As an affiliate, it looked like a good deal.

Just send targeted visitors to the sales page and make one sale for every sixteen or so visitors you send them.

So, I started working on my affiliate marketing campaign for the product.  In this case, I decided to use pay per click(PPC) to promote it.  Here’s why I started with PPC:

1. With PPC you get results quickly.  In other words, when you use PPC you don’t have to wait a month to see if your marketing campaign is working or not.  Results for your campaign start coming in very quickly.
2. PPC allows me to make money more quickly than other types of affiliate marketing.
3. This product claimed to have a very high conversion rate, therefore making it idea for PPC.

Let me explain that last one a little.

Generally speaking, your conversion rate is a little lower when you use PPC than it is when you use other types of affiliate marketing.  You can’t presell the product as much with PPC as you can when you’re marketing to your own list, visitors, or customers.  There are ways to mitigate this, but PPC just isn’t conducive to relationship marketing.

So I started a PPC campaign for this affiliate product and started testing it.

Boy was I disappointed!

I sent 500 targeted PPC visitors to the affiliate product sales letter and didn’t make a single sale!

Even accounting for the affiliate marketing strategy that I chose for this product, the sales letter had a dismal conversion rate.

As I said before, a 1:16 conversion rate mean that 6% of all visitors to the sales letter bought the product.  If I had sold just one product out of the 500 visitors I sent to the sales page, I would have gotten a conversion rate of 0.2%.

That’s aweful!

And it also makes it really hard to make any money promoting the product as an affiliate.

So I started looking at the merchant claims of a lot of popular affiliate products on networks such as Clickbank where the conversion rates aren’t independently verified.

I would guess that 40%-50% of the merchants are claiming 6% or higher conversion rates… And I don’t believe it for one second.  That number becomes especially hard to swallow when you see some of the sales pages and take a look at Clickbank’s ranking system (gravity).

My point is that you need to beware that some merchants lie about their conversion rates.  After all, it doesn’t cost them anything if you promote their product, send them free links, and never make any money.  Most affiliates will assume that it’s something they are doing wrong, not the ineffectiveness of the sales page itself.

Something to keep in mind the next time you’re looking at prospective affiliate products.

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Frankly, I’m a little torn on the idea because I think that some affiliates could really benefit from using business cards while others would find it a complete waste of time.

For example, if you promote a lot of different affiliate products in a lot of different niches, it would be very difficult to put business cards to any use out in the “real” world.

On the other hand, affiliates that have a website, blog, or newsletter could find business cards useful for getting more people to their sites.

What do you think?  Are business cards useful for affiliate marketers?

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So I’ve broken down the process of finding profitable Clickbank product to promote into three easy steps.

1.  Check the analytics of Clickbank products.

When you’re getting ready to start a new affiliate marketing promotion, you want to make sure that the product you’re interested in selling is actually something that people will buy.  Your first stop is to check Clickbank to find out what their best selling products are.  You can do this simply by visiting the Clickbank Marketplace and performing a search for products that will appeal to your target audience.  Make sure that you set the search engine to list the products by popularity.  That way you’ll know which products are the most popular at Clickbank.

If you want to delve into the products a little more deeply, you can find out what the buying  trends are for most products by visiting the free websites below:

• http://www.cbtrends.com
• http://www.cb-analytics.com

These sites will give you a much better picture of how individual products are doing in the marketing place.

2.  Visit the sales page to make sure it will convert.

Once you find some products that you’re interested in, you need to visit each product’s sales page.  The idea is to make sure that the sales copy is professional, well-written, and will convert your traffic into sales.

3.  Make sure the products are relevant to your target audience.

Last, but definitely not least, you’ll want to make sure that the products you promote are relevant to your target audience. If you’re in the weight loss niche, then you shouldn’t be promoting internet marketing products.

It may sound silly, but I’ve seen people do it.

Your most profitable affiliate marketing campaigns will be built around products that your target audience is interested in buying, addresses their needs, and fits into their lifestyles.

As you can see, it really only takes doing a little bit of homework on the best products for your target audience to make it really easy finding profitable Clickbank products to promote.

