I’ve had quite a good week in terms of getting things done but surprisingly I haven’t made one ClickBank sale as an affiliate. Not one!

I think perhaps this week I need to spend a bit of time increasing the ranking and amount of pages that I have out there. The more pages you have, the better chances you have of making some sales.

Autoblogging Update

I told you last week that I was trying out Instant Blog Submitter to test autoblogging on one of my old domains. Well the program up and stopped working on me last Tuesday. It keep coming up with an error about sockets or something. (I don’t know – I’m so untechnical).

I was still keen on the idea of autoblogging though, so I’ve downloaded a free wordpress plugin called wp-o-matic. That does all of the stuff I was using Instant Blog Submitter for (pulling rss feeds and publishing them to my blog) but it’s free. Can’t do better than free I say.

So far I’ve got 81 posts on the site – and I haven’t written one myself. Google has indexed about half of them. I’ve only had 4 search engine visitors so far though. Once I get to about 10 per day then I’ll add some eBay monetisation.

Just a note. If you want to try this I suggest that you DO NOT put adsense on your sites to monetize. It creates kind of junky posts and some don’t make much sense. Use either clickbank, ebay or amazon (depending on your niche).

I also suggest adding some youtube video’s and articles (grab them from ezinearticles keeping the resource box intact) so you get even more content.

Making Money Online with Amazon

I had quite a few people want to know more about making money with Amazon so I thought I’d let you know exactly what I do. This method can be applied to clickbank, cpa or anything really. I should really write an ebook and charge you all $27 for it – and if I was a good internet marketer that’s probably what I’d do, but you know what, I don’t care about that anymore and I really don’t have the time.

Anyway the biggest trick for making money with Amazon is to target actual product names. This way you’ll get people at the end of the buying cycle who are looking to buy with credit card in hand. Don’t bother yourself trying to find related long tail phrases, go right to the people who are ready to buy.

I usually head over to Amazon and check out their bestseller lists first, then look in Google Adwords to see how many searches they get. Finally I check out competition by using the intitle search parameter to see my competition. I usually do this for around 10 or so products and then set up hubpages or squidoo lens (I’m preferring hubs at the moment) around those products. If one product starts to make some good money then I’ll build a website around it to further capitalise on it.

Let’s take a look at this in more detail. I’ll take you through a process so you can follow along.

Let’s say that you want to target kids bicycles. Looking at Amazon’s bestselling products the top seller (as I write this) is a trike called Schwinn Roadster 12-Inch Trike. It’s a good price so you’ll earn a decent commission (although I rarely worry too much about price).

Heading over to Google Adwords Keyword Tool I plug in a few variations to find out the exact match searches for various phrases that people might use when searching for that item.

Make sure you have exact match selected in the match type drop down.

The results I get for this trike is:

schwinn roadster – 1,600
schwinn roadster 12 inch trike – 720
schwinn roadster trike – 590
schwinn roaster 12 inch – 36

Right now the top three look promising. I like them to have over 500 exact match searches – preferably over 1,000 though.

Now let’s look at the competition for the first three. I go to google and type in intitle:”keyword” to find competition. That’s just how I do it. You might have a different way.

Using this I find that I get the following number of competing pages:

schwinn roadster – 12,800
schwinn roadster 12 inch trike – 1,020
schwinn roadster trike – 163

I usually look for results under 1,000. I’d probably made an exception for the second one because it’s so close. The top phrase has too much competition – it’s unlikely to make you any money, but the bottom two are good candidates.

Next I’d create a hub or lens using that exact phrase in the title and probably a few extra times through the text too.

There you go. Easy! Now go and build yourself some pages.

JV Auction Profits Review

My former coaching teacher John Thornhill has just released a new ebook called JV Auction Profits and I was lucky enough to get a review copy from him. In his latest guide, he talks about how to use eBay to secure joint venture deals.

You can use his ideas whether you have a product or a list. He even gives help and advice if you have neither of these, and how you can still make money using this method.

He will give you his exact email that he uses to send to potential JV partners, what to say and how to set up the deal. The best part of the guide however is Chapter Nine in which John goes into detail about how he used this method to make $34,000 from one deal. The ebook is worth it just for this chapter!

It’s only a short little guide – 30 pages – but it’s got some really great information on making money this way. And the best thing is that John is only charging $10 for it. An excellent price for some good information.

Find out more …

My plans for this week

Well I’m going to concentrate on my adsense sites this week. I’m getting some good rankings for long tails, but I’d like to get my main keyphrases a bit higher in the search engines. I’ve written a few articles and I’ll also do some more backlinking from commenting and using Angela & Pauls links as well to get this higher if I can.

