MNR’s Blog

Affiliate Program Tutorial

Add comment January 10th, 2006

Affiliate Program Tutorial

This tutorial tells you the steps to take to generate income from affiliate programs.
No tricks.. Just solid, reliable methods designed to work for years.
You choose many different ways of earning affiliate commissions.
You’ll have your best chance of success if you do the following. Find a niche and create a useful, interesting, content-rich, keyword-rich website on one topic and weave in affiliate links and AdSense ads.

This method worked beautifully for me .
I urge you to master this basic method. It’s a bit like serving an apprenticeship.

As part of your apprenticeship you’ll learn SEO (search engine optimization) skills, copywriting skills and various other Internet marketing skills which will prove to be invaluable, whatever route you choose next.

With any luck, you’ll have a bit of fun, too!
Strictly speaking, AdSense is an advertising network. However, in many ways it’s similar to an affiliate program. I think AdSense is fantastic. It’s free to join, free to use and easy to use.

It’s often much easier to earn good money from AdSense than affiliate programs, so it’s essential that you include AdSense in your plans.

1. Set a goal. If you want to go somewhere, you need to know where you’re going.

Achieve small successes first, see the money in your hands or in your bank account, and then increase your goals. Perhaps you have much larger goals. That’s OK. Whatever your goals, I strongly recommend that you serve your apprenticeship by taking the following steps. They’ll give you solid knowledge and experience on which to build your affiliate business.

2. Find your niche. Read Ken Evoy’s free Affiliate Masters Course and use the excellent advice in it to find a niche that suits you and your interests. Print out the Affiliate Masters Course, find a quiet, comfortable spot and read it several times. Spend a lot of time thinking carefully about this and jotting down notes. You’re planning a business, so don’t rush it. It’s very important. You’ll probably avoid Internet marketing topics because that field is so overcrowded and competitive. It’s much easier to succeed if you locate a less competitive niche.

Choose a topic that is easy to write about. Even if you’ve already chosen a niche, I urge you to read the Affiliate Masters Course. It might make you change your mind. You can follow your passion or chase the money. With luck – and a bit of keyword research – you may be able to do both.

Don’t decide definitely on a niche topic until you’ve taken the next two steps…

3. Choose a profitable niche. Do some research on Google AdWords and Wordtracker to choose the most profitable niche from among the ones you’ve chosen. Because you’re planning to use AdSense, you want valuable keywords or key phrases, if possible ones that people are paying at least 50 cents per click for on Overture and AdWords.

You’re going to build a site the search engines love, so you also want to find key phrases that many people are typing into search engines. You don’t rely on guesswork. You must do this BEFORE you start building your web site. That’s critically important.

Here’s a useful free tool I like using for Overture research: pixelfast.com/overture/

Type in a phrase, for example, “hiking boots”, click “Go”, follow the instructions, and you can see how much advertisers are paying per click for that phrase on the Overture network of web sites. You can also see how many people searched for the phrase the previous month. For a number of reasons, this figure is often unreliable and can be grossly exaggerated. That’s why I double check results using Wordtracker.

Wordtracker’s free trial is fairly limited. Fortunately, they allow you to subscribe cheaply for a day or a week at a time. It’s very fast, so you can do an awful lot of keyword research in a day. I use the annual subscription now.

Go to Google’s AdWords and find out how much advertisers are willing to pay for the keywords or key phrases you’re interested in. Here’s how. Pretend you’re going to do an advertising campaign. Start the process. Set up an ad campaign. (You’re not going to advertise – you’re just doing the research.) Follow these steps.

In step 2, “Create Ad Group”, you’ll find you can click on “Calculate Estimates” and “Recalculate Estimates”. These show you the maximum you would have to pay per click to advertise for particular keywords or key phrases.

If you use Site Build It you’ll find the brainstorming tool in it awesome to help you come up with ideas and phrases you wouldn’t have thought of without it.

Beware: If you choose certain topics, Google will not allow you to place AdSense ads on your site and you’ll miss out on a very lucrative opportunity.

Such topics include gambling, firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles; beer or alcohol; tobacco or tobacco-related products; and prescription drugs.

For a full list of topics you may wish to avoid see: https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

Publishers can choose to have their ads displayed only on Google or also on a large network of sites. Will AdSense ads you see on Google appear your pages? To get an idea, find web pages that have material similar to the content you’re planning to create and look at their AdSense ads. You can also use AdSense’s preview tool to see which ads are being displayed to people in different countries.