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Egidijus Andreika, the creator of Click2Sell.EU, has put together a really nice list of the top ten things that merchants should look for in an affiliate management system and has agreed to allow me to reprint the article here.

Enjoy!

10 Things to Look For in an Affiliate Management System

There are many different affiliate management systems available. You have to select the best one so that you can get good profit and your affiliates are also happy. This article explains 10 most important things that should be present in a great affiliate management system, so you would be able to run your affiliate marketing business easily:

1) Complete control over recruitment of Affiliates:

This is the basic requirement of any affiliate management system because if you don’t have control over the number of affiliates joining and promoting your affiliate program you might be soon end up in loss or some spammers or your competitor may try to break down your affiliate system and create loss in your business. So, wisely choose the affiliate management system which provides complete control over the affiliates so you would be able to contact them, offer them help, request information and keep in-touch.

2) Offer multiple payment options for your customers and affiliates:

Your affiliates are distributed geographically all over the world. In one region particular payment option will be available and the same will not be available in some other region. PayPal is a good option because they are almost present in all countries but you can’t withdraw the money in some countries like Egypt where you can use MoneyBookers to withdraw the money. So, your affiliate management system should enable your affiliates to receive the payment via lot of payment processors else they will not work for you. Offer as much affiliate payment options as possible and then you will have no problem getting your product promoted!

3) Affiliate visitor and sales tracking is a must - track as much details as possible:

The affiliate management system should be able to provide you the ratio between the number of visitors and the sales made by them. This can help you to find out your best affiliate and reward your best affiliate every month it will create a healthy competition among your affiliates and you will enjoy the benefits of it. You must be able to track all details of your affiliates activities: views and visitors that your affiliates bring, the number of sales, conversion rates of your promotional partners, refund rates. Some systems even allow you to track the websites referring sales to your website and even keywords used on search engines to find and buy your products.

4) Affiliate reward system based on their performance:

The affiliate management system should not give the same amount of commission to all your affiliates i.e., it should provide more commission to those who bring quality traffic and make good sales and should give somewhat less commission to poor performers. So, that your good affiliates will try to work even harder to get more commission per sale. Make sure to select the system that allows you to set custom affiliate commission percentages for each certain affiliate. Then you will be able to reward your best performing ones!

5) Ban the affiliates if they use illegal methods - Affiliate BAN mechanism :

Some of your affiliates may bring traffic to your site by spamming or by redirecting their browser in malicious manner and some may buy your product if they like it but more than 95% visitors will consider your site to be malicious site and trying to spam them. So, it will bring bad reputation to your business hence, your affiliate management system should identify these affiliates and ban them. Your affiliate management system should allow you to identify these scammers - by allowing you to track number of visitors, websites used by affiliate to refer visitors - and then ban if you feel that certain affiliate hurts your reputation.

6) Be in contact with your affiliates - always stay in touch with them:

Money is the main factor for which your affiliates are working for you, but it isn’t the only factor which helps you to retain your affiliates. More or less all the affiliate programs offered by different product sellers are almost the same, so you can have an advantage if you do something different than what others do, you can do this by being in contact with your affiliates try to understand their problem and help them whenever they need your support and get their suggestions to improve your product. Always help your affiliates by contacting them personally, asking if they need some help. This way they will reward you with a lot of sales!

7) Keep track the refund rates of each certain affiliate:

When your customer is not happy with your product they request you to refund the money and you have to do this to maintain good reputation. There are basically two reasons for which your customers will ask you to refund: first is when the product is not really worth the other reason is they might be given some wrong information about the product by your affiliates and when they didn’t find that feature in your product they will request you to refund. So, your system should be able to track down those affiliates and ban them if they bring too many sales that ends up as a refund request - in order to protect your product and online reputation.

Track all websites that bring you visitors and sales via affiliate links:

Tracing down the source from where visitors arrive. Your affiliate management system should be able to trace out from where your customers are coming from i.e., the source which directs them to find the sales page and buy your product. After pinpointing it you have to focus advertising there to boost your sales. Such tracking capabilities allow you to identify the most profitable ‘traffic sources’ and concentrate on them (if it’s an affiliate - offer additional help, etc.). This way you can easily make your profits soar!

