Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Those of us in the affiliate marketing world work hard to get visitors to our pages, so it’s disappointing when they turn on their heels and walk out without even clicking a HopLink. The disappointment is intensified if you actually paid for the traffic using PPC advertising.

What can you do about this? Is it possible to still get value from visitors who are leaving your site? Do you just let them walk away, or can you still convert them into potential customers without requiring them to buy right then?

A lot of smart Internet marketers realize that every visitor to their site has value, and they maximize that value by realizing that even though not every visitor will hand over money, they can part with something that may prove just as valuable – their email address. Having a list of qualified, opted-in visitors can be very valuable to your marketing efforts, allowing you to re-market to these visitors later (just follow all CAN-SPAM guidelines), and can be a powerful bargaining chip when negotiating joint ventures with other Internet marketers.

Studies indicate that the majority of site visitors leave within 8 seconds of visiting a site. Another significant percentage leaves after reviewing the landing page and deciding the content is either not relevant, or not compelling enough for them. A mere 3% will actually make a purchase, on average. Interestingly enough, though, approximately 30% of visitors will sign up for a newsletter.

If you’re not getting many email addresses from visitors right now, and you’re feeling frustrated by all the traffic just walking away, then I strongly encourage you to try the following methods to improve your signup conversion rate.

• Popover – A popover is a small overlay containing newsletter signup information that can be set to appear on every visitor’s screen shortly after they arrive at your site. Unlike popups, browser blockers do not affect popovers. They can’t be missed either. They appear in an overlay that sits over the top of the page and can be as detailed as you like, listing the reasons why they should sign up and fields for their name and email address. You can see an example of this on SaleHoo’s main landing page (give it a few seconds to show up). You can style them any way you like and include as much or as little text as you want. To maximize your chances of a signup, make it clear what’s in it for them and make sure the whole process is easy and works smoothly!Testing indicates that delaying the popover for about 20 seconds gives visitors a chance to get familiar with your site so they’ll be more inclined to sign up.

• Sidebar signup – If you run a WordPress site, then adding a sidebar widget is something you can probably do in your sleep. Signup form code can be pasted into a standard text/HTML widget. With your signup form appearing on every page of your site, it increases the chances of it being seen and capturing an email lead before they exit, regardless of the entrance page.

Give them a reason to give you their email

Asking for an email address outright doesn’t generally work. The novelty of getting emails wore off about 10 years ago, so there needs to be a good reason for someone to part with their email address these days!

The secret to getting a visitor’s email address is to think about what they want. It sounds obvious but it’s often ignored. You get them what they want and they’ll give you what you want. Simple.

Think about what you have of value that you can offer in exchange for an email address.

• A free eBook
• A free 7-part mini-course
• A free trial membership
• A free SEO report on the visitor’s website (using an SEO tool like Traffic Travis)

Obviously free is a good start, but make it relevant and you’ll be on to a sure thing. For example, if you have a site about dog training, then offer a 7-part course on house training a puppy. Or, if your site is focused on Internet marketing, tempt them with a “Beginners Guide to PPC” eBook.

Give visitors two options: Buy or leave their email address

If you’re only focusing on making sales you’re ignoring around 97% of your visitors. That’s not good business practice. If you put as much effort into capturing email addresses as you do trying to make a sale then you can look forward to a far more successful online business in the future, with an email list that can potentially earn you a lot of extra dollars in the months to come.

Do you try to capture email addresses? What works for you?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Competition is stiff these days. It’s getting harder and harder to achieve optimal search engine rankings, at least without professional help. So how to compete in a space where it might not be feasible to increase rankings for your most competitive keywords? Believe it or not, there are actually plenty of ways to leverage existing visibility to increase traffic. To name a few:

