliate, Mark’s advice is useful for anyone who wants to take their Internet marketing game to a higher level and stand out from the competition.
Recently we’ve received a few client questions about issues affecting our industry, such as the FTC’s recent case against Ivy Capital and other “work from home” business opportunities. Specifically, some of you wanted to know how these issues might affect ClickBank vendors, and what we’re doing to address them.
First, please know that ClickBank appreciates the hard work and skill that our vendors put into developing quality products and effective sales messaging that appeals to customers. We want to do everything we can to support your efforts and ensure your products convert as well as possible, while also protecting you from the possibility of getting on the wrong side of the FTC.
We wanted to share some of the most important guidelines to keep in mind when creating your Pitch Page, upsells and other sales material. To ensure that ClickBank vendors stay in good standing with the FTC, we will apply these guidelines when approving new products and working with existing vendors.
Most importantly, please do not significantly alter your Pitch Page after approval. We recognize that some changes are necessary for testing, but if you need to make significant changes to your page (such as earnings claims or images, sales messaging or video content), please notify our Product Approval team so we can ensure the new page is also in compliance.
For Internet Marketing products: Per the new FTC information, sales material shouldn’t create the impression that customers can easily earn money without putting in much work, and should give specific ideas of how they’ll earn the money (e.g., content marketing, video marketing, social media, etc). Sales pages should also not overstate how much can realistically be made, or imply that earnings are guaranteed.
The FTC also strongly discourages false urgency/scarcity messaging (for example, “Only 3 copies left!”) when there is no actual scarcity. Closing the doors to new customers after a specified amount of time and reopening later is fine.
Any Pitch Page references to ClickBank sales stats need to be verifiable by ClickBank, and need to have been earned by the methods being promoted. For example, selling an affiliate training product using sales snapshots from a vendor-only account is not allowed.
For vendors using video Pitch Pages, if a Buy Now button appears during the course of the video, the price must appear as well. We also request that vendors provide transcripts of video sales letters when submitting a product for approval.
For upsells, the initial product purchased must be valuable and usable on its own, without requiring the purchase of the upsell offers. Customers must also be able to immediately access their original purchase upon completion of their order, before being presented with upsell offers. An access link may be placed on the first upsell offer page, but the link must be very clear and conspicuous (i.e., not hidden or in a small font). We highly recommend that vendors use ClickBank’s official upsell flows to present upsell offers to customers.
Please submit product approval requests at least several days before your launch, so that ClickBank has time to thoroughly review the offer and request changes if necessary. This is especially the case for products with video sales letters, since making changes to these can take time. We may not be able to accommodate last-minute requests.
To prevent customer complaints, vendors should not close refund request tickets or switch tickets from Refund to Tech Support more than once, and the latter should only be used when actually trying to help the customer and save the sale.
We hope this list helps make our guidelines clear. If you have questions about any of these items, please feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to discuss them with you.
We also want to reinforce that our mission is to make you successful, while at the same time ensuring our industry is on a strong foundation that will last long into the future. Thank you for your valuable work, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with you!
Before you begin building your website or hiring freelancers, you need to decide what your niche or subject matter will be. I would suggest selecting a niche that you are familiar with, enjoy, and that has a definite demand for continuous content.
The worst thing is to be three months into the project and realize the niche puts you to sleep. You need something that is exciting for you!
I decided to choose the mother of all niches, weight loss. I guess it’s fair to say I like a good challenge, but you have to manage your expectations and figure out what is realistic when it comes to achieving your goals, and how much effort and investment you are willing to put in.
Your content should always solve problems and answer questions that users are likely to be searching for in the various search engines. Doing plenty of keyword research is necessary so you can target long tail keywords and avoid hard-to-rank-for terms like “how to lose weight” or “lose weight fast.” As a new affiliate marketer you have to be realistic with what you can achieve. But the long term goal is one of residual revenue and an online property you can eventually sell to reap the benefits of all of your (and/or your outsourcers’) hard work!
For example, a recent article I posted is on how to make your body burn more calories, which is obviously a topic with significant search volume. Once searchers find it, strategically placed affiliate ads will take users to a weight loss or diet supplement website. See how that works? Find a market you can corner that’s not over-saturated with competition and you can start building from there.
Content Needs
The days of content farms are drawing to a close, with even EzineArticles.com losing over 30% of its traffic due to a recent update to Google’s search algorithm.
The path to the future is clear—create an authentic site with quality content and a positive user experience. Otherwise, your organic ranking days could be numbered!
Once you’ve chosen what your website will be about, it’s time to start generating some excellent content. The keys to improving the flow of traffic to your website are quality content and genuine inbound links (link farms are also on the swift decline).
