Your Affiliate Marketing Questions Answered

by 62 replies
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Hey everybody!

I'll make this brief. I'm really into affiliate marketing! I haven't seen that much dealing with affiliate marketing in threads here on the Warrior Forum, so I figured I'd start one.

Currently, I make my living from Clickbank and Amazon with a splash of Adsense, so I'm wondering...do you have any questions about Affiliate Marketing or related topics? I start with thread with the humblest of intentions and I realize that there are going to be questions that I can't answer but there are going to be a lot that I can after 4 years of testing and toiling over affiliate marketing strategies.

So, in the purpose of making this brief..what's your affiliate marketing question?

Thanks guys.

Thomas Kearo
#search engine optimization #affiliate #answered #marketing #questions
  • Hey, What's the pro and cons and how does one succeed as is very hard when there are literally millions maybe doing the samething product and routine, I'm currently in one and doing social media and autorepsonders and articles and adverts to build my list?
    Rick.
    • [1] reply
    • Rickling,

      One thing I've learned during my affiliate marketing career is to never worry about the others who are doing the same thing you are. Whether it's choosing a Clickbank product with high gravity (so you know people are doing the same thing) or creating you Internet Marketing Blog, there is always room for a newcomer. This is especially true if you're better than all the rest. One of the things that got me through this Internet Marketing life when I was living on nothing but Ramen noodles and water was that I knew that I was going to make it. If you know you're going to make it..you will.

      The other people that are promoting the same products might have a nine to five job. They might have children. They might have a life that is already laid out for them and doesn't require them to make any money online. These are things that I've used for fuel. These are things that have sparked my passion. These are things that I've used to set myself apart from the rest.

      I'll tell you this my friend. There were days when I sat for 8 hours at a time writing articles to make my rent and nothing more. There were days when I sat begging for work, but nothing compares to when you can launch multiple affiliate marketing campaigns that will make you auto-pilot income. Believe you me, there is a day rapidly approaching where you'll sit back and watch movies and make money while all your friends are at work. You'll smile.

      If this doesn't answer your question on why you should promote when there are other promoting, this will.

      Learn more than your competitors. Learn their tactics and use them against them. Go into Yahoo! Site Explorer, find out what backlinks they've used and use them against them. Stay up late, drinking caffeine and energy drinks until you literally pass out. These are the tools that make a successful Internet Marketer, and these are the tools that will give you success.

      As far as an exact method - Blog Comments work best. I kid you not. I've launched several of my niche Clickbank sites on blog comments alone. Articles are over rated and everybody under the sun knows about them. If you want to outrank your competitors, you must have the knowledge they don't. Here are a couple things you can use to blow your competitors out of the water:

      Blog Comments
      Authority Emails
      Profiles

      These are the three most under-used linking strategies in the game today. Use them and you'll earn yourself as much money as you need. I hope this helps. If it didn't, please reply again and I will answer again.

      Thanks,

      Thomas Kearo

      P.S. - I'd like to give you a free copy of my WSO free of charge - How To Bank With Clickbank. I feel that the tips outlined in here will help you in your affiliate marketing career. Thanks so much for the question and have a great day. I wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavours! What is your email address so I can sent it to you?
      • [ 4 ] Thanks
      • [1] reply
  • cjmo,

    You've got a lot of good tips! Thanks for posting in the thread. As Cjmo said, affiliate marketing is not easy, but it's really what separates the men from the boys when it comes to marketing online. While you have a point with the "why promote somebody else's product when you can make it your own", you also have to remember that affiliate marketing allows the internet marketing family do what they do best...market products.

    Affiliate Marketing can be a dreadnaught in terms of sales because the vendor has already done the research necessary to increase conversion rates and lay out the sales pages in a pleasing fashion. As long as I'm promoting a stand up product, I love the affiliate marketing relationship as I've made many friends during the process and have been able to turn to them for favors, etc.

    Networking is key.

