8 Headlines That Sell
Here’s 8 different types of headlines you can create campaigns around. Plenty of examples to help increase your sales.
Via Digg
Entries Tagged as 'Affiliate Marketing'
Return of the (Affiliate Marketing) Jedi
I was poking around on Ooof.com last night, when I saw a post announcing the return of Diorex.
I was first introduced to Diorex at the Uber Affiliate blog, and his writings blew me away. Diorex is an affiliate marketing Jedi, and the tips that he deigns to share with us unwashed masses are amazing and powerful. Be forewarned though, the man pulls no punches, and is as blunt as can be. If you can work past that, then prepare to get schooled.
Visit Diorex.
[Read more →]
The End of an Era
I know I haven’t been around a lot, and I’m not making excuses for it. A metric ton of bad karma has hit me in the last month, and I’ve spent three weeks digging my way out of it. Although I’m brimming with ideas and motivation, I’ve had to shelve my affiliate marketing plans for the time being.
That doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on affiliate marketing. Far from it. However, I just don’t have the time to devote to affiliate marketing to do it right at this point in time.
I’ve always been a ’set it and forget it’ type of person, and against the advice of all the gurus, I tried to run my first adsense campaigns in that fashion. I was lazy, and pretty much lost my ass, except for one campaign that I literally did about 0% research into, threw up on a whim, set a tiny budget for, and let run. To my amazement, that campaign has brought in money - not a lot, but a lot more than I ever really imagined it would.
This week my hands off attitude came back to bite me in the ass. Google’s billing department is retarded, and always throws up errors at billing time. They kill my account, and after two days or so, I have to reactivate the campaigns, or else they stay off. The last time this happened was when my life basically collapsed on me, and I decided to just leave my AdWords dead. And that’s where I left it.
Until Tuesday, when I noticed a charge from Google on my bank statement. Apparently, going completely against past performance, Google reactivated my campaigns last month. So baiscally I let an entire month go by wtihout realizing it, and had money falling out of my bank account in dribs and drabs. Not sound business sense.
But I digress. The point of this post is to wish Ruck from Cash Tactics a fond farewell. I had noticed a pretty big gap in his posting schedule as of late, and when I fired up SharpReader today, I got an explanation - Ruck had handed over control of Cash Tactics to a friend. I wouldn’t say I was shocked, since in the few months I’ve been reading Cash Tactics, Ruck has:
1) Launched an Affiliate Network
2) Witnessed the Birth of a new daughter
3) Gone back to college
4) And even taken the time to give a shoutout to a complete nobody ranting on a soapbox on the corner of Fuck off and Die
Any one of those would be a plate filler, and to try and juggle all of those at once should be considered grounds for an insanity plea. Throughout it all, Ruck has always been active in the comments on his and others’ blogs, his forum, and probably other circles I haven’t been invited to run in yet.
I’ve said in the past how much I admire Ruck. I’m in the situation he was a couple years ago - crap job with crap benefits, about to lose the wife and kids - in effect, screaming towards rock bottom at Mach 5. He was able to turn his situation around, and by god, so will I. It’s stories like Ruck’s, combined with Paul’s from Uber Affiliate that keep me plugging along. I know it can be done, I just have to find my own path.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Kris, the new Cash Tactics site administrator, has to say. He has some awfully big shoes to fill, but I don’t think Ruck would have tapped Kris if he couldn’t handle it.
The King is Dead! Long live the King!
Breaking the Silence
It’s time to break my self-imposed silence. I know I haven’t posted in almost two weeks, due to illnesses making the rounds in my household. This cold, damp spring has been killing all of our health, and some days checking my email is a herculean task. I’m on the mend though, and received my first affiliate marketing check yesterday, so I’m feeling revitalized.
With my renewed sense of purpose, I realize that I need to focus on what’s important: making money. As it stands, I need to focus on the prize, and blogging isn’t going to get me any closer to it.
I know I’m not going to make money by blogging, and that has never been the intention. If I want to make money by writing, I’ll do it in a different fashion than by writing about how to make money. There are no ads on this site, and I plan to keep it that way. This is my personal blog, and I have no intention of whoring myself like John Chow, or others like him. Not that I have anything against what he’s doing, but that isn’t me.
This blog is still going to be a dumping ground for information I need to keep an eye on, but I don’t think I’m going to be blogging per se with any regularity, since I feel that my time and energy needs to be focused on making money, not just watching others make money and talking about it.
Last night I watched the 2002 John Leguizamo movie “Empire.” It’s the story of a drug dealer trying to go legit after he finds out his girlfriend is pregnant. The story has some parallels to my life. Although I’m not involved with anything illegal, I want to legitimize my life and what I do.
