Yeah, you heard me right. The N1WAY 9-step process to making money on the internet came out a few weeks ago and it has hit the ground running hard. One of the readers Mark Hanson is now taking the guide and building a live site to showcase the steps of the guide. At the end of the project, Mark will be giving away his website to one of his lucky readers. If you are interested in joining this competition, click here.

Now onto the guide itself. I purchased the guide last week and had a chance to read through the steps to creating a killer niche store. I will be honest and tell you that the information that is authored into the guide is commonly available information that you can find yourself through hours and hours of research and brushing off inaccurate information on the internet. I found that the content put all the information accurate in a single location and tailored it specifically to building a niche store using either BANS or PhpBay.  I think the guide is well worth the money if you are trying to be successful at building a niche store. When I started BANS almost 3 years ago, I had such a tough time gathering and filtering all the information. Wish I had this guide then.

Another great technique I picked up from Wicked Fire is that you can use quizzes to promote CPA offers. In my previous post, I talked about using polls and the reason why polls work to promote your CPA offers is because the punter is not just given the offer, but had to work for it by voting on a poll. With a quiz, the punter is even more involved and has to answer a series of questions before receiving the offer.

There are two approaches of using quizzes to promote a CPA offer:

1. As a reward: In this technique, you let the punter go through the process of performing the quiz and then reward them with “a chance to win” something from your CPA offer.
2. As a reality check: In this technique, the quiz is used to ask the punter how much he or she knows about a particular topic. After completing the quiz, you tell them that they should buy/purchase your product so that their life can benefit from it.

Let me try to explain with an example for each of the techniques above.

Reward Quizzes

In this technique, you provide a quiz to test the punter’s knowledge about a popular topic such as Britney Spears. You have to create 5-10 questions about Britney Spears and ask the punter to do the quiz to see how worthy of a fan the punter is. You would want to make the questions really obvious so that the punter will get most of the questions correct and then you can reward the punter with some Britney Spears ringtones or a chance to win something for answering all questions correctly.

Reality Check Quizzes

Say you want to promote debt relief CPA offers. Instead of jumping up and down asking the punter to visit your website and sign up for debt relief, you are better off creating a quiz whereby you ask the punter to answer a set of questions to determine if the punter is in control of his finances or if he/she needs assistance with debt relief. After providing responses to the quiz, your landing page would then tell the punter that he/she needs assistance with debt consolidation and then show your CPA offer explaining how your offer can benefit the punter and assist him with his financial problems.

The reason why reality check quizzes are effective is because the outcome of the quiz stirs and emotion close to home that something is wrong in the person’s life and that he needs to find a solution. Coincidentally, you offered a solution at the end of the quiz.

This is as far as I’m going to explain the quiz technique. There are many types of quizzes to implement and many different offers you can promote with quizzes. The possibilities are endless and it is up to you to think-outside-the-box and create some interesting quizzes for your CPA offers.  Give quizzes a try and if you are successful at using this technique to promote CPA offers, please report back and let us know of your experiences. Unfortunately, PPC Coach does not promote this technique, so you won’t be able to receive coaching for quizzes. However, I am sure you will find users there that have tried this technique and are able to give you some advice and direction.

In March, I had a horrible PPC run. In fact, I lost $70 in all my poll PPC campaigns and have come to the conclusion that polls are a very difficult strategy for PPC and they are no longer effective due to the high amount of scrubbing that happens. So for April, I’m going to keep it simple and just do plain old-fashioned direct linking. Since the most important part of a direct linking campaign is the adcopy, it reduces the number of variables that influence my success or failure of affiliate marketing. I will report back at the end of the month on my results.

Despite my PPC failures in March, I had an incredible return on my eBay affiliate sites. I cashed in $110.89 from just two sites generating traffic purely through SEO. My sites are simple blogs with links to eBay auction listings. Here is a cool graphic showing my clicks to earnings ratio. I know that my numbers are very low and that there is so much more potential to develop these sites, but I am happy with where they are sitting at the moment.