    Best,

    Thomas Kearo
  • Do you have also experience with affiliate marketing of "physical" products or only "digital" and "services"?
    • [1] reply
    • Igor,

      I have expertise in the digital marketing field, but I am currently contracting an offline fortune 500 company to promote their offline goods digitally...therefore I consider myself experienced in both fields. Again, I am humbly starting this thread.

      I would like nothing more than you help you with your question Igor.

      Best of luck to you!

      Best Regards,

      Thomas Kearo
      • [1] reply
  • Hi @Glassjaw009, Can you please guide me how can i start affiliate market, or which product have to select, i am runing Gadgets niche site, i am confuse to select affiliate network for my site. Can you please guide me what to do?
  • What would you expect from "ideal" affiliate program for US market for "physical" product - by means of provision, conversion rate, target audience, payment delaym etc.? Please imagine the really ideal "physical" product affiliate program and let me know details. Thank you
  • That's a valuable list you provided, Thomas... your top three promotional methods:
    Blog Comments
    Authority Emails
    Profiles

    This gives rise to many questions

    1) How do you FIND the blogs and profiles you post on?

    Your criteria for choosing one blog over another?
    Presumably you put keyword hyperlinks in those profiles, but are these linked to the vendor's CB page? or to your own squeeze pages? or...?

    2) How you DO each of these 3 promotional tasks?

    Manually?
    With software? - if so, what?
    Outsourced? - do tell us more.

    Yep, many questions but you did volunteer.
    And btw, I imagine this is going to turn into a great thread.
    It's off to a good start.

    Thanks
    Gary
  • Thank you for answers. The reason for asking is to CREATE best affiliate program (in-house) for US market (we have the product). We are in jewelry business (as per my signature).

    The best way for creating program is listening to successfull affiliates what they want and what they consider important.

    So can you give me idea how the ideal affiliate program from your point of view is look like (what you need and what you don´t). Is jewelry interesting for affiliates?

    BTW: conversion rate 10% is extremely impressive.

    Thank you very much.
  • Thank you for valuable suggestions.

    1. 10% is OK. We can make 15% as an special individual agreement for best partners (which in i.e. diamond jewelry makes really impressive amounts). 30 days cookies are default.

    2. Would you mind, if I send you link to our in-house affiliate SW (we have to upgrade it), so you can tell me what is missing in the program or if it is good or we have to change it completely?

    3. I was very impressed by the 10% conversion rate - our rate is much lower yet. Can this fact daunt affiliates? Or they are more looking at absolute provision then percentage?
    How can we make better conversion rate according your opinion on our eshop? - so affiliates will profit from better conversion rate too?
    Is it untrustfull? More payment methods? Faster or different delivery? Too "exotic" to US customers? Or some other recomendations?

    Please do not hesitate to tell me not to waste your time if there are too many questions, or if it is OT for this thread

    Thank you.
    • [1] reply
    • Igor,

      I set out to answer affiliate marketing questions in this thread and that's what I intend to do. I greatly appreciate your consideration of my time and that really means a lot.

      I'd be happy to answer any questions you have and I'd be happy to address the certain questions you have regarding your affiliate page and so forth. Email me at t.kearo@gmail.com if you feel so inclined.

      Thanks Igor,

      Best Regards,

      Thomas
  • Thomas, thanks for going into such detail. Much appreciated.

    But let me see if I can extract even more detail...
    <wink>

    How do you find the # of incoming page links? - SEOquake plugin for Firefox or something different?

    Gary

    PS: Unrelated, but i see you're a member of the War Room. Can you give us your sales pitch about the benefits you're getting from it?
    • [1] reply
    • Gary,

      Thanks for the question! I've used an extremely diverse amount of tools, analytics programs and everything I could find under the sun for examining backlinks and link backrubs. The best one I've found is Yahoo! Site Explorer.

      They pick up on incoming links fast, the tool is extremely intuitive and it's free! This is one of the few things that Yahoo! does better than Google and Bing. It's a great tool!

