1. Don't buy expensive equipment if you are only going to use it once in awhile... rent it.
2. Don't over extend your credit with the hope that on the next job you will catch up. That's called working on cash flow. It is one of the biggest reasons for going broke.
3. Make sure you keep in contact with your customers and keep them informed of your progress; good customer relations are important.
4. Give yourself a time schedule on each job an try to stick it. Make sure your subcontractors are aware of your schedule.
5. Don't forget to put your sign and phone number on your truck...inexpensive advertising.
6. Don't be afraid to hire inexperienced people if you can train them. You are pay less wages and in many cases, get a good employee.
7. When considering office space, make sure there is easy access and lots of parking; construction offices do not have to be on a busy street.
8. Get extra wallet size license certificate. You can order them from the state for a small fee. This will enable your key employee to show proof of license when pulling permits, etc.
9. Keep a very accurate check book balance. If you bounce a check for a subcontractor or material supplier, you will loose their much needed confidence in your company.
10. Make sure you know who you are dealing with, who is authorized to approve contracts, plans, etc.
11. Don't go overboard in your office furnishings...there are many good used buys.
12. In choosing your company name, make sure it's not vague. the company name should say what you do. For example: A.B.C. Refrigeration, rather than, A.B.C Enterprises.
13. Don't expand your business too soon. Make sure you are financially able first. Get advice from your accountant.
14. When buying trucks, look around for utility company used fleet sales.
15. Don't ignore customer complaints; the sooner you take care for them, the better for all concerened.
16. Hire an answering service... very important that your customers calling on your ads are able to reach you. A phone not answered will create a lack of confidence in the caller.
17. Keep your appointments and be on time; there is nothing worse than being late or not showing up.
18. Don't let the customer bully you. Remember, you are the expert.
19. Don't give away extras on the job. It doesn't take many extra to use up your profit.
20. Comply with all safety regulations. You or your employees getting hurt on the job could create costly problems.
21. Construction is among the most dangerous occupations, the need for proper insurance is important.
Remark:
Everyone wants to succeed, however, wanting is not enough. You must know what to do, how to do it, and, most important, how to apply all the knowledge you gain to your business.
Persistence is the key to most people's failure or success, but if you don't have the basic knowledge to start with, the probability of your success is greatly reduced.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Mother's Day
Mother's day, a worldwide holiday celebrated this year on Sunday, May 9th. everyday our mothers cook, wash, and take care of us. And everyday ourmothers are there for us. We sometimes forget to say "Thank You". But once a year on Mother's Day, we have the opportunity to show our appreciation and surprise our mothers with a special gift.
This Mother's Day 2010, there are more gift options than ever before!
For example, flowers. Carnationsused to be the typical choice, but recently, a widely variety of flowers such as Roses and Gerbera, are also commonly giving on Mother's Day.
In addition, there are many new variations of bouquet arrangements and potted plants. You can even add a gift basket with organic foods or fruit!
Furthermore, there are many different ways to celebrate Mother's Day. Other than sending flowers, you can go out for a family meal, help out with housework so that she can relax and take the day off, give her sweet gifts such as chocolates and desserts, or give her gift certificates to beauty salon or esthetics.
She is your one and only mother, os try to be creative and make sure the gift is special and meaningful.
2010 Mother's Day Gift Recommendation #1 Everlasting Flowers
2010 Mother's Day Gift Recommerdation #2 For the Gourmet
2010 Mother's Day Gift Recommendation #3 For Her Sweet Tooth
So what exactly is the gift that will make your mother most happy?
The answer is easy! It's of course for you to go see her! Seeing her once will mean more to her than 10 phone calls. Your mother is always worrying about you from a distance. You might sometimes think, she's getting old. So why not go see your loving Mother. This year, as your Mother's Day Gift, go see your mother and tell her in person, "Thank You". This is the best gift a mother can receive.
**Sending carnation flowers is very popular. Depending on the color , the meaning of the flower changes, so before choosing the flowers to send to your mother, you can use this as a reference.
White: In memory of my mother who's past away, my love is alive, pure love, respect
Red: love for my mother, true love, affection, passion
Dark Red: my heart's grief and sorrow, lust
Pink: gratitude, deeply touched, beautiful gesture, profession of ardent love
Yellow: friendship, beauty, fluctuations of love, disdain and jealousy
Purple: grace and dignity
On a side-note: Don't forget Father's Day is the 3rd Sunday in June!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
iCook Cookware
Please Click Here To Join Amway - Independent Business Owner Now! refer by Yulan Kuo, IBO#5353047
By Yulan Kuo, IBO#:5353047
Website:www.amwayglobal.com
Tel:(800)253-6500
iCook 27-piece Set
Stars with the 16 basic pieces and then adds the 5-piece stainless steel saute pan set and 6-piece nonstick frypan set. The saute pan set includes two dome lids. The non-stick frypan set - with tempered glass lids - is just the ticket for foods where sticking is not an option.
10-1093 $1,358.78
iCook 22-piece Set
Along with the 16 basis pieces, this set boasts the 6-piece nonstick frypan set with incredibly durable Duramic nonstick coating, which makes healthy cooking simple. The frypan set includes 8-in., 10-in., and 12-in. frypans, each with a tempered glass lid.
10-1091 $1,072.95
10-1083 6-piece Nonstick Frypan Set only $436.80
iCook 21-piece Set
This set includes the 16 basic pieces, plus the 5-piece saute pan set: 2-qt. and 3-qt. saute pans with stainless steel dome lids, plus a junior dome lid. The saute pan set features the Vitalok system, which retains up to one-third more vitamines and minerals than traditional cooking methods.
10-1092 $1,072.95
10-1084 5-piece Saute Pan Set only $436.80
By Yulan Kuo, IBO#:5353047
Website:www.amwayglobal.com
Tel:(800)253-6500
iCook 27-piece Set
Stars with the 16 basic pieces and then adds the 5-piece stainless steel saute pan set and 6-piece nonstick frypan set. The saute pan set includes two dome lids. The non-stick frypan set - with tempered glass lids - is just the ticket for foods where sticking is not an option.
10-1093 $1,358.78
iCook 22-piece Set
Along with the 16 basis pieces, this set boasts the 6-piece nonstick frypan set with incredibly durable Duramic nonstick coating, which makes healthy cooking simple. The frypan set includes 8-in., 10-in., and 12-in. frypans, each with a tempered glass lid.
10-1091 $1,072.95
10-1083 6-piece Nonstick Frypan Set only $436.80
iCook 21-piece Set
This set includes the 16 basic pieces, plus the 5-piece saute pan set: 2-qt. and 3-qt. saute pans with stainless steel dome lids, plus a junior dome lid. The saute pan set features the Vitalok system, which retains up to one-third more vitamines and minerals than traditional cooking methods.
10-1092 $1,072.95
10-1084 5-piece Saute Pan Set only $436.80
Thursday, December 31, 2009
What Bananas can do for you
"A banana a day keeps the doctor away!"
A professor at CCNY for a physiological psych class told his class about bananas. He said the expression "going bananas" is from the effects of bananas on the brain.. Read on:
Never, put your banana in the refrigerator!!!
This is interesting.
After reading this, you'll never look at a banana in the same way again.
Bananas contain three natural sugars - sucrose, fructose and glucose combined with fiber. A banana gives an instant, sustained and substantial boost of energy.
Research has proven that just two bananas provide enough energy for a strenuous 90-minute workout. No wonder the banana is the number one fruit with the world's leading athletes.
But energy isn't the only way a banana can help us keep fit. It can also help overcome or prevent a substantial number of illnesses and conditions, making it a must to add to our daily diet.
Depression: According to a recent survey undertaken by MIND amongst people suffering from depression, many felt much better after eating a banana. This is because bananas contain tryptophan, a type of protein that the body converts into serotonin, known to make you relax, improve your mood and generally make you feel happier.
PMS: Forget the pills - eat a banana. The vitamin B6 it contains regulates blood glucose levels, which can affect your mood.
Anemia : High in iron, bananas can stimulate the production of hemoglobin in the blood and so helps in cases of anemia.
Blood Pressure: This unique tropical fruit is extremely high in potassium yet low in salt, making it perfect to beat blood pressure. So much so, the US Food and Drug Administration has just allowed the banana industry to make official claims for the fruit's ability to reduce the risk of blood pressure and stroke.
Brain Power: 200 students at a Twickenham (Middlesex) school ( England ) were helped through their exams this year by eating bananas at breakfast, break, and lunch in a bid to boost their brain power. Research has shown that the potassium-packed fruit can assist learning by making pupils more alert.
Constipation: High in fiber, including bananas in the diet can help restore normal bowel action, helping to overcome the problem without resorting to laxatives.
Hangovers: One of the quickest ways of curing a hangover is to make a banana milkshake, sweetened with honey. The banana calms the stomach and, with the help of the honey, builds up depleted blood sugar levels, while the milk soothes and re-hydrates your system.
Heartburn: Bananas have a natural antacid effect in the body, so if you suffer from heartburn, try eating a banana for soothing relief.
Morning Sickness: Snacking on bananas between meals helps to keep blood sugar levels up and avoid morning sickness
Mosquito bites: Before reaching for the insect bite cream, try rubbing the affected area with the inside of a banana skin. Many people find it amazingly successful at reducing swelling and irritation.
Nerves: Bananas are high in B vitamins that help calm the nervous system.
Overweight and at work? Studies at the Institute of Psychology in Austria found pressure at work leads to gorging on comfort food like chocolate and chips. Looking at 5,000 hospital patients, researchers found the most obese were more likely to be in high-pressure jobs. The report concluded that, to avoid panic-induced food cravings, we need to control our blood sugar levels by snacking on high carbohydrate foods every two hours to keep levels steady.
Ulcers: The banana is used as the dietary food against intestinal disorders because of its soft texture and smoothness. It is the only raw fruit that can be eaten without distress in over-chronicler cases. It also neutralizes over-acidity and reduces irritation by coating the lining of the stomach.
Temperature control: Many other cultures see bananas as a "cooling" fruit that can lower both the physical and emotional temperature of expectant mothers. In Thailand , for example, pregnant women eat bananas to ensure their baby is born with a cool temperature.
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): Bananas can help SAD sufferers because they contain the natural mood enhancer tryptophan.
Smoking &Tobacco Use: Bananas can also help people trying to give up smoking. The B6, B12 they contain, as well as the potassium and magnesium found in them, help the body recover from the effects of nicotine withdrawal.
Stress: Potassium is a vital mineral, which helps normalize the heartbeat, sends oxygen to the brain and regulates your body's water balance.. When we are stressed, our metabolic rate rises, thereby reducing our potassium levels. These can be rebalanced with the help of a high-potassium banana snack.
