If you follow my Squidoo lenses and my blogging, you probably already have 2-3 e-books or other Digital Products to sell.

So what is left is how you can sell your personal eBooks. Just for the record, to have the full picture I joint down all methods but I comment only  the new once, the tweaking, or unusual way to sell eBooks or any Digital Products.

As soon as you have an aBook you can sell it:
The common way:

• Sell it through ClickBank, as you can benefit of a potential 60,000 affiliates
• Get ISBN number for it and sell it on Amazon
• Write reviews in Blogs
• Write articles on ezines
• Write Press Releases

The advanced way:

• Ping your eBook landing page/saleletter with http://pingler.com
• Create Squidoo lenses
• Create Hubpages
• Promote on twitter, but send to a blog review or web site, not to a squeeze page
• Promote creating a fun page on Facebook
• Promote with Google Buzz
• Create a Video about it
• Transform your eBook into a Kindle book using http://dtp.amazon.com and offer the kindle version to amazon or   Mobypocket which has other format conventions as well

The massive action way which creates viral marketing campaigns:

• Sell eBooks with Rights, I have three tutorial posts about the Rights on:
  • Resell Rights (RR) and Master Resell Rights (MRR)
  • Private Label Rights (PLR)
  • Giveaway and Rebranding Rights

• Submit your sites with reviews on:
  • http://www.webceo.com/
  • http://submitexpress.com
  • http://addme.com
• Submit to Social Bookmarking sites focused on eBooks, this is a short list with the most effective sites:
  • http://www.free-ebooks.net
  • http://www.ebooktags.com/
  • http://www.ebookpalace.com/
  • http://www.wisdomebooks.com/
  • http://www.ebookjungle.com/
  • http://www.ideamarketers.com/
• Submit to ebook direstories:
  • http://ebookdirectory.com/
  • http://e-library.net/

Even though the above actions are powerful, I say you must use effectively SEO Strategies.  We already read volumes about keywords research and backlinks, I am not going to talk about them.

I want only to emphasize the roll of using Forum to help SEO strategies.

A good friend of mine and a very effective Internet Marketer, has had a lot of blogs very well ranked, but he also has had one which was under his level of ranking, with very little traffic. We discussed about it, he told me “that particular site is without hope”, and I said “you are doing so well with the rest of them, you must find out why this one is hopeless”.

I have very limited time but my friends have a special place in my heart and from time to time I looked at his troubled-Blog.  After 3 month his site was very well ranked, I sent him an email, congratulate him, and ask “What in earth you did to that site?”

He was laughing and finally said:

• I was in forums, research that niche and make a long list of keywords people are using for the particular niche. I compare my initial list of  keywords with the one I pick up from forums, and I discover that I am not writing about the keywords people are interested in, so I remain in the same niche but I shift a little the focus of my writing based on the keywords people are interested the most
• By accident I discovered that exists forums which allowed members to link back to their own site (or blog reviews posts) in forum comments, and I start using them. Those are called link exchange forums.

So with the first bullet I got more traffic because I start writing about keywords people are more interested in, with the second bullet I start to create a lot of links back to me.

This is all I did to turn around that side and by the way of backlinks, the time is limited for all of us, so as important as the backlinks are, follow this rule:

• in a niche with weak competition BL are good but not vital to have a lot of them
• in a saturated niche you must spend more time creating them

In summary, I hope in the way of selling an ebook I give you some specific sites which can produce viral marketing, witch is a must, and a show you the roll of forums, and the wander “link exchange forums” can produce.
I don’t give you examples because your research must be per niche, so you go in Google and type in search box:   allinurl: link exchange forums, and choose only what is good for you.

Until next time be well… and don’t ignore your friends… you will be surprised how much they know…

Michey

Popularity: 84% [?]

I just finish to delete all the nofollow ezines from a list.

So you get a pure dofollow list with both Alexa Ranking and Google Ranking.

Use it for free traffic!

Enjoy!

The entire list is dofollow tag in author’s resource box.
Until next time use it!

Popularity: 40% [?]

Confirmation Page And Integration With Aweber.

An e-mail is sent automatically by autoresponder and the visitor must confirm his e-mail clicking on a link.

It is professional to have a “Confirmation HTML Page” in addition to the autoresponder’s email.

In this case visitor will get both:

• Aweber email which you must customize and
• Confirmation HTML Page

In Confirmation Page you tell your visitor that:

• He will receive and email and must confirm his e-mail
• You give instructions to put your email in his whitelist

The first action we need is to create a list, but we create one in “List building Part 1”, now we need to clarify:

1. How to customize the aweber email
2. How the Confirmation HTML Page will look and
3. Where in aweber you fill in the Confirmation Page URL

Confirmation HTML Page

In this page you tell your user that he/she will receive an email from you and he/she must confirm his email for the process to go forward, you even give him an example how that email will look.

Next picture show the top part of a Confirmation Page. You can read the text:
“Congratulation You Are Almost Done”
“You must confirm the enail to reseice the free eBook as bonus” and
“Check your email right now”

Then it is an example of how the email will look like.

The second segment of the same Confirmation Page contains instructions to set-up a filter putting your email in a whitelist for the most used email services: Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.

