Colin answered my previous post and wanted to know how to get started, or rather how to find a niche to begin with.

Now there are numerous ways to go about this, but in this post I’ll talk about how I do this with Amazon products (since they are my favourite affiliate program).

Now while sometimes I’ll get ideas for products to promote by watching tv or reading magazines, usually my first step is to head over to amazon.com and look at their bestseller lists. They have them in nearly every department, and often you can drill down quite well too.

So for example, here is the bestseller list for Air Purifiers (Home & Garden, Vacuums, Air Purifiers). I just chose that list totally at random as it sounded cool (and let it be known that I know nothing about air purifiers LOL). http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/home-garden/267554011/ref=pd_ts_hg_nav (not an aff link).

As you can see, there are lots of different types of air purifiers to choose from, so the next thing I usually do is pick one at random. I usually like to pick something that has been in the top 100 for more than 60 days, have at least 10 customer reviews, and a four or more star rating.

Just from a quick glance, the Honeywell Air Purifiers seem very popular (lots of reviews), are a good price (so your commission will be decent) and have been around awhile (most of them more than 900 days in the top 100).

So I’d probably pick one of them (again at random) and write a unique hubpage around it.

Don’t worry too much about how much the item costs, many people will tell you to choose only products that are high priced, but I’ve promoted things as low as $10 before and still made good money (because I can sell more, and people always put more stuff in their carts at Amazon).

Then I’d repeat that for 9 other products (all in totally different categories and lists – so your next one might be a baby product, and other might be a garden chair etc) and write hubs around those too until I have 10 new hubs written.

With my hubpages, I’ll write a 300-400 unique post usually review style just talking about the product. I often will read customer reviews and reword this when writing my hub. Add a picture of the product top left and underneath it place your affiliate link directly to Amazon in a link capsule. Also in the first paragraph of the article, as a text link, I’ll also place a link to the product on Amazon. (You are only allowed two links – so keep it as one in the first para of the article, and the other under the picture in a link capsule).

At the end of the article I’ll also place a hubpage Amazon capsule too (you only get revenue share with hubpages with the capsule, so don’t put it at the top).

Once you’ve done all 10, sit back and wait a week.

At the end of one week you need to identify which hub got the most views, was ranked the highest and (fingers crossed) made you some sales. (Although to be realistic, most hubs don’t start earning until after a month or two).

Once you’ve identified your best item, this is what you are going to build a site around. Buy a generic domain name and get some hosting. I like using wordpress blogs, but you can use static hmtl sites too – makes absolutely no difference in ranking in my experience.

Let’s say your best performing product was about a lawnmower. Don’t think mini site, think authority site, with lots of different reviews and articles about lawnmowers. So perhaps you want to buy lawnmowerblog.com (no idea if it’s available). Try and get your main generic keyword in there if you can (it’ll be hard to get exact match so be creative – toplawnmowerreviews.com, thelawnmowerwebsite.com, ilovelawnmowers.com – you get the idea).

For the next 30 days write one post/review to your blog every day, and write one article to submit to ezinearticles.com (you can also add the eza article to your blog as well if you like).

Within a month you’ll be earning some sweet sweet cash. Most of your traffic at this time will be coming from ezinearticles, but over time your backlinks will build up too and you’ll get google traffic as well.

Oh and don’t forget to add a link to your new blog from that old hubpage as well. Once your site is established, then you can go and get some more backlinks for it if you like. Or you can repeat the above steps with a new site.

Hope that’s helped!

Tracey

After a comment by James a few days ago about what he recommended that I would tell a newb about earning money online I haven’t been able to get the question out of my head.

At the time I just answered with the typical – focus on one thing, take action – answer (which I still believe to be true), but is this really enough for a someone new who doesn’t even know WHAT they want to focus on or HOW to take action.

Do I take it for granted that new players know enough of the basics to get started, or do I need to go back to grass roots here and hand hold them with keyword research, setting up a blog/hubpage, and ways to get backlinks and/or traffic?

I have a feeling that I (not deliberately mind you) leave out a lot of the puzzle when I tell people how to make money online.

So tell me… if you are a new marketer who hasn’t yet starting earning anything (or not much) online, what DO you need help with?

How would you like to make a quick $700?

Well, I thought I’d help you get there by providing some simple steps on how you can do it. I mean we can all use some extra cash can’t we?

And by the way, there is no reason that you can’t scale this up to make much more than that, but I wanted to be conservative so I think a target of $700 by using this method I’m about to share is achievable.

For this to work we’ll be promoting a ClickBank product called Info Product Killer (IPK). The reason I’ve chosen this product is because it pays a commission of $70 per sale and it was hands down one of the best products I’ve ever purchased online (which you’d already know if you read this blog). (If you’d like to purchase it yourself you can do so here – although that’s not the purpose of this post – This post is all about helping YOU to make money). So to reach $700 you’ll need to make 10 sales of this.