      If you've got any more questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

      Thanks Gary,

      Thomas

      P.S. I cannot comment on the War Room fully at this time as my recommendation or anti-recommendation would not be based in experience as I'm actually too busy with clients and projects right now to frequent the war room regularly. When I do, I will surely give an honest review of it in the thread or send you a PM. I wouldn't feel comfortable reviewing it at this time as I'm not sure I frequent it often enough to do so. Thanks Gary.
      • [1] reply
  • I am wondering if you have any tips for preventing affiliate product review sites from getting banned from Adwords?

    I had a site up and running for 4 months, and then one day they shut down traffic for all campaigns directed to the site.

    Their reasoning was that is was a "bridge page". This page offered a review of the product along with an affiliate link.

    Any ideas on how to keep Google happy so this doesn't happen again?
  • Hey,

    Regarding affiliate marketing, what is your best opinion for a strategy at approaching selling?

    I dont want to work endless tireless hours trying to get traffic to a blog, and I do not have an email list. So that leaves me with Adwords.

    Would you work with adwords? Or continue working on getting traffic to the blog?

    • [1] reply
    • Baloney,

      I'd go ahead and stop my campaign. Do this. Set up a bunk site and run adwords on it. Once they approve it, set a redirect to redirect to your affiliate link. bing! Bang! you've got an Adwords auto-redirect. It's a thing of beauty.
  • Glassjaw009-

    Thank you for starting this thread. You have an awesome attitude and it's always great to see people helping each other out.

    I have a few questions for you;

    Code:
    1) How are you driving traffic (primarily); SEO, PPC/PPV, videos, back-links etc.?
2) Which traffic method do you prefer/recommend?
3) Do you have Adsense on any of your Clickbank/Amazon sites? If so, is it really worth it/profitable?
4) Which profit source do you prefer; Adsense, Clickbank or Amazon? Which is more profitable for you?
5) Are you finding it difficult to compete/rank and/or get 1st position in the SERPs with your Amazon/Clickbank sites?
6) Do you work heavily on your sites until they are on the first page of the SERPs, the first position of the SERPs - or what?
7) How many 'exact-monthly searches' do you aim for (for your keyword/key phrase) when starting a new campaign?
8) Do you have a set-amount of back-links/page rank that you have in mind as far as what you are willing to compete with (e.g. competitor site has 2000 back/in-links and a page rank of 4 - will you compete with them or will you move on to a new keyword that is less competitive)? -What is your threshold?
9) Why aren't you promoting non-virtual products by going directly through various merchant websites as opposed to Amazon (thus, getting longer cookies and higher commissions)?
10) I am going to assume that your preference regarding Clickbank products are centered towards e-commerce/money making products; that being said, what are your methods for finding workable keywords (with regard to getting on the first page of the SERPs) - since a lot of the workable keywords for these types of products are highly competitive?
11) With regard to emailing webmasters for a link-exchange, are you finding it difficult getting back-links for your Clickbank product sites? (Assuming you do e-commerce/money making promotion)
12) What kind of sites are you setting up for your Clickbank products? -Scam sites, review sites etc. - or are you having your visitors opt-in for email marketing?
13) For Clickbank products, do you use the product name in your keyword(s)? What about in the domain name/url?
14) How many websites do you have (Amazon, Clickbank and Adsense - total)? Do they all make you money?
15) Without asking you how much you make, can you give us a ballpark figure for what your sites average (individually) per month?
16) Are your profits relatively consistent, or are you having to build new sites regularly to maintain your current income level? (Obviously, you are probably building new sites regularly anyway, so I know that this question may be partially un-answerable)
17) How many pages do you typically try to have for each website that you build (for each - Amazon, Clickbank and adsense)?
18) How much content do you generally try to aim for on each page? (e.g. homepage/sub-pages - 200 words each, 500 words each etc.)
19) I know you made mention of following your competition with respect to copying their back-link strategy, but what kind of sites do you look for (in addition to the aforementioned) when you are back-linking and doing a link-exchange (e.g. do you always look for relative pages; and do you look for a minimum PR level from those sites - or strictly the in-link quantity that those sites have)?
    Please, don't feel obligated to answer any of these questions. I understand if you are reluctant to reveal any of your methods, and I understand that you may only have so much time for posting as you are probably busy with your work. That being said, answer what you like and ignore what you want. I certainly will NOT feel offended by any means. And again, I greatly appreciate the fact that you have started this thread and are willing to help out other people.

