Glend Article

PART 3 - PROJECT X ADVANCED TRICKS

Author: glend

Introduction

One problem that affiliates always seem to have is that they want a “fool proof” way to make money - one that will allow them to quit their job and make a full-time living from affiliate marketing. Does that sound familiar? Well, if that sounds like you, I have a question for you: how bad do you want it? Because, I have exactly what you are looking for, but it involves a bit of grunt work. So, how bad do you want it?

Hold that thought…

Just imagine for a second… waking up at 11am for a relaxed brunch, and banking over $100 in near passive income everyday. It sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, I do it every single day of my life, and I can tell you it is utterly incredible (I am pretty vindictive and I love to find a breakfast bar near a train station and sit down at about 9am checking my e-mails while I watch everyone scurry to work).

Why do I bring all this up? Simple. Because this next method I am about to tell you involves some work, and it will bore the hell out of you when you do it - but if you follow my steps you will be making between $40-200 per day in affiliate commissions when you follow through, typically within 30 days of reading this sentence. 

And, yes, the work is dull and boring - which is why you must always have that image of me sitting in that breakfast bar, chilling out while I watch people like the old me go through the corporate ringer.

Now, this method isn’t stylish, and it isn’t clever, but it provides results and you don’t need any capital whatsoever to set it up - unlike some of my other techniques. But it will take some “brute force” i.e. work on your end, and that’s something you should remember. Just picture me, relaxed as hell wearing my casuals in that breakfast bar, checking how much I made in my sleep and you will do well.
Summary of the technique

This is a real idiot proof one. In fact, if you hear an affiliate bragging on an Internet marketing forum about how he is doing this for a living, there is a good chance he does this method in some shape or form. Basically, we are going to find a product with an affiliate program, then write several articles that rank well in Google (with a little link to the product we want to promote), get some free traffic for our work, and repeat the process. 

If we do this the right way (and it has to be done the right way - read on), and we repeat it enough times (a good number of times - how bad do you want financial freedom?), we will generate $40-200 per day in affiliate commissions with zero capital investment. And we will do it within 30 days of reading this sentence. Sounds good?

I will explain how it works, and how I do it - the rest is on you.
Find a product to promote

Note: you can use one of the other product selection methods such as “the opportunist” method, the “copy the best” method, or the “thief in the night” method here (all to come). I suggest you have a constant portfolio of products you intend to promote using these methods. Alternatively, you can use the following “general” selection method below – or you can use some combination of these methods to build up your “product portfolio” - this is a term I use to describe a short-list of products you are thinking of promoting, almost all the super affiliates I have spoken to on my travels have one of these. You need one too – and you can use the product selection methods outlined in this guide to build yours. Now, on with the “general selection method”…
The general product selection method

Head over to http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.html and click on any category, and arrange the products by gravity. Then browse through and draw up a shortlist of 10-20 products that have a gravity of between 10-70. Above 70 and the product is already being marketed well, and less than 10 and the product has not proven itself yet (to generalize). 

Now, return to your shortlist and have a read through the sales letter of each product. Does the sales letter look persuasive? The “good” sales letters generally have a certain style to them - with lots of benefits (”revealed, the five
simple steps to catapult you to financial freedom!” - that kind of thing), lots of testimonials, and have a very “sales-like” feel to them. If you want to check out what a standard issue sales letter looks like, please check out the following
sites:

http://www.affiliateprojectx.com
http://www.adwordsmiracle.com *
http://www.horsebettingracingsystem.com
http://www.gotrythis.com
http://www.adwordsblackbook.com
http://www.butterflymarketing.com
http://www.keywordelite.com

*My two products. Not modest, am I?
Those are only examples, but you should start to see commonalities in the writing style (benefits, benefits, benefits!), and you should also note that the presentation is clean in all cases. Never promote a product that is not presented well. There are plenty of examples I could give (anything on Clickbank with a gravity of over 50 has quite clearly proven itself with good copy), but those are ones that I like – and they all demonstrate persuasive “standard issue” sales copy. Take note.