Strokes: According to research in The New England Journal of Medicine, eating bananas as part of a regular diet can cut the risk of death by strokes by as much as 40%!
Warts: Those keen on natural alternatives swear that if you want to kill off a wart, take a piece of banana skin and place it on the wart, with the yellow side out. Carefully hold the skin in place with a plaster or surgical tape!
So, a banana really is a natural remedy for many ills.. When you compare it to an apple, it has four times the protein, twice the carbohydrate, three times the phosphorus, five times the vitamin A and iron, and twice the other vitamins and minerals. It is also rich in potassium and is one of the best value foods around So maybe its time to change that well-known phrase so that we say, "A banana a day keeps the doctor away!"
PASS IT ON TO YOUR FRIENDS
PS: Bananas must be the reason monkeys are so happy all the time! I will add one here; want a quick shine on our shoes?? Take the INSIDE of the banana skin, and rub directly on the shoe...polish with dry cloth.. Amazing fruit !!!
A professor at CCNY for a physiological psych class told his class about bananas. He said the expression "going bananas" is from the effects of bananas on the brain.. Read on:
Never, put your banana in the refrigerator!!!
This is interesting.
After reading this, you'll never look at a banana in the same way again.
Bananas contain three natural sugars - sucrose, fructose and glucose combined with fiber. A banana gives an instant, sustained and substantial boost of energy.
Research has proven that just two bananas provide enough energy for a strenuous 90-minute workout. No wonder the banana is the number one fruit with the world's leading athletes.
But energy isn't the only way a banana can help us keep fit. It can also help overcome or prevent a substantial number of illnesses and conditions, making it a must to add to our daily diet.
Depression: According to a recent survey undertaken by MIND amongst people suffering from depression, many felt much better after eating a banana. This is because bananas contain tryptophan, a type of protein that the body converts into serotonin, known to make you relax, improve your mood and generally make you feel happier.
PMS: Forget the pills - eat a banana. The vitamin B6 it contains regulates blood glucose levels, which can affect your mood.
Anemia : High in iron, bananas can stimulate the production of hemoglobin in the blood and so helps in cases of anemia.
Blood Pressure: This unique tropical fruit is extremely high in potassium yet low in salt, making it perfect to beat blood pressure. So much so, the US Food and Drug Administration has just allowed the banana industry to make official claims for the fruit's ability to reduce the risk of blood pressure and stroke.
Brain Power: 200 students at a Twickenham (Middlesex) school ( England ) were helped through their exams this year by eating bananas at breakfast, break, and lunch in a bid to boost their brain power. Research has shown that the potassium-packed fruit can assist learning by making pupils more alert.
Constipation: High in fiber, including bananas in the diet can help restore normal bowel action, helping to overcome the problem without resorting to laxatives.
Hangovers: One of the quickest ways of curing a hangover is to make a banana milkshake, sweetened with honey. The banana calms the stomach and, with the help of the honey, builds up depleted blood sugar levels, while the milk soothes and re-hydrates your system.
Heartburn: Bananas have a natural antacid effect in the body, so if you suffer from heartburn, try eating a banana for soothing relief.
Morning Sickness: Snacking on bananas between meals helps to keep blood sugar levels up and avoid morning sickness
Mosquito bites: Before reaching for the insect bite cream, try rubbing the affected area with the inside of a banana skin. Many people find it amazingly successful at reducing swelling and irritation.
Nerves: Bananas are high in B vitamins that help calm the nervous system.
Overweight and at work? Studies at the Institute of Psychology in Austria found pressure at work leads to gorging on comfort food like chocolate and chips. Looking at 5,000 hospital patients, researchers found the most obese were more likely to be in high-pressure jobs. The report concluded that, to avoid panic-induced food cravings, we need to control our blood sugar levels by snacking on high carbohydrate foods every two hours to keep levels steady.
Ulcers: The banana is used as the dietary food against intestinal disorders because of its soft texture and smoothness. It is the only raw fruit that can be eaten without distress in over-chronicler cases. It also neutralizes over-acidity and reduces irritation by coating the lining of the stomach.
Temperature control: Many other cultures see bananas as a "cooling" fruit that can lower both the physical and emotional temperature of expectant mothers. In Thailand , for example, pregnant women eat bananas to ensure their baby is born with a cool temperature.
Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD): Bananas can help SAD sufferers because they contain the natural mood enhancer tryptophan.
Smoking &Tobacco Use: Bananas can also help people trying to give up smoking. The B6, B12 they contain, as well as the potassium and magnesium found in them, help the body recover from the effects of nicotine withdrawal.
Stress: Potassium is a vital mineral, which helps normalize the heartbeat, sends oxygen to the brain and regulates your body's water balance.. When we are stressed, our metabolic rate rises, thereby reducing our potassium levels. These can be rebalanced with the help of a high-potassium banana snack.
Strokes: According to research in The New England Journal of Medicine, eating bananas as part of a regular diet can cut the risk of death by strokes by as much as 40%!
Warts: Those keen on natural alternatives swear that if you want to kill off a wart, take a piece of banana skin and place it on the wart, with the yellow side out. Carefully hold the skin in place with a plaster or surgical tape!
So, a banana really is a natural remedy for many ills.. When you compare it to an apple, it has four times the protein, twice the carbohydrate, three times the phosphorus, five times the vitamin A and iron, and twice the other vitamins and minerals. It is also rich in potassium and is one of the best value foods around So maybe its time to change that well-known phrase so that we say, "A banana a day keeps the doctor away!"
PASS IT ON TO YOUR FRIENDS
PS: Bananas must be the reason monkeys are so happy all the time! I will add one here; want a quick shine on our shoes?? Take the INSIDE of the banana skin, and rub directly on the shoe...polish with dry cloth.. Amazing fruit !!!
Monday, December 21, 2009
Affiliate Program Tutorial
By Allan Gardyne
AssociatePrograms.com
This Affiliate Program Tutorial aims to give you a quick overview.
It's your road map to success as an affiliate.
I've been earning a good living from affiliate programs since 1998. Based on that experience, this tutorial tells you the 18 steps to take to generate a useful income from affiliate programs.
No tricks. No gimmicks. Just solid, reliable methods designed to work for years.
You have the choice of many different ways of earning affiliate commissions.
In my experience, you'll have your best chance of success if you do the following. Find a niche and create a useful, interesting, content-rich, keyword-rich website on one topic and weave in affiliate links and AdSense ads.
This method – with the more recent addition of AdSense ads – has worked beautifully for me since 1998.
I urge you to master this basic method. It's a bit like serving an apprenticeship.
As part of your apprenticeship you'll learn SEO (search engine optimization) skills, copywriting skills and various other Internet marketing skills which will prove to be invaluable, whatever route you choose next.
With any luck, you'll have a bit of fun, too! I do.
I include Google's AdSense in this tutorial. Strictly speaking, AdSense is an advertising network. However, in many ways it's similar to an affiliate program. I think AdSense is fantastic. It's free to join, free to use and easy to use.
It's often much easier to earn good money from AdSense than affiliate programs, so it's essential that you include AdSense in your plans.
OK. Let's get started...
1. Set a goal. If you want to go somewhere, you need to know where you're going.
Let's start with a modest goal. Say you aim to earn a total of $300 (US) a month in affiliate commissions and AdSense revenue. Imagine what you could do with that money. A holiday? A better lifestyle?
I've kept the amount low, because it's important that you believe you can do this. Achieve small successes first, see the money in your hands or in your bank account, and then increase your goals.
Perhaps you have much larger goals. That's OK. Whatever your goals, I strongly recommend that you serve your apprenticeship by taking these 18 steps. They'll give you solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.
2. Find your niche. Read Ken Evoy's free Affiliate Masters Course and use the excellent advice in it to find a niche that suits you and your interests.
Print out the Affiliate Masters Course, find a quiet, comfortable spot and read it several times.
Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. You're planning a business, so don't rush it. It's very important.
You'll probably avoid Internet marketing topics because that field is so overcrowded and competitive. It's much easier to succeed if you locate a less competitive niche.
Choose a topic that is easy to write about.
Even if you've already chosen a niche, I urge you to read the Affiliate Masters Course. It might make you change your mind.
You can follow your passion or chase the money. With luck – and a bit of keyword research – you may be able to do both.
Don't decide definitely on a niche topic until you've taken the next two steps...
3. Choose a profitable niche. Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you've chosen. Because you're planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Yahoo! Search Marketing and AdWords.
You're going to build a site the search engines love, so you also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. You don't rely on guesswork.
You must do this BEFORE you start building your web site. That's critically important.
Here's a useful free tool I like using for quick, rough keyword research: pixelfast.com/overture/
Type in a phrase, for example, "hiking boots", click "Go", follow the instructions, and you can see how much advertisers are paying per click for that phrase on the Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) network of web sites.
You can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. That's why I double check results using Wordtracker.
Wordtracker's free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a day or a week at a time. It's very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a day. I use the annual subscription now.
Go to Google's AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. You can do that by playing around with Google's free Keyword Tool.
For example, try putting in a keyword or phrase, such as "recipe" and click on "Get More Keywords". Pretend you're willing to pay the maximum per click the tool allows - 100. (It won't work properly if you ignore this.) Over on the right side of the page, make sure that "Cost and position estimates" is selected.
The tool will calculate for you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for a whole lot of words and phrases. Try entering a different word, say "debt" or "hosting", click on "Re-calculate" and watch how the CPC changes.
You don't HAVE to choose a topic which has expensive keywords. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.
If you use Site Build It you'll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn't have thought of without it.
Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you'll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.
Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.
For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US
Publishers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites. Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you're planning to create and look at their AdSense ads. You can also use AdSense's preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.
4. Research affiliate merchants. Do research to see if there are suitable affiliate merchants which match your topic.
You want ones that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling. You can search the AssociatePrograms.com affiliate directory for ideas.
Consider aiming for lifetime commissions.
If you're lucky, you'll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions – the sort reviewed in this directory..
You'll earn repeat commissions when "your" customers make more purchases.
5. Build a useful, interesting web site on your niche.
Create a content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines.
Show your personality. Have a bit of fun. Be memorable. You need to connect with your visitors. Remember that people like buying from people they like.
There's no space in this affiliate program tutorial to describe how to build a web site. For that, you'll need a good instruction manual.
If you're short of money, you can hunt for free information on sites such HTMLGoodies.
You'll save yourself an enormous amount of time and frustration if you take the plunge and buy a good instruction manual written specifically for affiliates.
Here are the two best options:
For keen do-it-your-selfers, I recommend Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook.
Rosalind is a real been-there-done-that super affiliate.
Her instruction manual shows you how she builds very successful sites using web authoring software.
It starts right at the beginning, discussing topics such as myths about doing business online, mistakes to avoid, how to choose the best topic, how to choose the right domain name, etc.
The book, updated in May 2006, takes you step-by-step through the whole process.
