08.21.07

August 2007 Newsletter

Posted in Newsletter Archives at 3:02 am by Administrator

Hey Everybody,

Sorry to keep you all waiting so long for this month’s newsletter, but I was having such a good time on the ranch that we stayed a little longer than I’d planned.  It sure is nice to be my own boss. 

I’d also like to apologize to those of you who posted questions this past week to the Affiliate Millions Discussion Board.  I didn’t mean to keep you waiting for a response, but I had a problem with my Administrator account that I have only just resolved.  My responses are now available.

Affiliate Networks & Programs
 

New Affiliate Networks
 

This week I have added two new affiliate networks to the Affiliate Millions site.
 

Linkshare.com - LinkShare is an e-commerce business solution for over 3.5 million online relationships. Become an affiliate of the LinkShare Network for FREE and earn revenue by linking to over 500 premier online merchants!

incentAclick.com - IncentAclick is easy to use and easy to join, and they offer hundreds of competitive affiliate programs.

New Affiliate Program Offers
 

Affiliate Fuel    

“Zooba Book-of-The-Month Club - All Books $9.95 each - Free Shipping with Membership.” (OfferID=122504) is now live as of August 9, 2007.

Affiliate payout for this offer is $22.75!

“AutoCheck Vehicle History Report - Protect yourself before you purchase. Save yourself time and money down the road.” (OfferID=131301) is now live as of August 1, 2007.
Affiliate payout for this offer is $6.00!
 

AzoogleAds.com         

ID        Top 5 Performing Offers                                   eCPC   CR       Offer Landing Page
 4539    Blockbuster Total Access ($9.99/mo)               $2.78   5.31%  http://x.azjmp.com/0nlml
 3350    Blinko Wizard - Today’s Hottest Ringtones!      $0.93   6.76%  http://x.azjmp.com/0YrkK
 3341    Singlesnet | Online Dating Made Easy                $0.22   5.50%  http://x.azjmp.com/0nlms
 4000    True.com | Search Only                                    $0.34   8.91%  http://x.azjmp.com/0nlnd
 1885    DadaMobile - 10 Bonus Tones                         $0.34   2.59%  http://x.azjmp.com/0YrrM

Search Engine Marketing Tips
 

Keyword Research Tool
 

A lot of you have written asking for assistance researching new keywords.  Although I believe the free tools offered by Google and Yahoo are quite good, if you are willing to pay a premium for more information, KeyCompete.com offers detailed information on what keywords are working for which sites.   

Search and Content Networks
 

Yahoo/Overture Sponsored Search – Yahoo! represents one of the largest and oldest search engines on the web. They are currently running a promotion offering $25 worth of free advertising to new customers.  That could translate to as many as 250 free clicks through to the affiliate programs you choose to advertise.  Click on the link below to take advantage of this great offer.

Yahoo! Sponsored Search connects businesses and customers online. Sign up and get a $25 credit.
 

Google AdWords – The pioneer in pay-for-performance search marketing. Google’s AdWords program is one of the top pay-for-performance search engines.

Website Design & Marketing Tips
 

Website Tools
 

I recently came across a great new company named Mpire that creates widgets for eBay and Amazon (among others).  These widgets are a great blend of content and revenue generation.  I have an example on my own site at www.AffiliateMillions.com/web-design.html that dynamically compares current prices for the same product on both Amazon and eBay.

Good Luck, Affiliate Millionaires in training!

Anthony Borelli

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07.06.07

Affiliate Millions Newsletter - July 5, 2007

Posted in Newsletter Archives at 5:28 pm by Administrator

Hi Everybody, 

I hope your summer vacation is going as well as mine.  My whole family has been on the ranch now for three weeks, and we’re having a great time.  Robyn is learning how to take care of the horses, and getting very comfortable with them, I must say.  Alyssa loves looking for eggs – the chickens are free range, and tend to lay eggs everywhere – and thinks every day is Easter now.  The boys are riding their ATVs, exploring our 60 acre spread, and making new friends of some of our closest neighbors (a 10 to 15 minute walk away).  Everyone is enjoying the pool, and the occasional short drive to the ocean.