This is important as you don’t want your visitors to lose any emails from you.

This format of instructions is classic all you have to do is to replace yourdomain.com with your domain, or wordpress-mu.net with your domain as I create those pictures from the confirmation page of our previous product: http://www.wordpress-mu.net

You create a Confirmation page, you load it on your server and you have the URL for it, you must come back to aweber and customize the confirmation email.

Customizing  aweber email.

You click on “create and manage lists”, scroll until you find the list you are interested in, is going to look like this picture.

You fill in all the information, save and go to the next screen:

This is the last part of the screen, you change:

• The thank you info, click on  gray little box
• In success Page you fill in with your Landing (sale) Page URL, this is where you redirect a visitor after he confirmed your email

What is left is the connection with your Confirm HTML Page.

When you create the form for your squeeze page, in page 2, you get this screen:

In this screen you must fill in the URL of your Confirmation HTML Page in “Thank You Page” and one more time on “Already Subscribed Page”.

If your visitor is first time customer for you, the URL from Thanks You will be enforced, but if the visitor is already a customer for you from other sale, then he is already on your list and Already Subscribed URL will be enforced.

In summary: After your visitor sign in in your Squeeze page he will receive and email generated by aweber which you already customized and a Confirmation HTML Page in which you remind him to confirm email and give instructions.

If visitor don’t confirm email, the process stops.

If visitor confirm email you redirect him to Landing Page where he will read more about your product and he will make his mind to buy it or not.

We offer the PDF format of each post on a different page, look it over:
http://affiliate-ecourse.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/e-course-pdf/

Until next time be well and well informed.
Michey

Popularity: 100% [?]

Copy writing is an art, habits and trends are changing from time to time, but we need copy writing for our landing pages, they are often called sale page.

The objective of copy writing is to get the reader to pay action, in other words we have to communicate enough value in order to persuade prospects to buy the product, and the way we do that is through copy writing…

You need to actually deliver the value and you can use copy writing to communicate value through written words, audio, video, etc

But the perceived value of your product in your visitor’s mind must be equal to or greater than the price… otherwise they won’t buy it.

So, how we create our landing pages:

• We can outsource, this can be expensive, and effective
• We can do it ourselves:
  • But to become a great copywriter and write expert sales copy takes time
  • We can keep it simple and write amateur sales copy from the beginning By the way, studying copy writing is going to help you in your marketing regardless of whether you write your own sales letter or not

I don’t want to give you recipes for Landing page but I will lay out the components of a good effective copywrite.  Keep in mind the what is working for a niche, cannot work for the other, and what is working today cannot work tomorrow.

It is also a controversy about what is more effective: a short or a long Landing Page.
I recommend a good read “The Death Of The Sales Letter” by  Michael Fortin

Basically you have to tell visitors:

1. Who you are
2. What you have as a product
3. Why the visitor need your product
4. How he can get it now – call of action at the end

If you can communicate effectively those information, you just create a compelling Landing Page which will take care of the four elements called AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

The components of a Landing Page:

1. Pre-headline which will grab the attention and add urgency
2. Headline  must stand as an request to a pressing need, and revile your USP (Unique Selling Point)
3. Deck Information it is a sentence which re-enforce a Title
4. Greeting to keep a friendly tone from the beginning, make it as personalize as you can
5. Opening paragraph with a hook to grab attention don’t use the empty hype words
6. Who are you and why should they listen to you, this will build credibility
7. State the problem show what problem you you solve for your visitor
8. Give the solution to the problem talking about your product: show the benefits on a bulleted list (include USP), show proof
9. Testimonials  with FTC rules this part will change a little, you have to keep on open mind in 2010 to see how this part will stabilize
10. Make the offer, must be an irresistible one, and you need to spell put why is so irresistible, use urgency: you need to buy it now because…
11. Reiterate the value and spell out the price.
12. Explain your bonuses
13. Make a money-back guarantee proposition
14. Ask for the order which is your Call to action
15. Order box with PayPal connection, I suggest to have the link two times: click on picture, and click on text
16. Closing/Signature
17. P.S.
18. Links to your support, disclaimers, eventually your affiliate program

Note 1: make the entire copy on white background, with enough white spaces, as must be an easy reading.
I don’t want to give you snippets of all those elements but I propose the following exercise:

• Print those 18 elements and keep the list on your working desk
• Go in Twitter and click a couple of times until you reach a landing page, if you get a squeeze page, sign in, confirm and you are redirected to the selling page ( you always can un-subscribe)
• If you don’t like this method, go to Clickbank and click on sales pages of products with good conversion
• With the list in front of you, try to find the elements from my list, make notes
• Repeat this for 5-10 products

At the end of this exercise you will have enough notes to start to create an amateurish copy.

Note 2: there is no other method to learn to become a copy write except experimenting, testing, split testing.   If you are selling a product from Clickbank you need only a Squeeze page, if you are selling your own product you need both: Squeeze and Landing Pages.

We offer the PDF format of each post on a different page, look it over:
http://affiliate-ecourse.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/e-course-pdf/

Until next time be well

Michey

Popularity: 26% [?]