9) Flexible affiliate training capabilities:

You should provide training to your affiliates about your product so that they can understand what they are selling, its advantages and disadvantages. This will help them greatly to convince their visitors to make them buy your product. Provide all possible promotional materials - banners, pre-written articles, e-mail letters and other content for your affiliates. Your affiliate management system should allow you to place and manage all promotional tools and thus enable your affiliates to access them easily whenever they need to.

10) Track all keywords that bring you visitors and sales and manage affiliates effectively:

Your affiliate management system should be able to find out the keywords used by the visitors to find your product on search engines like Google, yahoo or other search engines. This report can be used to stress these words more in other search engines by using the Meta tags and using ad services of Google, yahoo or other ad service providers. You should be able to track all keywords that people use to find your product via pay per click campaigns such as Google Adwords or Y! Search marketing or regular search engines. Once you find keywords that bring sales, you can easily concentrate on them, bid higher to get even more traffic and sales.

If your affiliate management system has these 10 things then you can be assured that you will make good profit, but always try to improve your system according to the latest technology so that you are always ahead of your competitors. We would recommend you to join Click2Sell.EU (http://www.click2sell.eu) affiliate management system. It allows you to sell your products online, run your affiliate marketing business and manage all your affiliates easily with a help of great statistical and analytics features. Choose a good affiliate manage system that will enable you succeed online!

Egidijus Andreika is a creator of Click2Sell.EU - affiliate marketing network. Click2Sell offers money making opportunity with online affiliate program network. Merchants - sell your products and develop online business. Affiliates - work at home and earn money online. Visit http://www.click2sell.eu

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I usually don’t get into those free reports, but this one really offers a lot of good information… especially the “X-Factor” strategies that they outline in the report.

To me, that made the download worth it!  I learned a few things that I’ll be using in my own blogs.

Anyway, I highly recommend that you get your own Roadmap to Become a Blogger.

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In a strange sort of coincidence, I got an email from a newsletter subscriber who wanted to know if all those catalogs were stealing her affiliate commissions.

She went on to explain that she was an affiliate for several of the companies that regularly send out catalogs.  If people typed the URL for those companies in directly to their computers and then bought something, wouldn’t she be out her commission?

The short answer is - Absolutely not.

Now here’s the explanation:   Anyone who has been directly referred to one of those catalog companies by you will have the affiliate’s cookie on their computer.

Depending on the company and affiliate program, the cookie is good for 30, 60, 90, or more days.  That cookie works no matter how the customer accesses the catalog company’s website from that computer, which means that the affiliate that originally referred that customer to the company will get a commission.

Affiliating with companies that do catalog marketing can be both a blessing and a curse.

On the one hand, the company that sends out catalogs regularly keeps their name in front of customers and ultimately gets more sales than online retailers that don’t.  If you’re the first affiliate to introduce that customer to the company, then the retailer is helping you earn more money.

The downside of affiliating with companies that market with catalogs is that most of their customers aren’t acquired through affiliates.  They purchase customer lists from other retailers and brokers to send catalogs out to.  If you’ve ever gotten a catalog out of the blue from a company that you’ve never heard of, then you know what I mean.

Catalogs sell products for online retailers, so it makes sense that they would use them extensively.

As an affiliate, however, the chances of you being the first to refer a customer to a high powered catalog company is slim.  Some companies send out their own cookies and don’t allow affiliate cookies to over-ride them… making it impossible to earn affiliate commissions.  It really depends on the company you’re working with and how they handle this.

Although some online retailers that market extensively with catalogs may deny that they do this, I’ve tested it out myself several times.  I’ve cleaned out all my cookies and typed in the direct URL of several of the big name catalog companies.  Then I’ve set up an affiliate account through my business name (different name, address, and email), clicked through an affiliate link, and made a purchase under my husband’s name on the same computer.  More often than not, the affiliate(in this case my company) didn’t get credit for the sale.