I have done this time and time again in every project I have taken from software development, to graphic design, to advertising, and now internet marketing. My biggest weakness is getting over the mental roadblock. The best analogy I have is to think of internet marketing like advertising. If you are trying to create an ad for a diet cola, would you copy the competitor’s ad for diet colas? Would your ad talk the lack of calories in your diet cola? Well, you could, but you wouldn’t want to. Consumers are buying diet cola because of its diet/low calorie qualities. They already know that and they are not stupid.

Instead, you want the diet cola ad to show what life is like if they drank the diet cola. You want to show how their life is improved (or how somebody else’s life is improved). You don’t market the drink directly, but you market the benefits of the drink. There are a million ways to illustrate this. Just turn on the TV and watch the ads displayed. This is called out-of-the-box thinking.

In internet marketing, out-of-the-box thinking is vital to the success of your affiliate marketing business. Do not copy what your competitor is doing, though it may work on the short-term. Do not setup an ad campaign that showcases obvious facts of the product to the consumer. You need to sell the benefits of the product or illustrate how the product will improve the consumer’s life. There are a million ways to illustrate the benefits of a product. As an internet marketer, if you can brainstorm some these out-of-the-box ideas on how a consumer’s life would benefit from your product, then you are in the game.

In my experience, the biggest mistake a beginner makes when doing affiliate marketing is trying to sell the product itself. It is the differentiator between a successful campaign and a losing one. If you are having trouble coming up with novel ideas to promote your product, I suggest signing up for PPC-Coach because they coach you with some examples. You can follow their directions to the letter, but remember what I said above, you need to expand on the directions given and think like an internet marketer to be truly successful in this game.

So the next time you setup your ad campaign, ask yourself whether you are showing the benefits of the product, as opposed to selling to the features of the product. Let me know how it goes.

When it comes to promoting e-mail and zip submit offers, you need to know when to keep an offer and when to toss an offer. I am sure that every affiliate marketer has their own strategy that works for them. Each strategy’s validity will also depend on many factors including promotion technique and target demographics. Today, I will show you two methods that are commonly used.

Method 1 – One offer at a time.
In this method, you would push only one offer in your campaign and use certain hard rules to keep or toss the offer. This method minimizes financial loss and will give you some ideas on whether the offer is working for your campaign. Its disadvantage is that it takes a bit more time to find the best offer and you are more prone to scrubbing by the advertiser.

The hard rules for swapping out an offer for another are as follows:

• Toss if after 30 clicks, there are zero leads.
• Toss if after 50 clicks, there are fewer than 2 leads.
• Toss if you have lost $15. This last rule is a catch-all accounting for your starting bid price and irregardless of click/lead ratio.
• Toss if after 10 offers tried, you still don’t get a lead.

Once you’ve found an offer that is giving you a positive ROI, you can either stay there, or you can continue testing other offers until you’ve tested all your offers and had a chance to evaluate which one was the best performing.

Method 2 – Rotate-rotate-rotate.
Anybody who’s read topics on PPC surely have heard about rotating multiple offers. Rotating will give you a feel (possibly early on) about which offers are converting well. You might even find the good converting ones in your first 30 clicks to your landing page. But in most cases, you will go through about 100-300 clicks before you know which one is a winner. This is more expensive obviously, but you may have some early indicators on which offers are converting. Another benefit is you minimize potential scrubbing and spread your eggs around in case an offer disappears.

In this approach, if you are receiving lower than 10% click/lead conversion, it is probably time to toss the entire campaign due to lack of interest. It may also be that your ad copywriting has mislead the visitor or that the landing page itself is flawed. Now remember that this 10% conversion rate is not written in stone because it is highly dependent on the CPA as well (i.e. payout $$$). But you really want to be in the 25% or higher range to be truly effective.