• Test Meta descriptions. This is one of the easiest ways to increase traffic even without increasing rankings. Obtaining a first page ranking for a given keyword is just one step to getting more traffic because there are still nine other organic competitors on that page. So take the time to test different marketing messages within the Meta description to improve your organic click through rate.  For starters, make sure descriptions are relevant to page content and ensure competitive differentiators such as price and quality are included. If running paid search, take the highest performing ads and test them in the organic space. By overlooking how your listings are displayed in search results, you are passing up one of the easiest ways to capture new visitors. So start testing those Meta descriptions because you better believe your paid competitors are doing it.
• Run PPC on branded keywords. It’s the old 1+1=3 saying. Coupling organic visibility with paid search visibility has been proven to improve click through rates within both spaces. Consistent messaging and prominent display improves trust among searchers – especially for those that might not yet be familiar with your brand – thus increasing their likelihood to click.
• Manage sitelinks. Check to make sure these are displayed in an ideal manner. If non-relevant sitelinks are being displayed over more useful ones (About Us vs. Book a Room, for example) then log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and block the sitelinks that are not adding any value. This will make room for the more valuable sitelinks to be displayed.
• Utilize rich snippets. Again, it isn’t always about how well content is ranking. It’s how content is ranking. In other words, take full control of how your content is displayed. One way to do this is to use rich snippets to provide more information and context about your products and services directly from the search results. These can be used for reviews, individuals, events and videos. Structured data will play a key role in the future of search, so this is not something to be ignored if you have the type of content that is currently supported with this format.
• Tweet strategically for real time search. Now that Google is integrating dynamic streams of real time content into their search results, much of which comes from Twitter, this represents a huge opportunity for additional traffic.  Use relevant keywords in your tweets so that these will rank in real time search results and you can gain additional (albeit short lived) search engine visibility.

Now I’m not saying to halt all search engine optimization efforts. Just remember that there are quite a few tactics that can be deployed in conjunction to SEO that will help to garner additional traffic. By taking advantage of all opportunities, large and small, you should see a lift in new visitors.

Rachel Andersen works for the Portland based SEM agency Anvil Media, Inc. She has expertise in all aspects of search engine marketing and specializes in SEO for large sites. Andersen has been responsible for the development and execution of dozens of search and social marketing campaigns over her time spent with Anvil.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

SEO without the SEO

From Clickbank.com

Written by: Charles Kirkland, Guest Blogger

This is Part 1 of a three-part series.

With numerous opportunities to make money online available worldwide, one of the most popular methods these days is affiliate marketing. There are several approaches to affiliate marketing, but most marketers agree that the fastest way to start making money immediately is through Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. Unfortunately, this is also one of the fastest ways to lose a lot of money if you do not plan properly.

In this guide, we will take a look at three critical factors that every affiliate marketer must be aware of in order to successfully turn a profit using PPC marketing without the risk of losing a large amount of money.

Factor 1 – Discovering a Profitable Offer

Generating an exceptional profit using ClickBank is still highly possible at the moment. Having said that, there is such a large variety of products and niches that it might be tough to choose the most effective income generating products on ClickBank to advertise. So what’s the easiest way to determine which products are ideal to promote so that you can make the most money without having to waste your time.

Let’s take a look at a handful of tips that when followed should put you on the right track to uncovering some of the most successful ClickBank products.

1. Pay attention to exactly how well other affiliate marketers are doing in promoting the product

It’s possible to understand a great deal about whether or not a product is profitable by looking at the sales statistics of others. A product is without doubt selling very well if there are a high number of affiliates advertising it. ClickBank has a sales statistic known as gravity, which is a number that represents the percentage of online marketers successfully promoting a specific product.

You shouldn’t make a judgment based solely on gravity, but it is useful data that ClickBank provides and can be an excellent tool in selecting a income generating product to advertise. Choosing virtually any product with gravity between 10 and 100 is usually a great start.  If the gravity is less than 10, odds are it isn’t selling very well. Likewise, if the gravity is more than 100 it may be an indication that the marketplace is saturated, although that is not always the case.

2. Monitor products that are rising in popularity

To discover successful products, it is helpful to pick one with statistics that are climbing. Restrict your choice of products to roughly 10 and track them for at least a week or two. Should you note that other affiliates are choosing one product a lot quicker than the others, then that could be a successful affiliate product.

3. Estimate the return rate

One crucial factor you should consider when choosing the top ClickBank products is the return percentage rate. When return rates are high, then a product sales rate is not indicative of your potential success with a product since you will likely end up returning your earnings in the future. Virtually any product with return rates higher than 15% probably should not be considered, irrespective of sales rates.

The only way to truly gauge return rates is to promote a product for a while and keep a close eye on the return rate. However, if you want to get a rough estimate of the potential return rate before you start promoting a product, you can do Google searches for these kinds of phrases:

“What is your opinion about PRODUCT TITLE?”

“Did you like PRODUCT TITLE?”

“Did anybody buy PRODUCT TITLE?”

The results for these searches will often give you a good overview of the quality of the product and what the general customer opinion of it may be.

4. Examine the size of the market

After you have narrowed down the products a bit more by crossing out products with high return rates, you should then check out the market size. For example, suppose you have found four different niches. Use the Google keyword tool and research the variety of keywords for each niche and determine the search volume. Google Trends is also a useful tool for analyzing the developments of a niche immediately and over time. The best scenario is to find a product with few competitors and high demand from customers.