When I was a kid, I was continually beat about the head constantly hearing about my ‘potential’ and failure to live up to it. I’m smart, testing somewhere in th 140 range on my IQ. I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I am smarter than your average bear.
As soon as my teachers found that out, I was constantly lectured about my potential. The problem is, none of them, not a single one, actually told me how to realize my potential. I later learned that the majority of education majors graduate in the bottom 50% of their college class.
Anyway, I’ve had the onus of realizing my potential saddled upon me for most of my life. The fact that I work in a factory and am wasting my fabled ‘potential’ means that I’ve become the black sheep of my family.
I make decent money, but I have to kill myself to do it. I come home every day bleeding from dozens of sheet metal cuts, metal slivers everywhere, coated in grease and hydraulic oil, coughing out the remnant of burning heavy metals that I’ve had to breathe in for 8 hours.
That’s why I decided to try affiliate marketing - so that I could enjoy life, and eventually rub everybody’s noses in my success. The check sitting here on my desk proves that I can do it, as long as I put my nose to the grindstone.
I’m going to finish this post with a monologue from Empire. The truth in his speech inspired me, and helped me to clarify what’s important.
We all know selling and competition, that’s what this country’s built on.
It’s all about one thing: making money.
Money, baby. Simple as that.
Everything else is just bullshit.
Money is why people come here from every country in the world.
It’s what the American dream is all about.
You think people come here from all over the world to live in East New York…
in Harlem, the South Bronx…
because of the beautiful views, because of the fucking quality of life?
For everybody– everybody– money is what life is all about.
Getting it, keeping it, losing it, holding it…
needing it, living it and dying for it.
You have to look like you got it, whether you do or not.
Black Hat Mashups
First off, I’d like to extend congratulations to Ruck, at Cash Tactics. This week he announced that his first daughter was born. It sounds like everything is going well, so I’d like to welcome him to a new world of concern. As the old saying goes: If you have a son you only need to worry about one prick. If you have a daughter, you need to worry about every prick in town. My daughter is only 17 months old, and already the boys her age are giving her the eye. I fear that it will only get worse from here.
Now, on to the goodies.
Affiliate Marketing
For those just getting started in affiliate marketing, Sean at the Warrior Blog has a tutorial that takes you through all of the steps - researching, locating, and then finally cashing the checks. I wish I had known about this when I had first started out. Your First Clickbank Sale.
Build a Niche Store (BANS) is something I’ve been looking into for a while. When my wife goes back to work, I may just break down and purchase it, since I’ve heard noting but good things about it. Affiliate Confession has a 7 part series on setting up and using BANS. A very good place to start if you want an easier entry into affiliate marketing.
Build A Niche Store Tutorials Overview - Parts 1-7
Part 1 - What BANS Does And Does Not Do
Part 2 - Niche Brainstorming And Getting A Domain Name
Part 3 - Installing And Setting Up Your BANS Affiliate Store
Part 4 - Tweaking Your eBay Affiliate Store
Part 5 - Adding Some Content To Your eBay Store
Part 6 - Article Marketing And Getting Links
Part 7 - Using USFreeAds.com For Traffic And Getting More Links
Article Marketing
The Warrior Blog has a tutorial on Article Marketing for promotional purposes. I know that a lot of people recommend doing article marketing, but it seems like a lot of work, that I’d be better off channeling elsewhere.
Mashups
Although it’s over a year old, Paul O’Brien’s list of Mashups created with Yahoo! Pipes is still a pretty good read to help inspire ideas for your own mashup.
I’m not sure of the date on this one, but SEO Book had a nice roundup of specific Pipes.
If you’ve been dying to create a mashup, but can’t program and can’t afford a program, Open Kapow may be for you. Using their simple tools, literally anyone can create a mashup in minutes just by pointing and clicking. Extremely useful if you want to use data from sites that don’t provide an Application Programming Interface (API) or Ready Site Syndication (RSS) feed.
Black Hat
If you have a Wordpress Blog, then Jimmy at Seeds for Wealth has a technique for raping Digg’s traffic. At best this trick is grey hat, at worst it’s black hat, but getting links from Digg is never a bad thing.
Continuing along the path to the Dark Side, Jimmy has tips on getting big trafic from BlogCatalog, and another one for using your avatar as visitor bait.
If you’ve been wondering how certain sellers always rank so high on eBay’s Pulse page, someone placed them under the magnifying glass, and found out that there’s a lot of cheating going on behind the scenes. estreet at Watched Item watched some top sellers on eBay Pulse, and gathered some compelling evidence that there is rampant cheating going on.
Datafeeds
5 Star Affiliate Programs has a pretty extensive list of affiliate datafeeds ready for integration into your website. Affiliate Datafeeds are great, because they help generate a lot of content for search engines to spider, as well as helping to monetize your website.