One particularly useful feature is her explanation of how she achieves high conversion rates (visitor-to-sales ratios), achieving conversion rates of 4% or 6% while most affiliates are happy with 1%.
Another of the strengths of the book is her descriptions of a wide variety of ways to get traffic to your site. This is important - too many affiliates rely on just one or two traffic-generating methods. The more traffic-gemerating methods you have, the safer your business is.
Rosaland is genuinely successful, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Now she's also a very successful author, with sales of more $1 million from her book, which is excellent value.
When you learn from her, you're learning from a winner.
Learn more about Rosalind's Super Affiliate Handbook here.
For affiliates who want to simplify things as much as possible and automate the tedious techie stuff, I recommend Ken Evoy's Site Build It (SBI).
SBI is a site-building, site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools, all in one place.
Once you have SBI, you don't have to go scurrying all over the Net adding more tools and software. You have almost all you need in one package, so you can concentrate on the fun part – creating useful, interesting content.
(Once you have SBI, the only addition you need to buy occasionally is a cheap, one-day subscription to Wordtracker. It's useful to double check the SBI brainstorming results against Wordtracker results.)
SBI comes with a newly updated, truly comprehensive instruction manual, a step-by-step Action Guide.
SBI is the tool I give my assistants.
Ken Evoy's instruction manual is doing my work for me. First it taught Rupert and now it's teaching Ros how to build a high quality, successful, revenue-generating site.
You could build a site without SBI, but using it saves you time and effort by simplifying the process.
SBI teaches you how to optimize your web pages so they'll be found in search engines. After building a page, you click the "Analyze It" button and it tells you what you need to do to improve it.
The SBI technique really works. Two of the SBI sites that Rupert built are included in the case studies on the SBI site.
See the proof in the SBI case studies
6. Add affiliate links. As you write the articles for your site, weave affiliate links into them. Always have a typical visitor in mind as you write the articles. Speak to that visitor.
Your task as an affiliate is to help your visitor decide what to buy.
One successful technique is to gradually lead your visitor towards a purchase. Start by outlining a problem, discuss a good solution that has worked for you, and end the article with a link that is a call to action, such as a hyperlink that says, "Find out more here."
Your task as an affiliate is NOT to sell (that's the merchant's job) but to presell, to warm up your visitors. You want your visitors in a ready-to-buy frame of mind when they arrive at the merchant's site.
For superb advice on preselling, I strongly recommend you join Ken Evoy's 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. It's free to join.
Ken is an absolute whiz at preselling and he's renowned for working extremely hard to help his affiliates succeed. He has a superb program. It's been No.1 in my Top 10 for several years.
7. Place AdSense ads on your site. Here's an excellent free AdSense tutorial.
If you have a good, popular site, it's remarkably easy to make good money with AdSense.
8. Get links. First, link to other sites. Choose sites that have similar or related themes, and invite those sites to link to you.
This is hugely important. Search engines love sites that have many links to them – especially if those links come from sites which are themselves popular.
Now you see why I said build a useful, interesting web site. If you do that, people are more likely to link to your site.
Here's an article I wrote describing how to get reciprocal links.
9. Anchor text. You'll also need to understand the importance of anchor text, the words you use to link to pages on your site, the words people use when they link to your site.
To search engines, anchor text is very important.
10. List your site in major directories and niche directories in your industry.
You probably already know about Yahoo! (good but expensive), DMOZ (often takes months to get into) and Zeal (tricky to get into; for non-commercial sites).
Here are some more directories (some charge a fee):
Gimpsy
Skaffe
Joeant
GoGuides
Business.com
SevenSeek
ThisIsYourYear
Looksmart (probably too expensive)
BlueFind
WowDirectory
Best of the Web
GeniusFind
Guides to web directories
David Mahler has a Guide to Web Directories. It's a good list of recommended web directories.
Here's another list: http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php
How to find niche directories:
Go to Search It! (It's a very handy free research tool.)
Scroll to the Search Category, "Specialty Hubs and Directories"
Choose one of the 4 options in STEP 2
Read the "Click Here for Information..." help before proceeding
Complete STEPS 3 and 4, and then click on Search It!
Read the tutorial. It tells you what to do with the search results
Get your search results. You should be able to find relevant, themed hub sites and directories which will list your site. Some charge a fee, some are free.
11. Write articles and distribute them to article directories (fairly easy) and try to persuade newsletters and other sites to publish them (more challenging). This step isn't absolutely essential, but it helps enormously if you do it. Now you understand why it was so important that you chose a topic that was easy to write about.
12. Add more pages and get more links. Keep adding useful, interesting, keyword-rich pages (you do research at Wordtracker for this) and keep encouraging more sites to link to your site.
Make friends with other web site owners, and more people will link to you...
13. Be patient. If your new site is typical, nothing much will seem to happen for the first couple of months or so, and you'll probably become frustrated and find it hard to believe that this is going to work.
You're likely to feel annoyed, cheated and ready to quit. You're likely to be a prime target for people selling get-rich-quick junk.
Many affiliates give up at this stage. Stick with it. If you're persistent and get the details right, the process I'm describing works beautifully.
Learn something new every day. Do something to improve your business every day. If you do that, success is inevitable.
14. Expect to see signs of success. Eventually, because of all the links to your site on other sites, Google, Yahoo! and MSN will find your site and start sending you traffic.
Perhaps around the three-month or four-month stage you'll be receiving 100 visitors a day. Visitors will like what they see and some site owners will start linking to you and asking you to link to them.
Keep at it. You're just getting warmed up.
15. The payoff...
About six months down the road, after little expense but quite a lot of hard work and research, you hit your magical $300 a month mark, from affiliate sales and from AdSense ads on your site.
Depending on the niche you've chosen and the skills you've learned, you might earn considerably more than $300.
Perhaps after 12 months, you'll be earning $500 to $1,000 a month from your site.
The checks keep coming in, month after month, even when you take a little vacation. You start telling friends how easy affiliate marketing is, and are puzzled when they're not convinced.
Of course, it's not really easy. It just seems easy after you've done the hard work.
...or the NON-payoff
If you've merely scanned the instruction manual and jumped right in without doing any research and built a "Make Money on the Internet" site, you'll probably earn very little. A search on Google for "make money" displays more than 4 million pages. If one of those is yours, you have a LOT of competition.
If you did this and it isn't working for you, go back to step 1 and start again.
16. Tweak your site.
To boost your conversion rate (your visitor-to-sales ratio), try little experiments, one thing at a time.
Try changing the heading on a page, the words, the colors, the placement of your links. With each change wait until about 1,000 visitors have seen the change, and monitor your affiliate commissions to see if they rise or fall.
You do this because you understand that if 1% of your visitors are buying and tiny changes boost your success rate to 2%, you'll DOUBLE your commissions.
17. The future
When you reach your goal of $300 a month, you wonder whether you should expand your site, perhaps adding a newsletter, an autoresponder course or two, a forum, RSS newsfeeds, a blog, a whitepaper, a report to sell ... and turn it into a portal. You dream big. Perhaps you even start dreaming of having your own affiliates promoting your reports for you...
Or perhaps you just research another little overlooked niche and start on your next simple little, low-maintenance money-generating site.
It can be done. The main ingredient needed is persistence. Been there, done that, and I have a very nice lifestyle to prove it.
The $300 a month target is very conservative. If that's all you earn, you've done something "wrong". You haven't chosen profitable keywords carefully enough, you haven't built enough attractive, keyword-rich pages, you haven't learned the basics of optimizing pages for search engines, or you haven't attracted enough good quality links to your site.
That's the wonderful thing about this business. You can make lots of mistakes and still earn useful money. Just don't make TOO many mistakes.
18. Take the first step. That's the one that matters most.
I suggest you go back and read through this affiliate program tutorial again.
Picture yourself owning a successful Internet business. Picture yourself opening letters and finding checks in them.
Imagine enjoying yourself spending the money, perhaps even giving up your day job so that you can concentrate on your own business.
Now take the first step.
And when you've quit your day job, please write and tell me. I love getting emails like that.
AssociatePrograms.com
This Affiliate Program Tutorial aims to give you a quick overview.
It's your road map to success as an affiliate.
I've been earning a good living from affiliate programs since 1998. Based on that experience, this tutorial tells you the 18 steps to take to generate a useful income from affiliate programs.
No tricks. No gimmicks. Just solid, reliable methods designed to work for years.
You have the choice of many different ways of earning affiliate commissions.
In my experience, you'll have your best chance of success if you do the following. Find a niche and create a useful, interesting, content-rich, keyword-rich website on one topic and weave in affiliate links and AdSense ads.
This method – with the more recent addition of AdSense ads – has worked beautifully for me since 1998.
I urge you to master this basic method. It's a bit like serving an apprenticeship.
As part of your apprenticeship you'll learn SEO (search engine optimization) skills, copywriting skills and various other Internet marketing skills which will prove to be invaluable, whatever route you choose next.
With any luck, you'll have a bit of fun, too! I do.
I include Google's AdSense in this tutorial. Strictly speaking, AdSense is an advertising network. However, in many ways it's similar to an affiliate program. I think AdSense is fantastic. It's free to join, free to use and easy to use.
It's often much easier to earn good money from AdSense than affiliate programs, so it's essential that you include AdSense in your plans.
OK. Let's get started...
1. Set a goal. If you want to go somewhere, you need to know where you're going.
Let's start with a modest goal. Say you aim to earn a total of $300 (US) a month in affiliate commissions and AdSense revenue. Imagine what you could do with that money. A holiday? A better lifestyle?
I've kept the amount low, because it's important that you believe you can do this. Achieve small successes first, see the money in your hands or in your bank account, and then increase your goals.
Perhaps you have much larger goals. That's OK. Whatever your goals, I strongly recommend that you serve your apprenticeship by taking these 18 steps. They'll give you solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.
2. Find your niche. Read Ken Evoy's free Affiliate Masters Course and use the excellent advice in it to find a niche that suits you and your interests.
Print out the Affiliate Masters Course, find a quiet, comfortable spot and read it several times.
Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. You're planning a business, so don't rush it. It's very important.
You'll probably avoid Internet marketing topics because that field is so overcrowded and competitive. It's much easier to succeed if you locate a less competitive niche.
Choose a topic that is easy to write about.
Even if you've already chosen a niche, I urge you to read the Affiliate Masters Course. It might make you change your mind.
You can follow your passion or chase the money. With luck – and a bit of keyword research – you may be able to do both.
Don't decide definitely on a niche topic until you've taken the next two steps...
3. Choose a profitable niche. Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you've chosen. Because you're planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Yahoo! Search Marketing and AdWords.
You're going to build a site the search engines love, so you also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. You don't rely on guesswork.
You must do this BEFORE you start building your web site. That's critically important.