This product converts at around 5%, which means to make 10 sales you’ve got get around 200 people to look at the offer. And I’m betting most of you already have a mailing list of more than 200 (or know how to get lots of eyes on this offer through SEO).

Sound achievable?

Awesome.

Of course I must let you know that I didn’t write/produce IPK and I’ve never met the author (although I have emailed him a few times and he seems really nice). I just really love the product, and you can’t beat that commission! $70 a sale – that’s good money.

So how do you get started?

First, register to become an affiliate for IPK. Head over to this affiliate sign up page and enter your details (for tracking your sales).  THIS IS IMPORTANT.

The product launches on July 13th and it’s only going to be live for 2 days so you’ve only got a little bit of time.

Craig Kaye (the author) has provided some pre-written emails that you can send out, starting a few days before and leading up to the launch day.

You can use these or write your own. (I prefer to write my own).

From now until then you can work at building your mailing list or you can just set up your autoresponder ahead of time.

Easy peasy.

I’ll be doing the same. In fact if you are on my mailing list, then expect to see some promo emails from me on this one. I am an affiliate after all

Good luck to everyone, and here’s to an extra $700 (or more) in your pocket.

UPDATE – Promoting Info Product Killer 2010 without a List

I’ve got quite a few people that said they would like to promote Info Product Killer 2010 but don’t have a list – is it still possible to make money? (Oh and by the way this method will work with any Clickbank Product)

Well yes it is. But it’s going to be hard work – are you ready?

Now since a lot of big name marketers are going to be promoting this, that means that lots of people are going to be searching online for reviews and information about it once they first hear about it.

That means you are going to have to make a blog post or article with words like

Info Product Killer Review
Info Product Killer 2010 Review
What’s in IPK 2010?
IPK Scam
IPK Case Study
IPK Bonuses (if you plan to offer bonuses)

And so on.

You can add this to your existing blog, hubpage, squidoo lens etc or you can make a new page or blog.

I probably wouldn’t bother writing an article for Ezinearticles at this stage since IPK is only going to be live for a few days and EA might take too long to approve your article, so use places where your article or blog post will go live immediately.

I’ll be using my already existing Info Product Killer Review site.

Remember, if you want to promote this you need to go to http://www.infoproductkiller.com/jv/859358/ and place your details in the ‘stay in the loop’ box so you can get all the latest info and get your sales tracked.

You’ll make $81 a sale.

Craig has also added some banners on the site too which you can put on your website.

Here’s to a successful campaign!

I’m going to start my Article Marketing Lifeline review with the sales page again, because this is where most people start when deciding if they are going to purchase a product or not. Plus I really get a kick out of the outlandish claims that some sales pages make when trying to sell their product.

At first glance it’s pretty much your standard sales page with the red headline benefit at the top (which in this case reads more like a good article title than a sales headline) and goes on to tell us the benefits of the product with a few testimonials thrown in and finally the big ‘click me to order’ button at the bottom. This page has three such buttons.

Now usually I read a page like this by looking at the headline first, then scrolling right to the bottom to see how much the product is before I actually read the page.

This is not a bargain product. It’s quite a substantial price at $67. (And call me cynical but why do internet marketer’s always have a higher price crossed out and then put the real price?)

Ok. So if I’m going to shell out that amount of money I’m going to want to see some real value, so next I usually see what exactly I’m going to get for my money.

Tim is offering a large bundle of article marketing resources that he has written or recorded himself (so no crappy PLR thankfully).

The first is his article marketing answers book, then his article marketing domination report, a video presentation of his 2008 System Seminar talk (and some extra bonus vids), a monthly report that will contain strategies and tips on article marketing and finally a special email address so that you can ask him any questions you like about article marketing.

He also offer’s three bonuses which are all reports: 15 Lessons Learned from 1500 article submissions, 6 figures from Adsense and an Article Marketing Mindmap.

So all in all – a massive amount of products.

I need to say that I already had his 6 figures from Adsense report (and it is excellent) which I got some months back (I can’t even remember from where).

I also like to read Tim Gorman’s posts on the Warriorforum because he gives away some really good writing and marketing tips from time to time.

But I don’t know him personally. And he certainly doesn’t have a clue who I am.

Well next post I’ll start to delve into the actual products (without giving away his secrets of course) so that you can get a better idea about what to expect if you purchase Article Marketing Lifeline.

Jump to the review about:

Bonus Report #1 – Lessons Learned from 1500 Article Submissions
Bonuses #2 & #3 – 6 Figures from Adsense and Mindmap

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