Be sure to check back tomorrow for Part 2, where we’ll discuss how to build a great landing page where you can send your PPC advertising traffic.

About the Author

You can read about Charles Kirkland and his adventures and misadventures in affiliate marketing at his blog. He also provides free affiliate training and videos for marketers at any level there as well.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. The Low-Cost Guide to Getting Started in PPC Marketing: Part 3
2. The Low-Cost Guide to Getting Started in PPC Marketing: Part 2
3. Sort Your Way to Success

Small business owners may have more of a need than most to be able to access their chosen suite of productivity tools from more than one computer or platform. As a business or startup owner you may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go.

Choosing primarily online tools for your productivity workflow is a great way to address the issue of source agnostic accessibility. It’s also a convenient method to ensure you have a backup of your important day-to-day items and files in case a particular computer or device fails. One other not insignificant factor in selecting cloud-based tools to keep you and your business on track is cost: the online equivalents of once desktop-bound applications are often much cheaper in both raw cost and maintenance cost, as tool upgrades usually happen behind the scenes and don’t require an in-house IT staff to keep up and running.

With the tools on this list, you should be able to check in on your current workflow stack regardless of which machine you happen to be in front of, what operating system it uses, and what browser it’s running. Plus, if you have a smartphone as your trusty mobile companion, chances are you’ll be able to access your tools from there as well. Check out our previous guide to mobile productivity tools as a logical companion to this piece, and consider your phone platform and setup and how well it may integrate with particular tools as you build out your productivity arsenal.

To-do Lists

One of the favorite and often-mentioned entrants in the to-do list category among productivity geeks is Remember the Milk. Featuring a robust reminder system via your choices of SMS, IM, or email, offline task management, integration with Google Calendar, and tight integration with several mobile platforms, Remember the Milk also has a clean and easy to use interface that Gettings Things Done aficionados swoon over. It also integrates with a number of other web services and third parties including Netvibes and iGoogle, Google maps, Twitter, Jott, the Mac and Linux desktop, and more.

Far from being the only game in town, however, Remember the Milk has a number of online to-do list peers worth checking out. Toodledo is a popular newcomer with a full-featured slate of ways to enter, organize, and sort your tasks. Featuring a tiered freemium service model, Toodledo also has great mobile integration and offers a handy comparison chart on how it stacks up against other popular web-based to-do apps.

If your to-do tastes run on the simpler and less cluttered side of the spectrum, there are several options worth looking into. TeuxDeux bills itself as a “simple, designy, free, browser-based to-do app” and embraces a minimalist interface accordingly. Task.fm is another interesting option in the minimalist category, with a source agnostic and natural language approach to getting items in and back out to you at just the right time with various reminder options. Ta-da List is a product from 37signals, makers of other popular web project management tools like Basecamp, Backpack, and Campfire — so if your small business already uses any 37signals tools you might find Ta-da List an excellent companion. Last but not least, the former Gmail Labs project Gmail Tasks is a simple to-do list that integrates right into Gmail, making it a nice and lightweight option for businesses that already use Gmail and/or Google Apps for email.

Note-Taking

It’s difficult to write about cloud-based note-taking without mentioning Evernote. You can get notes into Evernote in any number of ways, from email to browser bookmarklet to desktop or mobile app, as well as via the web-based interface and even via Twitter. You can also leave voice notes, plus have Evernote use optical character recognition to scan photos of business cards and other documents, converting printed material into searchable text. On the organizational side, you can create multiple notebooks, tag individual entries, and set up saved searches for frequently accessed collections. Evernote’s freemium business model offers a generous amount of monthly usage in the free version and a reasonable $5 per month/$45 per year premium version with a higher usage limit and other pro features.

Two other good choices for cloud-based notebooks that integrate well with their full-featured office suite counterparts are Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook. Both feature a typical web-based WYSIWYG note-taking environment as well as sharing and collaboration options for your notes and documents that need to be socialized. If you already routinely use either Google Docs or Zoho Office in your business to manage documents, it might make sense to adopt their notebook counterparts for your outboard brain workflow needs.

A couple of online note-taking options based on wiki technology include Springnote and Luminotes. They feature easy methods of linking pages and concepts together, and if you’re already familiar with the wiki concept and looking for a lightweight notebook that uses similar concepts you may want to check out these two. Springnote also promotes collaboration via notebook sharing as well.