Phew, my fingers are starting to hurt. I think I’ll leave it there for now, but I’ll write more soon.

Take care
Tracey

The latest software that my friends have all jumped on is called Niche Devil and it is created by a well known hilarious internet marketer named Victor Franqui.

By the way, when I say friends that’s not completely true as most of them don’t have a clue who the heck I am, but I do devour their blogs every time they write a new post since they have so much good information about making money online.

I was first alerted to Niche Devil when my favourite marketer Griz posted it on his blog and since whenever Griz posts ANYTHING on his make money blog I’m there in a flash.

Then I went over and checked out the sales page and video’s that Vic had put up about his new software. The video shows how he creates a complete eBay affiliate store online within 36 seconds (or something crazy like that). Heck I can’t even login to HubPages within 36 seconds so that’s impressive.

Now on the face value of it, it seems a pretty neat little script and I can definitely see its potential. It’s kinda like BANS (Build a Niche Store) on steroids. The advantage it has over BANS is that it creates lots of content on the site rather than just eBay ads which should please the big G since they love content.

Believe me, I was tempted at first.

But here is the reason I’m not buying it.

It has nothing to do with the cost or whether it could make me money or not. And it has nothing to do whether I think it’s a good script or not – heck I have no idea, I’ve not actually used it – it could make you millions within a week for all I know.

No, the reason why I’m not buying Niche Devil is because I don’t have the time to commit to it. A program like this needs time to set up AT LEAST 100 websites – probably more. Another of my favourite marketer’s, Ben from Make Money with SEO plans on making 1,000 Niche Devil sites. Yes, 1,000 !! I know. Ben is a cyber robot from another planet – I’m sure of this.

I have no doubt he’ll make money. Just as I have no doubt that if you commit to 100+ sites you’ll probably make money as well.

But this isn’t for me right now. I’m too busy with other projects.

So if I’m not buying it, then what on earth is the point of this post – I haven’t even included any affiliate links to Niche Devil (I know – what sort of internet marketer am I?).

Well my main purpose of this post to let my regular readers know it’s ok not to jump on the latest guru product for whatever reason and that’s ok.
Just because you follow someone and admire their marketing strategies and even follow some of their ideas doesn’t mean you should try and become a clone of them. You should be trying out things yourself and learning as you go. Buy products if they make sense to you and your business plan, but skip them if you can’t find the time to commit to them (because most products or eBooks DO require action and commitment for them to be successful).

Like I said, I have no idea if Niche Devil is good or not, that’s not the point. I don’t have the time to commit to it in my current business plan so I’m not buying it. That’s it really.

Peace
Tracey

Last Christmas period (October to December) I made over $10,000 profit from the Amazon Affiliate Program. That was with just 10 small websites and very little work. Which is why I love being an Amazon affiliate it’s very easy to make money with.

A lot of people avoid using Amazon to make money online because of the small commission levels (why promote a $20 book for around $1 commission when you can promote a ClickBank product and make $40 per sale).

Of course I do promote both, Amazon and ClickBank, but I actually feel it’s far easier to make money promoting Amazon products simply because physical products are much more in demand than ebooks.

So let’s go over how I made so much money in such a short period of time. First of all, I used the techniques outlined in Info Product Killer (which is an awesome ebook) so they weren’t entirely my ideas, and at the time I did have an Adwords campaign running as well (although I only had a very small budget).

I only ran the Adwords campaign over Christmas and since then (in the last six months) I’ve still been making a consistent $500 to $800 per month commission from Amazon and I’ve barely touched any of the sites or promoted them in any way since then.

So how can you do the same? How can you make money as an Amazon affiliate?

First you will need an Amazon affiliate account (duh!), so if you haven’t already got one then head over and apply. They usually take up to a week to approve you so sit tight and be patient.

Once they approve you, you’ll be able to start promoting their products.

Some people will tell you to only choose high cost products like TV’s, but to be honest I’ll promote anything that’s hot – one of my best selling items this month was a $15 book. It may only pay me around $1 each time someone buys it, but I’m selling around 10 to 20 of these a day. It all adds up.

And of course, you also get an Amazon affiliate commission with anything else your customer decides to put into their shopping cart, so I often get credit for items I wasn’t even promoting!

Choosing A Product to Promote

The best and easiest way to choose a product to promote is to keep your eyes and ears open to hot trends. Anything that is being advertised on television is a perfect thing to promote online. I like to watch The View or Oprah to see what products or books the guests are flogging and create a website around that.