Prior to any details it is useful to understated the role of  “Squeeze Pages”, or “Lead Capture Pages“, why Squeeze Pages are important, and how to create a Squeeze Page?

A squeeze page is a page designed to get names and email addresses, with other words it is a page which contains an Opt-in form, a potential customer must fill in.

The power of list building lies in the ability you have as marketer:

• To contact the leads in future
• To build a relationship, and
• Present special offers to them turning them into buyers.

I heard this question so many time:  Why somebody will buy from me?

The honest answer is:  not everybody will buy from you, but all of us have problems and we need a solutions to our problems. This is the beauty, if you can give your visitors, the solution they are looking for, you just transform a potential customer in a buyer.

When We Need A Squeeze Page.

Basically there are two ways to work with an Opt-in Forms:

• You create a Squeese Page in which you put a Opt-in Form, and as soon a potential customer sign in, you redirect him to a Sale Page
• You can put an Opt-in Form directly in your Sale Pages, doing so you don’t need a Squeeze page

When you sell an affiliate product,  you definitely must create a squeeze page to create a list for you.

If you send the potential customer directly to the sale page of the merchant, you maybe got a sale here and there but you don’t create a list for yourself, just the merchant creates a list.

Affiliate products are typical cases in which you have to have a squeeze page in which the Opt-in Form is linked with your autoresponder. As a courteously for your reader, you state that this is a product “presented by Your name”. The reader will know that this is an affiliate product, it is not professional to hide this information, and it is a request of new FTC rules as well.

In this case, you create a list from your Squeeze Page, and the merchant creates a list from his Sale Page.

Squeeze Page Model.

Every Squeeze Page contains the same parts and is focused on a SINGLE goal – getting the visitor to become a subscriber and/or buyer.

The parts are:

• A compiling Title
• A brief introduction of the product
• A bulleted list of benefits
• A picture of the product (eCover)
• An opt-in form with a call to action
• Optional audio or video
• Optional a signature of the list owner (sometime a picture as well)

Squeeze Page Headline. You need a headline that grabs your visitors’ attention and outlines the benefits of your free offer or a product.
Squeeze Page Headline is the first thing the visitor sees, and he has 7-10 seconds to make a decision to continue or go away. Your Headline must convince the visitor to keep going reading.
You must offer a solution for a problem. Make a headline to stand out using alternate color, bigger font, center.

Use bullets to show the benefits of the product you promote (not the features). It is more readable to use bullets.

Call To Action. After you get the interest of your potential customer, getting him to act now is the whole purpose of the squeeze page, he must  take action NOW by entering his name and email in your opt-in form.
Words like “Give me my FREE report”, “Subscribe Now”, “Let me get in” are needed on the button of your opt-in form on your squeeze page to specifically suggest an action.
You also can remind your potential customer how much they will benefit and how much worse off they will be if they don’t!

It is great to have eye catching graphics and look professional but the graphics don’t sell your product, the headline and the benefits will do it!

From the beginning, the squeeze pages was long, these days, long winded squeeze pages are losing effectiveness.

I don’t want to give you a recipe for this, you have to test and come with your best version of  Squeeze Page.

This is an example of squeeze page for one of our products:

Note:
If there is anything you absolutely must take away from an introduction to Squeeze Pages, it is that you cannot create a Squeeze Page that isn’t focused to your product.
With other words, don’t put elements which will distract the reader and have nothing to do with your product.

The Squeeze Page Templates you can use usually fall in 3 category:

1. You tell nothing, except you offer a free report, as the product you sell will come as a OTO
2. You tell the benefits of the product you sell in a bulleted list
3. Video Squeeze Pages

The general wisdom is the short Squeeze Pages are very effective, because they are focused. We call them about the fold, as they fit on a screen and the reader doesn’t need to scroll.

You can see examples of Squeeze Pages from each category, in a Squidoo lens I create about Squeeze pages:
http://www.squidoo.com/Squeeze-page

How you build your Squeeze pages?

The best place to start is to use a ready-made HTML squeeze page template. You can find on Google a lot of services which offer free Squeeze pages.
I recommend 2 different software to use for simplifying your work of creating Squeeze Pages:

• The first one is a one time pay software, you install on your server, you get:
  • On-line Video Training
  • Pre-Built Templates
  • Edit in Your Web Browser
  • Members Area for Updates and Tips
• The Second one is a Membership Site which let you use their software to create Squeeze Pages as long as you are a member, the advantage is that they can host your squeeze page, you don’t need a host, but if you have a host, you can use it to store the squeeze pages you create with that software.

If you have no HTML skills at all, or don’t have the time to learn, or no money to pay good designer, you can try Quick Squeeze Pages,

it is a software which offer templates and a easy way to compose requested elements of a squeeze page.

The Membership Site is: Your Squeeze Page 3.

The last ingredient is the traffic, this is the single way you make your squeeze page system profitable. But the traffic is your responsibility, is not part of this e-course, we  have a different e-course for traffic.

Note:  We offer the PDF format of each post on a different page, look it over:
http://affiliate-ecourse.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/e-course-pdf/

Until next time be well

Michey

Popularity: 38% [?]

You already heard that it is important to chose the right “Model”.