My brother and I are keeping busy cutting down some dead trees in the pastures, killing and cutting down some of the weeds and brush that have built up, and planting new hay.  Joe’s done most of the work, as I was foolish enough to get burned while we were burning one of the brush piles we built up.  Maybe I should stick to the safety of Internet Marketing and forget this horse farm stuff… 

No way baby, I’m living the dream!

Hopefully, you’ll be living your own dreams in a year or two as well.  With that in mind, let’s get to the advice.

Tips for Beginners
Picking the right affiliate programs
Although I am loathe to suggest a formula for picking the right affiliate programs to promote – your own personal skills, knowledge and ad writing styles are the best drivers of that process – so many of you have emailed me asking for help with this task, I feel I ought to provide at least a few more guidelines for picking programs early in your careers. 

1.      Stick with lower CPA programs in the beginning.  Say about $5 or less per commissionable event.  This isn’t because you can’t make money on some of those programs that pay $100+ commission, because you can, but typically those high commissions are the result of low conversion rates, and this means that you might have to spend between $200 to $500 before you can really be sure whether the campaign is a winner or a loser.  A $5 commission program will usually convert a bit better, and you can usually get statistically significant data spending just $10 to $25.  Save those high CPA programs for after you are already making money, and can afford to lose more in the search for additional profitable campaigns.

2.      Look for well-known companies and brands to promote.  Again, this isn’t because you can’t make money on the lesser known brands, but it is easier to attract customers to a known brand, and when you are just learning the ropes and trying to develop your ad writing skills, a well known domain name makes the process much less frustrating in terms of generating a useful number of clicks in a shorter period of time.

3.      Look for programs that offer performance incentives that include relatively easy goals in the beginning – not just higher commissions for 100k+ in sales, but lower performance tiers that help you improve your return at regular performance levels, starting with some relatively modest goals.  My all-time favorite affiliate program for beginners, and one that offers the potential to make at least between a few hundred to a few thousand per quarter when you become proficient, is Amazon.

Quick Start Guide
As always, I recommend my Quick Start Guide to take you step by step through the initial startup process of starting your own Search Marketing business.

New Affiliate Networks & Programs
This week, I have received the list of AzoogleAds.com’s top 5 performing campaigns from last week and I thought I’d pass the list along to you, so you’d know which programs their affiliates are having the most success with, and so you can take a stab at promoting one or more of these successful campaigns yourself.  This time, I have included the eCPC (basically the average earnings per hundred clicks) ad the CR (conversion rate).  Keep in mind, both these figures include search marketing and website generated statistics.

ID        Offer Title                                                                                                         eCPC               CR

4577    Thumbplay Private - Sprint, Cingular & Verizon traffic                                       $1.38               8.81%

4497    *Exclusive* RockinRinger                                                                                 $1.32               8.84%

4552    Webfetti - English Only (US, UK, CA, AUS, IRL, NZL) -ZKxdm021              $0.09               3.79%

3905    DadaMobile - Brazilian Ringtones                                                                     $0.10               10.22%

3350    *Exclusive* Blinko Wizard - Today’s Hottest Ringtones!                                   $0.98               7.45%

Just sign up now with AzoogleAds.com, and search for the affiliate programs and get the tracking code you’ll need to begin running ads for them.  As always, if you run into problems joining this – or any other – affiliate network, drop me an email at AffiliateSupport@AffiliateMillions.com  and I’ll work with the network on your behalf to get you accepted.

Search Engine Marketing Tips
Ad-Tuning
I like to repeat some of the more important advice from time to time – to remind veterans and inform newcomers – and the most important piece of advice every search marketer needs to remember is the importance of ad tuning.  No single technique has contributed more to my success then my habit of carefully writing ads and then testing them against similar ads to try and identify possible improvements.  Unless you firmly establish an ad at the very top of the search results for your keywords, with the lowest possible CPC (under three cents on Google, for instance), you should continuously try to improve your ads by creating new, almost identical ads to run alongside the current best performing ad.  Make small changes to a word or two, or replace a whole line in the title or description, then run that ad alongside the other to see if it performs better or worse than the original.  I have a number of helpful suggestions for this process in my book.