4. Research affiliate merchants. Do research to see if there are suitable affiliate merchants which match your topic.

You want ones that have excellent products, excellent reputations and sites that look as though they’re good at selling. You can search the AssociatePrograms.com affiliate directory for ideas.

Consider aiming for lifetime commissions. If you’re lucky, you’ll manage to select a web site topic that has affiliate programs which pay lifetime commissions or residual commissions – the sort reviewed at LifetimeCommissions.com. You’ll earn repeat commissions when “your” customers make more purchases.

5. Build a useful, interesting web site on your niche.

Create a content rich, keyword-rich site, designed to be found in search engines. Show your personality. Have a bit of fun. Be memorable. You need to connect with your visitors. Remember that people like buying from people they like. There’s no space in this affiliate program tutorial to describe how to build a web site. For that, you’ll need a good instruction manual.

If you’re short of money, you can hunt for free information on sites such HTMLGoodies. You’ll save yourself an enormous amount of time and frustration if you take the plunge and buy a good instruction manual written specifically for affiliates.

Here are the two best options:

For keen do-it-your-selfers, I recommend James Martell’s Affiliate Marketers Handbook. James is a real been-there-done-that super affiliate. His instruction manual shows you how he builds sites using web authoring software. One particularly useful feature is his explanation of how he uses an innovative page-linking strategy to concentrate Google PageRank and send visitors to a small number of selling pages. He doesn’t merely show how to do all this, with 40,000 words and 107 helpful illustrations. He also shows you his own network of successful affiliate sites.

My only criticism is that he’s a little brief in one aspect – researching and writing articles. I’d prefer to see more emphasis on building USEFUL sites rather than sites designed to be found in search engines.

For long-term success, that’s what I believe affiliates should do. As one observer noted, James comes across as a friendly shopkeeper. The most important fact is that James is highly successful, and shows you how exactly he does it.

You can check out James’s Affiliate Marketers Handbook here. For affiliates who want to simplify things as much as possible and automate the tedious techie stuff, I recommend Ken Evoy’s Site Build It (SBI). SBI is a site-building, site-hosting, site-promoting suite of tools, all in one place.

Once you have SBI, you don’t have to go scurrying all over the Net adding more tools and software. You have almost all you need in one package, so you can concentrate on the fun part – creating useful, interesting content. (Once you have SBI, the only addition you need to buy occasionally is a cheap, one-day subscription to Wordtracker. It’s useful to double check the SBI brainstorming results against Wordtracker results.) SBI comes with a newly updated, truly comprehensive instruction manual, a step-by-step Action Guide. SBI is the tool I give my assistants.

Ken Evoy’s instruction manual is doing my work for me. First it taught Rupert and now it’s teaching Ros how to build a high quality, successful, revenue-generating site. You could build a site without SBI, but using it saves you time and effort by simplifying the process. SBI teaches you how to optimize your web pages so they’ll be found in search engines. After building a page, you click the “Analyze It” button and it tells you what you need to do to improve it. The SBI technique really works. Two of the SBI sites that Rupert built are included in the case studies on the SBI site. See the proof in the SBI case studies

6. Add affiliate links. As you write the articles for your site, weave affiliate links into them. Always have a typical visitor in mind as you write the articles. Speak to that visitor. Your task as an affiliate is to help your visitor decide what to buy. One successful technique is to gradually lead your visitor towards a purchase. Start by outlining a problem, discuss a good solution that has worked for you, and end the article with a link that is a call to action, such as a hyperlink that says, “Find out more here.”

Your task as an affiliate is NOT to sell (that’s the merchant’s job) but to presell, to warm up your visitors. You want your visitors in a ready-to-buy frame of mind when they arrive at the merchant’s site. For superb advice on preselling, I strongly recommend you join Ken Evoy’s 5 Pillar Affiliate Program. It’s free to join. Ken is an absolute whiz at preselling and he’s renowned for working extremely hard to help his affiliates succeed. He has a superb program. It’s been No.1 in my Top 10 for several years.

7. Place AdSense ads on your site. Here’s an excellent free AdSense tutorial.

If you have a good, popular site, it’s remarkably easy to make good money with AdSense.

8. Get links. First, link to other sites. Choose sites that have similar or related themes, and invite those sites to link to you. This is hugely important. Search engines love sites that have many links to them – especially if those links come from sites which are themselves popular. Now you see why I said build a useful, interesting web site. If you do that, people are more likely to link to your site.