Or you can think seasonally, people buy coats and scarfs in Winter and pool supplies in Summer.

You can also take the easy option out and go right to Amazon itself and check out the bestselling items in each of their categories.

Once you have a list of potential items to promote then it’s time to do some keyword research. Ideally you are looking for something that has at least 1000 search per month and less than 250,000 competing sites. Keyword research only works if the product has been around for a while though, if it’s brand new (I like to promote new products because no-one else has jumped on them yet and you have virtually no competition) then your keyword research won’t help because there will be no stats available yet.

If you’d like to test a few products before you decide to build a website then start a free hub or blog and see what converts for you.

Next use the product name in your domain name (or hub name if you hubbing) only if the company allows it – some companies don’t care, other’s are very sensitive about it. That will give you the best search engine juice.

Write a review mentioning the product a few times and put a big picture on the page and of course links to buy the product at Amazon.

That’s how easy it is.

You should start to see some sales as soon as your websites / hubs get indexed and traffic.

Of course, if you serious about making money as an Amazon Affiliate I really recommend that you get Info Product Killer as well. It worked great for me.

So you’ve decided that you want to be an internet marketer – that’s great. But what product are you going to use to market online so you can earn an affiliate commission?

Choosing a product to promote can often be more difficult than you think because as marketers we have so much choice. Not only can we make money from promoting digital products such as eBooks and software, but also physical products from eBay or Amazon, or even your own product that you’ve written.

So I thought I’d take you through how I choose a product to promote.

Rarely do I choose the latest ClickBank Must Have Gonna Make You Rich eBook. I just don’t believe in most of them and I get sick of seeing the same old hype ‘no work required’ ‘make a million this week’ claims that in any other industry could get you sued.

Yes I know what you are going to say because I have a product on ClickBank myself, but I actually don’t recommend that product to newbies who email me because I think you do need a bit of internet marketing knowledge to really get the most out of using eBay classified ads.

In fact in the last six months, there is only one ClickBank product that I’ve purchased that I absolutely loved and that was Info Product Killer because it made me over $10,000 over Christmas last year and I plan on using the same strategies again this Christmas as well. (I kept a diary of my progress using IPK over at Info Product Killer Review – if you want to read about my results last Christmas).

Ok, so how do I choose a product to market?

It could be any number of ways. Sometimes I watch those late night infomercials to see what products they are marketing (they use the same principles that we do online – presell, customer testimonials, call to action).

Or I might be flicking through a magazine and notice a new product that catches my attention so I’ll do a search online to see if they have an affiliate program.

I also check Google Hot Trends, eBay Pulse and Amazon Best Sellers to see which products are hot at the moment as well.

Or sometimes I just set up a niche blog and write articles and slap up some Adsense and earn money that way.

Currently I’m growing my Adsense earnings as I learn more and more about SEO and plan on creating a lovely bit of passive income from it in the future.

With more and more people trying to make money online it’s hard to know what is real and what isn’t when it comes to online products and services. Even when you try and find a review for a product or eBook that you are considering buying most of the reviews that you’ll read are bogus reviews written by affiliates looking to cash in on a popular product. They’ve probably never even read or used the product that they are promoting so have no real knowledge of whether it’s a legit way to make money online.

One such item that many big ‘affiliates’ are promoting is called Site Build It (SBI) or SiteSell or something. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? To be honest I don’t know much about it apart from what appears on the sales page (which I’m not going to publish here because that isn’t the purpose of this post), but it doesn’t sound like something I’d ever be interested in.

It’s targeted to absolute beginners and claims to help you get started building your online empire with hosting, marketing and building your site for you for a modest fee of $300 (yikes!).

This brings me back to the purpose of this post. If perhaps you were new to online marketing and you tried and do a search on Site Build It Review you’d find hundreds of affiliates all trying to pimp the product with their so called reviews. By the way – that link there will take you to a review of a woman named Lis who thinks Site Build It is a scam and justifies her opinions very well.

She was so sick of all the fake reviews on Site Build It that she decided to write her opinion about it and, oh boy, what ensued was name calling and bashing left, right and center (read all the comments – they are hilarious).

Then of course I listened to Vic from Blogger Unleashed’s take on the whole debacle with a video that had me in stitches as he talks about the Site Build It Noobs and why they are not making any money (it does have graphic language so be prepared for that).

All this started from someone trying to write her own honest review about a product that many other affiliates are promoting.

An honest review of an online marketing product? Wow – what is our industry coming to? LOL