Information and News Gathering

When it comes to staying on top of developments in your industry and trends that might affect your business, it can seem daunting to make sure what’s most important crosses your desk and your eyeballs. Several related categories of online tools can help sift through the noise and help you pull out the signal, plus safely store information and concepts you may need to retrieve later.

In an earlier article we covered how to choose a news reader for keeping tabs on your industry, and by far the most popular web-based offering in that category is Google Reader. And if you prefer a cleaner, more magazine-like view of your Reader feeds over Google’s native interface, Firefox users should definitely give Feedly a try. But simply employing an RSS reader doesn’t always solve the problem of having too much incoming information to stay on top of, which doesn’t always come in at the most convenient time for you to absorb it.

A couple of tools can help with the latter problem of specifically storing an article and helping you remember to read it later, perhaps when other duties and tasks have quieted down and you find yourself with some spare moments to catch up on the things you knew you should make time to read at some point. Both Instapaper and Read It Later allow you to create a stack of items set aside for later reading, with a simple and uncluttered interface allowing you to check off or archive items after you’ve gotten around to reading them. Both integrate with various other tools in your online arsenal, with browser bookmarklet entry and iPhone integration. Instapaper also integrates with Feedly so you can send items directly to it from your feed reading experience, while Read It Later offers a Firefox extension that brings your “to read” stack closely into your browser. Instapaper also allows you to easily generate a printable version of your on deck items, or even download them in Kindle or ePub formats for reading on the go.

For longer-term storage of important articles, social bookmarking tools come in handy for preventing your bookmarks from being “trapped” in a single browser on a single machine. One of the original pioneering web services, delicious.com, is still flourishing (and now owned by Yahoo). Using a browser bookmarklet you can send articles and web pages you want to refer back to later to your delicious account, plus a short personal note and topic tags. The net effect of collecting many users’ individual bookmarks also creates a valuable discovery engine that can turn you on to even more relevant material in your business’s industry or niche. Two other options worth checking out include Diigo, a relative newcomer that offers integration with your delicious collection and allows you to highlight and annotate portions of pages, and Clipmarks, which focuses on saving and sharing just the parts of web pages you find most useful.

Going Further

The above are just a few of the productivity categories in which online tools can help your current workflow stack stay accessible from almost anywhere. Other web-based tools can help with mobile office needs from calendaring to document collaboration, file-sharing to collaborative presentations, from start pages to contact management and more. Other tools, like Jott Assistant, are out there to help you tie those tools together and access them via other applications you use regularly.

It’s helpful to keep a flexible and open attitude towards your workflow and the tools you use, and occasionally take stock of what’s working, what’s not working as well as it should, and areas where your productivity seems to suffer. If you’re willing to spend even a modest amount of time being periodically adventurous with new tools, you could open workflow channels you weren’t even aware were blocked, and even infuse your day-to-day and your business with new ideas and new energy.

photo credit: Elsie esq.

Improving your CTR is now the single biggest thing you as an advertiser can do to improve your AdWords quality score and reduce your CPC. When it comes to CTR, every little helps. Today, I’m going to show you two very simply things you can do to increase your CTR and as a result, your quality score. The following can be implemented easily and immediately but as with all changes to your PPC account, make sure you test the results. If it doesn’t work for you, revert.

Google has recently announced that you can now tag  your adwords ads with your company address. These are called location extensions. However, many advertisers do NOT want their company address under their ad.  We’ll cover that in another blog post. They are also not available in many countries.

Instead, we’re going to use regional targeting to add the County, City or State of the SEARCHER to the bottom of your ad. When the person that’s performing the search sees their OWN City, State or County below their ad they not only see a word they can relate to but an ad that’s a little different to most (if not all) of the other ads on the page. This has an immediate and sometimes astonishing impact on click through rates.

To achieve this we simply need to get a little more granular with our regional targeting in AdWords. It’s really quite simple. Instead of targeting a whole country like the US or Ireland, select “target specific locations within a single country or territories” and select EVERY STATE . You could even select every metropolitan area or even every city to have THOSE show up below the ad.

Likewise, Instead of targeting the whole country of The Republic Of Ireland, select “target specific locations within a single country or territories” and select all 26 Counties in The Republic instead. If you are based in Dublin for example, using this method, a searcher from Cork would see the word “Cork” below your ad.

That’s it! Simply update/upload your campaign, wait a few minute and when someone performs a search from any location that you are now targeting, their city, metro area, State or County will show up below the ad. We have found that in 100% of cases for both us and our clients, combined with gradual CTR increases this has improved our CTR significantly. CTR being the single biggest factor that you as an advertiser can influence towards your quality score, improving CTR is a no-brainer.

