Why? Because the cost per click on mesothelioma related adsense ads is rumoured to be approaching $100

So the adsense newbie thinks ‘Oh, I will build a content rich site on mesotheliomas and all I need is two clicks a day and I am sorted’

They are so very wrong

Before you run off and do that I will save you any disappointment by explaining why this plan is ill adviced

• That you will get $75 per click on a mesothelioma ad is a myth for most people. Yes it is true that the maximum amount of money for this keyword is stupendously high but most people get a much lower amout per click. This is probably related to click through action ie a click that results in an action will get better ads and more revenue per click than an empty click. Now I must admit that this information is not from Google but it is what i have deduced from reading the forums and my own experience.

• There are currently 10.9 million pages indexed in google for the search term mesothelioma. A lot of these pages are genuine mesothelioma patient concern groups, mesothelioma lawyers, mesothelioma medical experts and such. So how are you the adsense newbie planning to break into this market.

• The amount of work that you will put into this just to make an impression is better spent in a smaller, less competitive niche

• The same advise applies to other niches like student loans as with mesothelioma

Time frame from start of learning affiliate marketing to getting your first site operational

As a new affiliate marketing business person, expectations can run unbelievably high.

You have read all the offers ‘start making money within 15 minutes of reading this e-book’ or ‘How to make $300 every day’ You know the adverts I mean.

And you have probably bought some of these products only to find IT IS ALL HYPE!!!

Don’t despair. Affiliate marketing does definitely work. You just have to give it time.

With this series of affiliate marketing introduction guides, I will give you tips that may help you in the affiliate marketing world.

First off establish a time frame within which you want to start making money with your affiliate marketing business. Be realistic.

Obviously this time frame will be affected by how quickly you assimilate facts and how much time you have to spend developing your projects.

I think for the average person, 3 months is not too lofty a time frame

Month 1:

Month 2: Find your niche

Find a good product in your niche

Research your keywords

Build your site

Publish your site [get decent hosting ]

Register with search engines, directories

Month 3: Advertise your site with free classifieds

Check ranking

Tweak your site

Submit articles, write in forums, blogs

]]> http://affiliatecheck.com/?feed=rss2&p=20 http://affiliatecheck.com/?p=19 http://affiliatecheck.com/?p=19#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:24:38 +0000 Brandon http://affiliatecheck.com/?p=19 You’ve been working your site for months; burning the candle at both ends to promote and refine your online business. One morning you wake to your inbox full of sales orders or commission notifications. Kaching! Finally, success!

After a few days or weeks of this, you start to think about what you’ll do with this new found wealth, after all, $x per day multiplied by 365 adds up to a fair amount of scratch.

The dreaming begins. A new car? A boat? A house? A holiday house? Heck, just to get out of debt would be a start. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to not only dream this way but to discover that these things are truly possible to achieve.

.. but…

The reality of online business

The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away; especially if the traffic you’re getting is from organic search.. that is, the free listings provided by search engines. Your traffic may continue at that level for years, but it may also literally dry up over night. I was reading a study recently which stated small online businesses that don’t have a bricks and mortar store get on average 2/3 of their traffic from organic search listing. Could your business survive such a loss?

Survival strategies

Running a successful site/online store purely via the grace of search engines is a white knuckle ride indeed. Probably one of the best bits of advice I can give to anyone who has stumbled onto high ranking good fortune is to save as much of that cash as you can and continue working like mad for a while.

Build a nest egg up to at least 3 months of living expenses before you start spending too much of it on other goodies, and especially before you quit your day job - 6 months living expenses at a pinch if you can wait that long

During this saving phase, try to implement strategies to make your site more “sticky”; to encourage your visitors and customers to keep frequenting your site. Newsletter, blog, forum, competitions; these are all good options - particularly newsletters or a blog. Keep close tabs on your industry, don’t let what the cash can buy you cloud your thoughts too much. You need to think about what you’ll do should the free traffic suddenly dry up. Approach your cash management as if tomorrow your business will disappear.

Rainy day revenue streams

If you generate income through affiliate programs and you’re offered a choice of large one-time commissions or residual (ongoing commissions), if the company is solid; go for the residual commission option - this revenue may be what keeps your mortgage paid if things go wrong and buy you a little breathing space.

My wise old Chinese accountant once told me back in the days when I was selling computer equipment something along the lines of; “you won’t get rich selling products, sell services”. This was at a time before the Internet really took hold in Australia and “soft goods” became commonplace. Still, he was correct - selling hard goods is a hard game - inventory to maintain (unless you’re drop shipping), handling costs, tight profit margins. Software, information products and services is definitely a good way to go; so if you deal only with hard goods, consider subscription services as a way of generating an ongoing flow of income.

Rainy day revenue - survival in online business

You’ve been working your site for months; burning the candle at both ends to promote and refine your online business. One morning you wake to your inbox full of sales orders or commission notifications. Kaching! Finally, success!

