I have maybe written about this before but I wanted to go into a bit of thinking stuff for this weekend and though that writing a post on affiliate conversion rates for affiliate marketing would be a good step for me and for you as well. Just before going to be last night I started writing notes and checking stats on my clickthroughs and sales and I want to look at four stats.

Three Steps to Affiliate Conversion

The three parts of the affiliate conversion world from a visitor to sale point of view are; visitor to affiliate landing page, affiliate landing page to purchase page, and purchase page to clicking pay now. Lets take 1000 visitors as a base just so that we can see the flow through and how we can make these numbers better.

Visitor Through Affiliate Link – We get 1000 visitors to our page and some of these people are going to click our affiliate link. We will get anywhere from 10 to 200 people clicking though our link to our affiliate program. How can we increase this affiliate conversion rate? Well the landing page should not leak to other pages on our site or others (no other links out). We can make the interest in our visit compelling for the visitor to click through with better copy. We can add links within our copy so the links in context will go through to the affiliate program. And finally we can improve our call to action so that people that visit know what to do and what action we want them to take next. Read the rest of this entry »

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I have been working with a series of spreadsheets and a firefox plugin to track my Google rankings and it has worked out all right until I just found a slightly better process recently. Here is the only way that I knew of to track the rankings.

Micro Niche Finder – I look deep into my sites niche and look at what the best quality keywords are. I look for the highest traffic words with the lowest and weakest competition. Micro Niche Finder has helped me for over a year find keywords with little competition and to also find untapped markets or sub-niches that I have not though were useful.

SEO Book Rank Checker – I start with the SEO Book Rank Checker firefox plugin and look at the keywords that I am targeting. I can type in all my keywords and the domain that they are from and then let the plugin grab my rankings. Even though you can only enter in 50 keywords at a time I just copy in sets of 50 and get 100 keywords in there. The rankings that are kicked out are great for seeing where I stand or even if I am ranking at all for a keyword. If not I can write and get backlinks to that keyword

Microsoft Excel – I export those initial Micro Niche Finder keywords into a CSV file which I then save as an Excel spreadsheet and then every day when I rerun the rankings in the SEO Book Rank Checker I can then paste those results of keyword ranking, and page that is ranking into the spreadsheet.

This method has worked well for the last few months and has really uncovered where I am failing in my rankings but I believe that I have found a great service that will get rid of the SEO Book Rank Checker as well as the spreadsheet and that is SEO Cockpit which is a cheap internet based service that will track keywords and backlinks quickly and easily. SEO Cockpit will take my keywords and domain and tell me my rankings every day or two and also give me that added advantage of seeing how many backlinks I have for a given page. This is a fantastic time saver and will now be helping me generate content and backlinks instead of wondering why my rankings are not as good as I would like.

Well I have had a chance to use Micro Niche Finder 5 a few times over the last few days and let me tell you it is a cool product now for sure. James Jones has got things going in a great direction. There are a few bugs to be worked out but it is working smoothly and really fast.

So I thought I would mention a few features of Micro Niche Finder 5 that I like best. And here they are:

Micro Niche Finder 5

Easy Keyword search – Using Googles Adwords API to access data quickly and easily, Micro Niche Finder 5 allows you to just enter in a keyword and it will bring back up to 200 keyword terms that Google sees as synonyms (related terms) for that keyword and give you the number of searches per month

Projects - If you get more than a few sub topics for a niche, for instance in internet marketing you may think of affiliate, adsense, adwords, backlinks, and keyword research (interesting idea there) then you can get all the results for these terms and come up with a project.

This project will let you see the most popular terms within the whole broad niche

Find the best keywords – One of the problems with really popular keywords is that everyone and their dog is going after them.