While it’s not possible to auto rotate these ads in the same campaign, we had to try and replicate that for this test. We spread it out over a month (yea, low volume) alternating the days that each campaign was enabled. So each ad got the same share of days of the week, times of the day etc. The big drawback here is actual demand for the “product” on any specific day may have skewed the results slightly but I think we got a pretty accurate result that is in line with what we have seen with all our other campaigns.You will notice that the CTR is almost 100% greater and the cost is 100% less.

An increase in relevant CTR (No bounce/back rate) is an effective increase in that keywords quality score.

On the subject, to remove the location from below your ad (I have no idea why you would want to), you can target a specific geographic area using customized targeting.  Many thanks to Richard at Apogee for teaching me something new and keeping me on my toes over on the official AdWords help forum.

So there you have it. A simple, yet effective way to improve your quality score without much effort. What other ways have you found to increase the quality score of your keywords?

photo credit: Brett Stark

It’s not a secret, but we wanted to make sure you know about this…

Selling products via a Sales Page is the highest-converting method!

If you’ve received advice from any serious (and successful) internet marketer, odds are that they told you how important sales copy and sales pages are for selling products online. Sales pages are what we’ve used for ourselves; sales pages are what ALL THE PROS USE; sales pages are what YOU should be using!

Even if you currently have successful methods of capturing leads or sales… There’s an amazingly profitable opportunity in creating and sending traffic to customized, and highly-testable sales pages.

Let us clarify: Have a product, create a sales page, send traffic, convert.

Click Here To Learn More

Way back in 2002 (at least 40 internet years ago), I received a commission check for an ad that I placed on my first web site. A check from Moviephone for six cents. The amount struck me as so funny, that I could not bring myself to deposit the check. A small amount that was a major milestone for me. I had earned money for simply pasting some code on a web page. Nothing more. Someone out in the wild web wilderness then decided to click on the ad and the rest as they say was history. It must have cost Moviefone quite a bit more to actually prepare, print and mail the check. Nowadays most affiliate programs require reaching  a minimum amount before they will issue a check. In the case of Google Adsense, you need to earn $100 before they will pay you.

Most Internet Marketers started from similar humble beginnings. Jumping for joy when they earned their first dollar.

There really are unlimited possibilities when you enter the world of Affiliate Marketing on the Internet and it all can begin with a few cents.
___________________________________________________

Mark Jungheim is the CEO of Vaultis, LLC an Internet Marketing and SEO training firm based in Las Vegas, Nevada. www.vaultis.com

This is a guest post from Erica Douglass. After selling her online business for a million dollars at age 26, Erica “temporarily retired”. She now writes an online business blog at erica.biz. This is very much an article about advanced personal finance techniques, and doesn’t necessarily reflect my own philosophy.

You’ve pulled yourself out of debt, are saving a reasonable amount of income for your retirement, have built an emergency fund, and your daily needs are easily met with your income. Congratulations! Now what?

That’s exactly where I was in 2007. I sold my business and generated a huge windfall — over a million dollars. I paid off all my debt. And then I looked around and said, “Oh, crap.”

I had absolutely no idea what to do with my money. Previously, any extra money I’d earned was immediately stuffed back into my business, and I had been running deficits nearly everywhere. This was the first time in my adult life I’d ever had my head above water, financially speaking.

Over the next three months, I proceeded to blow over $50,000. Oh, don’t get me wrong — it was fun! I bought a new car (that I still drive), some really beautiful artwork from artists I loved (that looks great on my walls), and thousands of dollars in clothes, new furniture, and other indulgences, such as $4,000 custom hand-made stereo speakers (that I’m listening to right now.)

It was fun…for a couple months. Then it got boring.

My Spiral into Depression
Like many lottery winners, I spiraled into depression. The business I had spent six years of my life building was gone. I felt adrift — like I had no purpose. Despite having been “successful”, no one knew who I was. I had marginalized most of my personal relationships in favor of growing my business and working myself to death. And money wasn’t going to buy me out of the situation.

Slowly, I pulled myself out of my depression. I realized I had the opportunity to make myself into anyone I wanted to be. I could do anything I wanted. I had complete freedom. The thought was both exhilarating and terrifying.

I bought a shelf full of self-help books and read them all, relentlessly seeking to answer the many questions I had. Some of them were philosophical, like “What made me successful when so many others have failed?” Some were practical, like “How do I invest my money?” But all of them led back to one deeper question: “What should I do to be happy?” I soon realized the latter question was incorrect. The better question was, “Who should I be to be happy?”