Here's a useful free tool I like using for quick, rough keyword research: pixelfast.com/overture/
Type in a phrase, for example, "hiking boots", click "Go", follow the instructions, and you can see how much advertisers are paying per click for that phrase on the Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) network of web sites.
You can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. That's why I double check results using Wordtracker.
Wordtracker's free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a day or a week at a time. It's very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a day. I use the annual subscription now.
Go to Google's AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you're interested in. You can do that by playing around with Google's free Keyword Tool.
For example, try putting in a keyword or phrase, such as "recipe" and click on "Get More Keywords". Pretend you're willing to pay the maximum per click the tool allows - 100. (It won't work properly if you ignore this.) Over on the right side of the page, make sure that "Cost and position estimates" is selected.
The tool will calculate for you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for a whole lot of words and phrases. Try entering a different word, say "debt" or "hosting", click on "Re-calculate" and watch how the CPC changes.
You don't HAVE to choose a topic which has expensive keywords. Often topics that have expensive keywords are very competitive. You may do better choosing a less competitive niche with cheaper keywords.
If you use Site Build It you'll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn't have thought of without it.
Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you'll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.
Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.
For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US
Publishers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites. Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you're planning to create and look at their AdSense ads. You can also use AdSense's preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.
4. Research affiliate merchants. Do research to see if there are suitable affiliate merchants which match your topic.
You want ones that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they're good at selling. You can search the AssociatePrograms.com affiliate directory for ideas.
Consider aiming for lifetime commissions.
If you're lucky, you'll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions – the sort reviewed in this directory..
You'll earn repeat commissions when "your" customers make more purchases.
5. Build a useful, interesting web site on your niche.
Create a content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines.
Show your personality. Have a bit of fun. Be memorable. You need to connect with your visitors. Remember that people like buying from people they like.
There's no space in this affiliate program tutorial to describe how to build a web site. For that, you'll need a good instruction manual.
If you're short of money, you can hunt for free information on sites such HTMLGoodies.
You'll save yourself an enormous amount of time and frustration if you take the plunge and buy a good instruction manual written specifically for affiliates.
Here are the two best options:
For keen do-it-your-selfers, I recommend Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook.
Rosalind is a real been-there-done-that super affiliate.
Her instruction manual shows you how she builds very successful sites using web authoring software.
It starts right at the beginning, discussing topics such as myths about doing business online, mistakes to avoid, how to choose the best topic, how to choose the right domain name, etc.
The book, updated in May 2006, takes you step-by-step through the whole process.
One particularly useful feature is her explanation of how she achieves high conversion rates (visitor-to-sales ratios), achieving conversion rates of 4% or 6% while most affiliates are happy with 1%.
Another of the strengths of the book is her descriptions of a wide variety of ways to get traffic to your site. This is important - too many affiliates rely on just one or two traffic-generating methods. The more traffic-gemerating methods you have, the safer your business is.
Rosaland is genuinely successful, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Now she's also a very successful author, with sales of more $1 million from her book, which is excellent value.
When you learn from her, you're learning from a winner.
Learn more about Rosalind's Super Affiliate Handbook here.
For affiliates who want to simplify things as much as possible and automate the tedious techie stuff, I recommend Ken Evoy's Site Build It (SBI).
SBI is a site-building, site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools, all in one place.
Once you have SBI, you don't have to go scurrying all over the Net adding more tools and software. You have almost all you need in one package, so you can concentrate on the fun part – creating useful, interesting content.
(Once you have SBI, the only addition you need to buy occasionally is a cheap, one-day subscription to Wordtracker. It's useful to double check the SBI brainstorming results against Wordtracker results.)
SBI comes with a newly updated, truly comprehensive instruction manual, a step-by-step Action Guide.
SBI is the tool I give my assistants.
Ken Evoy's instruction manual is doing my work for me. First it taught Rupert and now it's teaching Ros how to build a high quality, successful, revenue-generating site.
You could build a site without SBI, but using it saves you time and effort by simplifying the process.
SBI teaches you how to optimize your web pages so they'll be found in search engines. After building a page, you click the "Analyze It" button and it tells you what you need to do to improve it.
The SBI technique really works. Two of the SBI sites that Rupert built are included in the case studies on the SBI site.
See the proof in the SBI case studies
6. Add affiliate links. As you write the articles for your site, weave affiliate links into them. Always have a typical visitor in mind as you write the articles. Speak to that visitor.
Your task as an affiliate is to help your visitor decide what to buy.
One successful technique is to gradually lead your visitor towards a purchase. Start by outlining a problem, discuss a good solution that has worked for you, and end the article with a link that is a call to action, such as a hyperlink that says, "Find out more here."
Your task as an affiliate is NOT to sell (that's the merchant's job) but to presell, to warm up your visitors. You want your visitors in a ready-to-buy frame of mind when they arrive at the merchant's site.
For superb advice on preselling, I strongly recommend you join Ken Evoy's 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. It's free to join.
Ken is an absolute whiz at preselling and he's renowned for working extremely hard to help his affiliates succeed. He has a superb program. It's been No.1 in my Top 10 for several years.
7. Place AdSense ads on your site. Here's an excellent free AdSense tutorial.
If you have a good, popular site, it's remarkably easy to make good money with AdSense.
8. Get links. First, link to other sites. Choose sites that have similar or related themes, and invite those sites to link to you.
This is hugely important. Search engines love sites that have many links to them – especially if those links come from sites which are themselves popular.
Now you see why I said build a useful, interesting web site. If you do that, people are more likely to link to your site.
Here's an article I wrote describing how to get reciprocal links.
9. Anchor text. You'll also need to understand the importance of anchor text, the words you use to link to pages on your site, the words people use when they link to your site.
To search engines, anchor text is very important.
10. List your site in major directories and niche directories in your industry.
You probably already know about Yahoo! (good but expensive), DMOZ (often takes months to get into) and Zeal (tricky to get into; for non-commercial sites).
Here are some more directories (some charge a fee):
Gimpsy
Skaffe
Joeant
GoGuides
Business.com
SevenSeek
ThisIsYourYear
Looksmart (probably too expensive)
BlueFind
WowDirectory
Best of the Web
GeniusFind
Guides to web directories
David Mahler has a Guide to Web Directories. It's a good list of recommended web directories.
Here's another list: http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php
How to find niche directories:
Go to Search It! (It's a very handy free research tool.)
Scroll to the Search Category, "Specialty Hubs and Directories"
Choose one of the 4 options in STEP 2
Read the "Click Here for Information..." help before proceeding
Complete STEPS 3 and 4, and then click on Search It!
Read the tutorial. It tells you what to do with the search results
Get your search results. You should be able to find relevant, themed hub sites and directories which will list your site. Some charge a fee, some are free.
11. Write articles and distribute them to article directories (fairly easy) and try to persuade newsletters and other sites to publish them (more challenging). This step isn't absolutely essential, but it helps enormously if you do it. Now you understand why it was so important that you chose a topic that was easy to write about.
12. Add more pages and get more links. Keep adding useful, interesting, keyword-rich pages (you do research at Wordtracker for this) and keep encouraging more sites to link to your site.
Make friends with other web site owners, and more people will link to you...
13. Be patient. If your new site is typical, nothing much will seem to happen for the first couple of months or so, and you'll probably become frustrated and find it hard to believe that this is going to work.
You're likely to feel annoyed, cheated and ready to quit. You're likely to be a prime target for people selling get-rich-quick junk.
Many affiliates give up at this stage. Stick with it. If you're persistent and get the details right, the process I'm describing works beautifully.
Learn something new every day. Do something to improve your business every day. If you do that, success is inevitable.
14. Expect to see signs of success. Eventually, because of all the links to your site on other sites, Google, Yahoo! and MSN will find your site and start sending you traffic.
Perhaps around the three-month or four-month stage you'll be receiving 100 visitors a day. Visitors will like what they see and some site owners will start linking to you and asking you to link to them.
Keep at it. You're just getting warmed up.
15. The payoff...
About six months down the road, after little expense but quite a lot of hard work and research, you hit your magical $300 a month mark, from affiliate sales and from AdSense ads on your site.
Depending on the niche you've chosen and the skills you've learned, you might earn considerably more than $300.
Perhaps after 12 months, you'll be earning $500 to $1,000 a month from your site.
The checks keep coming in, month after month, even when you take a little vacation. You start telling friends how easy affiliate marketing is, and are puzzled when they're not convinced.
Of course, it's not really easy. It just seems easy after you've done the hard work.
...or the NON-payoff
If you've merely scanned the instruction manual and jumped right in without doing any research and built a "Make Money on the Internet" site, you'll probably earn very little. A search on Google for "make money" displays more than 4 million pages. If one of those is yours, you have a LOT of competition.
If you did this and it isn't working for you, go back to step 1 and start again.
16. Tweak your site.
To boost your conversion rate (your visitor-to-sales ratio), try little experiments, one thing at a time.
Try changing the heading on a page, the words, the colors, the placement of your links. With each change wait until about 1,000 visitors have seen the change, and monitor your affiliate commissions to see if they rise or fall.
You do this because you understand that if 1% of your visitors are buying and tiny changes boost your success rate to 2%, you'll DOUBLE your commissions.
17. The future
When you reach your goal of $300 a month, you wonder whether you should expand your site, perhaps adding a newsletter, an autoresponder course or two, a forum, RSS newsfeeds, a blog, a whitepaper, a report to sell ... and turn it into a portal. You dream big. Perhaps you even start dreaming of having your own affiliates promoting your reports for you...
Or perhaps you just research another little overlooked niche and start on your next simple little, low-maintenance money-generating site.
It can be done. The main ingredient needed is persistence. Been there, done that, and I have a very nice lifestyle to prove it.
The $300 a month target is very conservative. If that's all you earn, you've done something "wrong". You haven't chosen profitable keywords carefully enough, you haven't built enough attractive, keyword-rich pages, you haven't learned the basics of optimizing pages for search engines, or you haven't attracted enough good quality links to your site.
That's the wonderful thing about this business. You can make lots of mistakes and still earn useful money. Just don't make TOO many mistakes.
18. Take the first step. That's the one that matters most.
I suggest you go back and read through this affiliate program tutorial again.
Picture yourself owning a successful Internet business. Picture yourself opening letters and finding checks in them.
Imagine enjoying yourself spending the money, perhaps even giving up your day job so that you can concentrate on your own business.
Now take the first step.
And when you've quit your day job, please write and tell me. I love getting emails like that.
Friday, December 18, 2009
The 2 Day Guide To Affiliate Marketing
Wrote by editor@esitesecrets.com
Instruction:
Many – and I mean many – Internet marketers have gotten their start through affiliate marketing. Consider this – you can start making money without creating a product, without dealing with support nightmares and even without a website. And you can get started immediately.