Setting your website up as an authority on a particular topic ranging from auto repairs to weight loss, using unique, quality content that is well-written, will help ensure your content drives the “right” kind of customers to the websites you promote.
The goal is to get people to your site and then on to the vendor’s site, and that requires helpful information that’s related to the vendor’s content. If you’re not a writer, or if you simply don’t have time to create content for an entire website, utilize the services of a freelance writer. These services can be found at sites like Elance, where I’ve found some of the best business partners around. Try to find someone that is already familiar with your niche, who has a basic understanding of search engine optimization and who can freely post quality content onto your site without you having to.
A professional with these skills will be able to provide you with high quality content that’s sure to bring visitors to your website. Without good content that keeps readers coming back, your affiliate links and promotions may not generate any additional income.
When you choose keywords to optimize for, make sure to choose phrases that are relevant to your subject matter and related to your vendor’s subject. You should also make sure to use phrases that would actually be searched for in search engines. For example, instead of ‘how to lose weight with oolong tea,’ which is too wordy, optimize your keyword text to read ‘oolong tea health benefits‘ and create a page title around that phrase.
Posting Frequency
An important factor in building a reputable site for affiliate marketing is posting fresh content to your site often. You want your site to become an authority on a subject, which means you want readers to check in with your website often for new content. By posting content at regular intervals, your readers know when to come for new information. Think of your website like a television show—you want readers to know when to come back for the next episode.
An authoritative website has many pages of content, which you will build up over time. This can’t be done in a few days. Give your website an edge by having a large amount of content ready for posting when your website goes live, and then continue to post high quality content regularly.
Networking
In addition to paying for the services of a freelance writer, you immediately want to begin networking with other bloggers. Bloggers with similar content may be able to act as ‘guest’ writers on your blog and you can do the same for their website.
[NOTE: If anyone is looking to exchange guest posts with us, just send a message via the contact form on our site].
By acting as a guest writer on another blog, it builds your reputation, and your website’s, as an authority on a particular subject. It tells your readers that you’re not just trying to make money, but you actually know what you’re talking about too. And those back links you get by guest posting will also help give your website’s rating a boost.
Inadvertent networking is another great way to boost your ranking in search engines. By creating high quality content that provides helpful information, other bloggers will link to your website as a credible resource, which will also improve your search engine ranking. This is why enjoying your niche is important, since it will make it easier for you to keep pushing out great content and chatting with new people in the industry.
Starting an authoritative website is fairly easy, and with the right tools you can be up and running in no time. Find your niche, stockpile your content for frequent updates, build your website and start linking! It’s easier than you think, and who doesn’t need another avenue to earn income these days?
Good luck!
About the Authors
Michael Cecchin in a successful Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur, and professional J-O-B escapee based in Toronto. Michael owns a number of online properties in the diet and fitness niche and is currently exploring opportunities in other niches. He has been working full-time online for the past 2 years and claims the terrifying memory of cubicle life is what keeps him motivated to continually expand his online business and live the dream.
Alex Miller is an affiliate and SEO superstar, originally from the UK and currently living in Orlando, Florida. Alex started as an affiliate in the Forex and fitness niche while building his SEO credentials. His main projects are now in the SEO niche, helping other business owners improve their site rankings through white hat tricks and tactics unavailable to mortal men.
ClickBank prides itself on timely payments, and we want to make sure you are well aware of how best to manage your payments. Here are a few details to keep in mind:
Question: What is a Payment Change Deadline? Answer: A Payment Change Deadline is the time by which all payment changes must be made. Specifically, after a payment period ends, all payment-related changes must be made by the following Tuesday. For example, if the period ends on 4-13-2011, then all changes must be made by 4-19-2011. The payment is then sent a week later, on 4-27-2011.
Question: What changes does this include? Answer: Everything payment related!
This includes:
Payee name
Address
Payment method
Payment threshold amount
Payment frequency
Banking information change
Question: What if I receive electronic payments from ClickBank? Answer: If you receive an electronic payment from ClickBank, ANY change to your banking information must be done and confirmed a full week before the payment is sent. Changes made later than this will not take effect until the next payment. To keep our system secure and protect your account, we can make no exceptions to these deadlines.
Question: What if I want to change my payment details the day before my payment is sent? Answer: Sorry, you can’t change your banking details the day before payment is sent and have the payment be sent using the new information. Any change must be done a week prior to payout.
We’re back with a new episode of Affiliate Marketing Today. In this episode, I talk with Internet marketing veteran and membership site expert Ryan Lee on how he’s managed to build multiple 7-figure membership-based businesses, and how it’s not nearly as hard as you think to create and maintain a membership site or continuity program.