What is a model?

According with Wikipedia:

“A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value – economic, social, or other forms of value.

The term business model is thus used for a broad range of informal and formal descriptions to represent core aspects of a business, including:

• purpose
• offerings
• strategies
• infrastructure
• organizational structures
• trading practices and
• operational processes and policies”

This is a very good generic definition for a model of an entire business, but in our case, a “Model” is made of operational processes which you need to sell on-line a digital product.

In part 3, when I was talking about the roll of autorespoders, I published a flow cart of events just to start the process of visualizing the autoresponder automated system.

That chart represent the simplest model of events/processes for selling an on-line product.

We come back and look at the chart from a different prospective.

If you sell a product from Clickbank:

• The part of flowchart with red writing is what you as a affiliate must do. With other words, you must create a squeeze page to pick-up names and e-mails of the prospective customers, and all the interface to work with your autoresponder, this way YOU CRETE A LIST for yourself
• When you reach the red line, your part is done and you just connect, on autoresponder with the sale page of the author/merchant. Whatever he decided to have as a flow is his business and you cannot interrupt or alter his way of doing business

This is the easy way, you are in charge only to create a squeeze page, and be sure that your try to increase your list.

If you sell a product with PLR:

Private Label Rights

You bought the PLR to the eBook, which meant you could edit, change, alter the content and put your name on it. With other words you are responsible now for the entire flow of events as you create a new product for yourself. You must create:

• A squeeze page
• A confirmation page
• A thank you page
• A sale page
• A download page
• An OTO if you wish
• Pictures
• A license as well, if you sell some rights for your new product

The flowchart remain the same but you create all parts of the selling puzzle. If you want to have a One Time Offer (OTO), you will replace the portion under the green line with this chart:

This way we introduce the OTO sale page instead to send customers directly to the download page. The customer has the choice of buying or nut and his action will determine which download page he will get.

Now between white an black there are a lot of gray nuances as well. Talking about the rights we also have:

Simple Resell Rights

This mean that after you buy the item you will be allowed to sell it to your customers and you can sell the product and keep 100% of the profit.

The product you sell should only include the Personal Use Only right, you can NOT give the resell rights to the product.

There may be limitations, like that you can only sell the product for a specific price or not sell to auction sites. The PUO and other limitations must be part of a license you deliver with the product.

Master resell rights

When you acquire master resell rights, you sell the product/service to your customers, and you may also grant your customers the right to sell it.

You can also pass master resell rights to your customers, if you personally have transferable master resell rights. This allows your customers to also sell the product with master resell rights.

Rebranding

With rebranding resell rights, you may replace the author links with yours. That is in addition to normal resell rights.

The most profitable are Master Resell Rights (MRR) and Rebranding.

Our flowchart with OTO are the most used. But a lot of flavors can be add it to it as well. Up-sell items and down-sell items are the most current, but they are not part of this course.

What I try to explain is a technique which has a learning curve attached to it, it will create for you a long range recurring income, and it will establish you as an authority in your nice.

There are other methods to sell Digital Products? Yes, the easy way, not as productive as the above method but good enough to consider.

I expose that method in a post on my other blog on the beach, it is called 7 Dollar Script:

http://affiliate-marketing.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/7-dollar-script/

You buy a script for just $7, you get a report about the script, within the report you have a link to download the script and a very detailed installation manual.

But you need a host with cPanel and some little skills use cPanel. I strongly recommend to learn cPanel regardless if you want to use the script or not.

What you can sell with this script:

• Can giveaway a free report/product
• Can giveaway free product 1 and sell product 2
• Can giveaway free product 1, sell product 2, and sell sell product 3 (One OTO)

In summary: I will continue going in details for the model from the chart which include OTO. Next time I’ll discus the Squeeze Pages.

Note:  We offer the PDF format of each post on a different page, look it over:
http://affiliate-ecourse.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/e-course-pdf/

Until next time be well

Michey

Popularity: 36% [?]

We have a product from Clickbank with a strange name

“Zero Friction Marketing”

this makes me worry a bit,  as the title of the eBook doesn’t contain enough good keywords from the start.
This doesn’t mean that I am ready to abandon the product, it just rings a bell for me that my key research will be harder and longer, I have to use my judgment and make a decision in top of the results of the search.  In a way it is a good example for the lesson.

Note: I want to state from the beginning that my way is not the only way, the number of tools you can use is overwhelming, I have chosen a couple of them I use to work with.  You can spend a  month or years to search keywords. I have to tell you that the techniques for searching keywords are changing with trends and what we do today may change tomorrow.
Please read this post as a good example of trend changes.

Step 1: Ezine Article and Yahoo Answer to find long tail key.

I’ll start in an unorthodox way, I’ll go first to Ezine Article and Yahoo Answer to get a short list of long tail keys, and to have a feeling if my product is in demand or not.

I’ll go first to Ezine Articles and in the search box at the top type in the name of your product and review.  I will try to find the most viewed articles for the last 90 days and see how many views each one has had.

If you find articles there that have gotten anywhere from 3000 views and up then its a pretty good bet there are lots of people interested in that topic. Bookmark the page of the article that has the most views in your favorites because we need  to come back to it later.