Extensive Squidoo Lens on Datafeeds
Tools
Marc Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection posted this week introducing us to Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine that works with Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted WordPress installations.Zemanta is a simple FireFox extension that creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress, and makes real-time suggestions for related news stories, Wikipedia articles, and Flickr photos. I’m very excited to start using this. You can also keep up to date with the latest happenings at Zemanta’s Blog.
WordPress Plugins
Jeffro2pt0 at Weblog Tools Collection rounded up 10 WP plugins that fight comment spam. I personally use WP Spam Free from Hybrid 6, and have no complaints with it. I do disable it every so often to see how much it actually stops, and It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.
Freebies
Since I like free stuff, here’s my link to Robbing Craigslist. If you want a free copy, just link to it from your blog too.
Emarket Scout tipped me off the the following: Freebies for Writers, Authors, and Screenwriters., Self Growth Freebies, and Free stuff for Windows Power Users.
Set AdWords Times to Save Some Dimes
Affiliate Marketing
Looking to save to some money on your Google AdWords? According to Online Money Dot.com your bids may actually be cheaper at night.
Jay at Online Opportunity has a pretty good tutorial on how to split test ads.
Y! Store Tutorials has a “dummies” guide to building landing pages. If you can’t build a landing page after reading this, then abandon all hope.
Blogging / Writing
If you’ve been writing an ebook, or just thinking about it, Hendry Chang has a laundry list of 18 reasons to give it away. If you’ve been waffling about the fate of your ebook, then this might just push you over the edge on pricing.
Traffic / Search Engine Optimization
The eBusiness Banter Blog has posted a three part tutorial on building traffic to your blog.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Software Marketing Secrets has a good article explaining why you should be building brands for your products.
Affiliate Marketing, Link Building, Search Engine Optimization: Sunday Morning Free For All
Tools
Icon Interactive has Four Free Tools for your use: Link Popularity, Search Engine Submitter, Keyword Suggestion, and Word Cloud. Of them, I found the Link Popularity to be the most informative, whereas the Search Engine Submitter and Keyword Suggestion tools kept breaking on me. I guess you get what you pay for.
Wordpress
Via Weblog Tools Collection: Blueprint Design Studio graces us with a list of their Top 10 Essential Plugins for Wordpress. I’ve used a lot of the plugins on this list, but TinyMCE always was a pain in the arse to get working properly. Subscribe2 is what all of the big boys use on their sites, but for some reason PlugInstaller breaks it, so I’m out of the loop on that one too. Finally, CFormsII seems to be powerful in the right hands, which are obviously not mine - I’ve never had any joy in getting it to work.
Performancing has a great article on using WordPress to build a web directory which is centered around two plugins; Alex Tang’s Link Directory plugin, and Links Back’s plugin WP Directory. I’m interested in trying this out, but according to Mr. Dash they’re both broken in WordPress 2.3.2, which means they’re probably just going to frustrate me. Still, something I’m going to keep on the back burner.
Search Engine Optimization / Link Building
Blogging Mix has a two part tutorial on how to get Google to crawl your website. They’re full of great ideas, and you’re probably already doing them, but a refresher course never hurts. The one tip that I always do that isn’t on this list, is adding your website feed to iGoogle. I remember reading somewhere that if you add your RSS to iGoogle it helps bump up your place in the queue. If your feed is provided by FeedBurner (a division of Google) then you should be doubly covered, right? Part 1 | Part 2
Build a Blog asks the question “To promote using blog directories, or not?”
Thanks to the post above, I was introduced to Skelliwag’s tutorial on Hansel and Gretel Link Building which is a straight forward guide to getting quality incoming sites.
Do Follow Directory is a directory of sites that have “do follow” enabled.
Info Doorway has a large list of “do follow” sites and forums arranged by Page Rank.
Eric Mitz tells us how he uses forums for backlinks.
Courtney Tuttle has a list of 102 ways to make your site a backlink superstar.
Micro Persuasion opines that we’re like a million monkeys on treadmills. Odd title aside, it’s a thought provoking discussion on channels and internet trends of the past few years.
Affiliate Marketing
Squidoo Lens on using Squidoo for Affiliate Marketing
My Web 2.0 has 5 tips for creating powerful text ads.
AffiliateSeeking.com is a directory of the various programs by which you can become an affiliate marketer.
Paul updated his Affiliate Marketing Guide. Awesome advice from somebody who is making 6 figures a month.
This post has been a week in the making, so I hope it’s not a total deluge. I plan on adding a lot of these links to the main site as time permits this week.
