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Making the most of ClickBank, Click2Sell and other Affiliate Programs
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If you have ever bought a downloadable ebook or video package online, the chances are that when you arrive at the download page, you will see a number of “unannounced bonuses”. These are usually free products that are related to the item that you have just purchased. The whole concept of these bonuses is part of building a rapport with your customers. They buy a product from you and you get more than you bargained for. It makes you feel better about buying the product (if it was quite expensive, you might now feel justified in buying it because of all the extra content you have received).
Feeling good about something you have bought usually reflects on the vendor – you feel good about buying from that vendor. This in turn builds trust and you are more likely to buy from them again, knowing that they usually over-deliver.
Keeping up with The Joneses
Now let’s look at it from the vendor’s point of view, because if you’re running or starting a business, you become the vendor. You might be thinking it would be a good idea to include a number of unannounced bonuses with your products, and you’d be right – you also need to build a rapport with, and gain trust from your customers. Looking at it a little more cynically, you might fell obliged to include bonuses, just to keep up with the competition in the online world.Bonus Material
So now you need a source of bonus material. Perhaps you found it difficult enough to get your first product together, so you’re not looking forward to creating more. Well of course, you don’t have to – there’s plenty of MRR (Master Resale Rights) and PLR (Private Label Rights) material out there that you could use.
These are sometimes available for free, but the better-quality stuff needs to be purchased.
Now wouldn’t it be good if instead of paying for your bonus material, you got paid for it? Believe it or not, it IS possible.I recently bought a package that, like so many others, came with 5 unannounced bonuses. The first item on the list of bonuses was an ebook, which I simply downloaded from the vendor’s site. The other 4 items, however, were all affiliate links to other free products. Obviously, affiliates don’t make money from free products, but they do get a cut from the OTOs (One-Time-Offers) that are presented to the customers when they sign up.
So, if you are an affiliate for any free products that pay out on the OTO, or you have other related products that you giveaway, why not use them as a source of “unannounced bonuses”? If you know any other marketers who work in a related field, why not strike up a joint venture with them to promote each other’s product as unannounced bonuses?
Finding free products with affiliate programs is not difficult – you’ve probably signed up for some yourself. Did you ever use those affiliate links after you signed up? Probably not. What a great way to resurrect them and potentially make some money.
Why Unannounced?
You often see sales pages offering bonus items, so why include unannounced bonuses?
There are a few good reasons:- The customer already feels good about getting the advertised bonuses, but to be given even more once they’ve paid makes them feel even better. It all helps to build the relationship with the customer.
- They might be added at the last minute – especially if they are part of a JV with another marketer. They can be added to or removed from the download page at will. It’s likely that the sales page will be cached by the search engines, but the download page will not, so the download page can be changed at any time without causing any problems.
- You might not want your competition to know that you are giving them away – especially if it is one of your own products that you are testing. They’ll find out eventually, of course, but by then it might be too late.
Marketers don’t give away additional products because they are feeling generous – it’s because they know they get more sign-ups and sales if they do. Start delivering bonuses and “unannounced” bonuses with your products and see what difference it makes.
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There are a lot of so-called SEO experts out there. Whether they are or not is a different matter. If you consult any of them, or read their ebooks, reports etc., one thing that will be mentioned almost without fail, is Back-Links.
What is a Back-Link?
Most simply stated, a back-link is a link from a website back to your own website. To be worthwhile, they have to be slightly more than a simple link, and the SEO experts should tell you how to optimize those links if you can.Why Should You Have Back-Links?
If you want your website to be seen, it needs to rank highly in the search engines for your chosen keywords or phrases. (Actually, that’s not necessarily true, but that’s the subject of a whole new post)
The search engine companies have closely-guarded algorithms for determining a site’s position in the search results pages. It is generally known, though, that one part of this algorithm involves the number of relevant incoming links to a website. The presence of those links suggests to the search engines that the site is of some value.
Therefore, the more back-links you can get, the higher your site will rank in the results pages. But don’t be fooled into thinking that simply getting a large number of back-links will get you on the front page of the search results; there are other factors involved.What are the Characteristics of a Quality Back-Link?
One-Way Links
The SEO experts will tell you that a one-way link is better than a reciprocal link. (a reciprocal link is where you and another website owner agree to set up links to each-others’ site)
When it first became known that incoming links were a factor in search engine results, a whole industry of “link farms” arose. These were sites where you could set up a link to your site as long as you linked to them in return. Of course, the search engines got wise to the link farms and outlawed them. In fact, if they found that you linked to and from a link farm, your site would suffer a penalty and be placed further down the results pages than it would without the links.