Next I’ll go to Yahoo Answers and search for questions that my product could solve. If I see there are a lot of questions my product could solve then I have probably picked a good product.

Now I want to find out if the people answering those questions are leaving links to products in their answers. If they all are, then I know the competition is going to be stiff at Yahoo Answers. If there are no links to products in the answers, you may have good success making sales just by leaving a link in your answers.

Now, I’ll come back to the article I bookmarked from Ezine Article. While on the page of the article I hit the “View” button on my tool bar, scroll down to where it says “Source”. Click on the “Source” button and a window will pop up in my Windows Notepad (text editor). In top I can see a piece of HTML code and it will look something like this:
…
<meta name=”description” content=”A short description”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”CPA affiliate marketing, affiliate offers, CPA Networking,… “>
…
What I am looking for is the word “keywords” . The words that follow it that I have highlighted are the long tail keywords I am looking for. Long tail keywords are phrases (two, three words or more), that people type into the search engines to look for something.
At this point I open up Notepad on my computer and copy and paste those keywords one underneath the other into the Notepad file.

Step 2: Use Google Tools to see the competition

At the point I have a short list of long tail keys:

• CPA affiliate marketing
• CPA affiliate offers
• CPA networking

I’ll go on Google search and type each long tail key in quotations:

After clicking Google search I get the following screen:

I continue with second and third long tail keyword:

In all 3 screens I am interested on:

• How many results? –  I get 1,100,000, this is a lot of competition, 109,000 and 14,000, last two have less competition. The rule is: If it’s too few, my niche may be too obscure. If it’s too many, I may need to downsize in on a smaller niche. The ideal product will have a number around 20,000
• How many paid ads? – I have a fair amount of ads (see the arrow) on all. The rule is: Lots of ads mean that there is money in the niche, but too many ads also means more competitors
• What kind of sites are on the first page? - Analyze the first page of results. What kind of sites are they? Does it look like the sites are making money? Are there any digital products, or direct competitors with exactly the same product you want to promote?  The rule is: The answers to all those questions will help you to position you product on the market

My conclusion so far:

• First long tail keyword  has a lot of competition, I am not worried about it as I expect to have a lot of competition for this subject, and the figure is inflated because CPA also means accounting, and I noticed this types of sides as well
• Second and third look better on figures, but I need more info to make my mind

I continue my research with a free Google tool:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This is the first screen where I try “CPA affiliate offers” as this one has a better chance from among the last 3 screens:

The screen with results looks as the following one. And I completely changed my mind about this long tail key, as in the first line of the results I see only 58 hits on “Global Monthly Search Volume” column, and further down I noticed that there are a lot of better combinations of those 3 words.

I repeat the same search for “cpa affiliate marketing” and I find out  780 hits on “Global Monthly Search Volume” column.

After this search, I am closer to a decision. But I still want to do one more research with Google.

Google Suggest is my next research. This is the path we must follow.

Go to Google.com, in the top you find a horizontal menu, click on “more”

we have a drop down menu, find “even more” and click on it

under Explore and Innovate subtitle (right top), click on “Labs”

we have 5 pages, we scroll until we find “Google Suggest” and click on it, or we type Google Suggest on search box and click “Search Labs”.

We are in Google Suggest now.

It looks as a regular Google Search box, but it is different, we need to put only cpa and just 1-2 letter from Affiliate – cpa af, and a drop down with suggestions will appear.

Play a little changing the first letter and you will love this small tool which really suggests a lot of long tail keys.

This is another way to discover long tails keys.

At this point I have made up my mind, I will go with “cpa affiliate marketing” long tail key in spite of a big competition. This will be my domain for the squeeze page:

CPA-affiliate-marketing.com.

Step 3: Other key research tools.

I have stated that my way is not the single way; there are hundreds of good tools.

Two very good tools I like a lot are:

Brad Callen’s (ver. 2 is awesome): http://KeyWordElite.com

and

http://SpyMarketer.com which redirects you to a tool known as SpyFu, this is my favorite tool to show me what competition is doing. I’ll look over to see:

• How many advertisers exists
• How much traffic they are getting
• How much they are spending daily on PPC, not because I want to use PPC, but gives me an idea if money exists for this niche
• The advertisers have an affiliate program, and how they are advertising

All those information make me decide my own strategy of advertizing. It look complicated but is not, after you practice 2-3 this strategy, you will have a great understanding of the market and all this will come naturally to you.

Using my experience there are three types of beginners:

1. The ones who ignore the keyword research
2. Some start to do a minimum research on keywords and grow as they go, creating your own style is a matter of time
3. Perfectionists who spend too much time doing it and never are happy with the results of the research, and end up doing nothing

I think you need to position yourself in the second category.

Both tools are paid, it makes sense to buy them only if you really dedicate yourself to creating Digital Products and extensively sell affiliate products as well.

In Summary:

We find a product, we know in general what we need, we decide a domain name through key research, and we have a list with long tail keys and one word key as well.

Next time we will come back to the tools we need and start to use them.

Is this a very good product to sell – NO – because of the competition, a perfect one has a greater gravity in ClickBank.