Tuesday I go see a specialist for my hernia and see when they want to perform surgery. I’m praying that it won’t be until after my wife returns to work. I’ve been dealing with this for several months now, another one shouldn’t hurt as long as I take it easy. A little Alieve generally keeps me on my feet, and that’s all I need. If I do have to go in fo surgery, expect posting to pick up dramatically.
I’m currently hatching several mini e-books, and when I finally hatch them, you’ll be the first to know.
Friday Freebies
Affiliate Avalanche: Network Your Way to Success
Hack WordPress: The Ultimate Guide to Pwning Your Software
Daily Moolah: 6 Social Media Optimization Plugins for Wordpress
The Dead One: Turn Your WordPress Into a Fully Functioning Forum via ReviewOn
From Zen Cart Optimization: 200 Words That Make Money, and 14 Words That Lose Money
Affiliate District: Lay Out a Good Affiliate Marketing Plan
Viral King’s Viral Marketing Tips
7 Steps to Creating Your Own Product
Moms Prosperity Network: Law of Attraction, Good Things Happen to Bad People
Comment Sniper Software Guarantees you first post bragging rights!
Best Free Autoresponder Roundup
Super Blogging Tips: 75 Ways to Increase Your Site’s Traffic
And to cap it all off, 15 Reflexology Healing Techniques. Skip the Kinoki pads and use your hands!
Signs and Portents: Affiliate Marketing Update
This weekend the wife and I sent the kid to grandma’s for the weekend. On our way back home we stopped and cashed in two Buy One, Get One Free (BOGO) pop caps along with picking up some supplies. Stumbling out of bed this morning, I grabbed a Diet Pepsi from the fridge and cracked the top. BOGO! Great way to start the day. Later, just before noon, I grabbed another Diet Pepsi from the fridge for roadtrip fuel. Another BOGO. Sometimes luck works in strange ways.
I made another sale from my AdWords campaign. That brings the grand total up to $82 this week. I added some long tail keywords to my primary campaign and started playing “Survivor” with alternate ads. I brought another campaign online late last night that is my most researched/worked one yet. 340 specific keywords, including some great long tail keywords that shouldn’t have been available to me.
Right now I’m limiting the campaign to a specific geographical region with some very motivated customers that have no problem spending a lot of money on something that they have the expectation of lasting for decades. Looking at my analytics, there are more hits to the offer than clicks listed in my Google stats. It may be wishful thinking, but I’m guessing that a couple of visitors are making repeat visits to confirm to themselves that it’s a worthwhile product. They’ve taken the bait, the hook has been set, and now it’s just time to reel them in.
I’m going to let the new campaign run for another day before I start playing Survivor with it too.
I’m in the process of building an eBay classified ad that should provide the start of a good email list. For 30 cents a day, it seems like a pretty good investment. I’ll keep you updated on its progress.
Finally, I have a campaign in the works with some pretty awesome prizes, but first I have to make sure that a couple more of the prizes are in place before I announce it. More details forthcoming.
Saturday Morning Moneymaking
Saturday Morning Funnies: Only in Russia
3 Tips to Optimize Your Email Landing Pages. Pretty common sense stuff, but it’s amazing how rare ‘common’ sense is.
6 Easy Ways to Improve Your Affiliate Offer. How to make your squeeze pages sing like the big boys’.
50 Directories to Submit Your Site To. Another Directory List. All have high pagerank and don’t require reciprocal links.
Free Backlinks on Squidoo. Free is free, and backlinks are backlinks.
Backlink Creation Guide lens located on Squidoo.
Increase Technorati Authority with this link exchange program.
Top 100 Social Video Sites. There’s also a sister post Top 100 Social Networking Sites
34 Sites that Pay You to Blog.
Making Money With Youtube. Similar to this post on Cash Tactics from a few weeks ago. Great minds think alike I guess.
20 Ways to Get Massive Traffic.
DotCom Mogul has a pretty exhaustive list on CPA Networks.
Two thoughts on affiliate marketing:
Amit at Super Affiliate Mindset posts his tips on how to get started as an affiliate
Paul disagrees quite strongly.
Right now I’m doing Amit’s system, although I’ve been pressed for time and haven’t setup the backend tracking, which I realize is a mistake that I plan to rectify shortly. I definitely see Paul’s point, and understand where he’s coming from. I’ve always been happy to spend money to make money. I’m not making big bucks, but I am making sales every couple of days, and that helps me feel that I’m not wasting my time.
I’m lucky enough that I have the HTML/web design background so I’m not starting from scratch, but my copywriting skills are sorely needing to be developed.
In site news, I’ve added CommentLuv which will append the last post you make on your website underneath your comments here. So comment away!
This post has been about three hours in the making, so I’m drawing the line now. Off to enjoy some kid-free Saturday action!