Since that time, the search engines have viewed reciprocal links with some suspicion, so if you can, try to set up one-way links.Relevance
If you’ve ever owned a blog, you will have no doubt been inundated with what are known as “spam comments”. These are comments left on your blog simply to get a back-link. Most of them seem to link to sites selling drugs or pornography.
Even if your blog is about dog grooming, you’ll still get those spam comments.
And this is the key to good back-links. You might have noticed that earlier I wrote “relevant incoming links”. If the link comes from a site that has nothing in common with your site, it’s useless. The search engines want to link together relevant information. If you’re searching for “bass fishing”, you don’t want to see results about drugs that claim to enlarge certain parts of the body, and the search engines want to lead you to information relevant to your search. Not just because that’s the whole point of them, but they also stand to make money from related advertising.So, don’t go around commenting on every blog that you can find just to build back-links. If you do leave comments on blogs, make sure that they are relevant to your own website – and don’t forget to enter your web URL in the comment form.
Keyword Links
A big mistake that many people make is not specifying relevant keywords in the link back to their site. Sometimes it isn’t possible to do this, but in many cases, it is. For example if you post your URL in a forum signature, don’t just write the URL – make it a link with relevant keywords in it. The same goes for links in resource boxes on article sites.Heavyweight Sites
Although Google state that Google PageRank (PR) is simply a guide, it does appear that links from sites with a higher PR do contribute more when it comes to determining a site’s position in the results pages. Some people will tell you that PR only has any effect if it is 4 or higher. When you have a lot of back-links, how can you tell which ones are contributing most to your site’s position in the results? You can’t! It’s probably worthwhile advice going for higer-ranked sites, but getting links from them can be proportionately more difficult!No-Follow?
Having said all this, you might find that many sites have been set up so that links are “NoFollow”. This tells the search engines not to include the site when it comes to calculate back-link weighting. So after carefully locating and setting up a quality back-link, you might find that it isn’t a back-link at all.Finding Suitable Sites for Back-Links
Use article sites such as Article Content King to publish articles relevant to the content of your site and include a good, keyword link in the resource box.Join relevant forums, add your URL to your signature and then join in the conversation. Don’t put URLS in your posts – you’ll get blacklisted. Don’t write terse, useless posts, such as “I agree” just to get your signature up there – write useful replies to other people. And be civil.
You know the keywords and phrases that are relevant to your site, so use them to search for others. Find relevant blogs and post comments on some of the articles. But make sure that they are worthwhile comments. Simply writing “Great site” will probably get your comment placed in the trash. Join in the conversation and write something that contributes to the article.
If that sounds too much like hard work, there are easier ways. I recently discovered TextLinks. They have a network of around 10,000 blogs on which you can post links, articles etc., each with a link back to your website. By posting on different blogs each time, you can end up getting links coming in from hundreds or thousands of different sites. Being blogs, they tend to get visited by the search engines quite frequently, which helps to build your back-links quickly. What’s more, if you decide to cancel your membership from TextLinks, the back-links will remain.
It doesn’t come cheap at $99 per month, but there are similar sites which charge much more than that – Linkvana for example, which charges $147. And for your $99 you can keep adding more and more links.
TextLinks are currently offering a free 21-day trial period in which you can set up 25 back-links. And if you don’t decide to upgrade after the trial-period is over, your 25 links will not be deleted.Related Reading:
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Over the years, there has been a lot of discussion about cloaking affiliate links. Some people say that you need to do it, while others say it’s not necessary. This article discusses the reasons why you might want to cloak your links, and describes ways to do it should you decide that you need to.
First of all, what are the reasons for cloaking your links?
Commission Theft
One of the first reasons that people started to cloak affiliate links was prevent people from stealing commissions. This was particularly true for ClickBank affiliates. The format of ClickBank hoplinks was such that anyone who was themselves a ClickBank affiliate would recognise a hoplink and could replace the affiliate Nickname with their own. This would have the effect of denying the original affiliate their commission, and claiming it for themselves.
Nowadays, if you use ClickBank’s online hoplink builder, the hoplink is encrypted so that this substitution is no longer possible. However, there are thousands of old-style hoplinks still in use inside ebooks, emails and websites.Link Length
Typically, affiliate links – not just ClickBank hoplinks – are quite long. This can cause problems inside emails where the link gets broken over two lines. The resulting link then fails to work. These long links are also quite ugly. They generally consist of a URL with one or more values tacked on the end, which identify the affiliate and maybe the product code.Affiliate Aversion
Many people who buy products on-line don’t like to think that a proportion of their money is going to a “middle-man” and not the product vendor. This is especially true of ClickBank products where the affiliate earns 75% of the sale price. Oddly enough, if they bought the product directly from the vendor, they might not think twice about paying say $47. But when they realise that when bought via an affiliate link, about $35 of this is going to the salesman, they feel as if they are being ripped off. Cloaking a link can give the impression that the affiliate is in fact the vendor, and that there is no affiliate involved in the chain.Product Integration
As mentioned above, many people don’t like the idea that they are paying an affiliate. By cloaking a link with your own domain name, the buyer will be led to believe that the product is your own.For example, let’s say that you own the domain www.FantasticStuff.com.
