Be Sure To Check Out The New Pages Added
I have been asked by a number of people to do some actual reviews of IM products I have used, so I set up a separate page on this site specifically for product reviews.
I just posted my first one entitled “Affiliate Genie Review,” and you can see it on the menu bar (it also includes a video of the software in action).
I hope they are helpful so you can make an informed decision about whether or not to invest in some of these tools.
Thanks!
Campaign Anatomy – Let’s Get That Profit Center Up!
If you are just arriving here, this post is part of a series of posts where I show you, step-by-step, what I do to put together a profitable campaign. To start at the beginning, GO HERE.
How’s it going guys? I’ve had my grande black eye from Starbucks, so I’m ready to go!
So, we have our keywords, we know what vendors we are going to promote, what do we do next?
At this point you have to decide if you want to do a free campaign or if you want to pay a few dollars to get it up and running. The difference, other than a few dollars, is that with free services, you don’t own anything, and with paid you own your own little piece of Internet real estate.
Some people say to only use free methods to start, like Squidoo, blogger, Wordpress.org, weebly, etc. However, I like to have my own domains. This is because I can do whatever the heck I want to with my site on my own domain.
On the free sites you are a slave to their policies – at any moment your site could be taken down. This happened recently to me over at Squidoo with a Magic of Making Up lens. One day it was there, the next it was gone.
Poof! All that work down the drain.
So, for my main sites I direct traffic to, I buy my own domain name. It’s super easy to get one. I get mine from Hostgator because it’s about $7-$8 a month for unlimited domain hosting. You can, however, use whoever you want really, but Hostgator is one of the best.
Some others are Namecheap, Godaddy, and ProHost.
A couple guidelines on domains:
- I like to get a .com or .net since they are more common and people are more familiar with them.
- I pick one of my keywords (the one I like the best) and I try to make that my domain name
- I try NOT to have dashes, underscores or any other symbols in my domain name.
- If I cannot get my main keyword in my domain as a .com or .net, I will add something to the keyphrase, like “now” or “site” or something like that. For example, if my keyword was “dog training tips” and I could not get dogtrainingtips.com or .net, I might try for mydogtrainingtips.com or .net.
- If this does not work, I will move on to the next keyword and try with that one. And then the next one…and on and on.
- If I cannot get any of my keywords in my domain, I will resort to dashes.
- If dashes fail, then I will try for a .info or .org name, but this is a last resort.
After all this I should have my domain name.
Now you have to build your site…
Let me just tell you that if you have no experience building a web site, go with the free methods talked about above, like Squidoo, or even set up a Wordpress blog. I say this because the layout and design is already set-up for you for the most part.
While you do this, become familiar with building sites and look at tons and tons of other peoples sites to see what you like and don’t like.
Keep a file and make notes of what you like and don’t like – what grabs your attention at certain sites. What’s your first impression of sites you visit?
There are 2 parts to building websites: the aesthetic and the technical.
The aesthetic is how pleasing it is to the eye. I have found that you should stick with red, black, green and blue as “buying” colors.
The technical is how to actually get it up and running online. I can’t go into a full tutorial here on how to actually build one because there are tons of software programs (paid and free) that you can use to get it up and running.
But here are some guidelines I use to set mine up:
- I generally do not use dark background colors.
- I almost always have an attention grabbing headline.
- I keep the typing to a minimum and have a fair amount of white space.
- I have a lot of “call to actions” (i.e. affiliate links)
Ultimately you want to make it easy for the person to get through to the vendors website without being spammy or hard sell too much.
IMPORTANT***ALWAYS keep in mind that your job as an affiliate is to “pre-sell” NOT sell. Let the vendors sales page do the selling. Your job is to just get them to click on your affiliate links.
Now, as far as what type of site to set-up, there are a few kinds you can choose from. You can have a mini-site, an authority site with 100’s of pages, an e-commerce “store”, a review site, a squeeze page, etc.
In this sample campaign we will be using a review site. Review sites work fairly well when you have multiple products in a niche that are similar. In this guitar niche I am doing a review site because of this – there are a number of guitar lesson courses online, so I will review them for the visitor.
Resources To Build Your Sites
When I started internet marketing, building a website was a daunting task. Not that I am technically challenged (well, not too much!), but it was just all so new. I’m also 37 years old, so I didn’t grow-up with the internet!
I went out and bought a software called XSite Pro 2. I set-out building my own sites by pure trial and error. I figured out ftp (file transfer protocol) and built quite a few sites with X Site Pro. And looking back now, I built some really crappy ones!
The point is, DO NOT BE AFRAID TO MAKE MISTAKES. Your site will NEVER be perfect, just get your content on there and publish it. Start promoting it as soon as possible and you can make changes as time goes on.
A tool I just started using which is literally allowing me to have sites up in minutes (I have to add content, but the design, meta-tagging, etc are 90% done from the get go) is called Affiliate Genie.
Chris Rempel, aka the Lazy Marketer, developed Affiliate Genie from the ground up and has put some truly amazing features in it that allow you to crank out SEO friendly affiliate sites pretty fast.
If you invest in tools like this to make your life easier, you can check it out at his site at www.AffGenie.com
But, again, keep in mind that it is not necessary to have this tool, there are free methods. They take a while longer to learn and get sites up and running, but heck, they are free.
One such free software is NVU. NVU is a free website design software with a lot of great functionalities. I still use it for some quick, easy squeeze pages. Play around with it and see what you think.
So, the goal for now is to:
1) Get a domain name and hosting at a place such as Hostgator
2) Review other sites and make note of design elements you like and don’t like
3) Get your own site up and running if you use a domain name. For this, you can use Affiliate Genie, XSite Pro 2 or NVU. If you opt for the free methods, build a free site through Squidoo, Wordpress, or weebly.
In the next post, we are going to talk about getting loads of targeted traffic. Without traffic, there’s no sales, and without sales, there’s no moolah!
We’ll talk about some basic traffic strategies as well as some advanced ones.
I am also currently working on some pretty cool traffic strategies that can dramatically increase your traffic. I hope to be done testing them in the next few weeks and will let you in on them as I perfect them!
Keep moving forward!
-
Tools I Personally Use & Recommend
