So far in this series we’ve created a way to redirect prospects sent by affiliates to oodles of different product sales pages from one clickbank account, and created custom affiliate URLs to ensure that affiliates are linking to your site, not Clickbank’s, for their affiliate links.
Today I want to solve on other problem I have with Clickbank.
When you run an affiliate program through Clickbank, you do not know who your affiliates are. All you know is their Clickbank ID.
I don’t really need to know their mailing address or the name of their pet canary, but it would be nice to have their name, email address and Clickbank ID.
It would be nice to be able to email affiliates about any special offers they could promote to their list.
It would be awesome to be able to send out an email to all my affiliates when I’ve got a new product.
Having a ready made list of people who might promote a new product is much more advantageous than starting from 0 affiliates with each product and hoping that a few folks will find it in the Clickbank marketplace.
And should I ever want to abandon Clickbank and move to a different affiliate management service, I would definitely want to tell all my affiliates about the new setup.
So, I need, at least in some minor way, to have my own affiliate list.
I decided that the most effective way to do this is with a combination of a bit of custom PHP and Aweber. Read more…
I have been checking out some of the preseason videos for The 30 Day Challenge, and today was a particularly intriguing one. Check out this video about Google Subscribed Links.
Coincidentally, I have been asked to test out a product that could really help with this. I hope I’ll have permission to let you know about it in the next day or two.
In the meantime, why not subscribe to the Surf the Mind Subscribed Links feature!
Once you’ve subscribed, check out how it works by clicking this link. Or how about this one. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an image-highlighted link for every major product launch? Pretty exciting stuff.
Image by jurvetson via FlickrThese days it seems like everyone wants to be a “problogger”, though why that is, I am not sure.
Perhaps the word itself is appealing. Perhaps the prominently displayed revenues of a few probloggers make others wish for the same prosperity.
I am not a problogger. I make my living on the Internet. I make what many would call a very, very good living with my sites. But I do not try to make money primarily from blogging.
Blogging is fun. It’s a good way to get a nagging thought off your mind. It’s a good way to share your ideas with random strangers. It can even be a good way to make some cash.
But I am lazy. I cannot imagine myself tied to my computer and my blogs each and every day for all eternity. While my work still requires me to be online most days, my ultimate goal is to be able to leave the computer entirely for several months next year without a drop in revenue.
That ain’t going to happen with blogs. The problem with blogs is that they’re never finished.
If you build a portal or information site… lets say, “Everything you need to know about raising thoroughbreds”… at some point, your work is going to be pretty much complete. You can keep up to date on new developments, but that isn’t going to require more than one or two updates in any given month. Contrast that to tech blogging, where you can miss a huge story by sleeping for one hour.
A comprehensive information site takes a tremendous amount of work to build in the beginning (it’s like writing a book!), but once it’s done, you don’t have to tend it daily to keep people coming back. You’ve got a genuine resource that Google will adore, visitors will find useful, and your search listings and revenue will stay pretty steady whether you update weekly or monthly… or even every other month.
One site I’ve built using this technique makes me about $5,000 a month, and although I generally add content to it twice a month, at the beginning of the year I was exceptionally busy and didn’t add anything for a little over three months. My traffic and revenue did not decrease at all. Nor would they if I left it another three months.
I built another small site on a very obscure topic about a year and a half ago. There were a few other sites with one or two pages of information on this particular topic online, but nothing comprehensive. This site has no Adsense, because there are too few related advertisers to make it worthwhile, but it does have a few loosely related Clickbank products, and a lot of Amazon links.
That little site, which has NEVER been updated since it was finished, brings in at least $30 in Clickbank and $100 in Amazon referral fees each and every month.
I’m not saying you can’t use WordPress or other blogging software to create in information site just like that one. In fact, WordPress (with a load of tweaking), is a great platform for building just about any type of site. But the usual blogging format, with dated posts and archives, makes evergreen information seem dated, and makes it sadly obvious when a site hasn’t been updated recently.
Now, there are a few exceptions in my portfolio too. I have some content sites whose traffic has whithered away over time, and I have two blogger blogs that haven’t been updated in two years that have steadily increasing Adsense revenue each month for no apparent reason.
But, in spite of the anomalies, I am far more confident that I will achieve my goal of Internet-free vacations next year through content sites rather than blogging.
If you are just the opposite, and a month away from your computer sounds like a torture worse than waterboarding, then perhaps life as a problogger is just what you’re looking for.
Then I’ll come by and read your blog when I’m online. I might even click an ad. And I’ll be ever so thankful I’m not doing that particular job.
I’ve recently been bombarded by links to Russell Brunson’s Affiliate Evolution offer from other marketers. For $10, the package certainly is a steal. I no more than glanced at what was offered for the price before I hit the buy now button.
And then I saw that the payment system was NOT Paypal.
Now, I don’t have anything particular against using my credit card for purchases like these. It’s just that I’ve noticed a lot of forced continuity offers popping up in the marketing arena recently, and if the marketer isn’t using Paypal, there’s no telling how insanely difficult it might be to unsubscribe from a costly subscription if you happen to get sucked in.
So as soon as I see a non-Paypal payment page, I take a second, or even third look, before entering my credit card.
Affiliate Evolution is actually ABOUT continuity offers so it’s obviously going to have one. To Brunson’s credit, the page does not have a FORCED continuity offer. It’s just a little sneaky.
When you get to the payment page, you’ll notice that the total on the shopping cart is not $10, but actually closer to $40 because of a shipping charge. The shipping fee is NOT for Affiliate Evolution, but rather for a “trial month” of a monthly newsletter plus a DVD. After the ‘free’ month (which you pay a huge shipping fee for), your credit card will be charged ANOTHER $40 a month until you unsubscribe. And remember, this isn’t a Paypal subscription, so you will have to do something that’s likely more onerous than going to Paypal and hitting the cancel button to ditch the extra fee.
I nearly stopped the purchase process right there, but I took another look, and below the cart, there is a checkmarked box where you can choose to select the bonuses.
If you deselect that checkbox, you can continue the payment process for only the $10 you wanted to pay for the products advertised.
Your shopping cart will immediately show only $10 once you do this. You’ll still be required to enter a shipping name and address, but since you’re not being shipped anything, you can just enter “NA” for the address, city and postal code.
Then all you’ve got to do is wade through the one time offers (yikes! are there really that many of them!?) and grab your files. For a mere $10 it is well worth the price, even if you’ve got to jump over a few minefields to get them.
After all, you can learn about continuity offers without getting sucked into them, can’t ya?
I haven’t done anything in the field of Internet marketing since November 2006. My existing sites are still rolling, and proving the value of promoting physical and evergreen products with real, non-spammy sites, my income from those sites hasn’t diminished more than one or two percent since that date.
But now, faced with starting a new project, I feel rusty.
So, I thought I’d bone up on a bit of reading at the Warrior Forum (It seemed more helpful and interesting to me before. Not so much now. Is it just me?), pull out some old software to see if it still works, and find an interesting marketing list or two to join for ideas.
Any other ideas on lists to join, software to buy, or information to scour? I’m not looking for overload, but I did notice that the keyword software and article submission software I was using two years ago no longer works, and I’m a lot behind in the web 2.0 marketing world….