In addition to the techniques listed in my book, you should be aware that Google AdWords will now allow you to pause an ad, rather than delete it, when you wish an ad to stop showing within an ad group.  This feature is important because ad history is important to the Google algorithm.  I have on occasion deleted an ad I thought I had improved upon, only to find that I had either incorrectly interpreted the results, or that the ad history itself was still critical to the success of the ad group.  If you pause an ad, and then experience a sharp drop in performance, you can correct the problem by simply resuming the ad.  If, however, you delete ads when you believe you are done with them, you will not be able to undo the deletion.  You can recreate an ad that is identical to the old one, but you cannot recreate the ad history, save by the slow passage of time.

Search and Content Networks
By now, some of you may be ready to branch out beyond Yahoo! And Google, and try some of the second tier search engines.  Although these other search and content networks might not be as big as the others, they can still deliver additional volume, sometimes for much less per click than their better known rivals.

Search 123:      A pay-for-placement search model, Search 123 is an excellent outlet for reaching customers you might not be exposed to on the larger search engines.

Enhance Interactive:      Enhance is a pay-for-placement search engine with over 2 Billion Monthly Searches.  Join Enhance Interactive today and receive $25 in Free Clicks.

MIVA:             MIVA is also a pay-for-placement search engine with high quality traffic.

Website Design & Marketing Tips
Website Promotion
One thing to keep in mind when you are promoting a website of your own is the importance of search engine optimization (SEO).  Be sure to focus some of your efforts toward getting your site to appear in the natural search engine results.  If you successfully climb to the top of a few key searches, you will begin getting the best kind of traffic…  FREE! 

A great book on SEO that I have recommended before is Insider Seo & Ppc: Get Your Website to the Top of the Search Engines, available now on Amazon.

Website Templates
As I have also mentioned many times before, our FREE website templates are one of the services I am the proudest of.  These templates are professionally designed, and include simple instructions for incorporating your own affiliate advertisements into the html code.  Simply download the files from my site and unzip them to your root directory on your web server.  Don’t have a web server?  Don’t worry, just skip down a few paragraphs and you’ll find affordable and reliable web hosting services you can use to publish your new website.

With the recent changes of companies like eBay.com – which no longer allows direct search marketing – landing pages could become the affiliate wave of the future.

Presently, as Affiliate Millions is still just getting started, we have only one template available.  It is a template for an online college degree selection site, and it is available at www.AffiliateMillions.com/web-design.html.  You can view a working example of the website at www.Great-Colleges.com.

I strongly suggest Affiliate Fuel for your source of education offers to list on this site, as they have a large number of high paying, high converting college degree offers.

Good Luck, future Affiliate Millionaires!

Anthony Borelli

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06.30.07

Affiliate Millions Newsletter 6/15/2007

Posted in Newsletter Archives at 9:10 pm by Administrator

Hi Everybody,   

Well, I’m taking the whole family up to the ranch on Monday to spend the summer.  The kids already love it, but this will be Robyn’s first time actually staying there.  Hopefully, she will fall in love with it too, and I can finally start leading the life of a country gentleman.   

“Land spreadin’ out so far and wide… keep Manhattan just give me that countryside!” 

Before I get started with the advice this week, it has come to my attention that some of your newsletter requests did not make it onto the newsletter list until this week, including some from as long ago as April.  I want to apologize to those subscribers who have missed out, and offer them the chance to read through some of the archived newsletters, should they wish to do so.  I will be trying to publish these newsletter archives to the Discussion Board, but until then, you may simply reply to this email with “Request for archives” in the subject or body of the email, and I will make sure you get copies of any newsletters you may have missed. 

Tips for Beginners 

This issue’s big tip is to check out the Affiliate Millions Discussion Board, which is now fully functional.  We now have a number of posts and comments on a variety of subjects, and there is a lot to be learned for a beginner – or an expert – on the board.  Also, you may feel free to post your own questions or comments as well.  As always, you may also query me directly at AffiliateSupport@AffiliateMillions.com.   