In December 2007, I started blogging. I exposed a significant amount of my business life and thoughts. I wrote about my successes and my mistakes and failures. I enjoyed writing, doing videos, and interacting with my readers. Helping others figure out their purpose, their businesses, and their websites and blogs was a fantastic experience.

Spending with a Purpose
I made a point of trying to achieve greater states of happiness on a daily basis. Instead of being merely content — or even apathetic — with my current state of being, I realized I could be happier daily. And suddenly it hit me: I understood what I wanted to do with my money. I wanted to outsource pretty much everything I hated doing.

In order to live a simpler, calmer, but more effective life, I had to drop the shackles of wanting to do everything myself. To allow time to meditate, think, write, and create, I had to get rid of the drudgery of daily tasks. I realized my money could serve a fantastic dual purpose: To allow others, whose passion is cooking, cleaning, or assisting in various ways to help me — while I supported them by giving them income to do what they loved.

My life fundamentally changed that day. I started hiring people to do everything I didn’t want to do. The first step was to hire a cleaning service. Then I hired a personal assistant to work out of my house, filing papers, doing laundry, and organizing. I hired virtual assistants to do all the menial tasks I hated doing: bookkeeping; video editing; audio editing; even setting up my Facebook fan page. (Lisa, my VA who set up the Facebook page for me, said happily: “I can’t believe I get paid to do this!” And I realized…we’re both lucky.)

My Daily Routine
I wake up in the morning and my VAs have sent me their updates. I am building a business where I create how-to videos for small business owners and bloggers who want to drive more traffic to their sites and get more customers.

I learned meditation, and currently spend about 40 minutes a day relaxing. I also spend a few hours a day doing the parts of my business I love, from creating videos to writing to programming. When I walk down to the kitchen, it’s clean; Elia, my housekeeper, comes in every week to make sure it’s spotless. She spends 2 hours cleaning our kitchen; total cost to me: $30.

My VA in the Philippines edits my videos and does a fantastic job for $3.33/hour.

Whenever I do an interview with another entrepreneur, I send it to another VA in the Philippines, who, for $9/hour, edits it perfectly, getting rid of all the strange pauses and “um”s. I send the edited interview off to a transcriptionist. For less than $30, I get back an excellent transcription, often 12-16 pages long.

Lisa, my VA here in the U.S., has set up an entire website and integrated it with a shopping cart for my customers to order products and access them once they have ordered. She charges $30/hour (my most expensive staff member) and she’s worth every penny.

I treat my staff members well, and they love the fact that they can work from home and get paid great wages ($3/hour in in the Philippines is equal to about a $65,000/year wage here in the U.S.) They are happy — I can see it in their emails and text chat messages.

My partner Richard and I fight less. There’s no scrapping over who will do a certain task. If no one wants to do it, we work together to figure out how to hire someone.

A Disease Opens My Eyes
I was recently diagnosed with Celiac disease. The management of the disease may sound simple, but it’s not: eliminate wheat, oats, barley and rye from your diet. Most restaurants have very few gluten-free items; I’m lucky if I can order one non-salad item from a typical menu. Some restaurants are impossible to eat at; soy sauce, for instance, has wheat in it. I’ve gotten sick from things as odd as bacon, cake frosting, and ranch dressing.

After a few weeks of eating mostly hot dogs and tuna fish, I grew tired of my limited options. I thought about learning to cook, but it wasn’t something that excited me. So we hired a personal chef to cook our meals — one who understands the challenge of cooking gluten-free. We pay her $10/hour, including travel time to deliver the food to us, and she gets a fun side job.

In a randomly-chosen week before I hired a personal chef, I ate out four times and went to the grocery store twice. I spent a total of $179.91 on restaurants and groceries. Last week, I spent $215.49, including groceries, for eating out and paying my personal chef. My “eating out” expenses dropped from $86.14 to just $32.28 — over 60% less! My total spent was $35.58 more, but to me, that’s a small price to pay for gourmet food of my choice delivered to my door. Another remarkable and unexpected side effect was that I no longer have an urge to go out and spend money at fancy restaurants — I simply ask my chef to make what I want and deliver it to me.

It has been more than two years since I sold my business, and I am happier than I have ever been. I made different choices than most: We rent a house instead of owning (a savings of nearly $4,000/month in our neighborhood — more than our monthly rent payment!); we only have basic cable; we don’t have a landline, credit card debt, car payments, or student loans.

