The Affiliate Lair

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In the video, I mentioned that I’d upload the first 2 videos of the case study. In the interest of time, I’ve decided to hold off on that until June 25th. The reason being is that it takes time to edit, produce and upload these videos…and right now I need all the time I have to put into this promotion. I got a late jump on this so I’m trying to get as much done as possible.

The promotion is coming along well. I am using PPC, video, and social networking to drive traffic. You will see all of it.

I thank everyone for their patience and giving me an opportunity to make it up to you. Be on the lookout for an email from me on June 25th.

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

I know it’s been a couple weeks since the last video was posted. My apologies for the delay. My brother in law was in a pretty serious car accident and it has really thrown my schedule off. It’s about a 40 minute drive each way to the hospital to see him. He’s OK, but he’s going to have a pretty painful recovery. He has several fractures in his pelvis and bones surrounding his hip area. Here’s a look at what’s left of his car:

The fire department had to cut off the roof and passenger side door to get him out.

The fireman that got him out said he was lucky to be alive. After seeing this, I have to agree. We are just thankful to still have him around. He’s a strong guy so we’re confident he’ll make a full recovery.

OK, now onto the business at hand. I am currently still working on setting up the review site for Case Study 1. I have recorded a few more videos and they will be up shortly. I have also decided to add a couple extra case studies based on some projects that I am working on. These will be:

Case Study 2: One product review landing page – This is what I have the most experience with and have had the most success with up to this point. I am going to begin work on a review style site that is centered around one product. The goal will be to build a list and sell this product. This will be a much quicker case study than the review site and will give you alot of insight into my process.

Case Study 3: CPA Offer – I am starting to experiment with some CPA marketing. CPA has been the hot topic in IM for awhile now. I am going to show you a method of using Wordpress blogs to build CPA style landing pages. I will also show you how to get traffic to these offers through PPC and video marketing. The content network is going to be a major part of this case study.

I will send out an email as soon as more videos are loaded up. I thank everyone for being patient with this. I plan to show you alot more and make this an ongoing project as I do enjoy making these videos.

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

You’ll notice a new tab up top. The “case studies” tab. I just uploaded the first 2 videos. They cover how I use direct linking to test offers before I spent time building a review site.

The next videos in the series will be the actual building of the review site.

If you have any question on the videos, please submit them in the comments section. I’m glad to be back and look forward to really picking up the pace here.

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

Sorry for the silence around here. After getting back from my wedding/honeymoon I had quite a bit to do to get myself caught up. I planned to get started on the case studies last week but one of my sites was compromised by an attack on one of the MySQL databases. Basically some sort of malware was installed and would popup what looked like an antivirus scan. The site is an ecommerce store that has about 10K pages so I was hard at work trying to make sure the entire site did not get compromised.  It has been a major issue and a huge distraction. But I think we’ve just about got it under control.

Anyhow, I will be uploading the case study videos starting this week. I am most likely going to do two case studies at the same time. One will be a review site like X recommends in the Black Book…the other will be a one product presell site. I use both strategies so I want to show you both.

Before I spend any time on a review site, I almost always like to send some traffic directly to the merchant’s sales pages to see if they will convert for me. I usually use Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter to do this. Why? Because frankly they are much easier to deal with than Google. They are not as slap happy and I can run my ads without worrying about quality score. Between the two of them, I can usually get enough traffic to get  a sense of what the conversions will look like.

I simply setup an ad campaign and link directly to the sales page. I keep my ad groups very targeted. They look like this:

product name

author name

url of product

When I put up the case study videos, I will show you the exact keywords I use. I just don’t want to post them until I have my initial results. But this part of the process is fairly easy.

The first videos will be up in 24-48 hours.

I thank you all for your patience. It is much appreciated.

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

I just uploaded 3 more niche research videos. I have changed the format a bit. The full video will no longer appear on the screen. Instead, there will be a link and the video will open in a new window. I’ve found that this makes the video larger so you can see everything that is going on and it decreases load time.

OK, I’m off to get married. Once I return on the 20th, things will kick into high gear here.