    Good luck and take care.
    -M
  • Here is a question
    w/ clickbank lets say I find a product and I dont want to create a site around it can I just use the little hop link deal and send track to that using PPC? If so what is the best way to do so and how do i hide that hope think or make it redirect to my .com (if i decided to use my own domain)
    • [1] reply
    • Murderface,

      Thanks for the question. Love the name by the way.

      1. PPC when a site is new and can boast significant ROI. SEO afterwards.

      2. I recommend SEO. It's the only method that stops costing you money after a while.

      3. I stick to one monetization method per site. Too many clouds the effectiveness of all of them.

      4. I prefer Clickbank. It's easier to make money with Adsense, but if you get a well converting Clickbank product, you'll make a lot more (in general).

      5. I choose micro-niches so it's not difficult to get ranked 1st in the SERPS at this time.

      6. I have a couple phases. First, I'll work hard to get to page 1 on the site. Then I'll lump it with the rest of my sites on page 1 and do "maintainence" SEO until it jumps up there.

      7. Exact searches 10,000-15,000. I'll choose a keyword with more if there is a great competition to search potential ratio.

      8. I usually won't compete with sites with 10,000 backlinks or more in a micro niche. If I want to compete with sites like that, I'll choose a bigger niche and launch a long term campaign.

      9. I've run across too many untrustworthy non-virtual affiliate programs and I don't like talking on the phone. =)

      10. This question requires a bit more detail. I'll come back to this.

      11. My Clickbank sites look extremely legitimate and so it's not hard to get backlinks from emails. In general, people won't link to a spammy website that sells a very reputable product, but they will link to a website that looks professional that sells utterly useless items. It's all about appearance. It really doesn't matter what monetization method you're using.

      12. Review sites work best. I'm not a scammer and I won't promote a product if I don't personally see some sort of value in it.

      That's all I have the time to answer right now. Sorry I couldn't answer more, but I will definitely come back to these questions later. Thanks for the great questions!

      Best,

      Thomas
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • Thomas-
    Excellent job! Thanks a bunch for the replies!

    Yes, my handle is blacker than the blackest of black times infinity.

    About the scam sites...what I mean is, sometimes, when you search for a Clickbank product on Google, you will see a site in one of the top 10 spots on the SERP's with a title like 'is CBproductX a scam?' -or- 'CBproductX is a scam!' ...then, when you look at the page, you get a clever introduction about how the webmaster heard about the product and was skeptical...but, after taking the dive and purchasing it, found out that it was actually a good, legitimate product. And of course, the rest of the 'review' is filled with anchor text that have an affiliate link to said product sales page.

    I've never done it, but it must work. It's obviously a clever way to use keywords that you know people are searching for - to get traffic to your site. I guess it's only deceitful if you haven't actually purchased the product - and you don't really believe that it's great etc.

    Thanks again,
    -M
    • [1] reply
    • Murderface,

      I misinterpreted what you meant by scam sites. Thanks for clarifying it up! Yes. I have a few of them like that and they do work but they're basically just review sites. My "is product x a scam?" site and review sites perform at about the same conversion levels. I guess it's really just a matter of personal preference.

      Again, thanks for the questions as I'm sure they've helped others as well. Viva la Warrior Forum!

      Best,

      Thomas
      • [1] reply
  • What about a site where one can get a maximum of all the affiliates link or program information.
    IS there any site where all these information can be collected?
    • [1] reply
    • Hey Thomas I love this thread you have started. Good insight so far too. I am getting back into promoting CB products after relying mostly on ebay and then they terminated my account and I lost all I worked hard for. I almost forgot how much I loved clickbank and how easy it is to promote the products on there.