9. Anchor text. You’ll also need to understand the importance of anchor text, the words you use to link to pages on your site, the words people use when they link to your site. To search engines, anchor text is very important.

10. List your site in major directories and niche directories in your industry.

You probably already know about Yahoo! (good but expensive), DMOZ (often takes months to get into) and Zeal (tricky to get into; for non-commercial sites).

Here are some more directories (some charge a fee):

Gimpsy
Skaffe
Joeant
GoGuides
Business.com
SevenSeek
ThisIsOurYear
Looksmart (probably too expensive)
BlueFind
WowDirectory
Best of the Web
GeniusFind

Guides to web directories. David Mahler has a Guide to Web Directories. It’s a good list of recommended web directories. Here’s another list: http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php

How to find niche directories:

Go to Search It! (It’s a very handy free research tool.)
Scroll to the Search Category, “Specialty Hubs and Directories”
Choose one of the 4 options in STEP 2
Read the “Click Here for Information…” help before proceeding
Complete STEPS 3 and 4, and then click on Search It!
Read the tutorial. It tells you what to do with the search results
Get your search results. You should be able to find relevant, themed hub sites and directories which will list your site. Some charge a fee, some are free.

11. Write articles and distribute them to article directories (fairly easy) and try to persuade newsletters and other sites to publish them (more challenging). This step isn’t absolutely essential, but it helps enormously if you do it. Now you understand why it was so important that you chose a topic that was easy to write about.

12. Add more pages and get more links. Keep adding useful, interesting, keyword-rich pages (you do research at Wordtracker for this) and keep encouraging more sites to link to your site.

Make friends with other web site owners, and more people will link to you…

13. Be patient. If your new site is typical, nothing much will seem to happen for the first couple of months or so, and you’ll probably become frustrated and find it hard to believe that this is going to work.

You’re likely to feel annoyed, cheated and ready to quit. You’re likely to be a prime target for people selling get-rich-quick junk. Many affiliates give up at this stage. Stick with it. If you’re persistent and get the details right, the process I’m describing works beautifully. Learn something new every day. Do something to improve your business every day. If you do that, success is inevitable.

14. Expect to see signs of success. Eventually, because of all the links to your site on other sites, Google, Yahoo! and MSN will find your site and start sending you traffic.

Perhaps around the three-month or four-month stage you’ll be receiving 100 visitors a day. Visitors will like what they see and some site owners will start linking to you and asking you to link to them. Keep at it. You’re just getting warmed up.

15. The payoff…

About six months down the road, after little expense but quite a lot of hard work and research, you hit your magical $300 a month mark, from affiliate sales and from AdSense ads on your site. Depending on the niche you’ve chosen and the skills you’ve learned, you might earn considerably more than $300. Perhaps after 12 months, you’ll be earning $500 to $1,000 a month from your site. The checks keep coming in, month after month, even when you take a little vacation. You start telling friends how easy affiliate marketing is, and are puzzled when they’re not convinced.

Of course, it’s not really easy. It just seems easy after you’ve done the hard work.

…or the NON-payoff

If you’ve merely scanned the instruction manual and jumped right in without doing any research and built a “Make Money on the Internet” site, you’ll probably earn very little. A search on Google for “make money” displays more than 4 million pages. If one of those is yours, you have a LOT of competition.

If you did this and it isn’t working for you, go back to step 1 and start again.

16. Tweak your site.

To boost your conversion rate (your visitor-to-sales ratio), try little experiments, one thing at a time. Try changing the heading on a page, the words, the colors, the placement of your links. With each change wait until about 1,000 visitors have seen the change, and monitor your affiliate commissions to see if they rise or fall. You do this because you understand that if 1% of your visitors are buying and tiny changes boost your success rate to 2%, you’ll DOUBLE your commissions.

17. The future

When you reach your goal of $300 a month, you wonder whether you should expand your site, perhaps adding a newsletter, an autoresponder course or two, a forum, RSS newsfeeds, a blog, a whitepaper, a report to sell … and turn it into a portal. You dream big. Perhaps you even start dreaming of having your own affiliates promoting your reports for you… Or perhaps you just research another little overlooked niche and start on your next simple little, low-maintenance money-generating site. It can be done. The main ingredient needed is persistence. Been there, done that, and I have a very nice lifestyle to prove it.