That’s our due diligence done (we aren’t going to commit too much to refining the list down at this stage), and we should now have a shortlist of the 10-20 products we want to promote. We will whittle this list down as we move through the stages so we don’t need to be laser-focused to start.
Do your Keyword research

Remember, when we write our articles, we are going to get the majority of our traffic from search engines, largely Google. The reason for this is that Google tends to rank articles on the sites we will be posting on well. You will also get some residual traffic from Yahoo and MSN, but experience shows that it is best to focus on Google and get some secondary traffic by chance, rather than the other way around. 

We find keywords that are relevant for our product, write articles based around those keywords, and get free traffic off the back of Google and the articles site – if we repeat this process enough times, we will generate substantial income. This method has allowed many affiliates to quit their jobs and work from home. Its slow and painful, but a “fool-proof”, zero capital way to make money as an affiliate. If you hate your boss, have lots of time, and little capital, this may be the one for you. 

When you use this method over and over, you will become a master at keyword research. Researching keywords several times per day has a habit of doing that to you. When we choose to promote a product, we are often going to be at a complete loss as to what the relevant keywords are. Quick question: what does someone interested in learning how to play golf search for? I am
sure you can come up with a few ideas, but after 5 or so terms you probably run out of steam.

Now at this point I want to slide into a little sales pitch: if you are really serious about this method, then I suggest you invest in Keyword Elite - I offer a series of advanced training videos for anyone who buys the product via my link – see http://www.killyourjob.com as mentioned earlier. If you can’t afford to shell out the program, at least not yet, then read on.

There are a number of ways to collect keywords for our product, and I tend to take a “scatter gun” approach to draw up keywords and then filter them down later. Once more, this is not an exhaustive list, and it is not a “clever” set of steps, but as I say this is a brute force method that works – not a sly workaround.

1. Check out the affiliate page of the product – see what keywords the merchant recommends you promote his/her product on. But don’t stop there.

Very often the product vendor will have an affiliate page with relevant keywords on it - these are intended for Adwords advertisers, but they will work just as well for our keyword-articles. There are two points to bear in mind here. 

The first is that you should also do a quick search for competitors and look at their affiliate pages too (very often they will have different keywords that you can use). 

Tip: The second point is that most vendors will provide many vague, semi-related keywords that don’t convert that well. The rationale here is that the product vendor will have 1,000 affiliates all promoting his product across hundreds of keywords. By the time those guys realize that strategy doesn’t work and give up, a new crop of affiliates fill their place. Great for the product vendor, not so good for the affiliates.

2. Use Google and Yahoo’s suggestion tool
You can take a broad keyword and enter it into both Google and Yahoo’s suggestion tool - this will throw up new keywords for you to use (for example if you throw “google adwords” into Google’s suggestion tool, one of the suggested keywords is “make money with adwords”). You can head to http://pixelfast.com/overture for the suggestion tool. 

3. Browse resource sites
Take one of the keywords relevant to your product (the more general the better), and type “[keyword] directory”, “[keyword] wikipedia” or very simple [keyword] into Google. If we browse directories related to our keywords, we will see lots of “niche specific” keywords that we wouldn’t have hit on before. 

Wikipedia (the online encyclopaedia) is great because doing a search for the relevant term will very often bring up a list of other terms (along with an article with lots of keywords in it, many of which will be links themselves – so they stand out in the article). Finally, if we just type our keyword into Google we can peruse related sites and scour them for any keywords that we otherwise wouldn’t have found - very often we can draw up a shortlist of 50 or so possible keywords from these three sources in around 20 minutes.

At this point, we should have a list of 30-100 possible keywords for each of our products. We now need to filter these down to a manageable number - time for the next stage.