We also cover important tips like how to get people to sign up for your program in the first place, and how it’s possible to create a very successful business by creating inexpensive membership programs (we’re talking less than $5 per month).
If you’re interested in finding out more about these inexpensive membership sites and how you can easily create them yourself, check out Ryan’s new program Nano Continuity.
ClickBank tells us they have over 100,000 affiliates, but these are only the active ones.
The number of INACTIVE affiliates is far, far higher.
And do you know the main reason why these affiliates fail? For many, it’s because they think that affiliate marketing simply involves putting their link on a traffic site or in a free ad.
The reality is that if you just use an affiliate link you are very limited in your ability to get traffic from the major sources:
You can’t use Google AdWords and most other PPC services
SEO (search engine optimization) is not possible
Article marketing is restricted. Most services ban affiliate links.
Forum marketing is restricted. Most forums ban affiliate links.
The truth is that there is one thing you MUST have.
It’s a proper PRESELL page.
That’s a page where you offer a review or recommendation for the product you are promoting. Something that entices the visitor to read on and click through as you explain, for example, the benefits of the product, how it worked for you, what the results were, and so on.
But the problem is that you need to put the presell page somewhere. Typically, this is on a hosted site.
So why doesn’t every ClickBank affiliate have a site ?
Because it involves (they believe):
the high cost of hosting
the technicalities of setting up a site
the need to understand HTML
advanced SEO techniques to attract traffic
No wonder they shy away from using the one strategy which outranks all others – and consequently look on helpless as their ClickBank account doesn’t make money.
But it need not be like this.
Think ‘Blog’.
If you don’t want to get involved in creating web pages there’s a wonderful alternative. A blog.
Putting a presell page on a blog is simply a matter of writing the content of a blog post then pressing the publish button. Then seeing it automatically picked up by the search engines thanks to the in-built blog pinging services.
In addition, simple low-cost hosting is sufficient for a blog, as you don’t need advanced features.
The other great advantages of a presell page are:
you can provide a tempting bonus for the customer to claim after the sale
you can capture email addresses and build a list
you can add tracking links in addition to those provided by ClickBank
you can switch easily to a complementary affiliate program, if necessary, without affecting existing promotions
In summary, if you want to succeed as an active ClickBank affiliate, the small effort and expense to set up a blog and presell page will reward you a hundred times over.
About the Author
Harvey Segal runs the ClickBank Success Forum where over 14,000 members enjoy free advice for all their ClickBank questions and effective solutions for blog hosting and development.
ClickBank tells us they have over 100,000 affiliates, but these are only the active ones.
The number of INACTIVE affiliates is far, far higher.
And do you know the main reason why these affiliates fail? For many, it’s because they think that affiliate marketing simply involves putting their link on a traffic site or in a free ad.
The reality is that if you just use an affiliate link you are very limited in your ability to get traffic from the major sources:
You can’t use Google AdWords and most other PPC services
SEO (search engine optimization) is not possible
Article marketing is restricted. Most services ban affiliate links.
Forum marketing is restricted. Most forums ban affiliate links.
The truth is that there is one thing you MUST have.
It’s a proper PRESELL page.
That’s a page where you offer a review or recommendation for the product you are promoting. Something that entices the visitor to read on and click through as you explain, for example, the benefits of the product, how it worked for you, what the results were, and so on.
But the problem is that you need to put the presell page somewhere. Typically, this is on a hosted site.
So why doesn’t every ClickBank affiliate have a site ?
Because it involves (they believe):
the high cost of hosting
the technicalities of setting up a site
the need to understand HTML
advanced SEO techniques to attract traffic
No wonder they shy away from using the one strategy which outranks all others – and consequently look on helpless as their ClickBank account doesn’t make money.
But it need not be like this.
Think ‘Blog’.
If you don’t want to get involved in creating web pages there’s a wonderful alternative. A blog.
Putting a presell page on a blog is simply a matter of writing the content of a blog post then pressing the publish button. Then seeing it automatically picked up by the search engines thanks to the in-built blog pinging services.
In addition, simple low-cost hosting is sufficient for a blog, as you don’t need advanced features.
The other great advantages of a presell page are:
you can provide a tempting bonus for the customer to claim after the sale
you can capture email addresses and build a list
you can add tracking links in addition to those provided by ClickBank
you can switch easily to a complementary affiliate program, if necessary, without affecting existing promotions
In summary, if you want to succeed as an active ClickBank affiliate, the small effort and expense to set up a blog and presell page will reward you a hundred times over.
About the Author
Harvey Segal runs the ClickBank Success Forum where over 14,000 members enjoy free advice for all their ClickBank questions and effective solutions for blog hosting and development.