Is this a bad product to sell – NO – it is the type of product you have to work harder on driving traffic to it, but it is OK to use it.

For the ones who are trying along with me, at this point you need to have:

• PayPal account
• A company to register a domain (I use Name Cheap)
• A host with cPanel (I use HostGator)
• An FTP tool, I suggest FileZila which is free
• An HTML editor, I suggest Kompozer which is free as well

Note:  We offer the PDF format of each post on a different page, look it over (for previous posts):
http://affiliate-ecourse.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/e-course-pdf/

Until next time be well

Michey

Popularity: 51% [?]

What we know.

What we know up till now:

• Even though creating your own products is the most effective route to profits, it is possible to make a lot of money on-line without creating your product

• We choose a product to sell from Clickbank, under the following conditions:

  • Gravity: I request higher then 20, this product has 58.17 (this represents a number calculated by CB that takes into account the number of different affiliates who earned a commission by promoting this product over the past 2 month. This number can give you an idea of the higher the better. However, high gravity can also indicate that there will be a lot of competition in promoting this product. )

  • % Commission: I request higher then 40, this product has 60% (This is the commission rate you will earn from a successful referral of this product.)

  • $ Sale: I request higher then 20, this product has $67.39 (This number typically shows the commission rate for a product. You the affiliate make this amount of money)

  • % Refd: I request higher then 10, this product has 80. ( This is important, as this can give you an indication of how popular a product is with affiliates, and how competitive it might be to promote it. This is the percentage of sales that were referred by affiliates.)

When I look at a product the most important parameters for me are: Gravity and %Refd. And in this example the red numbers tell me that both numbers are up vs. the numbers I requested as a minimum I am willing to accept. This is a good product for me.

Very important point: Noticed that the commission is not my first requirement, as a high commission isn’t an advantage if gravity and %Refd are poor.

Methods to sell a product.

Well, we have a product. What we do with it depends on our purpose.

We want:

1. Just to sell a product here and there, or

2. To build a business which will last in time and produce recurring income

You will be surprise to find out that we have 3 methods to sell this product:

• The wrong way: you just send traffic to the sale page of the merchant’s site (his sale Page), this is wrong because you personally don’t build a list for yourself. The money are on the list, some people will unsubscribe, this is OK, but the majority will stay with you if you treat your list well, and you will continue to do business with them offering other products in future

• The lazy way: buy $7 script, don’t install, and use it only to advertise the script attaching your PayPal ID to it, you have to buy as FTC let as advertise only products we own, use and know very well: $7 Dollar Script (installing the script, and using to sell any product is falling in the next method)

• The right way:

  • Buy a domain for each product you advertise, create squeeze page with an opt-in form – this is just for you to collect emails and names, send people who sign in to the sale page of the vendor

  • Buy a domain and use use $7 script to sell products, you have to install the script, in this case all the elements you need are created automatically by the script with less work from you

If you sale your own product the process is longer and some point I’ll get to it as well, but now I don’t want to spread too thin, I stay on Affiliate Marketing.

The roll of autoresponders.

To have a paid product you must use the power of an autoresponder.

Let’s see what an auroresponder can do for us:

• let us create a list for each product we sell

• let us create the code of an opt-in form

• collect leads

• handle unsubscribes

• present people with subscription offers

• deliver the product

• deliver bonus(es)

• send emails to your list

• send out newsletters

• send out e-course emails

And all of this of those are done with an automated system. This really means that for each product you have work to do from the beginning, but in future your involvement is less time consuming and the product is delivered is in autopilot.

• I created my first e-course one year and half ago and it was a joy. I had the course:

• I divided in 8 lessons, each being a different PDF document

• I load ed all those PDFs on my server

• I aweber I create 9 emails, the first 8 emails contains the URL of one lesson, the 9^th email was just a thank you email

• I schedule the 9 emails to be sent in odd days from the day somebody sign-in to request the e-course

• And I was done. From the point in which I had the course, took me around 3-4 hours to create the automated system and test

I’ll take each feature from the chart and I’ll explain in details in future posts. At this point I present the flow of events just to start the process of visualize the autoresponder automated system.

To help I just narrate the entire process:

1. We create a squeeze page which contains and opt-in form and the promise of a free product, and drive traffic to it

2. Some people aren’t interested, they don’t fill in and the process stops

3. Other people are interested, they will fill in the opt-in form and press a process button

4. To those people the aweber will send a message to confirm the e-mail address

5. Some people will change their mind and not confirm, for the the process stops here, they are not part of the list

6. Other people will confirm the email address, they will be part of the list

7. To them aweber will send the first follow up message and redirect to the merchant sale page

8. The sale page contains more information about the product, and a PayPal button. This is the place where a potential customer will decide if he really wants the product or not

9. If he doesn’t buy for him the process stops

10. If he buys, he is redirected to PayPal, he pays, and he is redirected to download page

11. In the same time aweber is sending a follow-up message which also contains the Download URL, this is just in case the buyer lost the download page

12. The download Page contains the URL of the product, the bonus (this is the free product we premise in the squeeze page) and sometime unadvertised bonuses.

We will go step by step in future posts, this is the description in a nut shell.