Tip: one keyword you are definitely going to want to target is the title of the product itself. In fact, writing a review or pre-sell and targeting the keyword of the title of the product can be very profitable for two reasons. Firstly, remember that anyone searching for the product is super targeted. Secondly, it is very often easy to rank well for the keyword of the product title as merchants have very few genuine back-links (they may have 100 affiliate links pointing in at any one time, but the site may well have a Page Rank of 0-2, It is not uncommon for a popular ClickBank product to not rank in the top
position for its own term. Many successful affiliates will write their pre-sell, add it to a site like USFreeAds or Ezine Articles and send Adwords traffic to that page. That way they get their Adwords clicks and organic traffic, all on the
same page.
Filtering your keywords

All keywords are not created equal. Someone searching for “project x affiliate guide” is a very qualified prospect, worth twenty times as much to me as someone searching for, say, “make money” (at least to me and my affiliates). 

If you were advertising on Adwords, you would pay possibly five-ten times as much per click for the former. Of course, here we aren’t using Adwords, and so we can’t throw up an ad and track conversions (and using guesswork to try and predict which keywords convert is ill advised). But, we can still use Adwords to our advantage.

Adwords can be a profit monster in the right hands. Anyone who owns a copy of my Adwords Miracle guide knows that. But, Adwords can also be a ruthless, cutthroat business. 

Anyone bidding on a keyword that doesn’t convert will generally pull his or her ad in a matter of days. Over time, only the profitable ads survive. For this reason, the ads that show up on Adwords for a particular keyword will give you a clear window into what the people searching for that keyword are after. If you have ever tried adveritising a product as an affiliate on a competitor’s keyword, you will know how difficult it is to maintain a good ranking. 

If we do a search for “Adwords Miracle”, we will see that nine out of ten ads are promoting Adwords Miracle (and I doubt the guy advertising something else is profitable). If we type in our keyword and look at the ads being shown, we can see what the people searching that key term are interested in (some would say the ads shown are more relevant than the organic terms, since the advertisers pay a heavy price if they are not relevant). 

The point: If there are several products similar to the one we are going to advertise currently being advertised, then it would be a good idea to target this keyword with our article. Because, chances are it converts for products like ours.

However, we are not done yet. While Google loves the sites we are going to use to create our articles, it does not love them more than well-established, hub sites. To give you a flippant example, we are not going to rank better than Google for the search term “google”. 

Likewise, certain terms (such as “poker”, “credit cards”, etc) are going to be insanely competitive and we have zero chance of even ranking in the top 100 searches for them with our article. We really do need to rank in the top ten for our term, and so we will need to go a bit lower down the tree to pick our keyword.

Of course, the problem with going too low is that we need some traffic i.e. we need people searching for the term that our article will show up under. Too low and we won’t get the traffic, too high and we won’t be able to compete.

But there are some gems – fairly popular terms that aren’t too hard to rank for – and we can find them.

The first step we need to take is to head to Overture (Yahoo)’s suggestion tool over at http://pixelfast.com/overture and enter the term in question. The figure on the right is the number of times that particular term has been searched for in the past month. 

We are going to want to target a term that has been searched for 300-5000 times per month, so if any of your keywords fall outside that scale, cross them off the list.

Now that we have the search volume down, we need to ensure that the term is not too competitive and that we are going to be able to rank on the search page. Google ranks web pages in a pretty funny way at times (I can’t summarise exactly how they do it in a book, if I could I would be charging $2,000 for Project X and people would pay)… but we can gauge roughly how
competitive a term by looking at the results that are currently in the top ten. And to get it right most of the time, that’s all we need.

Pay attention to three factors: Alexa rank, PageRank, and the title of the page. If you are a Firefox user (you should be), you can get a free extension called SearchStatus (http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus) which will display PageRank and Alexa rank automatically for every page you visit - a great time saver. 