The $300 a month target is very conservative. If that’s all you earn, you’ve done something “wrong”. You haven’t chosen profitable keywords carefully enough, you haven’t built enough attractive, keyword-rich pages, you haven’t learned the basics of optimizing pages for search engines, or you haven’t attracted enough good quality links to your site. That’s the wonderful thing about this business. You can make lots of mistakes and still earn useful money. Just don’t make TOO many mistakes.

18. Take the first step. That’s the one that matters most. I suggest you go back and read through this affiliate program tutorial again. Picture yourself owning a successful Internet business. Picture yourself opening letters and finding checks in them. Imagine enjoying yourself spending the money, perhaps even giving up your day job so that you can concentrate on your own business.

Now take the first step.

And when you’ve quit your day job, please write and tell me. I love getting emails like that.

Collected from internet

Spy Cameras - Spycams

Add comment December 31st, 2005

Spy Camera is Cheap! See what you’ve been missing with a wireless Spy Cam! We can’t tell you what to use it for, but COLOR wireless Spy Cam will easily see and record what goes on around your neighborhood when you’re at work. Hide the wireless Spy Cam anywhere you like so you can easily check in on the hot girl next door, record who stops by your home and much more. When you’re away, the FREE Motion-Detection & Recording kit automatically records all the action to your VCR whenever motion is sensed, so you’ll never miss a moment. Yeah, we can’t tell you what to use your wireless Spy Cam for – just don’t get caught.

Motion-activated recording kit automatically turns your wireless spy cam and VCR on and off so there’s no wasted tape!

• Capture camera video straight to your VCR
• Get 4 hours of continuous/wireless camera power
• Send burglars a clear message your home is protected

XCam2 Color Security Camera & Receiver

Your Complete Home and Small Business Security Camera Solution. Send wireless video up to 100 feet through walls & floors to any TV! Easy to Set Up! Even Easier to Use!
InstantON Camera Technology - Switch Cameras with No warm-up time!

Motion-Activated VCR Recording Kit

Capture everything that happens while you’re gone right on your VCR. Get the video evidence you crave - automatically and only when the ActiveEye Infrared Motion Sensor detects movement - No wasted tape!
With the Battery Pack, your XCam2 video camera can be completely wireless - combining wireless 2.4 GHz technology with a wireless power source to give you unparalleled flexibility. Up to four hours of power! Now you have the versatility of a complete mobile wireless video broadcasting system to use in as many locations as you need! Requires four AA batteries.

Video Surveillance Decals

Now you can keep intruders away with one of the most effective deterrents. A simple sticker is one of the most visible ways to deter criminals from making your home an easy target. The message it sends is clear - you are prepared for them and any attempt to access your house will only bring them pain.

Password Protection

Add comment December 31st, 2005

Here is the way to password protect your pages without the assistance of the administrator. You even have not to work in this strange UNIX-Environment.

The only things you need are :

- a text editor
- an ftp-program to move the created files to your WWW-Server and to do some other stuff (I used FileZilla - a very nice free program that is even understandable for an amateur like me. Therefore the following description will assume the use of this program.)
- a browser because we have to link to a certain page for some help
- a pen and a piece of paper.

Furthermore you have to have the permission to create directories and change the properties of self-created files and directories on your Web-Server. If you have all that it is quite easy:

Step 1:
Think of a nice username and password that later on have to be typed in from everyone who wants to see your protected pages. Take the pen and the piece of paper and write these down. And don’t forget: Wherever you use capital letters those who want to access your pages will have to use capital letters as well!!!

Step 2:
Use your ftp-Program to access your Web-Server. There you create a directory where you want to place the password protected files using the ‘make new dir’ command from the Commands menu (you can name it whatever you want). Then you create a second directory where you will later place the file with the password information (again use the ‘make new dir’ command). Now take the pen and the paper and write down the complete and exact path of the directory you created for the password information file(the ftp-program should display this if you open the directory).

Step 3:
Open your text editor and write the following lines:

AuthUserFile xxx/.htpasswd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName yyy
AuthType Basic

require user zzz

After you have done this you replace the xxx with the path you have written down on your piece of paper. Furthermore you replace the yyy with one ore more nice words. These words are only there to make the procedure of accessing your protected pages a little bit nicer. Because if someone wants to access these pages he will first see a nice box that asks him for the username and password. The first sentence in the box will be: Enter username for yyy. Then you replace the zzz with the username you have written down on your piece of paper. Finally you save this file somewhere on you computer under the name htaccess.txt

Step 4:
Open your browser and go to the page http://www.euronet.nl/~arnow/htpasswd/ There you fill in the form with the data from your piece of paper and push the calculate button. A new page will appear on which you will find a line in large letters that starts off with the username you have written on your piece of paper and some strange letters afterwards. Take again your pen and write the whole (!!!) line down.

