Glend Article

The basics – a quick summary

Author: glend

What Project X isn’t

Firstly, be aware: Project X is not an exhaustive “welcome to affiliate
marketing” manual. I explain what you need to know, but I don’t spend 300
pages waffling about the basics. A large part of the manual is focused on the
actual methods you need to make money – with a bit of background thrown in
here and there. All the information you need (whether beginner or pro) is
here, but not a drop more. Time is money, so let’s get going…

A bit about affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is: the promotion of products by third parties in exchange
for a commission / cut of the sale.

To explain with an example, let’s say I am selling an e-book called “Project X”
and I want to increase my sales by getting affiliates to market my product. I
decide to list Project X on ClickBank, an established affiliate network that I
will return to later. One day you are browsing the marketplace and see my
product – it pays out a 50% commission, and you like the look of the sales
letter. In short, you think the product will sell and you know how to market it.
You promote it using the methods outlined in this book, and sell three copies.

The product sells for $97, which means you earn a little over $44 after fees for
each sale. In a few days, you have generated an additional $132 for yourself.
That is the affiliate marketing that I know – and that you shall soon know too.

A bit about ClickBank

ClickBank (http://www.clickbank.com) connects over a hundred thousand
affiliates with thousands of information product vendors. In case you are
wondering what an “information product” is, you are reading one now.
Information products include e-books, video tutorials, audio teleconferences
and software – basically anything that comes in a digital form (i.e. not
physical).

From your point of view, you sign up to ClickBank, get a free affiliate account
and look for products you want to promote. Whenever you get a sale, your
account is credited with your affiliate commission and checks are mailed out
every two weeks.

The reason I love ClickBank is the large commission on every sale. You see,
since ClickBank specialises in information products (where the productvendor’
s costs are tiny), a large commission is passed your way – often as
much as 50-75%. It is far easier to get rich earning 75% of a sale than 5% of
one (which is what you will get with many products on other networks such as
Commission Junction and LinkShare).

For these reasons, the majority of this guide will be focused on strategies for
ClickBank affiliates.

One section of ClickBank that you will be visiting over and over again for the
next few months is the ClickBank Marketplace, which can now be found at
www.clickbank.com/marketplace.html. The ClickBank marketplace lists all of
the products that are currently being sold by vendors – so that affiliates can
browse through and pick one to start promoting. There is no need to apply to
promote products with ClickBank, you just enter your ClickBank name and get
started.

You can browse the product categories at ClickBank or search for a specific
product or keyword. You may for example, choose to click on the “Marketing
& Ads” category to browse through all products in that sector, or you may
decide to search for all products with “betting” in their description.

You can also arrange products by the following factors:

$/sale How much affiliates have earned per sale in the past (taking
refunds into consideration)

%/sale How much you earn as a percentage of the total price of the
product (50% is the norm, 75% is a great percentage)

% referred How many of the sales made are referred by affiliates (so a
percentage of 50% means half the sales are made by affiliates,
and half have come from the product vendor’s own promotions)

gravity How popular the product is – how many affiliates have sold the
product recently. This is not a true number (so a gravity of 100
does not mean 100 affiliates have sold a copy in the last two
weeks), but generally the higher the gravity, the more popular
the product is and the more affiliates are promoting it.

Here is an example of a page on the ClickBank marketplace – note how the
products are arranged in order of popularity (ClickBank take gravity, total
sales, and all the above factors into consideration when deciding on the
popularity figure).

Also note that the above factors are listed for you to review, so you can click on
the product title and take a closer look if you see something you like – a high
gravity, or a big commission. You can see all of the above factors below the
product title and description highlighted in green:

I will return to all of these factors later in the guide, as and when they become
relevant for the different Project X methods. For now, just make a note of each
factor and what each one means.