You decide to sell a product at www.WizzoThing.com, and your affiliate link is www.WizzoThing.com/buynow.php?affid=12345.When people see this link, they will realise that it goes to a different domain, and might become suspicious that it is an affiliated product link.
If you set up a cloaked link, however, using your own domain, it could look like this:
www.FantasticStuff.com/WizzoThingThis link looks much more convincing. It is totally integrated into your domain, so buyers will not suspect a thing.
Safety Net
I am an affiliate for an excellent piece of software that lets you build professional websites. I had my affiliate link and I promoted it on-line and in ebooks and reports. Then, after about a year, the vendor decided to change the affiliate program that they used to sell their software, and all affiliates were issued with a new affiliate link. This broke all the old affiliate links. Luckily, I had cloaked my link, so all I had to do was to update the cloak with the new link.
All my links now worked with the new system.
Now imagine if I had put the original affiliate link in all those ebooks and reports. Anyone reading them would find that the links no longer worked. Putting the cloaked link in meant that the links still work perfectly.At the time, I didn’t realise this. It was only when the vendor changed the affiliate system that I realised what a huge benefit this was.
Aide Memoire
How many times have you wanted to include your affiliate link in some marketing, but can’t remember it? If you set up your cloaks in a similar manner, all you need to remember is the product name.
Remember the example above:
www.FantasticStuff.com/WizzoThing
It’s your domain name, followed by a slash, followed by the product name. Simple.
Set up all your cloaks in the same style and you need never forget a link.Disadvantages
I have yet to find any disadvantages to cloaking links, so my recommendation is to always cloak your links whether you are concerned about any of the above issues or not.Cloaking Your Links
So having established that it’s a good idea to cloak your links, how do you go about doing it?There are a number of ways of doing it. They are all quite easy, but some do require some slight knowledge of either HTML or PHP.
The Easiest Way
This is by far the easiest way to cloak a link. It has a couple of drawbacks. The first being that the link does not match your domain, so the buyers might be suspicious that you are hiding an affiliate link. The second is that it relies on a 3rd-party service provider. If that service is changed or withdrawn, your links will fail.This method uses URL-shortening services such as qkr.cc, tinyurl, bit.ly etc. Simply log on to one of these shortening sites, enter your affiliate link and get the short URL which you should then promote.
One major advantage of using services such as this is that many of them provide click tracking statistics.
(Personally, whenever I want to shorten a URL, I use qkr.cc, which is one of the tools provided with the free Viral Marketing Method).The PHP Way
If you have your own domain and web hosting, the chances are that you can install and run PHP scripts. What you need to do is create a folder below your main domain space, with the name of the product you want to promote. In that folder, add a short PHP file called index.php.
That file is your link cloak, and it should contain the following 3 lines:
<?php
header("Location:YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK");
?>
Replace YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK with the full URL of your affiliate link, including the http:// part.
Here’s an example promoting an affiliate link to the article site, Article Content King:
<?php
header("Location:http://www.article-content-king.com/pro/?member=14696");
?>
If I was promoting this link from this blog, I would create a folder named “ack” and save this file in there as index.php.
Now all I would have to do is to promote the URL http://www.cbintuition.com/ack.
It’s really that simple.
The HTML Way
If your hosting doesn’t let you run PHP scripts (some free hosting services don’t), you can use HTML instead.As above, you would set up a folder named after the product you want to promote, but this time, insert a file named index.html. This file should contain the lines shown below.
<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK">
<title>PRODUCT_NAME
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Again, replace YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK with the full URL of your affiliate link, including the http:// part.
Replace PRODUCT_NAME with the name of the product you are promoting. This product name won’t usually be displayed unless the network or server is running slowly for some reason.Again, you would promote the URL of your cloak, consisting of your domain name followed by the folder name.
More Alternatives
There are other ways of cloaking links such as domain level redirects, but the methods outlined above should work perfectly well for most users.Final Thoughts
Some people who cloak links often use an additional folder named “recommends”, “uses” etc. This makes the final cloaked URL look something like:www.JoeMarketer.com/recommends/ThisProduct
To me, this is a dead giveaway that it is a cloaked link. Of course, many marketers who use this method don’t hide the fact that it’s somebody else’s product. They often write in their emails something like:
“My good friend John Doe has just released ThisProduct and it’s taking the Internet world by storm. If you want to get in on it before they are all sold out, go to www.JoeMarketer.com/recommends/ThisProduct.”