Last year, Adam Horwitz released a product called Mobile Monopoly that took the Internet marketing world by storm. One of the main reasons it was so popular is that it taught affiliates and vendors how to quickly get involved in mobile marketing, which everyone recognizes as a huge opportunity but not many people could understand how to take advantage of.
Even though Mobile Monopoly is now almost a year old, the marketing opportunities it covered are still relatively untapped and uncompetitive. Since we get asked how people can get into mobile marketing all the time, we asked Adam to put together a quick video covering some of the most common ways that Internet marketers are taking advantage of mobile marketing to grow their own businesses and make money promoting others’.
Near the end of the video, Adam talks about a new product he’s creating called Local Mobile Monopoly, where he teaches how to get local businesses to pay you to drive traffic to them. If you’re interested in getting Adam’s free training on how to get started with local marketing and get in while the market is still young, just click the link below.
Get Adam’s Free Local Mobile Marketing Training!
We’re back with a new episode of Affiliate Marketing Today, and in this episode Dush and I interview Melford and Concetta Bibens. They’re one of the few husband & wife teams in the world of Internet marketing, and have been able to create several successful online businesses together. In this show, they discuss how they got started, how they work together as a team, and how to approach Internet marketing with the attitude and mindset you need to be successful.
Also, if you’re interested in learning more about Melford and Concetta’s system for long-term success as an affiliate marketer, take a look at their site Ultimate Cash Blueprint.
One of the biggest lessons I learned in my Internet marketing career is understanding how to find people online that are ready and willing to buy! Once I worked out how to do this, my Internet marketing efforts really started to take off. In this post I’m going to share with you some tips to help you master this vital online marketing concept.
Finding the Buyers
Keyword data is the biggest factor that distinguishes online marketing from the offline world. Before the days of Google and keyword data, businesses relied heavily on market research companies to provide insight into the mind of the consumer.
These days we can simply analyze the keywords they type into Google and base a lot of our decisions on this. You might think this is obvious, however you would be amazed at how many people fail to grasp this.
Commercial Intent
This leads me onto my next point; ‘Commercial Intent’. This is simply judging how likely a person is to buy, based on the keywords they use in their search.
Ideally, you want to be driving traffic to your sites on keywords with high commercial intent, as these keywords will convert at much higher rates than more general, information-seeking keywords.
Example Searcher
Let’s look at an example to demonstrate this point more clearly. If a person types “acne” into Google, I would consider this to be a low commercial intent keyword, the reason being that we can’t tell what their intention is at this stage. They may just want to learn about acne and how many people have it, or the main causes of acne. These searches are known as “information seeking keywords,” and they’re not likely to result in high conversions to sales for you.
However, let’s say that the person who typed “acne” into Google did in fact have bad acne and needed a cure. The next thing he/she might do, after they browsed some websites about acne, is head back to Google and refine the search a bit more.
They might start researching the kind of acne they have, and type into Google “Types of Acne.” This is not a buyer keyword, but it may reveal to the searcher that they have a type of acne known as cystic acne.
So they might now type into Google “cystic acne treatment” and read some more webpages about possible acne treatments that you can use. At this stage, the commercial intent of the keyword has increased, and the conversions to sales also increase with it. We know exactly what the searcher’s problem is and that they are looking for a solution for it.
You can take this even further by getting very specific, and get extremely high commercial intent with keywords like “buy cystic acne treatment.” When you see the word “buy” in the search phrase, the searcher is blatantly telling you that they are ready to buy.
Conversions & Profits
Essentially, the higher the commercial intent, the higher the conversion rate for keywords and the more profit you will make. Therefore, it is important to build your websites on keywords that have a high amount of commercial intent.
What you must keep in mind, though, are the traffic stats for a keyword. It’s all well and good to be targeting a super-high commercial intent keyword, but if no one is searching for it, then you won’t make a penny.
When I look at keyword figures I usually aim for no less than 500 exact match searches a month in the local market I am targeting. I then start with half a dozen keywords and build my sites from there, with the intention to grow the list of keywords I’m targeting out over time.
Also, I will often target lower search volume buyer keywords as my secondary keywords for a page. For example, if my primary keyword for a page is “cystic acne treatment” I might target “buy cystic acne treatment” as a secondary phrase to collect that extra bit of buyer traffic to that page.
Although there are several more steps to creating profitable affiliate sites, building on a solid foundation of buyer keywords is the most important thing to get right.
About the Author
Matt Carter is a full-time Internet marketer based in Australia. His main focus online is building affiliate sites and doing search engine optimization. To learn more about Matt and his free video training, please visit Matt’s Affiliate Marketing Blog.
