Vendor or Affiliate: To be or not to be?

As most internet marketers go, they spend their time using their own money and hard-learned skills promoting other peoples products for a commission. Some make millions doing it, some make a living. I do neither though I am looking in to the affiliate side.

The premise behind being an affiliate marketer is that it’s easier to promote someone else’s product rather than create your own, however, it’s extremely difficult to market other peoples products as any affiliate marketer would admit.

• Huge learning curve
• Tough competition from other affiliates promoting the same offers/products
• Technical knowledge of Search Engine Optimization & Pay Per Click Advertising
• Marketing methods (Such as squeeze pages, copy)

The list of reasons why promoting other peoples products is hard work is endless, yet it’s easier to promote others than create your own? I don’t believe that.

Let’s look at the vendor, the person who creates the services or products affiliates are promoting. When it comes to affiliates, in my opinion, the vendor can laugh all the way to the bank. Where’s the risk in allowing affiliates to promote your products, providing you have a good lawyer?

• It costs you nothing
• You’re receiving money you wouldn’t of otherwise

Sure, it may be difficult setting up a service and if you chose the wrong sort of service it could cause a massive headache with customer care - which is why I wouldn’t ever create a product or service that required support or any interaction with the customer after purchase except for if they’re requesting a refund.

The vendor also needs to invest money in good sales copy (e.g. e-books) or may need to out-source technical work (such as programming a service) which could cost in the hundreds or thousands. I believe the rewards for owning your own product though far make it the better choice. See how I’m in the middle of creating 2 products for Clickbank as a vendor. It’s not that difficult.

Here’s a question: If you’re promoting someone else’s e-book right now from Clickbank and earning $50 per day - and you know there’s at least 5 competitors on Adwords probably making a similar amount.. why not think about creating your own competing product, making it better, with better sales copy, advertise your own product and then contact those affiliates and let them try their hand at promoting your product instead?

Instead of $50 per day from promoting someone else’s product, you could be earning up to $500 or more. I think experienced affiliate marketers really ought to look in to developing their own products once they have succesfully promoted others. What better way to start, really.

Discover 2 Million Keywords In Hours Using Wordtracker

I’m going to share a technique I started using last week where-by you can extract more keywords than the 1,000 limit in Wordtracker and build a far larger list of keywords for your niche.

Let’s take the topic and keyword ‘blood pressure’ and enter it in to Wordtracker, which returns the maximum 1,000 results - 10 pages with 100 keywords on each.

Obviously there are more keywords for blood pressure behind the first 1,000.. but first let’s use the export tool and take the first 1,000 in to Excel…

Then we save the file to the hard drive and open it in Excel..

Now leave the Excel file open in the background and return to the Wordtracker query search box again.

This time to break past the 1,000 keywords barrier and discover more keywords on blood pressure we’re going to take the most popular results from ‘blood pressure’, which are ‘high blood pressure’, ‘low blood pressure’ and ‘normal blood pressure’ and do a search for each of these keywords individually.

First let’s do the search on ‘high blood pressure’ which also brings up the maximum of 1,000 keywords. Export and save the Excel file to your hard drive.

Now let’s search for ‘low blood pressure’ which only brings up 200 keywords. Export and save the Excel file to your hard drive.

Finally search for ‘normal blood pressure’ which brings up 115 keywords. Export and save the Excel file to your hard drive.

Now you should have 4 Excel files from the original search for ‘blood pressure’, ‘high blood pressure’, ‘low blood pressure’ and ‘normal blood pressure…

If you follow this to the letter, you will also still have open the 1,000 list of ‘blood pressure’ keywords. Keep that open but also open the 3 other Excel files.

Now begin to highlight and copy & paste all of the keywords from the 3 Excel files to the original ‘blood pressure’ keyword list. I shouldn’t need to explain how to do this.

While you do this, you will probably think hey up Pete, there’s obviously duplicate keywords in these lists, and you’re right - once you’re done copying and pasting I’ll get to that.

Ok, so now you should have an Excel file with a list of 2,834 keywords, including duplicates, so let’s filter those out right away by following these steps:

1. Make sure you have 3 columns labeled, in this case ‘Keywords’, ‘Searches’ and ‘Estimated Searches and then drag from A-C to highlight all 3 columns and all of the keywords.

2. Click Data > Filter > Advanced Filter:

3. Check the ‘Unique Records’ box and click OK:

Now you need to be careful - you will notice the numbers in the columns on the left turn blue, and it’s at this point you click EDIT > COPY.

3. Start a blank work sheet (FILE > NEW > BLANK WORKSHEET) and click EDIT > PASTE:

Now you will be presented with a list of keywords with any duplicates filtered out. Notice there are now only 2,363 keywords:

Now have at it! I used this exact method to build a keyword list of over 2 million related keywords in around 4-5 hours. We could of kept putting more of the original ‘blood pressure’ keywords in to Wordtracker instead of just the original 3 secondary phrases and built a list far larger than this, but this was just for an example.

In my opinion this is the best method of using Wordtracker for discovering keywords to use for PPC (Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, AdCenter etc).

Now, do you know anyone paying cash for blood pressure leads?

Test Campaign For Ringtones Started 300 Clicks for $50

As mentioned a few days ago I applied to Azoogleads to promote their ringtone offers but I also applied to Maxbounty and Jamster on Commission Junction. Maxbounty approved me minutes ago so I’ve started my test campaign with them

I created a small test campaign using $50 and I’m paying 0.16 (with any luck) per click for 300 clicks on Adwords. The campaign is very targetted therfore I’m expecting at least 1 lead. I don’t expect to break even, but 1 lead would suggest it’s worthwhile persueing the avenue I am in regards to keywords. If I get a poor conversion, I’ll call it a success, wait for when I can promote Azooglead’s offers and get serious with promoting ringtones.

Watch this space for results of my test.

Got Ringtones? GADOOD Enters the Ringtone Market!

I’ve noticed on my travels there’s a lot of people making a lot of money in the ringtone market - and dare I say a lot of them don’t even seem that smart to me.

The industry was brought to my attention last year and popularized by Shoemoney from Digitalpoint, who I would assume is responsible for a large influx of eager beavers rushing to Azoogleads in the search of gold. Azoogleads are responsible for the largest paying CPA ringtone offers in the industry.

It’s time to wet my feet in what seems to be a cash-cow if you’re able to purchase cheap targeted clicks through PCC, which I believe I’m able to do. Whether or not Google will slap me after a while and raise the prices of the keywords I know I’m able to purchase right now for peanuts, I’m not sure. *shrug*

I have created my website, which I won’t disclose for obvious reasons and Azoogleads have approved my application. Once they receive my W8 Form from those nice IRS guys over in America, I’ll get cracking.

Watch this space.