      I guess I will throw some questions your way too:

      Say the competition has about 500 backlinks to their sites on the 1st page of Google for the keywords you want to target and you want to start a new site promoting CB products. How long would you say it would take to start ranking on page one and how soon would you start building backlinks?

      By the way, I love your attitude about affiliate marketing because it sounds like mine. I know I can be the best at what I do and beat out any other affiliates trying to do the same thing. This is my only job (by choice) and I can devote as much time and energy as I want for IM. Looking forward to hearing great things from you and possibly pm in the future.

      Jon
      • [1] reply
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • Hi,
    Can anybody set me straight ? I have been promoting a bunch of different Clickbank products. I am getting steady targeted visitors to these sites and all the way to the checkout page. I have not received even one sale, it seems like I should at least get an occasional conversion. Am I wasting my time with these products or should I be looking at non digital stuff to promote ?
    Thanx
    nevadajim
    • [1] reply
    • nevadajim,

      Thanks for the question and I apologize for not answering it in a more timely manner but here we go. This is a common problem with affiliate marketing ventures. What you're most likely seeing is people that are intrigued but aren't "serious buyers" and they're not biters in the sense of fishing. They might be curious, so they're going to check out the checkout page but they're not totally into buying right at that second.

      I would relate it to the situation where you go and buy a car. It's the sales associate's job to get you to buy right there and right then. If he doesn't present a deal that's just...spectacular and a deal you can't pass up, you're not going to buy at that time. Perfect salesman will close the deal right then and there. Then again, good salesman will lose a few leads off the lot but actually close the sale later. This is where an email opt-in comes in.

      You said you're not experiencing that many conversions or sales. If that's so, I would recommend and email opt in form to contact them with at a later date. An email opt in is like the online equivalent to a business card from a car dealership. If they decide to buy that particular product at a later date, they'll buy from you as opposed to somebody they don't know at all. This is what I can recommend right now with the information you provided.

      If you need further assistance with on-page optimization or sales conversion, let me know the site address and I'll check it out!

      Thanks,

      Thomas
  • What do you use to track CB conversions from your PPC marketing efforts? IE: which ads & keywords are converting. I found tracking 202 to not be working all that well.
    Cheers!
    • [1] reply
    • Hi Thomas.

      I am interested in PPC but keep seeing threads about Google banning people from running adword campaigns. What precautions should be taken to stay on the straight and narrow?

      Thanks.

      Jim.
      • [1] reply
  • inter123,

    I always have just used the "if it feels wrong it probably is approach". Really, as long as you're not doing extremely blackhat things Google is not going to outright ban you from adwords. They may disapprove your ads but for a first time warning they won't outright ban you. Your best bet would be to look over the TOS and make sure you're not doing anything against it. Sorry I couldn't help more.

    Thomas
    • [1] reply
    • Hello All and thanks for the great thread here. I am a pure newbie who found this forum because I was investigating a product pitch which was made to me through my email. I don't want to derail the thread and I have a very simple yet complex question. I am a newbie with no practical experience in AM or website building. I love the concept and I am looking for a place to start. The amount of information, the jargon, the strategies, etc are overwhelming for a newbie. Assuming that I am a zero on a 1 to 10 scale, where do I start? Thnx in advance for any help.

      John

      P.S. the product was WP Mage which is reviewed on another thread.
  • In order to become a successful affiliate marketer, your website should stand out in Google and appears in the first page of Google when somebody search for your product.
    • [1] reply
    • Johnoink,

      Great! Welcome to the forum. Let me assure you that there is no better place to learn Internet Marketing than this forum, so you're on the right track there.

      That being said, I can't particularly help you because I don't even know where to begin. If you have absolutely no background in Internet marketing or Affiliate Marketing, it would be better to read some threads where other people have posed questions first and then come back to this thread when you have a specific issue.

      I would really like to help Johnoink but I certainly can't write a book in a post on everything about Affiliate Marketing. Well, I guess I could but I don't get paid enough to do that =)

      I look forward to hearing from you again and if you have a specific question in the future I'd be glad to answer it! Thanks.

      Best of luck in your future IM career,

      Thomas
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