Talk soon,

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

Hey everyone,

I moved the Single Action Page Blog Theme and videos to the “Wordpress” tab. This way the videos won’t try to load every time you login. This should make the site load faster for you. Be sure to mouse over the tabs up top to make the sub tabs appear. All of the new videos are under the sub tabs.

It also appears that the site was down for a few hours this morning. I’m not sure what caused this problem. But everything seems to be working again. If I keep having trouble, I may end up switching hosts…hopefully there won’t be any further problems.

If you have any trouble with the site (site is down, can’t see videos, sub tabs not working, etc) please let me know by either leaving a comment or emailing me at chrishubbard1@gmail.com. If there are still bugs in the site, I want to get them worked out asap.

Thanks,

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

I just added 3 Niche Research videos and 3 Wordpress SEO Optimization videos. You can find them under the tabs “Research” and “Wordpress” above.

From here on out, I will be adding all new videos to pages and they will be located under tabs in the header of the site…this way you can leave comments. For some reason, comments on posts refuse to work and support has not gotten back to me.

I hope you find these videos useful. I will be adding a few more niche research videos. I know niche research isn’t the most exciting topic but I’m spending a good amount of time covering it because I think it’s such a critical part of the process. From there we will move into product selection and finding affiliate programs to promote.

More videos will be added very soon.

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

I have already begun creating some niche research videos and they will be up here soon (look for them on the weekend). One thing that I’ve realized through my conversations with several people who purchased ABB through my link is that I have marketers of all different levels in terms of skill and experience. This presented me with a challenge…do I cover the basics and risk upsetting those who are more advanced…or do I cover the advanced stuff and risk confusing those who are new?

I came to the conclusion that I should really try to cover everything. The most important thing to me is that I deliver videos that will give everyone a process to follow to get affiliate campaigns launched. And obviously that process will be based on what X teaches in the Affiliate Black Book. In this game, the more offers you put out there, the more money you will make…and having a core process that you can follow over and over again is key to getting alot of campaigns up and running.

So what I’ve decided to start off with is a case study. I will film myself researching a niche, locating and analyzing products to sell, researching keywords, setting up my blog/landing pages, and then setting up my PPC campaigns.

In the videos that I’ve done so far, I have laid out how I personally do things. But as I’m going through the process, I may stop along the way to explain what I’m doing and why. For example, I just made a video where I am researching the ClickBank marketplace. During the video, I stopped to explain what the numbers under each product mean and why I look at them. So I explained how to tell the commission rate, how much you will make per sale, what gravity means, etc.

For many, this will be very basic and honestly it may bore you. But I know there are others that will find it beneficial as they are just getting started and have not setup any campaigns in the past. So I ask you more experienced marketers out there to just bare with me as i go through some fundamentals and basics. I will get to the advanced stuff. I just want to make the videos as detailed as possible so they help everyone.

By the end of this case study, it is my sincere hope that everyone who watches these videos will be able to duplicate the process – regardless of their experience level.

On another note, it has been brought to my attention that the comments are not working as they should. It seems that you can leave comments on the “pages” such as the “About” page…but the comments for the posts are not working. I thought I had screwed up the settings at first but I checked them and they are correct.

So it is my belief that the problem is being caused by the membership site plugin I’m using. I am going back and forth with support trying to get this fixed. As of this writing, support could not figure out what was causing the problem so they referred it to a programmer. I am awaiting the response from the programmer. I really want to get the comments working so that I can get feedback and answer questions as we go through the case study.

I will get this worked out somehow so that we can have the open discussion that I promised.

OK, I think that’s it. I will put my first few videos up this weekend. I’ll shoot out an email as soon as they are up.

Chris

Chris Uncategorized

This weekend I will get started on the first Affiliate Black Book case study. I am going to choose a niche, pick several products and build out a review site using the strategies laid out in ABB.

This is going to be a great step by step case study. I’m looking forward to doing it. I will load up the videos as soon as I make them.