I chose, instead of buying more Stuff, to live a more fulfilled life. For me, even more important than holding onto my money tightly was to learn to let it go — to give it to others in exchange for work well done, and to trust that they could do tasks well. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Previously at Get Rich Slowly, Erica shared Finding Time to Pursue Your Dreams: How to Free Up 750 Hours a Year with One Simple Change and The Ten-Minute Budget. Download her free Blog Success Manifesto, which offers 30 tactical tips to grow your blog faster than
you ever have before.

Written by: Chris McNeeney, Guest Blogger

When I first got started as a ClickBank vendor several years ago, I faced one of the major challenges that faces all new ClickBank vendors: how to find and attract affiliates to promote my product. Since then, I’ve sold several very successful products through ClickBank, and have learned what it takes to get affiliates to promote your product, which is absolutely key if you want to make a lot of sales. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned over years of finding and attracting affiliates.

First Things First

An extremely important step in attracting affiliates that many new vendors don’t know about or ignore is promoting your offer yourself before seeking out affiliates. The reason for this is that you need to make sure your offer converts. Otherwise, all your efforts will be wasted. Many affiliates, especially highly successful ones, will only give a product one chance. If it doesn’t convert into sales for them, they’ll stop promoting it and probably won’t try again, especially if they spend money to promote it.

Pay Per Click traffic is a great way to test how well your product converts. The goal is to get a conversion rate of at least 1% – ideally closer to 3%.

This may sound like unncessary groundwork, but it really is a vital first step: the importance of having a high converting offer can’t be stressed enough.

If your offer converts, recruiting affiliates will be a piece of cake. Any affiliates you bring on board will make money and continue promoting you. Their efforts will quickly pull in many new affiliates, and so on – its a virtuous cycle. Your offer will go viral if your conversions are high, as other affiliates start to see what their competitors are promoting.

However, if your offer does not convert you will have a tough time keeping any new affiliates you do manage to enlist. Your offer will likely stagnate and then disappear for good.

So be sure to run a simple PPC campaign to test your conversion rates before reaching out to affiliates. You can get more info on PPC at my Affiliate Videos page.

Next Steps

Now that you have a proven 1-3% conversion rate, its time to start contacting affiliates. The good news is that some of the work is already done. With ClickBank, you are never working from a dead start.

First, the ClickBank Marketplace will introduce your new site to a potential network of hundreds of thousands of affiliates (you should submit your product to the Marketplace as soon as you are approved). Second, the fact that all payments are handled by ClickBank ensures you have instant trust with affiliates. ClickBank have paid out over $1 billion to vendors and affiliates – so your affiliates know they will be paid on time, which is important since you don’t have any reputation right now. In short, listing your product with ClickBank gives you a firm platform to recruit affiliates from. You may well even attract affiliates passively before you start work.

But a mere presence on ClickBank won’t be enough; we have to actively build on that platform and reach out to affiliates if we want to succeed.

So how do we do that? And what kind of affiliate do we recruit? To a large extent, it depends on your niche. In the fat loss niche, for example, you have many avenues open to you. There are thousands of potential affiliates, some with lists of customers (so they can promote you via e-mail), some spending huge amounts of money on Pay Per Click traffic, and others with well-visited “authority sites” that pull in masses of free (”organic”) traffic from the search engines.

Smaller niches may be more restrictive, with all the sales coming from one traffic source or affiliate type. For example, in your niche, perhaps there are 10 big e-mail affiliates (”list owners”) who account for 70% of all sales. I’ve seen it happen before. Perhaps all the action is happening on a handful of search engine keywords that can be targeted via “organic search” or “pay per click” (this is actually the norm).

I have divided affiliates into 3 types here, but there are many other traffic sources, such as affiliates who purchase ad space on media networks (”media buys”). For simplicity’s sake I have restricted the affiliate types to e-mail, Pay Per Click and organic.

Pay Per Click Affiliates

PPC affiliates are very often the easiest to reach of all, although often the most fickle (they are constantly tracking their return on investment, and so will move to the highest converting offer in a heartbeat – another reason to ensure you are converting before you recruit affiliates).

PPC affiliates basically buy traffic from search engines such as Google, so that when people enter a keyword relating to your niche (e.g., “fat loss guides”), their ad shows up on the right hand side of the search results page.

If you enter a few keywords that relate to your niche, look at the ads that appear down the right hand side. Do any affiliates appear here that are promoting your competitors’ offers? Are there are any vendors promoting their own offers but collecting leads? If so, they may be open to promoting your offer to their lists.

If you find advertisers like these, you should contact them and ask them to promote your offer.