This is the description of the simplest process, there are more complicated versions which include OTOs, up-sale, down-sales.

Note:  We offer the PDF format of each post on a different page, look it over:
http://affiliate-ecourse.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/e-course-pdf/

Until next time be well

Michey

http://michaelacernescu.com

Popularity: 39% [?]

How to Choose a Good Product to Sell

I hear so many times that 90% of the people who are trying Affiliate marketing fail to be successful. This is the right time to tell you why.

There are only 3 reasons people fail:

• Don’t choose the right product to advertise
• Don’t drive enough traffic to the campaign
• Don’t choose the right model for creating the campaign

I’ll start with choosing the right product to sell, looks trivial, but it is not as there are thousands of products. Some are very good, some are medium good, and a lot of them are garbage as well. Especial for beginners is hard to select.

You can choose to sell your own product, a product you already know about it, or you must do some research to find a good product to sell.

In our case I have a domain for a CPA product I want to sell but I haven’t had the time yet. I will use that product in this workshop and at the end of this exercise for the example:

• I’ll get a product with the right campaign to sell
• You’ll get the knowledge  to reproduce for an example of your choice.

The right place to choose a product is ClickBank. It is a huge market place, and the reputation and services of this company are impeccable.

ClickBank will:

• Automatically bill the customer, pay the seller, and pay the commissions to the affiliates
• It is acting as a trusted intermediary, maintaining complete security and quality control in every transaction
• Affiliates can freely link to any seller, and sellers can freely accept new affiliates. The fraud or misrepresentation is eliminated.

I have used Clickbank for over 2 years and I highly recommend CB to everyone who wants to sell information products on line. To open an account as an affiliate is free.

Sign up for your free account with ClickBank

At this point you need an account to start the process of finding the right product for you.

Click on http://www.clickbank.com

This is the screen you will get. Just click on sign up in the top menu

It is a very simple sign up process.

Create a nickname for yourself  (the people will know you by this nickname) and create a password:

After you have an account click on Marketplace button:

This is the next screen that you get:

It is a long screen, the next picture represents the bottom part on this screen, and you must fill in the Stats part first, don’t forget to put some numbers in the right box:

Those are in general my choices:

If you choose good key(s) the system will return to you the following screen:

In this case I used CPA as a key and I like the first product as the author offers 60% for affiliate (me), from the total of $122.66 I’ll make $67.38,  the author makes $45.28, and ClickBank gets a fee as well.  This is a good choice not only as revenue but because the gravity and %refd are higher then the figures I choose.

If this is my choice, I’ll click Promote button, and this is the next screen:

You need to fill in your Account nickname and a tracking ID which is optional but highly recommended.

After you fill in and click Create, you obtain a screen with the information you need to start promoting:

What you need from here is the second link which is very well encrypted.

You will introduce this link in your promotion campaign.

We have to stop here as the model to choose and how to create the right campaign are a sumject which will follow in different lessons.

In summary: our purpose was to find a product, and we have one.

Note:  We offer the PDF format of each post on a different page, look it over:
http://affiliate-ecourse.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/e-course-pdf/

Until next time be well

I really need to hear from you, your comments will help me to structure better next lessons.

Michey

http://michaelacernescu.com

http://affiliate-marketing.crabbysbeach.com/blogs

Popularity: 35% [?]

Musings from Affiliate Marketing and beyond:

1. Introduction
2. Affiliate Marketing Etiquette
3. FTC New Rules
4. What is Viral Marketing
5. Tools we need for Affiliate Marketing

1. Introduction:

Choosing to make your own Digital Products to sell will be rewarding.
You can take a great deal of pride in what you offer to the world, and you establish yourself as notoriety on a specific subject, niche. I am an advocate of creating your own digital products, but it is a learning curve to get to that level, you need proper tools and skills.

This is the reason why a lot of people start with Affiliate Marketing, selling others digital products. All of us started that way, and when the time was right we created your own digital products.

I here you – sell others products! It is legal? It is moral? It is ethic? Sure! So, what is an Affiliate Marketer?

An affiliate marketer is just a “person” who drives traffic to a product.

As an affiliate you can promote:

• A specific physical or digital product
• An entire business: promote eBay, Amazon, IBM…
• A website: a membership site, an on-line eStore, a Blog
• An On-line coaching program or just an e-course for a specific topic
• An Internet related Service: you sell tickets to NFL, NHL, or you create lenses for people, or you create graphics on request,
• And of course you sell your own products if you have any

The affiliate marketer in return receives compensation for his or her efforts on behalf of the business, or the author of the product, most commonly in the form of revenue sharing.

If you have a lens in which you promote an Amazon Book, you are the affiliate of Amazon, and you receive a percentage of the selling price for that product.
You have a great list of affiliations for Squidoo lenses created by Bev:
http://professional-squids.ning.com/group/affiliatemarketing/forum/…

Affiliate Marketing is a broad subject; you can spend years reading about it.
The purpose of this e-course is to:

• Narrow down what is important
• Establish the best practice of selling on-line as an affiliate, showing you good models
• Show common mistakes and
• Make you think as a “marketer”, this is crucial, but take time, and a mental effort

2. Affiliate Marketing Etiquette

2.1. Honesty for life:

Do your best to be honest from the beginning and remain honest after your name is established and you are a celebrity.