Chris

Chris Affiliate Black Book Videos

I have found that Wordpress blogs help quite a bit with getting good to great quality scores within your Adwords campaigns. But let’s face it; they’re not the end all, be all when it comes to quality score. The real key is twofold:

1. Give Google what they want – follow Google’s guidelines when you build your pages and they will love your site

2. Implement some basic SEO

OK, this is going to be a long guide but it should end your quality score woes for good. Doing all of this will take some time but it will be worth it. Just follow these steps in order whenever you setup a new campaign (this is for Google’s “search network”..not the content network)

1. Domain name – if possible, have you main keyword in your domain name.

2. Do not use a private domain name..most domains are public by default so you usually don’t have to worry about this.

3. Do not cloak your pages or use iframes – Google hates this and it will kill your quality score

4. Meta tags – Put your main keyword in the “title” tag of your page. Also be sure to write a compelling call to action for your “description” tag. Make sure your description tag also has your keywords in it.

5. Use an h1 tag for your page’s headline and again make sure some variation of your main keyword is in the headline

6. Put images on the page that are relevant to your message. Name these images using keywords that are relevant to the image….any other images that are NOT relevant to your message, name them numbers. This can sound confusing so let me get into an example:

If you are promoting a dating product and you have a picture of a couple out on a date, you might name that image: “firstdate.jpg”…that shows Google that this image is relevant to the keywords that you are advertising for. But if you have an image that is a company logo, you should name that image “1.jpg” instead of “logo.jpg”. Here’s why: if you have only 2 images on the page and one is named “logo.jpg” and the other is named “firstdate.jpg” then Google sees that 50% of your images are relevant….but if you instead name the logo “1.jpg”, Google will ignore it and only see the “firstdate.jpg” picture, making your images 100% relevant…

Also, do not use an “alt tag” on the images that you have named with numbers.

Note: NEVER name non relevant images with keywords to try to fool Google. Naming guarantee images, add to cart images, company logos, etc with keywords is a surefire way to get a Poor quality score with Google.

7. Include a ” Contact Us” and “Privacy Policy” link on your page. I also like to include a “Terms of Service” link for good measure. Google’s TOS requires this so be sure you do it. Make sure these links go to pages that have the proper info on them. These links must also be regular links that Google can spider so no javascript.

8. Make sure your “Contact Us” page has a name, address, phone number and email address. Google’s TOS requires full contact info on the page. Do not use a form as Google’s spiders cannot read forms.

9. Be sure that your written content is relevant to the keywords you are advertising for. I know this is obvious but so many people make this mistake. If you are promoting on the keyword “dating in los angeles” you need to make sure your content is focused around this term. I like to have this exact term in my page at least 2 or 3 times if possible. You can also use variations of the term like “find a date in los angeles”

10. Only use original content – No PLR or copied content on your landing pages. If it’s not original content, you will get penalized by Google. If using PLR content, be sure to rewrite it so that it is original.

11. Create some inbound links to your page before you start your Adwords campaign. If you are promoting multiple pages on the same site, you can usually get away with just having some incoming links to the homepage…but linking to internal pages is not a bad idea either. I will get into this in another post about links…(for now just use digg.com, a blog, setup a wordpress.com blog and post with links back, etc)

12. Make sure Google has spidered your site before running ads. Do a google search like this “site:yourdomain.com”…so for this site I’d type this into Google “site:affiliatelair.com”…this will show you if Google has indexed your pages or not. If they have, then it’s safe to go ahead and fire up your Adwords campaign.

13. Include audio or video on your page. This can be as simple as embedding a YouTube video. It’s not absolutely necessary but Google likes to see video and audio content on your pages.

14. Build your site out to at least 5 pages. These pages need to be keyword rich pages focused around your topic. Link the pages together as well so that no page is left out on it’s own without a link into it.

15. Once your page is complete, ask yourself: if I was searching for this term and landed on this page, would I be happy with what I find? This is very important because Google is all about providing quality search results. If you can honestly answer “yes” then you are on the right track. Google also measures how long searchers stay on your site (yet another reason to include a video or audio on the page)

I will do another post on opt in pages. Despite what you may hear, you CAN use opt in pages with Adwords as Google specifies that you can use Adwords for “lead generation”….you just have to do it the right way. I will get into that in depth in a later post.

Chris PPC