Vendor or Affiliate: To be or not to be?

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion, Affiliate Marketing, PPC - Pay Per Click April, last year

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.

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? :)

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.

Have your say (1 comment) 3:15 pm

Discover 2 Million Keywords In Hours Using Wordtracker

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, PPC - Pay Per Click, Wordtracker April, last year

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? :)

Have your say (5 comments) 2:36 am

Steal Competitors Keywords With KeyCompete.com

Posted in: Marketing and Promotion, Ringtones, Google Adwords, PPC - Pay Per Click April, last year

Given that I’m running a test with ringtones, during my keyword research I bumped in to a website called KeyCompete that claim they can discover your competitors keywords by entering their domain name, or simply entering a keyword - and it pulls a list of websites and their keywords for you to download.

I paid for a days access at $19 to see what it’s like, and here’s what I managed to do…

I remembered Shoemoney mentioned a website promoting ringtones called downloadrings.com, so I entered the URL in to KeyCompete and it returned 736 keywords. Interesting I thought - how does it find these keywords? I’m guessing it scrapes the website pulling off what it deems to be keywords but I aren’t sure.

What I do know is, it seems to work to some extent:

Example of keywords it returned:

Of course, I wasn’t satisfied with just this, so I entered the keyword ‘ringtones’ in to KeyCompete and it gave me a list of websites, one being pimpmytones.net which had the largest number of keywords to ’steal’. How many? 7,259…

Here’s the first 20:

Ok - this is pretty interesting stuff. I also downloaded all of Jamster’s reported keywords (7,666) and a boat-load of other ringtone websites keywords. I reached my daily query limit but in total I racked up over 20,000 keywords.

Not bad for half an hours work, huh? Visit KeyCompete to learn more.

Have your say (1 comment) 11:25 am