This often works because the marketer is trusted to recommend good products, but if you’re concerned that people will think you’re just trying to sell them yet another affiliate product, I wouldn’t recommend this approach.
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There are many benefits to article marketing, so to say that conversion is the key may be a slight exaggeration, but this is probably the most misunderstood and under-explained benefit of article marketing. Too many people involved in Article Marketing become obsessed with SEO and backlinks that they neglect the other aspects of this marketing method.
Of course it is not ALL about conversion. Article marketing is a great way of building links and traffic and increasing your search engine ranking, but the increased traffic and search engine rankings mean nothing if your website does not convert.
So what does article marketing have to do with website conversion?
Quiet frankly, everything! All forms of marketing are about converting visitors into customers, and article marketing is no exception.
You may not realise this but the most important aspect of sales conversion is not your headline, your graphics, your design, your sales copy or your logo. In fact it is nothing on your web site at all. This has been proved on numerous occasions by high-performing “ugly” websites. The most effective thing you can do to increase your sales conversion is to influence people before they even visit your website.
It’s the Frame of Mind that your visitor has when they click through to your web page.
When people read articles on article sites, directories and blogs, their frame of mind is “Information Seeker”. They are looking for information about the subject of your article. When they stop to read your article, you have “hooked” them and you have only one chance to “reel them in”. Your article must keep the visitor hooked until they reach the end, because that is where they will find the link to your site. The only way you will keep them hooked is to provide useful, well-written, honest information on your topic. By keeping the visitor interested, you start to build a rapport and a sense of trust. It is at this point that you spark a transition in your visitor; a transition from “Information Seeker” to “Buyer”. If they reach your website as a Buyer, they are more likely to make a purchase than if they are still an Information Seeker.
If you realise this, it is very likely that you will achieve a lot more success from your article marketing efforts. Not only are you likely to make more sales, but you will naturally write better articles.
If you write your articles with the intention and purpose of “framing” the reader, you’ll not only get higher conversions from the traffic coming from your articles; the chances are that you’ll get more traffic to your articles. How? Website publishers are always on the lookout for good quality articles. If your article is well-written and informative, it becomes attractive to the publishers, who will put copies of it, or links to the original version, on their own site, complete with links to your site. That can make a HUGE difference to your sales conversion.
When a trusted publisher publishes your articles, their readers are already willing to follow their recommendation. That means that they are predisposed to “buy into” the frame of your article – they have already started to trust your article even before they have started to read it.
You see it’s a lot better to approach your article marketing as a relationship-building exercise, rather than as an SEO exercise and if you do, you will likely get better search engine rankings too, so the SEO aspects will follow on automatically.
Article Content King syndicate all your articles to targeted publishers. Click here to submit your articles.
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At the time of writing there are about 1.25 million people registered with ClickBank. But of those, only around 100,000 are actively promoting and selling products from the ClickBank Marketplace. That amounts to just 8% of registered affiliates.
If ClickBank is so good, what is going wrong?
The biggest problem is ClickBank’s Accounting Policy which makes it difficult for beginners to receive the initial commissions they have earned. It is the result of this policy that so many ClickBank affiliates have become completely disillusioned and just given up.
ClickBank, of course, are not concerned by this. When accounts go dormant for extended periods, they start to deduct administration charges from them until any balance has disappeared. And there are plenty more news affiliates where they came from, and there are also many thousands of successful affiliates who are bringing ClickBank a nice income.
An Alternative
There is an alternative to ClickBank. It operates in a similar way – acting as a mediator between vendor and affiliate – but their accounting policy is not as strict.
The company is Click2Sell. They offer very similar features to ClickBank, but with some marked differences.
- It costs nothing to register, whether as an affiliate or a vendor
- Vendors can sell unlimited products from one account
- Affiliates DO NOT have to sell to 5 different customers before receiving their commissions.
- Multiple Payment methods – Paypal, Moneybookers, Authorize.net, Worldpay or Google Checkout
- Payment to vendors is immediate – no waiting for checks in the post
- Payment can be made to affiliates by PayPal – immediate transfer – no waiting for checks
- Products can be Digital, Physical or Subscription based
- Powerful tracking features available as standard
- No waiting for product approval
- Products can be sold in US Dollars, GB Pounds or Euros
I tend to think of it as “ClickBank without the grief”. Affiliates don’t have to worry about whether their account will go dormant or not, or whether they will meet the sales criteria. They make a sale – they get their commission.
If you’ve been hit by ClickBank’s Accounting Policy, why not give Click2Sell a try. It’s free – you have nothing to lose, and commissions to gain.
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