You get paid by bringing buyers to sellers. When they buy, you get a “piece of the action” -- called a commission. So, if a prospect buys a $50 product, and the product pays 50% commission – you will make $25.
In other words, you are like a commission-only salesperson. Except that you don't have to do all the selling – or, often, much selling at all. You don't have to do take any “orders”. You don't have to meet prospects “face-to-face.” All you have to do, often, is simply introduce interested people to the product. And it all happens online.
Considering that you can advertise on the Internet often for free or very inexpensively, it may be the perfect place to start, or expand, your efforts in creating an online income and an Internet business.
With no floors to sweep, no insurance to pay and advertising that can work for you 24hours a day – it can easily become a fairly passive income. One you can start up while still showing up at the day job – or, when sufficient, taking “the rest of the day off” -- nearly every day.
The Action Plan
Day 1:
Where Do We Find Buyers?
Finding products to sell is a small fraction of the Affiliate Marketing Plan. The “meat” of affiliate marketing is finding buyers. Trust me, if there are buyers, there will be products to sell.
In general, there are two really great types of buyers – people who will buy no matter what the economy is doing.
The first group is called “desperate buyers” -- they have a problem and they need a solution – now. For instance, people who are in pain. Or, they’re facing a financial crisis (like an impending foreclosure). They are looking for a solution as quickly as possible – and these folks have a credit card hot in their hands searching earnestly for a solution.
The second group is “passionate (or rabid) buyers.” You know these people. Maybe you are one yourself. They are people who buy everything on a particular topic. Maybe it's golf. Or baseball. Or Harry Potter. Food and cooking. These can also be people who buy anything put out by a particular manufacturer (remember Beanie Babies?).
Groups of folks with a common interest we call “niches.” Now, not all niches have buyers. We call niches with buyers “niche markets.” But we don't want just a niche market – we want a niche market full of red-hot buyers.
So where do we find these rabid buyers?
Well, there are a number of places to look.
But, first of all, I'd recommend keeping your eyes and ears open.
What are those things that your friends and relatives simply can't live without? What's Oprah talking about?
Actually, one way to find hot buyers is to look at what are hot sellers. This actually can kill two birds with one stone – not only can you find hot markets, you can find the products that are popular with buyers.
For instance...
Nearly all marketplaces – eBay, Amazon, Clickbank – and the like will also have a list of hot products.
With eBay, there is - eBay Pulse http://pulse.ebay.com/
With Amazon, there is - http://amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ A useful rule-of-thumb is if a particular book is ranked 20,000 or higher.
Checking on a particular niche – see if there's a magazine on the topic -- http://www.amazon.com/magazine-newspaper-subscriptions/
Amazon Bestsellers in a variety of products: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/
The Electronic Marketplace, Clickbank: http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
Let's say I'm looking for a product with hot buyers. If we look under the “Health & Fitness Category” we see products which are listed in Clickbank's definition of “most popular.” Currently, the top two products are “Fat Loss For Idiots”, and “The Truth About 6-Pack Abs”
Where Do We Find Products?
Well, while eBay and Amazon both have affiliate programs, Clickbank is very, very popular with Internet Marketers. One of the appeals of Clickbank products is that they are digital products – meaning they are great for impulse buys.
Buyers can get immediate satisfaction from their purchase because they can immediately download and start using their product.
But wait! There's actually another way that we can make money that is similar enough to affiliate marketing that we'll include it here. And that is the world of CPA, or “cost per action” offers.
What does this mean? It means that you can actually get paid for bringing prospects to interested parties. They don't have to buy anything. But those parties know how much they will make off of every person they convert into a buyer – and they know how many prospects they can convert into buyers. They then know how much they can pay you to go find prospects to bring to them.
One of the most common of these offers you've probably seen: Video Professor. Those offers you see for ringtones are often CPA offers.
Some of these offers will pay you if the person signs up for their offer, on down to paying you for people who simply enter their zip code.
How To Become An Affiliate
You can easily sign up for Clickbank as an affiliate, here:
https://www.clickbank.com/affiliateAccountSignup.htm?key=
Once you are an affiliate with Clickbank (and I've never heard of them turning anyone down), you can promote any of the offers in their marketplace. Just go to the link provided in the last section, and look around. You can click on the “pitch page” to see the sales page, and you can see how much you will make when you sell the product.
Clickbank is not the only place where you can find products to promote as an affiliate. I previously mentioned eBay and Amazon as companies that have affiliate offers. Also, there are other affiliate networks like Clickbank, such as PayDotCom. Some individual and smaller companies have affiliate programs, but you may want to be careful in selecting some of them because they may not have reliable payouts. You can keep up with various affiliate companies and their reputations at Allan Gardyne's AssociatePrograms.com website.
You can discover affiliate programs for companies by looking down at the bottom of their product page and they will often have a link that says “affiliates” or “associates” or “partners”. Click on that and you will find out
what they require to become an affiliate. Some companies have “open” affiliate programs –which menas they will take just about anyone who signs up; others have what are called “closed” affiliate programs and are more restrictive in who they allow to promote their products.
Whatever you do, be sure to read the “terms of service”, because affiliate programs often have restrictions (usually quite reasonable) on how you promote their programs – and violating those restrictions can get you thrown out of their affiliate program. For instance, most programs will throw you out if they feel that you are sending out “Unsolicited Commercial Email” (UCE) – or what is commonly known as SPAM.
For promoting CPA Offers, there are tons of companies. Most CPA companies are not completely open, and have an application process. But if you seem serious and can convince them you will bring them traffic, you should be accepted.
When you go to a CPA network site, you want to look for “publisher application.”
For instance, here are some companies you can apply to:
Azoogle – One of the larger CPA Companies
MaxBounty – have a diverse array of offers
NeverBlueAds – A newer company, popular because of its interface
CommissionJunction – Also known as “CJ.com” (They’re celebrating their 10 th year)
These are just a few of the companies – as you can see, there is a lot to choose from, and this is just scratching the surface.
Choosing Your Offer
Of course, you'll want to pick an offer that fits your niche.
For your first go-around, pick something that is an established product and makes decent money.
For instance, if we decided that weight-loss was our niche, we might pick the “Fat Loss For Idiots” product from Clickbank.
When we go to the marketplace for promoting products (as discussed earlier) – we see this information:
Fat Loss 4 Idiots. Affiliate Page Here: FatLoss4Idiots.com/aff ::: Thanks.
$/sale: $30.36 Future $: - Total $/sale: $30.36 %/sale: 75.0% %refd: 87.0% grav: 423.83
The pitch page will show you the sales page, the “create hoplink” link will easily allow you to create a url to use so that you will get credit for the sale when people buy through that link. (First, though, you have to sign up with Clickbank and get your Clickbank nickname.)
What you want to look for in Clickbank offers, along with the “$/sale”, is the “grav” number. “Grav” stands for “gravity”, and indicates Clickbank's assessment of the popularity of the item (in a formula only known to them) – reportedly based upon a combination of number of sales as well as the number of affiliates promoting it. If there are lots of people promoting it, you can be sure that it a good percentage of visitors become buyers. (Good can range anywhere from 1 out of 100 visitors – or 1% -- on up.)
With AzoogleAds – and other CPA networks, the older the “open date” is, the better. That indicates that the advertiser has been successful with this offer.
Setting Up Our Machine
To promote affiliate offers, you can set up a simple machine by using a simple 2 page website with an autoresponder.
I’m about to lay out what you need to make this happen. DON’T freak out! I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re first starting online, but after you build a site or two, you should be able to breeze through these steps with no problems! J
(In fact, if you want video training on how to get a domain, point it at your hosting account, and FTP your files to your site, and even how to set up a Wordpress blog in just minutes, check out 7 Minute Setup )
Here’s what you'll need:
1. A hosting account
2. A domain name
3. A text-editor or webpage editor
4. 2 very simple web pages
a. A “Squeeze” or “Opt-in” page
b. A “download page”
5. An autoresponder account
6. FTP software
7. The link to your affiliate offer
1. A Hosting Account
A hosting account is where you will store your web pages. There are literally hundreds of webhosting companies – from expensive, top-of-the-line to down-in-the dirt grungy. You don't generally want down-in-the dirt grungy, but you don't need to pay for top-of-the-line, either.
A webhosting company that’s popular with many Internet Marketers and has great prices and support is HostGator.com
HostGator is one of the few hosting companies I’ll recommend. I’ve been with them for years, and never had a problem that wasn’t fixed VERY quickly by their support)
2. A Domain Name
A Domain name provides your web pages with an address on the Internet. It's what people type in to the address bar of their browser, and what is commonly known as a “URL” (Uniform Resource Locator) or “URI” (Uniform Resource Indicator).
Pick a domain name that will be relevant to your niche. If we choose “Fat Loss For Idiots” we might want to choose, “SecretsOfFatLossForIdiots.com”.
You can buy your domains for a great price at NameCheap
3. A Text Editor or Webpage (aka “HTML”) Editor
I highly recommend you download what's called a “WYSIWYG” html editor (for “What You See Is What You Get”) which allows you to create web pages simply and easily – by adding formatting and font styles and the like. These editors allow you to build a web page visually, so you know exactly “What You Get”
Why not just use Microsoct Word, you ask? Because Word is TERRIBLE for web pages. I cannot stress that enough. Microsoft Word should NEVER BE USED TO CREATE WEBPAGES! When you save a Word document as a web page, the program adds a bunch of gobbledy-gook to the backround of the page that ends up costing you money in the long run. (We’re here to make money, not lose it!)
There are a number of WYSIWYG editors, some of which are high end, like one program called Dreamweaver. But you can get along quite well with the free and quite excellent webpage editor KompoZer.
Telling you how to edit web pages is a whole other animal, and it’s just too much to put into this report. But there are a number of great – and FREE – resources that will show you how to do so easily. You can just go to Google and type in “How to learn HTML” or “How to use KompoZer” and it should bring up a number of options for you to check out!
4. 2 Simple Webpages
The next step in this process is to create 2 simple web pages. The first is called a “Squeeze Page” or “Opt-In Page”
Squeeze Page (Name it index.html)
A squeeze page is simply an offer to exchange valuable information in trade for the user's email address.
Basically, you will take the “opt-in” form that you get from your autoresponder company (don’t worry, I’m going over this next) and create a page with a tantalizing offer – a report or a series of emails.
You want to offer something that will entice the people in the niche you are targeting to sign up.
For instance, for “Fat Loss For Idiots” you might want to offer a report titled something like “How To Lose Fat Quickly!” or, the “Top 10 Tips For Fat Loss.” (You may have to do a bit of research, but not too much, to find ideas for the content for your report – but don't steal other people's content!)
Incidentally ( and here's the real power ) – once you have your visitors on your email list – you can promote other Affiliate or CPA offers and other products relevant to buyers in this niche for MORE money! We’ll talk about your email list in just a minute.