Step 5:
Open your editor again and type the line you have just written down on your piece of paper. Push Return to create an empty line below. Now save this file under the name htpasswd.txt

Step 6:
Now open your ftp-program again and access your WWW-Server. First go to the directory where you want to place your protected pages and copy the file htaccess.txt from your computer to this directory. The name of the file should appear on the Remote side of the ftp-program. Mark this file and execute the ‘Rename’command from the Commands menu to rename the file to .htaccess (don’t forget the dot!!!) Now execute the ‘change file attributes’-command from the Commands menu. A box appears where you type in 644 where it says ‘manual’.

Now you change to the directory where you want to place the password information. To there you copy the file htpasswd.txt You then rename it to .htpasswd (again don’t forget the dot!!!). Then you do what you already did to the htaccess file, i.e. you mark the file, execute the ‘change file attributes’-command from the Commands menu and type in 644 where it says ‘manual’. Now we are nearly done. The last thing you have to do is to close the directory where you are in, mark it and once again execute the ‘change file attributes’-command from the Commands menu. But now you type in 711 where it says manual.

That should be it. Whatever pages you place in the directory you created for protected pages can only be watched in the browser if the username and password are typed in.

Password Protection - Lotus Notes

There is a way of having Password Protected pages without going through your webmaster. But, this would only apply to Internet users that use Lotus Notes. Lotus provides a product called “Domino Web Server” that allows you to take any Lotus Notes database and publish it over the Internet. The originator of the database, not the webmaster, using assigned access levels gives the pages/database, password protection. What that means is, that you the originator of documents (HTML-coded, etc.), stored in a database, can give an anonymous web user “No Access” to that page(s)/database.

You give the users of your pages/database access by assigning the access level through the database, not the server. You assign the “Login (UserID)” and “Password” to an individual user or group and assign them access above “No Access” level.
In summary, the database originator can assign his own “Password Protection” without having to go to his webmaster, service tech, etc.

GPS Buying Tips

Add comment October 5th, 2005

Anyone that enjoys the great outdoors has probably heard of GPS devices. They can come in handy when you are hiking, boating, biking, or doing just about anything else in the great outdoors. Twenty years ago, you had to rely on a compass the position of the sun and stars and your own common sense. Not anymore! Now you can have a handy little device that can pinpoint your exact location at any given time of day.

If you are in the market for a GPS device, it is important that you understand how it works. Since the GPS devices rely on air signals, you must have a GPS receiver and a clear view of the sky for them to work. When your device is turned on it is actually linking up with 27 orbital satellites in place around the planet. Four of the nearest satellites are located and the distance from them to you is calculated via the hand held device. The process is called trilateration. Based on that, the GPS device can determine where you are on the planet. Pretty neat huh?

When you look at the different types of GPS devices out there, you may wonder which one is right for you. Prices can range from $100- 5000 dollars, so it is important to do your homework. Find out what features each device has, and determine whether you need them or not. The following is a list of tips to get you started when you are shopping.

- Research the name brand. Though GPS technology is fairly new, the manufacturer should have a long track record of creating quality electronics.

- Don’t buy the cheapest or the most expensive GPS device out there. The cheapest may not meet your expectations and the most expensive one probably has too much extra stuff you will never use.

- Look for a large display, lighted if you are going to be traveling at night.

- If you plan on traveling by foot look for a model that is lightweight, and water resistant.

Once you decide on a model that you are interested in, head over to your local sports supply store. Get prices on the model above and below it for a good range. You can also try to look at auction sites like Ebay.com to find a good deal. If you are lucky enough to find one that is used, make sure to test it out first to make sure that it works properly.

Deciding to buy a GPS system is a personal one, so make sure that you understand the ins and outs of the technology. If you do a variety of different activities a good basic, waterproof model will do the trick. If you have friends or family members that own a GPS system, ask them if they are happy with their purchase. That way you can get an honest opinion on the different brands out there. An online opinion site like epinions.com is also a great place for honest answers.