A bit about Commission Junction

Commission Junction is another affiliate marketing network, like ClickBank.
Commission Junction (or “CJ”) also brings together affiliates and product
vendors, but CJ doesn’t just specialize in information products; it also offers
physical products for its affiliates to promote. CJ has many large brand names
on its site, and is extremely well established.

Once more, it’s free to sign up as an affiliate (or publisher as CJ calls it); CJ
also has a series of indicators which show you how popular a product is – the
most important of which is, “EPC” or estimated earnings per click. This
indicates the value of 100 visits for affiliates who have sent this affiliate
program traffic.

In other words, if an affiliate program on CJ has an EPC of $56, then sending
100 visitors through your link should result in an average of $56.

A bit about Google Adwords

Adwords is Google’s “pay per click” engine: in other words, you pay to appear
on ads shown on Google whenever someone searches for a term. Each time
someone clicks on your ad, you are charged a small fee – typically of $0.20 to
$0.70 – although that figure varies quite a bit depending on how competitive
the keyword is. As we will soon learn, keywords are not created equal and it is
not wise to avoid the more expensive keywords, as tempting as that may be.

Adwords uses several factors to determine how much you pay per click, the
most important of which is “click through rate” or CTR – if your ad is shown
100 times and clicked on 10 times, your ad is said to have a 10% CTR, which is
very good (2-5% is generally good, although once more it depends on the
keywords in question and other factors).

The easiest way to increase CTR is to be relevant to the keyword in question
(don’t try to sell laptops on the keyword “Desktop computers”), and to use the
keyword in question several times in your ad.

Here is an example of a search for the term “ClickBank”; you will see the
organic results (these guys are not paying to be there) down the middle, and
the Adwords ads running down the right-hand side under “Sponsored Ads” –
the guys on the right are advertising and are paying between $0.30-0.70 per
click to be here:

Adwords can be a bit intimidating, and you may want to consider buying my
Adwords guide – www.adwordsmiracle.com at some point in the future. If you
prefer, you can spend some time searching for free material, then be my guest
- this should at least get you through the basics and you can return to AWM
when you feel inclined to. There is no need to buy AWM now for the purposes
of the techniques inside Project X but you may want to (I will teach you
everything you need to know about Adwords to put the PX methods in place).

But, I do suggest you check out AWM at some point in the future. I am biased,
but then again it those techniques have got me rich, quick. So I am going to
recommend AWM until the day I die.

A bit about your product portfolio

One thing that all of the super affiliates I have spoken to have in common is
that they have a collection of products that they are thinking of promoting /
are promoting. In short, they keep their ear to the ground and are aware of
products that are launching, products that have launched, products that have
been successful for others… these guys are spoilt for choice when it comes to
picking products to promote.

This means that they can be very selective when it comes to what they do
decide to push, and they can afford to invest a little bit of time in several
different projects at once. Then, they can see what works, and throw
themselves into it a bit more. They have their feelers out everywhere and are
waiting to get pulled through by a profitable campaign when it shows itself.

This is in stark contrast to the ailing affiliates I spoke to – who had no concept
of the product portfolio and just seemed to promote one thing, flop, and then
move onto the next product.

It is important that you have a constantly changing list of products that you
are either promoting or are considering promoting at any one time. With tens
of thousands of products out there, you must know how to separate the good
products from the bad – and a large part of this guide is focused on sourcing
hot products. In fact, there has never in the history of the world been a more
comprehensive set of techniques for discovering products.

I suggest you start building your own “product portfolio” as soon as you have
finished the manual. Throughout Project X I will return to this point.

A helping hand for the true beginners

While I have tried to remove much of the “fluff” from this guide, I know there
will be some of you out there who are true beginners and are already starting
to feel overwhelmed with the information here. Not to worry – I have created
a “Welcome to Affiliate Marketing” video for you, which you should have
downloaded from the APX access page. If you are a complete beginner, I
suggest you watch that video two or three times and then give yourself an hour
off before returning to this handbook. You should move at your own pace, but
no slower.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 4:11 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.