It’s an unofficial test, so take it for what it’s worth.

My advice is to stick with smaller, less known catalog companies to increase your chances of being the first affiliate on the scene, or to arrange a pay per click or pay per lead situation with the big online retailers that use catalogs if you want to work with these types of companies.

When it comes to affiliate marketing, there are much better ways to earn a living than working with the super-sized online retailers… especially if they earn most of their revenue through catalog marketing.

But that’s just my opinion.

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The article itself is okay, but the timing is a little off.

I’ve been selling Christmas stuff since the day after Halloween! In fact, I had all my Christmas marketing ready and sitting in place long before Halloween so that all I had to do was flip a few switches on November 1st and everything switched over to Christmas marketing.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you don’t already have your Christmas marketing in place by now you’re probably too late for this year.

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Five years later… stand alone affiliate directories have pretty much become obsolete.

Oh sure, there are still a lot of affiliate directories out there going about their business as if nothing has changed, but they continue to survive and thrive because they have adapted to the change in the affiliate marketing environment.

Take a look at one of the oldest, if not THE oldest, affiliate directory still left - AssociatePrograms.com

It started out as an affiliate directory and nothing but an affiliate directory in 1998 when the whole concept of affiliate programs was totally new. At the time, Amazon.com was still the new kid on the block and really became the company that pioneered this whole affiliate program trend. In the months to follow, many other businesses followed the Amazon model and started their own affiliate programs. Today we have thousands of affiliate programs to choose from, thanks to Amazon.

AssociatePrograms.com is also a pioneer… in affiliate marketing. Today, they continue to be one of the loudest voices in affiliate marketing because they have continued to adapt and change. Now they provide a lot of information about how to make money with affiliate programs, affiliate marketing product reviews, how to manage affiliate programs, etc. and their affiliate program directory has become much more of a secondary business - even though their directory is one of the most comprehensive affiliate directories available.

Over the years, tons and tons of affiliate program directories have sprung up because their owners thought they could make a quick buck… something that I was guilty of in 2003 too. (Oh, the shame!) And there are still new affiliate directories popping up now and then, but they are actually less focused on the directory and more focused on affiliate marketing content.

So why are affiliate directories obsolete?

A few years ago (in 2006), I sat down and evaluated the income produced by this particular website (purely a directory at the time) to try to decide whether I wanted to keep it or move on. Frankly, it had become a real pain wading through affiliate program submissions and I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep the site.

When I looked at the numbers, it was absolutely shocking!

I was spending hours each week going through new submissions, I had thousands of programs listed in my database, over a thousand visitors each day, and the site was producing very little income.

But why?

It took me awhile to figure out, but here’s what I came up with:

1. All those “visitors” that I was getting were people submitting their affiliate programs to the directory. They weren’t the people most likely to click on my affiliate marketing product links or Google Adsense advertising.

2. These visitors were not who I thought my target audience was. In a directory, everything is pretty much geared to people who are looking for more information about a particular topic… in this case affiliate programs. Everything on my directory was aimed at people looking for affiliate programs to promote, but that target audience wasn’t actually visiting my website.

3. Affiliate programs are so readily available now that you don’t need a directory to find a good affiliate program to promote. If you’re looking for an affiliate program, you’re much better off finding the product first, then finding out if they have an affiliate program. I know that’s a bit contrary to what you’re used to seeing, but that’s how most experienced affiliate marketers go about finding programs to promote.

Affiliate Program Directories Had Become Basically Obsolete!

Having said all that, I think that you can still make money with a really good affiliate directory provided that you understand that your target market for an affiliate directory is really affiliate managers and people who are new to starting their own affiliate programs, rather than people who want to promote affiliate products in their businesses.

I’ve actually toyed with the idea of re-marketing my former directory for the affiliate manager audience… unfortunately that’s just not as much fun for me. I like affiliate marketing, not affiliate management.

Although, I guess you could market affiliate programs to your affiliates as an affiliate manager… but I really hate it when affiliate program managers do that!