Download Page (Name it download18972.html)
The second page you’ll need is called your “Download Page.” On your download page, you will have a link to your report (more on that in a second), as well as a link to the affiliate or CPA offer that you are promoting.
Note that the name I suggest is download18972.html – I just typed some random numbers. I do this so nobody can try to guess my download page very easily. Sometimes I use something like download_1234_4soieur.html or something equally crazy using letters, numbers, and _s only.
Now, remember the second hoplink we gave above? You will want to use that hoplink on your page (if you are promoting that particular product. “Hoplinks” are actually a Clickbank term, so other affiliate networks will probably call their affiliate links something more off the wall – like, well, “affiliate links”.
Now, you will probably want to say something more than just “click here” -- because you want to entice your visitor to click on the link for this offer.
So, you might say something like “This is a product that I found really has helped many people in their battle against the bulge”. If you've actually used the product with success, brag on that.
Also, you can look on the product page for their “affiliates” link, and they may have more promotional material (banners, graphics, and the like) that you can use on your download page.
5. An Autoresponder Account
An autoresponder company is an email provider where people can sign up to email lists that you create. Once you have an account with one of these companies, you can then send out email to your members automatically on a periodic, scheduled basis. So you set it up once, and then keep profiting from it over and over (?)
Here are a couple of popular Autoresponder providers:
1. GetResponse.com
2. Aweber.com
Basically, you can set up your account so when someone signs up for your email list, they get email #1 after signing up, email #2 a day or two later (whenever you'd like to schedule it), email #3.
It doesn't matter when they sign up – the autoresponder company keeps track of what email to send each person, and when to send it – so you don't have to!
One of the other things that autoresponder accounts also do is ensure email deliverability. If you send out email from your own domain, your domain might accidentally end up on a “blacklist”, (I’ve been there before, you don’t want it to happen to you, believe me) and email will not be delivered to email providers like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, etc. who subscribe to the blacklisting companies. (Most email providers and Internet Service Providers – ISPs – do…)
Here's the secret: When you set up your autoresponder form, you will be asked for the location of a “Thank you” page. You want to put your affiliate link into that field. For most autoresponder services, it defaults to a form on their site. You don't want that. You want the user to go to your affiliate/CPA offer, so you can make money!
For instance, let's take the 7 Minute Setup product I talked about earlier. If my ClickBank Username was “tones3778”, I would use the “create hoplink” function in the Clickbank marketplace to create my affiliate link – which would look like this:
http://zemiblast.7minutes.hop.clickbank.net/
Put that in the “Thank you” page for your autoresponder signup form!!!
While you're at the “create hoplink” form, also grab the other link provided.
You’ll want to use the one that looks like the link above on your download page, because the a parts of that tag make it clickable for you, so your visitors can click it to check out the offer!
When the site gives you the HTML form to put on your page, paste it into your Squeeze Page so you can start getting email signups!
Then, in the first “follow up” email (ie – the email that is sent after the user signs up for your email list) give them the link to your download page, and tell them that you’re going to be sending the weekly tips and tricks about the niche you’re working in.
If you’re promoting 7 Minute Setup, your weekly tips and tricks would be about websites, blogs, or making money online.
6. FTP Software
FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”. And that's what this software does. It transfers files from your computer to your webhosting account. All it does is move files from one computer (yours) to the other (that of the webhosting company)
The programs mentioned below make the process very similar to simply copying a file from one place on your computer to another. There are a number of free options for ftp software.
You’ll use one of these programs to transfer your squeeze page and download page to your server:
1. KompoZer -- That's right, the html editor mentioned above has ftp software.
2. FireFTP - This is an extension that is used with the Firefox Browser. If you have more questions about ftp, what it's used for, how to use it – you can find answers at the very excellent help page for FireFTP.
7. A Simple Report
As mentioned above, when you create your webpages, you want to have a report to offer to people to inspire them to sign up to your email list.
You can make simple but elegant-looking reports using products like Microsoft Word, the free OpenOffice suite, or with online tools like Google Documents .
Yes, I told you not to create web pages with Word. But I HIGHLY recommend using Word to create your reports and ebooks and such. I’m actually using Word 2007 to write this right now J
After you create your document, you will want to make sure it's readable on all computers. The way to do that is to create a “pdf” document out of it.
You can use the pdf creation capability of OpenOffice, which will let you convert Word (.doc) or OpenOffice (.odt) documents into pdf files from directly within OpenOffice (using File->Export as PDF)
Or, if you don’t want to use OpenOffice, you can convert Word documents to PDF files for free doc2pdf.net. This is the process I use, because it’s quick & easy, and I don’t have OpenOffice on my computer, since I have Microsoft Office.
To Summarize Day 1:
Find a hot niche
Find a hot selling product
Create your 2 web pages
Create an opt-in list in your autoresponder account
Create your report
Upload the pages to your webhosting account ... and now we're ready for Day 2 !
But Tony, How Do We Connect The Buyers To The Products?
That’s our only topic for Day 2, because it’s SO important! Let's Go!
Day 2:
Day 2 is our wash, rinse, and repeat day. By that, I mean this is the process you’re going to repeat over and over to keep boosting your income.
You need to get your prospects to your web page, otherwise known as “traffic.” When they are prospects who are interested in your niche, we call that “targeted traffic” -- and that's the kind we want. So how do we get it?
Well, there are a number of ways of getting traffic – you can pay for traffic, by paying for advertising – such as through Google AdWords and other Pay-Per-Click programs; you can “borrow” it – by doing Joint Ventures (more suitable for when you have your own product); and you can get free traffic.
We're just going to talk about a few ways to get free traffic. (Free is good, right?) Specifically, we’re going to talk about how to get traffic via writing articles and via “web 2.0” sites (which also leverages article writing) Here we go!
Article Writing
First, you have to write some articles. Articles with titles similar to those we suggested for your report also make good article titles (but don't use the same one for both your article and your report.
People like to read articles that start with “How to” and “10 Ways” and “Top 5.” They also like to read articles with catchy headlines. So obviously, headlines are important.
So important, in fact, that I sometimes put off deciding on one until after I’ve written my article, so I can have the entire time I’m writing to decide what the best title will be J
Your article body (the real bulk of the article) should be between 600 and 1000 words. This might sound like a lot, but it’s only about 1 ½ or 2 pages of standard sized text. Most people can bang out an article in an hour or so, assuming they don’t need to do research for it.
I’ve been known to write articles in under 30 minutes if I’m really passionate about a subject, so it’s definitely doable.
Finally, after you’ve written the article and chosen a title, it’s time to write the “resource box” – this is where you get to actually promote your site. You can’t do that in the main body of the article (nor do you want to, because people would see the article as advertising and leave before they were interested in learning more!)
But, in the resource box, you should bridge the gap between your article and your free report. Try something like this “Think these 10 tips were good? Visit http://yourdomain.com for 10 more tips that are EVEN better!” (Where http://yourdomain.com is your actual domain, not yourdomain.com…)
Ok, I have a few articles written. Now what?
Once you have written your articles, you want to submit them to the top 5 or 10 article directories.
Here's a list of the top 10 article directories (In no particular order, except #1 through #3 – they’re the best)
1. ezinearticles.com
2. ArticlesBase.com
3. goarticles.com
4. articlecity.com
5. searchwarp.com
6. articlealley.com
7. buzzle.com
8. articleset.com
9. articlesnatch.com
10. articledashboard.com
Web 2.0 Sites
Web 2.0 sites are all over the place, but we’re going to focus on 3 specifically. These social sites that are great places to put content about your niche and entice readers to your email list and to your offers.
Here are just a few:
1. Squidoo.com
2. Hubpages.com
3. Google Knols
By getting your content...and more importantly, your links, on these sites, your squeeze page stands to get more traffic. People read your articles and other content that you put up, find you, find your opt-in page, sign up to your list and buy the products you point to.
While it may look a bit complicated to start with, this is a very simple process, and once you get going, it can also be a very fast process, too!
What's more, once you've got your content up – the hard work is done – and your pages do all the hard work – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Quick Tip: Write some more articles and link to these Web 2.0 sites in the resource boxes, you’ll be amazed at how well it works!
And then it’s time to do it all again! Sweet. J
So here's the 48 hour game plan:
Step 1: Find the product you want to promote
Step 2: Build your website
Step 3: Write articles and create content on web 2.0 sites
Step 4: Repeat Step 3 until you're tired of promoting
Step 5: Repeat Steps 1-4 until you've made so much money you don't care any more
A Quick Note
This might take some time to ramp up your traffic. But keep writing articles and get your content out there on high-ranking websites, and soon you'll have traffic coming from places you don't even expect.
One of the advantages of putting your content on article directories like Ezinearticles.com is that other people can take your content and put it on their site – as long as they keep your resource “box”. That means...more links to your website, and that means more traffic!
This isn’t a fast way to Internet millions, but it is something you can do to make some money in just minutes a day
In Closing
How much traffic you get will always vary not on just how many articles you write, but where you post and how widely your articles get distributed – so it pays to write those articles well.
This is a great way to make some cash without really having to do a lot, after your machine is set up.
However, this action plan alone probably isn’t going to make you a millionaire. In fact, it’s probably not going to let you quit your job and do this full-time…
If you want to do that, you need to step it up and take more action.
The good news? It’s EASY!
There’s a site called Pure Profit University that has full video training on all of the things discussed in this report.
The easy to follow, step-by-step video training shows you what you need to do to start making real money online, and then how to take your business to the next level when you start to pull in a good income.
Think about what you’d do if you were your own boss – where would you go? What would you buy? What kind of hours would you set? Who would you spend more time with?
Now let us help you realize those dreams.
Instruction:
Many – and I mean many – Internet marketers have gotten their start through affiliate marketing. Consider this – you can start making money without creating a product, without dealing with support nightmares and even without a website. And you can get started immediately.
You get paid by bringing buyers to sellers. When they buy, you get a “piece of the action” -- called a commission. So, if a prospect buys a $50 product, and the product pays 50% commission – you will make $25.
In other words, you are like a commission-only salesperson. Except that you don't have to do all the selling – or, often, much selling at all. You don't have to do take any “orders”. You don't have to meet prospects “face-to-face.” All you have to do, often, is simply introduce interested people to the product. And it all happens online.
Considering that you can advertise on the Internet often for free or very inexpensively, it may be the perfect place to start, or expand, your efforts in creating an online income and an Internet business.
With no floors to sweep, no insurance to pay and advertising that can work for you 24hours a day – it can easily become a fairly passive income. One you can start up while still showing up at the day job – or, when sufficient, taking “the rest of the day off” -- nearly every day.
The Action Plan
Day 1:
Where Do We Find Buyers?