You can brainstorm keywords to find these PPC affiliates by entering the URL of your website or related keywords using the Adwords Tool or my affiliate keyword tool. Search for each related keyword that the tool returns and look for affiliates advertising on that phrase.

Organic / Website Affiliates

Some affiliates buy traffic from the search engines via PPC, but others have established sites that actually get free rankings in the search engines. These “organic” affiliates often have a huge amount of traffic coming to their sites, and so can be superb affiliates.

The first step to finding them is to take the keyword list you generated earlier (when you were looking for PPC affiliates), enter the same keywords, and now look for webiste owners appearing on the left hand side of the results page. Visit every site and head to their contact page, explaining how your offer is relevant to their website. Some website owners may not be familiar with affiliate marketing, so you may need explain to them why it can be lucrative for them and a good fit for their audience.

You can also search for the name of a competitor’s product (e.g., “The Ultimate Fat Loss Guide”) and contact any website that has a review of your competitor’s product. If they are promoting your competitors, they may well promote you also. When contacting these organic affiliates be sure to emphasise why your offer will add value for their visitors.

E-mail Affiliates (”JV Partners”)

These are the hardest affiliates to get on board, but also potentially the most lucrative. E-mail affiliates have a list of customers that they can promote offers to. It stands to reason that many of your top e-mail affiliates will be your competitors, such as other product vendors. These guys have a customer list of their own, and may be interested in promoting your offer to their list.

If you do get them to promote, they can generate huge numbers of sales with a single e-mail. Secondly, e-mail affiliates are the key to going viral: since all the big product vendors and affiliates sign up to each other’s lists, if they do promote you, other affiliates can jump on board quickly. A high-converting offer can go viral off a single e-mail, as more and more affiliates see the e-mail blast and jump on board. That’s the power of reaching thousands of people with a single e-mail.

List owners like this are in theory very easy to find – just do a simple search on the ClickBank Marketplace and contact any vendor in your niche who is collecting names and e-mails on their Pitch Page.

However, while they are easy to find, these affiliates are also the hardest to recruit. Many of your e-mails asking for promotion will probably go ignored, much more so than the other kinds of affiliates. These guys are bombarded with e-mails like yours, and they just don’t have the time to answer every one they receive. It isn’t personal, its just business.

For this reason, I advise you to focus on the PPC and organic affiliates to start with. Then, when you have some grass-roots traction behind your offer, and you know your product converts well, you can approach the big e-mail affiliates from a position of strength.

What to Say When You Contact Affiliates

You usually only get one shot at contacting affiliates, so it’s vital that you do it right the first time. First, make your e-mail personalised to the affiliate in question. Reference their site and start by telling them your offer is relevant and will deliver value to their visitors/customers. Please do not send out a “one size fits all” e-mail. Any potential affiliate receives dozens of e-mails like yours – you need to make it personalized if you want your offer to stand out.

Next, tell them why they will make money by promoting your offer – give them your overall conversion rate, details of any affiliates you already have on board, and how successful they’ve been. Explain what is working especially well for you. Finally, close by giving them a call to action – tell them to either visit your affiliate page or e-mail you back for further information and a review copy of your product.

Closing Thoughts

I’ll repeat my advice from earlier: it’s vital that your Pitch Page converts before you recruit affiliates.

This will make it much easier to retain the affiliates who you do recruit, and also bring on new affiliates once you get your first set of affiliates on board. Once you have a high-converting offer, set up your affiliate page, listing details of your conversion rates at the top of the page. The affiliate page is where you will be sending potential affiliates, and should include your HopLink info and any resources (Adwords ads, e-mail swipe copy, etc) that affiliates can use.

You should also submit your offer to all the affiliate directories that are out there, along with the “announcements” sections of the top affiliate forums. This will take some time, but is vital to establishing your initial grass-roots foundation. Then, once your offer converts, your affiliate page is live, and you are listed in some directories, you can approach the above 3 affiliate types and start generating some real sales for your ClickBank product.

Finally, understand that affiliate recruitment is a numbers game. Look at it as a process rather than an “end game.” You’re looking to build gradual momentum, get your offer out there, and if it converts, the viral power of the Internet will do the rest. A high-converting offer only needs a little push before it gathers traction. So get to work – and build that initial buzz yourself!

About the author

Chris McNeeney is the owner of Affiliate X – a resource site for ClickBank affiliates with affiliate tools, affiliate videos and training information.

Take a look at these related posts:

1. Six Steps to Finding a Great Product to Promote
2. Choosing the Best Keywords to Promote ClickBank Products Using Search Engines
3. Seven Habits of Highly Successful Affiliates

photo credit: nDevilTV

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