Just to explain, PageRank is Google’s method of measuring how many links point to a particular web page.  If all the pages in the top ten for our keyword have PageRanks of between 0-3 then, that is a good sign. If they are all PageRank 5 and up, that is a bad sign. 

Alexa rank is a rough measurement of how popular a website is - and the lower the number, the more popular the site is (Yahoo.com has an Alexa rank of #1, it is the most popular site online). 

Generally, if the majority of pages in the top 10 for our keyword have Alexa ranks of less than 100,000, that is a good sign. If there are more than a handful of sites with Alexa ranks of less than 20,000 then that is a bad sign. Finally, look at the title of each of the web pages - do the titles include the keyword in them - if so, there is a good chance that the page has been “optimised” for that keyword, i.e. the webmaster is deliberately trying to compete on that keyword, and it will be harder to rank for that term).

Provided our keywords have search volume of between 300-5000, and the competition isn’t too tough on Google, we have a keyword that we can target. Now, we can move onto the next stage which is creating the article itself.
Writing the article itself

If you’re like me, you don’t like hard work, which is why I am going to recommend that you always write articles similar to ones that have already been written. 

In very simple terms, if you are writing articles on “make money with adwords”, search for articles on that subject, draw out what the points you like and start to write your article. Your article really does not have to be genius, it just has to be a solid 500-700 word piece. Don’t just put out any piece of junk, and if in doubt, rely on others articles (copy ideas, but do not steal words wholesale – this is well within the law in case you were wondering). But then again, don’t think it needs to be Shakespeare. It doesn’t.

One important issue with the article itself is keyword density. Keyword density refers to the number of times a particular word or keyphrase appears on a web page. 

For example, if I write a 500 word article, and mention the keyphrase “make money with adwords” five times, then the article has a keyword density of 1%. I generally aim for a keyword density of between 3-6% - too low and Google won’t think we are relevant for our keyword; too high and Google will think we are spamming to get a good search ranking. 

You can copy and paste your article to check keyword density) at http://www.live-keyword-analysis.com/

You will also want to mention the keyword or key phrase once at the start of the article (in the first paragraph) and once in the final paragraph.

Finally, you will want to add an author resource box to your article - this is the *most* important part of your entire article (it is where you convince people to click through to your link, in this case our affiliate link). The resource box
should include three pieces of information: your name, the benefits of the product you are trying to sell, and a call to action. 

Study other articles that show under your keyterm and see how their resource box links – as I see we don’t get rich by being innovative.

Submitting your article

There are literally thousands of article directories to submit your articles to. And a beginner would think that the best thing to do is to submit your site to 100 of them. After all, the more sites, the better, right? Not quite. Google will
penalize articles that are same as others (called duplicate content), so it won’t endear us to Google. Moreover, many article site owners don’t like you submitting duplicate content. That said, you can still do it for some extra traffic, it’s just that Google wont rank you well for those articles.

I suggest you submit your article to one of three sites:

Ezine Articles ( http://www.ezinearticles.com), SearchWarp (http://www.searchwarp.com) and USFreeAds (http://www.usfreeads.com) - I suggest you sign up to all three and alternate between them - Google seems to love all of them (although USFreeAds is not an article site, Google loves it and it will work for purposes. You can submit ads for free, or become a paid member to speed up the process).

Once you have submitted your article, you should expect to show up on the first page of the results within a week, and you will generally stay there for between 3 weeks and 2 months. You will of course need to repeat this process to make it work - I suggest you write 3 new articles per day, using this method to make $50-200 per day within the space of 30 days.

If you do or do not decide to use this method (its a lot of work), be aware that is a “fool proof” way to make a living from affiliate marketing - and its there if you want it. 

You may want to use some of the tracking methods that I cover in Section 3 (so you know where your sales are coming from), and I suggest you cloak your links too, once more using the information in Section 3).

Tags: CPA affiliate, Work At Home

This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 4:25 am and is filed under Affiliate Tips, Work At Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.