Finding products to sell is a small fraction of the Affiliate Marketing Plan. The “meat” of affiliate marketing is finding buyers. Trust me, if there are buyers, there will be products to sell.
In general, there are two really great types of buyers – people who will buy no matter what the economy is doing.
The first group is called “desperate buyers” -- they have a problem and they need a solution – now. For instance, people who are in pain. Or, they’re facing a financial crisis (like an impending foreclosure). They are looking for a solution as quickly as possible – and these folks have a credit card hot in their hands searching earnestly for a solution.
The second group is “passionate (or rabid) buyers.” You know these people. Maybe you are one yourself. They are people who buy everything on a particular topic. Maybe it's golf. Or baseball. Or Harry Potter. Food and cooking. These can also be people who buy anything put out by a particular manufacturer (remember Beanie Babies?).
Groups of folks with a common interest we call “niches.” Now, not all niches have buyers. We call niches with buyers “niche markets.” But we don't want just a niche market – we want a niche market full of red-hot buyers.
So where do we find these rabid buyers?
Well, there are a number of places to look.
But, first of all, I'd recommend keeping your eyes and ears open.
What are those things that your friends and relatives simply can't live without? What's Oprah talking about?
Actually, one way to find hot buyers is to look at what are hot sellers. This actually can kill two birds with one stone – not only can you find hot markets, you can find the products that are popular with buyers.
For instance...
Nearly all marketplaces – eBay, Amazon, Clickbank – and the like will also have a list of hot products.
With eBay, there is - eBay Pulse http://pulse.ebay.com/
With Amazon, there is - http://amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ A useful rule-of-thumb is if a particular book is ranked 20,000 or higher.
Checking on a particular niche – see if there's a magazine on the topic -- http://www.amazon.com/magazine-newspaper-subscriptions/
Amazon Bestsellers in a variety of products: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/
The Electronic Marketplace, Clickbank: http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm
Let's say I'm looking for a product with hot buyers. If we look under the “Health & Fitness Category” we see products which are listed in Clickbank's definition of “most popular.” Currently, the top two products are “Fat Loss For Idiots”, and “The Truth About 6-Pack Abs”
Where Do We Find Products?
Well, while eBay and Amazon both have affiliate programs, Clickbank is very, very popular with Internet Marketers. One of the appeals of Clickbank products is that they are digital products – meaning they are great for impulse buys.
Buyers can get immediate satisfaction from their purchase because they can immediately download and start using their product.
But wait! There's actually another way that we can make money that is similar enough to affiliate marketing that we'll include it here. And that is the world of CPA, or “cost per action” offers.
What does this mean? It means that you can actually get paid for bringing prospects to interested parties. They don't have to buy anything. But those parties know how much they will make off of every person they convert into a buyer – and they know how many prospects they can convert into buyers. They then know how much they can pay you to go find prospects to bring to them.
One of the most common of these offers you've probably seen: Video Professor. Those offers you see for ringtones are often CPA offers.
Some of these offers will pay you if the person signs up for their offer, on down to paying you for people who simply enter their zip code.
How To Become An Affiliate
You can easily sign up for Clickbank as an affiliate, here:
https://www.clickbank.com/affiliateAccountSignup.htm?key=
Once you are an affiliate with Clickbank (and I've never heard of them turning anyone down), you can promote any of the offers in their marketplace. Just go to the link provided in the last section, and look around. You can click on the “pitch page” to see the sales page, and you can see how much you will make when you sell the product.
Clickbank is not the only place where you can find products to promote as an affiliate. I previously mentioned eBay and Amazon as companies that have affiliate offers. Also, there are other affiliate networks like Clickbank, such as PayDotCom. Some individual and smaller companies have affiliate programs, but you may want to be careful in selecting some of them because they may not have reliable payouts. You can keep up with various affiliate companies and their reputations at Allan Gardyne's AssociatePrograms.com website.
You can discover affiliate programs for companies by looking down at the bottom of their product page and they will often have a link that says “affiliates” or “associates” or “partners”. Click on that and you will find out
what they require to become an affiliate. Some companies have “open” affiliate programs –which menas they will take just about anyone who signs up; others have what are called “closed” affiliate programs and are more restrictive in who they allow to promote their products.
Whatever you do, be sure to read the “terms of service”, because affiliate programs often have restrictions (usually quite reasonable) on how you promote their programs – and violating those restrictions can get you thrown out of their affiliate program. For instance, most programs will throw you out if they feel that you are sending out “Unsolicited Commercial Email” (UCE) – or what is commonly known as SPAM.
For promoting CPA Offers, there are tons of companies. Most CPA companies are not completely open, and have an application process. But if you seem serious and can convince them you will bring them traffic, you should be accepted.
When you go to a CPA network site, you want to look for “publisher application.”
For instance, here are some companies you can apply to:
Azoogle – One of the larger CPA Companies
MaxBounty – have a diverse array of offers
NeverBlueAds – A newer company, popular because of its interface
CommissionJunction – Also known as “CJ.com” (They’re celebrating their 10 th year)
These are just a few of the companies – as you can see, there is a lot to choose from, and this is just scratching the surface.
Choosing Your Offer
Of course, you'll want to pick an offer that fits your niche.
For your first go-around, pick something that is an established product and makes decent money.
For instance, if we decided that weight-loss was our niche, we might pick the “Fat Loss For Idiots” product from Clickbank.
When we go to the marketplace for promoting products (as discussed earlier) – we see this information:
Fat Loss 4 Idiots. Affiliate Page Here: FatLoss4Idiots.com/aff ::: Thanks.
$/sale: $30.36 Future $: - Total $/sale: $30.36 %/sale: 75.0% %refd: 87.0% grav: 423.83
The pitch page will show you the sales page, the “create hoplink” link will easily allow you to create a url to use so that you will get credit for the sale when people buy through that link. (First, though, you have to sign up with Clickbank and get your Clickbank nickname.)
What you want to look for in Clickbank offers, along with the “$/sale”, is the “grav” number. “Grav” stands for “gravity”, and indicates Clickbank's assessment of the popularity of the item (in a formula only known to them) – reportedly based upon a combination of number of sales as well as the number of affiliates promoting it. If there are lots of people promoting it, you can be sure that it a good percentage of visitors become buyers. (Good can range anywhere from 1 out of 100 visitors – or 1% -- on up.)
With AzoogleAds – and other CPA networks, the older the “open date” is, the better. That indicates that the advertiser has been successful with this offer.
Setting Up Our Machine
To promote affiliate offers, you can set up a simple machine by using a simple 2 page website with an autoresponder.
I’m about to lay out what you need to make this happen. DON’T freak out! I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re first starting online, but after you build a site or two, you should be able to breeze through these steps with no problems! J
(In fact, if you want video training on how to get a domain, point it at your hosting account, and FTP your files to your site, and even how to set up a Wordpress blog in just minutes, check out 7 Minute Setup )
Here’s what you'll need:
1. A hosting account
2. A domain name
3. A text-editor or webpage editor
4. 2 very simple web pages
a. A “Squeeze” or “Opt-in” page
b. A “download page”
5. An autoresponder account
6. FTP software
7. The link to your affiliate offer
1. A Hosting Account
A hosting account is where you will store your web pages. There are literally hundreds of webhosting companies – from expensive, top-of-the-line to down-in-the dirt grungy. You don't generally want down-in-the dirt grungy, but you don't need to pay for top-of-the-line, either.
A webhosting company that’s popular with many Internet Marketers and has great prices and support is HostGator.com
HostGator is one of the few hosting companies I’ll recommend. I’ve been with them for years, and never had a problem that wasn’t fixed VERY quickly by their support)
2. A Domain Name
A Domain name provides your web pages with an address on the Internet. It's what people type in to the address bar of their browser, and what is commonly known as a “URL” (Uniform Resource Locator) or “URI” (Uniform Resource Indicator).
Pick a domain name that will be relevant to your niche. If we choose “Fat Loss For Idiots” we might want to choose, “SecretsOfFatLossForIdiots.com”.
You can buy your domains for a great price at NameCheap
3. A Text Editor or Webpage (aka “HTML”) Editor
I highly recommend you download what's called a “WYSIWYG” html editor (for “What You See Is What You Get”) which allows you to create web pages simply and easily – by adding formatting and font styles and the like. These editors allow you to build a web page visually, so you know exactly “What You Get”
Why not just use Microsoct Word, you ask? Because Word is TERRIBLE for web pages. I cannot stress that enough. Microsoft Word should NEVER BE USED TO CREATE WEBPAGES! When you save a Word document as a web page, the program adds a bunch of gobbledy-gook to the backround of the page that ends up costing you money in the long run. (We’re here to make money, not lose it!)
There are a number of WYSIWYG editors, some of which are high end, like one program called Dreamweaver. But you can get along quite well with the free and quite excellent webpage editor KompoZer.
Telling you how to edit web pages is a whole other animal, and it’s just too much to put into this report. But there are a number of great – and FREE – resources that will show you how to do so easily. You can just go to Google and type in “How to learn HTML” or “How to use KompoZer” and it should bring up a number of options for you to check out!
4. 2 Simple Webpages
The next step in this process is to create 2 simple web pages. The first is called a “Squeeze Page” or “Opt-In Page”
Squeeze Page (Name it index.html)
A squeeze page is simply an offer to exchange valuable information in trade for the user's email address.
Basically, you will take the “opt-in” form that you get from your autoresponder company (don’t worry, I’m going over this next) and create a page with a tantalizing offer – a report or a series of emails.
You want to offer something that will entice the people in the niche you are targeting to sign up.
For instance, for “Fat Loss For Idiots” you might want to offer a report titled something like “How To Lose Fat Quickly!” or, the “Top 10 Tips For Fat Loss.” (You may have to do a bit of research, but not too much, to find ideas for the content for your report – but don't steal other people's content!)
Incidentally ( and here's the real power ) – once you have your visitors on your email list – you can promote other Affiliate or CPA offers and other products relevant to buyers in this niche for MORE money! We’ll talk about your email list in just a minute.
Download Page (Name it download18972.html)
The second page you’ll need is called your “Download Page.” On your download page, you will have a link to your report (more on that in a second), as well as a link to the affiliate or CPA offer that you are promoting.
Note that the name I suggest is download18972.html – I just typed some random numbers. I do this so nobody can try to guess my download page very easily. Sometimes I use something like download_1234_4soieur.html or something equally crazy using letters, numbers, and _s only.
Now, remember the second hoplink we gave above? You will want to use that hoplink on your page (if you are promoting that particular product. “Hoplinks” are actually a Clickbank term, so other affiliate networks will probably call their affiliate links something more off the wall – like, well, “affiliate links”.
Now, you will probably want to say something more than just “click here” -- because you want to entice your visitor to click on the link for this offer.