2.2. Build your reputation:

Be patient and build the trust on you gradually, a reputation is not establish or acquire in an hour, or a day, or a month. It is a matter of time, how long? I honestly don’t know is based on personality, perseverance, and the native talents.

2.3. Manners, Manners, and Manners:

Manners count simply because people treat you as you treat them. You have nothing to lose being: polite, caring, sharing, considering. The good manners will transform your buyers in repeating buyers for your products.

2.4. Volume vs. Quality.

There are instances in which we need volume work but we must be sure that we don’t compromise the quality of our work. It is a hard balance we make and maintain.

2.5. Don’t hype – period!

2.6. Follow the Rules of any kind of Resell Rights if you bought the rights.

2.7. Do Not Spam

Comparing Squidoo with other platforms, Squidoo is more generous with Affiliate links or any other type of links, you are allowed to use them, but this doesn’t give a free ride to spamming.

Outside of Squidoo you also don’t spam, the Google algorithms are very sophisticated, they will find out and penalize you with low ranking for doing it.

This is a short list but if you want more info you can read my lens:
http://www.squidoo.com/Etiquette-Affiliate-Marketing

3. FTC New Rules.

It is true that we have to follow new FTC rules; you have on Squidoo two lenses with good information about them:

Kathy McGraw’s lens:
http://www.squidoo.com/FTC-and-Affiliate-Marketers

My lens:
http://www.squidoo.com/FTC-new-rules

4.  What is Viral Marketing

I want to clarify the meaning of a term you will hear frequently “Viral marketing”. The term was first used in a 1996 article called “The Virus of Marketing” and was adopted immediately in Internet Marketing jargon because it is so suggestive.

“Viral marketing” means that the word about your business will spread like a virus utilizing social and business connections that you put in place to grow your business.
It is also called “word of mouth advertising”.

Viral marketing functions on the basis of voluntary participation in the process of advertising. Relationships are the key to the success of any viral marketing approach, and can take many forms.

The basis for the connection may be:

• All kings of communities: your town, your social bookmarking, social networking, blogs, platforms as WordPress-MU, Ning,
• Family and friends
• Business associates: Affiliates, Joint Ventures partnership, people you met on conferences, seminars
• Email lists that are associated with a niche

To put in place a viral marketing you really need:

• To start with offering real value
• Impeccable services for your products
• Offer FREE products, advice, knowledge
• Over deliver, it is always a good surprise when you advertise a bonus, and actually add another 2 unadvertised bonuses, all of them really good value.

We need to get in more details and find out:

1. How to Use Viral Marketing to Drive Traffic to Your Site
2. How to Make Your Product Viral
3. How to Avoid Viral Marketing Mistakes
4. How to Use Blogs In Your Viral Marketing Campaign

But all those will be the subjects of another post after we already discus the best practices and models. Today I limit myself to the definition

5.  Tools we need for Affiliate Marketing

The beauty of selling Digital Products (e-books, e-courses, videos, audios, interviews, webinars, software packages, scripts and more) is that you don’t need big investments up front, but you definitely need some good tools to work with. Even the tools, you can get them gradually.

I give you a minimal list and I specify when a software package is FREE or PAID.

Note: I attach some links to make your life easier, but if you have a substitute with a product you know, trust, and has the same requested parameters, be free to use it.
My links are useful especially for the people who are using that software for the first time. Example: if you go on Google and search “free HTML editors”, you will get a list of minimum 1000 sites to choose from, and it will be hard to decide which one to pick up. The one I recommend, I know and use myself and this can be an important element of trust.

We need:
5.1. A PayPal Account, type of account – premier, it is FREE

5.2. An HTML Editor. There are a lot of good HTML Editors, choose from:

• Nvu, FREE, it is my preferences if you need to create HTML pages, sites
• Komposer, FREE, very easy to use good for novice

5.3. Buy a domain name, again a lot of choices,
I use Name Cheap, $9.69 one domain per year

5.4. Host for your domain, which has: cPanel, excellent support, MySQL, Fantastico utility,
I use HostGator with a baby croc account and I am happy about it, $9.75 per month

5.5. FTP software to transport files from your PC to Host, you can use:

• FileZila client is FREE and very easy to use
• Smart FTP client it was free when I started but now is $36.95, one time payment

5.6. An Autoresponder account to handle your lists, broadcasting messages and so on.

• aWeber which has a deliverability over 95%, protect you from spam, this is the one used by all pros, the cost per month vary based on the number of people in your list (the range is $19 for a list of 0-500, and go up to $149 for a list of 10,000-25,000, but this price is per month). aWeber is excellence but because has so many features it is not very easy to use, it is a learning curve
• Get Response is $18 per month

5.7. Software for graphics: GIMP is FREE

Note 1: The most important are the host and the autoresponder, in those 2 cases I suggest to go with the best possible.

Note 2:  We offer the PDF format of each post on a different page, look it over:

http://affiliate-ecourse.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/e-course-pdf/

Until the next time be well

Michey

http://michaelacernescu.com

Popularity: 37% [?]