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“Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc… experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.”

Well, I’ve been rolling that whole idea around in my head for the last couple of weeks and working out how it applies to my own blogs in various niches. Unfortunately, I found that a couple of my blogs were actually aimed much more at reporting than being an expert. I just never thought about the difference and how it affected the perceptions of my website visitors.

Then the light bulb really went on!

Today, I was looking through some of my favorite blogs about affiliate marketing and I realized that the majority of them are suffering the same problem… they’re just reporting about what others are doing in the affiliate marketing industry rather than positioning themselves as experts.

If you do a Google search for “affiliate marketing blog,” you’ll find thousands of websites reporting the latest news about different affiliate networks, new affiliate services offered, or out and out sales messages and advertisements… but there is very little out there about specific methods, strategies, techniques, etc. to make money with affiliate marketing.

Maybe I’m all wet, but I don’t see why anyone would consistently visit a blog or subscribe to an RSS feed that only talks about what others are doing in the industry…

What’s in it for me?

And that’s the point that a lot of bloggers across a lot of industries are missing. As bloggers, we’ve all got to spend more time providing the kind of content that our target audiences really want and a lot less time advertising and reporting on what others are doing… even if it means that we post less often.

For those of us with the actual experience in our industries, it really shouldn’t be that hard.

It just requires a little paradigm shift.

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Personally, I’ve never really gotten into the idea of generating revenue with forums because I really didn’t think that kind of activity was as profitable as many other marketing strategies an online business can employ.  In short, Willy had to “show me the money” before I was the least bit interested in Instant Forum Profits.

Well, Willy Crawford took on that challenge and told me that he was one of the experts interviewed for Instant Forum Profits because he uses forums extensively in his own marketing.  In fact, he’s rapidly approaching 9000 posts on just one forum, and nearly all those posts are designed to market his business.

Interesting… but I still wasn’t sold.

After all, one person’s success doesn’t mean that a marketing strategy is a go for my business.

That’s when Willy told me about the other forum marketing experts that were interviewed for Instant Forum Profits:

• The Rhodes Brothers:  The topic of their interview is “How To Build A List Of 10,000 RAVING Fans With Forum Marketing”
• Dennis Becker:  His interview topic is “How To Build Your OWN Community-Based Forum… To The Tune Of Thousands Of Dollars Per Month!”
• Rob Toth:  He talks about “How To Monetize The Traffic You Generate From Forums Using Smart Lead Captures and Irresistible Offers”
• Lee McIntyre:  The topic of his interview is “How To Build A Full Time Internet Business - Starting From Scratch!”
• Combined with Willy Crawford’s Interview on  “How To Leverage Forum Marketing For Profitable Relationships And Lucrative JVs!”

Okay, great, sounds like you may have something here Willy… but I’m really not willing to spend money on another marketing technique that may or may not actually work for me and my business.  That’s when Willy Crawford really ponied up and offered me all the Instant Forum Profits MP3’s for FREE!

Well, how could I turn down a freebie with that much interesting, and possibly useful, information in it???

So I downloaded the MP3’s, hopped on the treadmill and started listening.  It didn’t take me long to figure out why Willy was so excited about these interviews… They are absolutely amazing!

I was so engrossed that I almost knocked myself off the treadmill!

I decided to call it quits (I don’t like the treadmill too much anyway) and sit down and start taking some notes.  Very quickly, my mind started swimming with ideas that I could use in my own business and begin using forums to generate additional revenue for some of my specific niches.

When I finished, I decided right then and there that I wanted to be able to share this great information with other people like you, who may not have ever thought about how you can use forum marketing in your business.  So I got in touch with Brian McElroy and secured a deal where I could offer Instant Forum Profits MP3’s to my visitors and subscribers for FREE!

That’s right!

Just click on the link below, register, and you will be immediately sent to a download page where you can get all 5 Interviews in MP3 format along with  complete transcripts of each interview and never pay a dime!

It just doesn’t get any better than free!

http://imarketingwatch.com/ap/instantforumprofits.php

Best Wishes,

Arvada Yates

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