• You can do analytics within Micro Niche Finder 5 to find the number of backlinks needed to be top 10 for a keyword, this is called the measure of backlinks or MOB for short.
• You can do an Exact phrase search to find out how much competition you are up against.
• And finally you can also do a SOC serach which is the strength of competition, which takes a bunch of factors together to give you a number that will tell you how competitive overall a term is to go after.
• Lastly we have something called OCI this is a Microsoft rating on a level of Commercial Intent, that is how much of a buying keyword that term is on a rating of 1 to 100.

I have been using Micro Niche finder 4 for a long time but this new release of Micro Niche Finder 5 is fantastic. I am so excited to see a smoother interface and really quick response, in fact much faster than before.

There are piles of new features that I will dig into in depth in the next few days but I hope you see just from these quick notes just how powerful a tool this is tho get more done in less time and to perfectly hit a buying niche with real needs that you can help and make money from.

Keyword Elite 2.0 is the new product from Brad Callen, a person who has created some powerful software before this as well. Here are some of its features.

There is just a one time fee of $197 and no monthly fees to do your research. You can use it to search in all three major search engines Google, Yahoo & MSN. It shows you a huge list of profitable keywords. See different profitable Adwords campaigns and copy what they are doing and find JV partners online using the JV Diamond Miner

You can create your initial keyword list by adding long tail and short tail keywords using this program. After you have created a list you can filter out the keywords in all the different ways that are used. It will be possible for you to use Ask.com, Google Suggestion Tool, Meta Tags and Free Keywords to get keyword ideas.

With this program you can find out how competitive a specific keyword is in each of the paid “pay per click” search engines, such as, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing (MSN).

You don’t have to worry about creating your own marketing strategy, by using keyword elite 2.0 you can easily find profitable Adwords advertisers whose marketing strategy you can use.

You can see the Adwords advertisement history of a keyword for every website that has advertised with that keyword for at least in the past six months. You can also find out how good a specific keyword is in getting you a higher ranking in the 3 big search engines.

The software also allows you to see what percentage of people searching on your keyword are just surfers or could be potential buyers.

Another important thing that this software will show you are the “on page” optimization elements for each of the top 10 ranked websites for the keywords you input, giving you information on how you should be optimizing your own web page to make it to the top 10.

You will be able to see different specific keywords/website combinations in Adwords over a period of time. This will give you information about which keywords are used repeatedly by people.

This JV Diamond program enables you to find websites that are building an email list. You can partner with these websites because these can send some targeted traffic to your website by sending e-mails to their list.

With this program you will able to find CPA offers to match the niche that you’ve found to be profitable niche to pursue. You can search through 13,000 CPA and affiliate offers to find the best one.

When you use the software for the first time you get confused in trying to work out what each tool can do, but the amount of information it provides is huge.

Keyword Elite 2.0 can be used by both new and experienced marketers to get to identify profitable key words and products. The software comes with a 30 day search marketing elite membership and 8 weeks money back guarantee.

So I haven’t posted in a while and frankly I was feeling a bit more like a family many and not even doing much posting anywhere lately but fortunately my affiliate and adsense income has trended up about 10% more in the first couple months of the year compared to last year, which is OK.

Anyway late in the year last year I read the Conduit Method by Chris Rempel. Chris seemed to have an interesting method of marketing and a very persuasive salespage so I checked it out. The book was $14 and was only about 15 pages or so but what Chris is really good at is laying out the groundwork for you and forcing you to ask the questions about your affilate business that you tend to gloss over.

You know like, Who is your customer?   What is your customers real need?

That kind of stuff. Anyway after reading the Conduit Method and then looking at how the system would work for me I bought (yes bought) a very cool wordpress template from a guy offering a “Conduit Method Style WordPress Template” on the Warrior Forum. What is has is tabs in the bottom of each review page and the Conduit Method is all about reviewing products honestly so that you can let your prospects guard down and get them to the salespage where they can decide wether or not to buy. The concept seems to work very well and my first attemy made my $450 from one page done in 20 minutes one night, well 450 for the month of January we will see how well February works out for sales. Read the rest of this entry »

Reverse Niche Selection? What the hell could this be?

