Posts in the "Affiliate Marketing" Category

• Niche Internet Marketing

  Affiliate Marketing

  Let’s recap on lessons learnt over the past few months endeavours. In what I will only attribute to my “youthful exuberance”, I have come to learn two rather expensive and ultimately fatal (amateur) mistakes of niche internet marketing.

  Referring (in the below example) to the niche of Bonsai tree care – which I discovered using Google Products which provides insights into what products people are searching for right now; I did my competitor analysis to discover 393,000 competitors / pages were returned in Google, most of which not well Search Engine Optimised, with not many paid
  advertisers. Using Google trends, I also learnt which demographics were searching for information on this, from where, and when they were searching for this through the course of a year – overall, things looked fairly promising!

  And so then it began. I jumped immediately onto oDesk to log jobs for the creation of the ultimate ebook on Bonsai tree care, along with 7 unique articles which I could later use for article marketing. Total cost, $120USD.

  I purchased a domain name (approx $15USD) and set out on creating a high quality score website, templating the layout and content structure from established IM gurus’ sites such as Frank Kern’s Email Tricks site – for which I logged another job for this website design ($50USD). With the jobs logged, I set off to research what information my niche would want to know about – this later formed the outline to my ebook.

  So things were progressing very well, or so I had thought. As it turned out, my Internet Marketing friend who had also been pursuing a number of different niches at the same time (he was doing this full time whereas I was only doing this part-time around my full time job), discovered that of the 5 information products developed and launched using this same methodology, 4 of these had failed to commercialize – even though the initial online competitor analysis proved favourable!

  So we had to go back to the drawing board. Where did we go so wrong? Discovering niche markets was fairly easy. Assessing the number and quality of competitors was also fairly straight forward, especially when using such tools as Market Samurai which provides insights into not only competition on differing keyword terms but also adwords advertisers (I highly recommend this application to anyone interested in Internet Marketing)! So conditions appeared favourable, but then why weren’t we rich yet??

  This brings us to current day and a couple of very unfortunate realisations that ultimately led to us kulling 95% of our niche marketing ideas as potential (viable) candidates. We ended up developing a niche marketing checklist, or flowchart rather, including a fairly comprehensive test plan that we’re expecting will drastically reduce our strike out rate.

  Referring specifically to my Bonsai tree care niche specifically, this failed on 2 criteria;

  1. it doesn’t solve any immediate problems,
  2. alternatives were too readily available, and worse yet, FREE!

  … we had failed on two aspects of classical marketing which we had overlooked while we had our Internet Marketing blinkers on. The following isn’t a comprehensive listing, but for those who don’t want to sign up for the full checklist, I’d STRONGLY RECOMMEND asking yourself the following 3 questions before throwing yourself into a prospective niche market to attack;

  1. Is my prospect experiencing pain & urgency or irrational passion?
  2. Is my prospect proactively searching for a solution?
  3. Does my prospect have no or few perceived options?

  So in conclusion, my Online Marketing income is now officially in the red, but valuable lessons have been learnt along the way. It will be interesting to see how these new discoveries will translate into profitable niches for our future endevours.

  Those on my mailing list will receive the complete Niche Marketing Checklist / Flowchart shortly

  As a final BONUS for my readers, I found the following two video posts very informative on the subject of Niche Marketing. The first is a post by Frank Kern on the subject of “Finding something to sell” – Frank Kern is definitely one of the industry’s experts in Niche Internet Marketing. He’s also got a lot of very informative other posts on his site which may also be of interest to you.

  The 2nd bonus video is by Steven Clayton and Mark Ling, who talk in depth about keyword research and competitor analysis. They go into a great deal of details, however the important things to note here is the information on the money word matrix – the video’s quite long, so it may take a little while to load. Enjoy!

  And so the quest continues! All the best till next time!

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• The Internet Marketing Formula

  Affiliate Marketing

  The formula for Internet Marketing is pretty straight forward. Whether you’re promoting your own product or that of an affiliate, your online marketing campaign should basically go along the lines of the following, in approximately the following order for development;

  1. Identify the Niche Market or Product to Promote
  2. Do your Keyword Research
  3. Create your squeeze Page with an “ethical bribe” to collect your visitors email details
  4. Then on the final product page, deliver a compelling sales letter to complete the sale.

  Sounds simple enough right? Well, more or less. Probably the most complicated component of this entire process is the initial learning curve! (1) There are literally thousands of Niche markets out there; everything from the mainstream online dating and latest miracle fat cures through to the more specific (and crazily enough, proven to be lucrative) niches of tatoo design, how to build chicken coops and pumpkin carving! (2) The next step is Keyword research; this typically follows a fairly specific criteria also in order to establish the correct long tailed keywords pertaining to that specific niche which generate enough traffic per month without excessive competition. Your keyword research will play an integral role in both your Google Adwords campaign and site’s search engine optimisation (which feeds back into your page rank and ultimately cost-per-click overhead).

  (3) Your squeeze page (or “lead generation” page) requires a special mention as this is the component which is by far the most important in your online marketing promotion. Generally speaking, there is only a 1% conversion of people who hit your site that actually go through to complete a purchase. Through the giving away of something of value (an “ethical bribe”), in exchange for a visitor’s name and email, you are able to build a list of potential buyers within that niche market. As has been reiterated to me countless times by MANY of the Internet Marketers I have met and spoken to; THE MONEY IS IN THE LIST! … and I cannot emphasise this enough. Through effective back-ending, your online marketing campaign can potentially convert as high as 20% or even 50%, through email marketing directly to your niche-specific list. I’ll go into the specifics of settings this up in detail later on.

  (4) Finally there is the sales letter leading to the final product sale itself. When dealing with affiliate products, the affiliate themselves will more than likely already have a sales page in place for your to send your traffic to. This isn’t to say you’re completely at the disposal of the affiliate’s sales copy, as your preceeding squeeze page can (and should) also be used to further incentivise the sale through perhaps a post-sale bonus of sorts. If you’re promoting your own product (and I will step you through this process in later posts), then the creation of your own sales letter will be key to the success of your campaign, and unless you’re a professional sale copywriter, I would strongly recommend outsourcing this task.

  So you now have a brief outline of the Internet Marketing formula. In the following posts I’ll be going through the various components of this in more detail. I’ll also be opening up my own newsletter shortly which will give you additional how-to’s and guides on such things as correct website submission techniques to search engines, search engine optimisation tips as well as guides on information production creation, setting up your own payment gateway and more advanced guides on back-link generation techniques!

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