Affiliate marketing is not easy money as you probably know. You need to have the right flow of the right people to buy the right product. Even when all 3 are just right you can still struggle to sell because you can’t get your visitor to switch into the buying mood. When the person does not want to buy a product any attempt to sell will only drive them away. When the person is in buying mood however you can even sell them 3 products in the raw. It has been proven that one of the best times to sell someone a product is straight after their first purchase, while you customer is still in the buying mode, with his/her credit card out.
So what if you already had a customer looking to buy one product or another? All you had to do was to find that product for them. Seems to good to be true? Not at all! I introduce you to Yahoo answers. What you do is simply scan for the right question. For example: “What spyware cleaner should i buy?”. That person has a problem and needs a solution. In this case he wants to buy a spyware cleaner. What you do is jump into your clickbank quickly. Go to marketplace and find a nice spyware cleaner. Create your hoplink and answer the guy’s question: “Hey! Here is a very good spyware cleaner i use -link-. Never had a problem with it. bla bla bla”. Then go and find some more questions. You will usually be able to find a nice product for most questions.
Think quality rather than quantity. Take your time to write a natural looking answer that does not look like a sales pitch. It is a good idea to cloak your affiliate links too. You can create a quick blog on blogger and then use the following code in your template to redirect people to your affiliate link: < meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://ww w.youraffiliatelink.com">. Now you can use your blogger url as your referral url in Yahoo answers. Alternatively you can use my link cloaking tool.
A few weeks ago i was invited to join Yahoo toolbar affiliate campaign on commission junction. After doing a bit of research i have decided to give it a try. Basically Yahoo would pay me $1 for every person installing their new toolbar. Excellent! Do you know what i did? I just started a bunch of PPC campaigns on Adwords, Adcenter and others site pretty much just targeting “Download Yahoo toolbar” keywords and phrases. lol i would actually appear higher than Yahoo for anyone searching for their toolbar. The best thing is that people searching for “Download new yahoo toolbar” pretty much just want to download it. Therefore my traffic conversion was close to 100%. For every 5p (10c or so) i would spend on a click i would get $1 back. I have made an absolute (small) fortune doing this for two weeks or so. My arbitrage was short lived however. This morning i was contacted by Yahoo reminding me that:
(f) Publisher may bid on search terms available from Web sites, search engines or other directory or referral services (e.g., Yahoo! Search Marketing, Google, etc., collectively “Search Engines”), provided that (i) Publisher’s search terms, listing titles and descriptions, and the content of their Web sites do not violate the trademark, copyright or any other rights of Advertiser or any third party, as determined by Yahoo! in its sole discretion; and (ii) Publisher complies with the following guidelines, as determined by Yahoo! in its sole discretion:
Oooooooops…
So i have decided to pull out just to be on the safe side.
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This entry has been indexed and ranked by Google within 2 minutes or even less. Crazy! I remember the times when you had to wait for days to get indexed.
There is a new advertising network around http://www.brring.com When you sign up you get given a personal phone number. Whenever someone rings that number, they hear a 10 second ad and then get redirected to your mobile or house phone. You get paid up to $1 for every phone call. This is great! The only downside is that you will probably annoy the crap out of your friends and family. You can always ask them to ring you on your original number but then you will not generate any money.
There is a way around it. In fact you can get paid for advertising. Grab yourself a free/old sim card and setup a voicemail. Register an short and easy to remember domain name. What you do then is sign up to some dating PPA (Pay per action) affiliate (Or any other affiliate). You can probably find a few programs on www.cj.com. You then redirect your domain name to your affiliate url. Ask your girlfriend or any other hot sounding female to record you a small voicemail message. For example: “Hey! You probably hear this message because my line is busy. Meanwhile you can check out some of my pictures on yourshortdomain.com. My username is somesexyname. The signup is free”. Take your sim out and make sure people get redirected to your voicemail when your phone is off. You are ready to go!
All you need now is people to ring you. Post a classified ad on craigs list, gumtree or any other free classified site. Something along the lines of: “Fun and sexy girl looking for some fun” “Hey! I recently moved into (City name) to go to university and i don’t know a single person here. I’m very bored bla bla bla. Im into dancing and bla bla bla. If you can save me from boredom/want to have some fun bla bla bla give me a call on (Insert your brring number here). Post as many ads as you can on various sites and different location sections.
Now whenever someone rings you after reading your ad they will hear a quick advert from bringg. That’s your $1 or so. Then they get redirected to your personal number. Obviously the sim car is somewhere on your desk by now so they get redirected to your sexy female recording. If they decided to go further and sign up to your free PPA affiliate site you get further $2 or so. The response/conversion rate should be great and you can easily make a few $100/day. I was doing something similar a half a year ago, earning £400 ($800) per day.
PS: You need to be a US citizen to participate even though you can still find a way around this… Hmmmm lets see… Skype number for example? If you live outside of US and don’t want to do anything sketchy then just wait. There are plans to expand the service to other countries.
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Rumour has it that a few guys had problems getting their payment out of brring. So proceed at your own risk
This time i will give you an idea and it will be up to you to turn it into something a bit more productive. Or even expand it and try out other combinations. You can become an Ebay affiliate on http://www.cj.com The whole program is quite boring. You get £8 for every confirmed and active user you refer. Quite frankly i could not convert a single visitor myself. It just seems like everyone in the world already has an Ebay account. What i did like however is this:
3. Action: Winning Bid
ActionCriteria A registered user places a Winning Bid.
Action Referral Period 7 day(s)
Action Referral Occurrences Unlimited
Commission 30.00%
So after clicking your link an active Ebay user will bring you 30% of the money Ebay makes out of him in fees for 7 days. What you need now is to find some people who use Ebay every day or at least once a week and trick them into clicking your link. Then you pretty much profit from their Ebay activity for the next 7 days. There are a lot of forums and various groups out there for Ebay users. I could go there and post something along the lines of: “Does this coupon for 20% off on Ebay works for anyone? -link-”
Ok, i won’t get into any more detail than that…
A few months ago i decided to buy a little proxy and see for myself what the fuss is all about. I simply could not be bothered starting from scratch so i purchased this proxy for $60 which already had some nice search engine traffic. Within the first week i realised that it is a waste of my server resources. So i simply made it unusable by removing the search form. To my surprise my CTR went through the roof. I was no longer using up my bandwidth yet this little proxy would make 5 times the money from Adsense. It earned me just under $600 within the last few months. Not bad eh?
From the users point of view… They search for the proxy on Google and when they find one they realise that it does not actually work. They still need to a proxy so they click on the Adsense ad because this is just what it is displaying.
Fair enough… this user will probably never come back but who cares? As long as i have a fresh stream of daily visitors from SE’s I’m happy running a static page that needs no work what so ever and does not use any of my resources.