This week I have been looking at expanding my business from what it is now, a one trick pony with a couple of side businesses to a wider affiliate business. I have been researching new niches, brainstorming some new ideas and tonight somehow i ran across an ebook called Reverse Niche Selection.

Reverse Niche Selection seemed to catch me tonight at a very opportune time. I do not buy almost any of these “make money” type ebooks and at $14.95 the  ebook was at least a realistic price so I did a quick Google search and got the same crap about why this is such an excellent book. Well they always say that anyway so I didn’t care much.

What did make this different though was a couple of comments that I saw on the Warrior Forum where people were saying that this book is really good. It is a couple months old so I can’t remember exactly how I found the comments but anyway I decided to plunk down my $14.95 and see if the secrets that the Reverse Niche Selection salesletter promised were worth it.

Well I get the book and it is only 25 pages. One strike against it there because I tend to like some detail and glossing over is never good.

It ends up that Reverse Niche Selection only covers three topics.

1. The difference between the two types of affiliate types that make money and how to identify them
2. How to identify the best products in these niches
3. How to build a converting offer to sell your own or an affiliate product

When I say discover a niche I do not mean going for IM or going for Weight Loss. The book looks more at broad categories and whether they will convert for you.

So I need to tell you why this is a great little book. I really do like it. There are probably about 50 little ideas you can get from this book as well as a well thought out strategy to pick niches based on real world sales ideas instead of what we normally look at, you know internet marketing, or dog training, or some other market that is hot to people in the echo chamber of internet marketing.

All of this and I read it in less than an hour.

I don’t want to spill too much here but you can see my links. I am really glad that i dropped the $14.95 on this ebook tonight I learned a lot and have a much better idea now as to how I should be respinning my current flock of sites and what to actually concentrate my time on.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I have.

Last year I bought a long MP3 of a two hour interview that Russell Brunson did with a guy that made something like 10 million dollars from magazine and TV advertising for a male enhancement product. I was not interested in the product or even the ads but more about the process of building a giant business and the interview was fantastic.

Well Russell Brunson has a new Affiliate program training system???????? ????? ???????? and this one is only $10. I just bought it and it is long and really great. I just wanted to pass on the tip for anyone interested.

There have been lots of articles I think written about what we as internet marketers should be doing every day to build a business.

First of all you have to look at what your goal for the day is. do you want to create new income streams or do you want to enhance the reach of your current sites and income streams.

I think that your most important daily priority or one of them at least is to do product reviews.

Product Reviews

A product review is not much different then a blog post, I actually create my product review as a kind of blog post. At the minumum you would be able to post and say

“This product is great, go buy it”

Well that is not good enough in almost any case there is in fact a few steps in the affiliate review process. Here are the steps.

Find a problem

Let the reader relate to your vies

Get the reader to see your solution

Explain your solution

promote and link over to your solution

I posted this as a comment on another blog but realized that it was in depth enough to put on my own blog as infomration that we can all use.

I use clickbank for a few of my products and the way that I use it often is by cloaking the link to clickbank within my review and then when people go to the site they will be going though my referral link. This way I should lose fewer sales by people just getting rid of my Clickbank hop link code.

I have a few bonuses that I offer when people buy a clickbank product through my review page. I will have about 10-15% of the people that buy through my review and up asking for these bonuses but I have had three or so requests over the last three months that did not end up buying through my link. I have three things to think about this. Read the rest of this entry »

I have nothing else to say then what the title says.

Affiliate marketing has been changing over the last couple of years and now it is not just good enough to have a site with lots of links. It is more important to build trust in your readers and offer them content that will give them a reason to trust you as a person that can offer them a solution.

I just read a great link laden article by Rae at SugarRae. The article goes into depth about ideas like building sites around specidif programs, building niches and finding products for them as well as great stuff on Cost per action and not letting your business by a one man band.

Read it and read the linked content. It may take a while but the stuff is fantastic.