After launching 3 campaigns on the content networks (Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter), I learned that sub-300 keywords per campaign will get you little to no traffic at all. On my Adwords campaign, I have provided just shy of 400 keywords and received ZERO impressions over the last 5 days. On adCenter, my smallest campaign contains 72 keywords and is receiving about 100 impressions per day.

A bit of asking around and doing some investigation, I learned that 2000-3000 keywords is what I should be aiming for. Also, there is no need to be diligent and prune irrelevant keywords on the content network. With the polls that I am running, you want curious people generally interested in the topic to hop onto your landing page and submit their vote.

My next goal is to launch 3 more campaigns with 2000+ keywords in each campaign to generate more impressions. The one good thing about getting low impressions in my first 3 campaigns was that I did not have to pay for clicks, because I received none.  So I consider this a free lesson in PPC advertising. You don’t get very many things for free in this industry.

One last thing I’d like to add is that if you have a new Google Adwords account, it may take several business days for staff to perform a manual review of your account and campaign. If you want to start quicker, setup an account and setup a quick campaign for a pre-existing website (does not have to be yours). This will get your account approved so that when it is time to setup a real ad, your account will be ready and your ad will be online within a few hours instead of days. Total cost of this effort doesn’t need to be more than $5.

Lesson Learned

1. Ensure at least 2000+ keywords on the content network.
2. Don’t worry too much about keyword quality.
3. Setup and get your Google Adwords account approved early.

Today, I wrapped up my first Facebook campaign. I can tell you right now that it was an e-mail submit offer from Neverblue that pays $1.60 for a visitor to upload their baby photo to The Great American Photo Contest. I was able to get 4 days of impressions from Facebook before it completely crapped out. The problem with this offer is that you need to upload a photo of your baby. That means the user has to go hunt down that baby picture. I found that most of my users were clicking on my ad during the day time, perhaps when they were at work, using the work computer. It was unlikely for them to have their baby photo on their work computer. Hence the weakness in the Facebook system for not allowing ads to run on certain time slots only. I have since dismantled this campaign and moved on to others. But I came out making $16, which I am quite proud about. Remember, that I started out with FREE money from Facebook.

January 2009 Stats

So what is next for me? I am going to try out some offers with MaxBounty on Facebook to see if they can convert a little better. My goal is to minimize input that is required to convert. No hunting for photos to upload. Just enter your e-mail address or ZIP code and that’s it. Let that be a lesson for others. Keep user input to a minimum for conversion.

I have dedicated myself to read almost all posts of the top 5 affiliate marketing blogs. Why am I reading instead of making money marketing? I am not the kind of person to just jump right into things. I need a plan of attack and this whole week, I have been building this plan of attack and looking at various strategies. I need a strategy that fits my lifestyle and utilizes my best strength. I will publish my plan later and hope to look back at this plan one day and see what I did right and what I did very wrong.

Back on topic … I stumbled upon another great post about step-by-step affiliate marketing posted on The Affiliate Toolbox. This one talks about promoting ringtones, which from what I learned is a heavily saturated sector. If you are interested, please have a read. You will notice that the strategies mentioned in the affiliate marketing tutorial I posted yesterday is also being applied here.

This is a must-read for beginners entering the world of affiliate marketing. After 3 days of reading and reading and even more reading all the popular affiliate marketing blogs and the WickedFire forum, I finally stumbled upon Uber Camp’s Affiliate Marketing Tutorial. This tutorial is amazing and walks a beginner through the whole process of getting into affiliate marketing. It took me nearly 4 hours to read through the tutorial in one sitting, but I feel more educated in the area of affiliate marketing and PPC advertising for the following reasons:

• All the acronyms and definitions used throughout the topic are clearly explained.
• The author goes into excruciating detail about each step of the process from picking an affiliate network to getting your first payout.
• The author has also graciously unveiled the tips and dirty tricks that one would get only from experience and trial-and-error.

Many thanks to Uber Camp for this tutorial, a very valuable resource for anybody wanting to break into affiliate marketing.