Affiliate Network & Program tips 

Using Landing Pages 

Earlier this month, I promised some more detailed advice on how to use landing pages for affiliate programs like eBay’s, whose new payout structure includes a prohibition on direct search marketing (running ads for eBay on search engines that link directly to eBay).  Under this prohibition, you are still allowed to advertise a site of your own on Search Engines that in turn will link to eBay. 

The success of this new strategy will depend on more than just your ad text and keyword selection – your primary concerns in direct search marketing.  Now you will need to add the quality of your landing page to your list of concerns.  Google will be looking at two things when they review your ad’s landing page; relevance and content. 

Relevance is simple, if you are running an ad against keywords like baby carriage, car seat, baby stroller, etc., then you will want to make sure that these items are featured prominently on the landing page.  Luckily, eBay has an easy to use Editor Kit that will help you create dynamically relevant eBay item lists for your own page to display.  This is almost as good as sending them to a similar page on eBay, as you will get up to the second listings, and they will be able to shop and buy from your page as easily as from eBay.   

Content can be more difficult, and Google can be funny about what they do and don’t approve.  Sometimes, just offering a relevant list of items for sale like suggested above is enough.  Other times, Google might decide that the page is only an advertisement (without other content) and shut off your ad.  The key is to be certain you offer some content besides just what is for sale. Content can be relevant tips, advice, discussion or news.  The fresher the better, as this will improve your Google page rank, and landing page rank will help your ad in the Google AdWords algorithm.  One simple trick, if you are stumped on how to provide fresh content yourself, is to get relevant news stories delivered to your page by a free news content provider like InterestAlert.com.  This news is easy to incorporate into your page, can be customized to the content of your page, and will satisfy Google’s content requirements. 

I have a VERY simple example of these two tools – the Editor Kit and InterestAlert.com – at www.Find-Great-Deals-Here.com/eBay. 

I leave it to you to make the necessary improvements to the look and feel of your page to make it as successful as possible, or you may enlist the help of the experts at Dotster for Fast and Affordable Custom Web Design.  They can also assist you in finding and buying a domain name, as well as hosting your new site. 

Search Engine Marketing Tips 

Search and Content Networks 

Up until this week, Google AdWords has always been my first recommendation for Search and Content Networks.  They did pioneer pay-for-performance advertising, after all.  But after several weeks of Yahoo’s new pay-for-performance system being in place, I have moved them to the top of my list of recommendations.  It is not so much that I can say they are simply better than Google – they each still each have their own advantages that make that a difficult, case by case call – but I believe they are certainly as good as Google, and in many areas the competition is not yet quite as fierce (or savvy) as on Google AdWords. 

I encourage all of you who have not given Yahoo a try already to take advantage of the current offer; 

Yahoo/Overture Sponsored Search – Yahoo! represents one of the largest and oldest search engines on the web. They are currently running a promotion offering $25 worth of free advertising to new customers.  That could translate to as many as 250 free clicks through to the affiliate programs you choose to advertise.  Click on the link below to take advantage of this great offer. 

Yahoo! Sponsored Search connects businesses and customers online. Sign up and get a $25 credit.  

That’s all for this week. 

Good Luck, Affiliate Millionaires in training! 

Anthony Borelli

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Affiliate Milliosn Newsletter 6/1/2007

Posted in Newsletter Archives at 9:07 pm by Administrator

Hi Everybody, 

The bad news is; I don’t have much prepared for this month’s newsletter. 

The good news is; the reason I haven’t gotten the newsletter together in time is I have been killing myself trying to get this discussion board working…  And at long last it works!!! 

I have pre-populated some discussion threads based on your emails, and please feel free to register and post your own comments and questions.  I have quite a few other tasks to catch up on now, so I may not respond to your posts for a couple days, but I will certainly get to them as soon as I can.  I’ll try and put out a meatier mid-month newsletter in a couple of weeks. 

But wait!  I almost forgot… you’ll want the address of the discussion board, I’ll bet.  There is a text link at the bottom of the main page of Affiliate Millions – still waiting on the button – but you can reach it directly at www.AffiliateMillions.com/discussion-board/index.php.