So, you might say something like “This is a product that I found really has helped many people in their battle against the bulge”. If you've actually used the product with success, brag on that.
Also, you can look on the product page for their “affiliates” link, and they may have more promotional material (banners, graphics, and the like) that you can use on your download page.
5. An Autoresponder Account
An autoresponder company is an email provider where people can sign up to email lists that you create. Once you have an account with one of these companies, you can then send out email to your members automatically on a periodic, scheduled basis. So you set it up once, and then keep profiting from it over and over (?)
Here are a couple of popular Autoresponder providers:
1. GetResponse.com
2. Aweber.com
Basically, you can set up your account so when someone signs up for your email list, they get email #1 after signing up, email #2 a day or two later (whenever you'd like to schedule it), email #3.
It doesn't matter when they sign up – the autoresponder company keeps track of what email to send each person, and when to send it – so you don't have to!
One of the other things that autoresponder accounts also do is ensure email deliverability. If you send out email from your own domain, your domain might accidentally end up on a “blacklist”, (I’ve been there before, you don’t want it to happen to you, believe me) and email will not be delivered to email providers like yahoo.com, hotmail.com, gmail.com, etc. who subscribe to the blacklisting companies. (Most email providers and Internet Service Providers – ISPs – do…)
Here's the secret: When you set up your autoresponder form, you will be asked for the location of a “Thank you” page. You want to put your affiliate link into that field. For most autoresponder services, it defaults to a form on their site. You don't want that. You want the user to go to your affiliate/CPA offer, so you can make money!
For instance, let's take the 7 Minute Setup product I talked about earlier. If my ClickBank Username was “tones3778”, I would use the “create hoplink” function in the Clickbank marketplace to create my affiliate link – which would look like this:
http://zemiblast.7minutes.hop.clickbank.net/
Put that in the “Thank you” page for your autoresponder signup form!!!
While you're at the “create hoplink” form, also grab the other link provided.
You’ll want to use the one that looks like the link above on your download page, because the a parts of that tag make it clickable for you, so your visitors can click it to check out the offer!
When the site gives you the HTML form to put on your page, paste it into your Squeeze Page so you can start getting email signups!
Then, in the first “follow up” email (ie – the email that is sent after the user signs up for your email list) give them the link to your download page, and tell them that you’re going to be sending the weekly tips and tricks about the niche you’re working in.
If you’re promoting 7 Minute Setup, your weekly tips and tricks would be about websites, blogs, or making money online.
6. FTP Software
FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”. And that's what this software does. It transfers files from your computer to your webhosting account. All it does is move files from one computer (yours) to the other (that of the webhosting company)
The programs mentioned below make the process very similar to simply copying a file from one place on your computer to another. There are a number of free options for ftp software.
You’ll use one of these programs to transfer your squeeze page and download page to your server:
1. KompoZer -- That's right, the html editor mentioned above has ftp software.
2. FireFTP - This is an extension that is used with the Firefox Browser. If you have more questions about ftp, what it's used for, how to use it – you can find answers at the very excellent help page for FireFTP.
7. A Simple Report
As mentioned above, when you create your webpages, you want to have a report to offer to people to inspire them to sign up to your email list.
You can make simple but elegant-looking reports using products like Microsoft Word, the free OpenOffice suite, or with online tools like Google Documents .
Yes, I told you not to create web pages with Word. But I HIGHLY recommend using Word to create your reports and ebooks and such. I’m actually using Word 2007 to write this right now J
After you create your document, you will want to make sure it's readable on all computers. The way to do that is to create a “pdf” document out of it.
You can use the pdf creation capability of OpenOffice, which will let you convert Word (.doc) or OpenOffice (.odt) documents into pdf files from directly within OpenOffice (using File->Export as PDF)
Or, if you don’t want to use OpenOffice, you can convert Word documents to PDF files for free doc2pdf.net. This is the process I use, because it’s quick & easy, and I don’t have OpenOffice on my computer, since I have Microsoft Office.
To Summarize Day 1:
Find a hot niche
Find a hot selling product
Create your 2 web pages
Create an opt-in list in your autoresponder account
Create your report
Upload the pages to your webhosting account ... and now we're ready for Day 2 !
But Tony, How Do We Connect The Buyers To The Products?
That’s our only topic for Day 2, because it’s SO important! Let's Go!
Day 2:
Day 2 is our wash, rinse, and repeat day. By that, I mean this is the process you’re going to repeat over and over to keep boosting your income.
You need to get your prospects to your web page, otherwise known as “traffic.” When they are prospects who are interested in your niche, we call that “targeted traffic” -- and that's the kind we want. So how do we get it?
Well, there are a number of ways of getting traffic – you can pay for traffic, by paying for advertising – such as through Google AdWords and other Pay-Per-Click programs; you can “borrow” it – by doing Joint Ventures (more suitable for when you have your own product); and you can get free traffic.
We're just going to talk about a few ways to get free traffic. (Free is good, right?) Specifically, we’re going to talk about how to get traffic via writing articles and via “web 2.0” sites (which also leverages article writing) Here we go!
Article Writing
First, you have to write some articles. Articles with titles similar to those we suggested for your report also make good article titles (but don't use the same one for both your article and your report.
People like to read articles that start with “How to” and “10 Ways” and “Top 5.” They also like to read articles with catchy headlines. So obviously, headlines are important.
So important, in fact, that I sometimes put off deciding on one until after I’ve written my article, so I can have the entire time I’m writing to decide what the best title will be J
Your article body (the real bulk of the article) should be between 600 and 1000 words. This might sound like a lot, but it’s only about 1 ½ or 2 pages of standard sized text. Most people can bang out an article in an hour or so, assuming they don’t need to do research for it.
I’ve been known to write articles in under 30 minutes if I’m really passionate about a subject, so it’s definitely doable.
Finally, after you’ve written the article and chosen a title, it’s time to write the “resource box” – this is where you get to actually promote your site. You can’t do that in the main body of the article (nor do you want to, because people would see the article as advertising and leave before they were interested in learning more!)
But, in the resource box, you should bridge the gap between your article and your free report. Try something like this “Think these 10 tips were good? Visit http://yourdomain.com for 10 more tips that are EVEN better!” (Where http://yourdomain.com is your actual domain, not yourdomain.com…)
Ok, I have a few articles written. Now what?
Once you have written your articles, you want to submit them to the top 5 or 10 article directories.
Here's a list of the top 10 article directories (In no particular order, except #1 through #3 – they’re the best)
1. ezinearticles.com
2. ArticlesBase.com
3. goarticles.com
4. articlecity.com
5. searchwarp.com
6. articlealley.com
7. buzzle.com
8. articleset.com
9. articlesnatch.com
10. articledashboard.com
Web 2.0 Sites
Web 2.0 sites are all over the place, but we’re going to focus on 3 specifically. These social sites that are great places to put content about your niche and entice readers to your email list and to your offers.
Here are just a few:
1. Squidoo.com
2. Hubpages.com
3. Google Knols
By getting your content...and more importantly, your links, on these sites, your squeeze page stands to get more traffic. People read your articles and other content that you put up, find you, find your opt-in page, sign up to your list and buy the products you point to.
While it may look a bit complicated to start with, this is a very simple process, and once you get going, it can also be a very fast process, too!
What's more, once you've got your content up – the hard work is done – and your pages do all the hard work – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Quick Tip: Write some more articles and link to these Web 2.0 sites in the resource boxes, you’ll be amazed at how well it works!
And then it’s time to do it all again! Sweet. J
So here's the 48 hour game plan:
Step 1: Find the product you want to promote
Step 2: Build your website
Step 3: Write articles and create content on web 2.0 sites
Step 4: Repeat Step 3 until you're tired of promoting
Step 5: Repeat Steps 1-4 until you've made so much money you don't care any more
A Quick Note
This might take some time to ramp up your traffic. But keep writing articles and get your content out there on high-ranking websites, and soon you'll have traffic coming from places you don't even expect.
One of the advantages of putting your content on article directories like Ezinearticles.com is that other people can take your content and put it on their site – as long as they keep your resource “box”. That means...more links to your website, and that means more traffic!
This isn’t a fast way to Internet millions, but it is something you can do to make some money in just minutes a day
In Closing
How much traffic you get will always vary not on just how many articles you write, but where you post and how widely your articles get distributed – so it pays to write those articles well.
This is a great way to make some cash without really having to do a lot, after your machine is set up.
However, this action plan alone probably isn’t going to make you a millionaire. In fact, it’s probably not going to let you quit your job and do this full-time…
If you want to do that, you need to step it up and take more action.
The good news? It’s EASY!
There’s a site called Pure Profit University that has full video training on all of the things discussed in this report.
The easy to follow, step-by-step video training shows you what you need to do to start making real money online, and then how to take your business to the next level when you start to pull in a good income.
Think about what you’d do if you were your own boss – where would you go? What would you buy? What kind of hours would you set? Who would you spend more time with?
Now let us help you realize those dreams.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Salty Oatmeal
INGREDIENTS:
* oatmeal - one bowl
* carrot - 1/3 stick
* dried mushroom - 2
* laver (dried and pressed seaweed) - 2 sheets
* celery - 1 stick
SEASONINGS:
* MSG - 2 tsp
* salt - 1 tsp
* soy sauce - 1 tbsp
Cooking Instructions:
1. peel carrot and shred; soften dried mushrooms by soaking in water, shred.
2. cook oatmeal, carrot and dried mushrooms in water over mind heat for five minutes; tear laver sheets into pieces and put into pot; add seasonings and celery; cook lightly.
Fried Beancurd Bun
INGREDIENTS:
* dried beancurd bun - 4
* chili sauce - half a bowl
* peanut oil - 10 oz
* sweet potato powder - 5 oz
SEASONGINGS:
* MSG - 2 tbsp
* soy sauce - 3 tbsp
Cooking Instructions:
1. cut beancurd buns in half; soak in the mixture of chili sauce and seasoning for several minutes; stir.
2. heat oil in a pan; coat beancurd buns with sweet potato powder; deep fry till golden; slice fried beancurd buns.
Curry and Potato
INGREDIENTS:
* potato - 2
* curry powder 2 tsp
SEASONINGS:
* MSG - 1 tsp
* salt - to taste
Cooking Instructions:
peel potatoes and slice; heat oil in a pan; stir-fry potatoes; add curry powder and cook till well done.
Pickled Baby Cucumber
INGREDIENTS:
* baby cucumber - 3
* hot red pepper - 1
SEASONINGS:
* salt - 1 tbsp
* sugar - 2 tbsp
* vinegar - 1 tbsp
* sesame oil - to taste
Cooking Instructions:
1. bruise baby cucumbers and cut into pieces; soak in salt water for five minutes; rinse in cold water.
2. squeeze water out of the pickles; add seasoning; stir for five minutes.
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