After a few days or weeks of this, you start to think about what you’ll do with this new found wealth, after all, $x per day multiplied by 365 adds up to a fair amount of scratch.

The dreaming begins. A new car? A boat? A house? A holiday house? Heck, just to get out of debt would be a start. It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to not only dream this way but to discover that these things are truly possible to achieve.

.. but…

The reality of online business

The Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away; especially if the traffic you’re getting is from organic search.. that is, the free listings provided by search engines. Your traffic may continue at that level for years, but it may also literally dry up over night. I was reading a study recently which stated small online businesses that don’t have a bricks and mortar store get on average 2/3 of their traffic from organic search listing. Could your business survive such a loss?

Survival strategies

Running a successful site/online store purely via the grace of search engines is a white knuckle ride indeed. Probably one of the best bits of advice I can give to anyone who has stumbled onto high ranking good fortune is to save as much of that cash as you can and continue working like mad for a while.

Build a nest egg up to at least 3 months of living expenses before you start spending too much of it on other goodies, and especially before you quit your day job - 6 months living expenses at a pinch if you can wait that long

During this saving phase, try to implement strategies to make your site more “sticky”; to encourage your visitors and customers to keep frequenting your site. Newsletter, blog, forum, competitions; these are all good options - particularly newsletters or a blog. Keep close tabs on your industry, don’t let what the cash can buy you cloud your thoughts too much. You need to think about what you’ll do should the free traffic suddenly dry up. Approach your cash management as if tomorrow your business will disappear.

Rainy day revenue streams

If you generate income through affiliate programs and you’re offered a choice of large one-time commissions or residual (ongoing commissions), if the company is solid; go for the residual commission option - this revenue may be what keeps your mortgage paid if things go wrong and buy you a little breathing space.

My wise old Chinese accountant once told me back in the days when I was selling computer equipment something along the lines of; “you won’t get rich selling products, sell services”. This was at a time before the Internet really took hold in Australia and “soft goods” became commonplace. Still, he was correct - selling hard goods is a hard game - inventory to maintain (unless you’re drop shipping), handling costs, tight profit margins. Software, information products and services is definitely a good way to go; so if you deal only with hard goods, consider subscription services as a way of generating an ongoing flow of income.

bt, saving and investment

While things are good, still try to keep capital investment down if possible during this period and certainly don’t become over-committed credit-wise. That rainy day revenue saving could serve you very well, both psychologically while you’re still doing well and especially should you suddenly hit the skids. How frustrating would it be to run yourself clean out of cash during a slow period when maybe all you needed was to be able to hang in there for one more month?

By the same token, don’t be too tight when it comes to reinvesting back into your business - growth is a good buffer against hard times. Determine a safe percentage of revenue to reinvest that still sees your bank balance grow and then stick to it.

Entrepreneurial spirit vs. safe play

I’ve been making a living purely online now for over 5 years and the web has been very generous to me - but I still have a “day” job in the online world. Often I wonder if I had jumped away from the job at particular points if I would have been able to pretty much retire by now. I’m not complaining about my income, I’ve been very fortunate; but there’s nothing like a family and mortgage to throw a bit of cold reasoning water on an entrepreneurial spirit that can sometimes get a little heated :). And perhaps that’s not a bad thing.

No doubt you’ll come across rags to riches stories, and they do certainly occur - but the rags to riches to rags scenarios and the rags to even older rags occurrences are far more frequent.

Chasing your dreams is great, throwing everything on the roll of a dice can be exhilarating - but always consider what you can lose by doing so. It’s the old gamblers saying of “don’t bet what you can’t afford to lose”.

Get rich slow… and keep it :).

1. Pay Per Sale (PPS) - This is the most common type of affiliate program. When promoting programs, products or services on a pay per sale basis, the affiliate only earns money when a sale is made through their affiliate link. Usually the money earned is a percentage of the total sale, and this is called the affiliate commission.

With a Pay Per Sale type of affiliate program, it’s important for the affiliate marketer to select programs and products which will sell well in their chosen niche. Otherwise you’ll be wasting a lot of time and effort and getting very little in terms of sales results.

In order for sales to be made consistently in a Pay Per Sale program, the products must be very good, the sales letter must be very good, and the merchant must also be very good. Then of course, the affiliate must be able to send enough targeted traffic to those sales pages, so that sales can actually be made.

2. Pay Per Click (PPC) - A pay per click affiliate program usually involves some sort of advertising. Instead of the affiliate marketer recommending specific products and services, they simply put advertisements on their website or in their email newsletters. When visitors or readers click an ad, the affiliate earns a small amount of money.

The most popular PPC affiliate program online today is the Google AdSense program. There are many others though, and each has different criteria for joining, as well as earning money and being paid.

PPC affiliate programs are popular with many affiliate marketers, because they feel like they don’t have to actually try and sell anything. Instead, they can provide great content on a blog or website, and the visitors click ads passively.

3. Pay Per Lead (PPL) - Pay Per Lead affiliate programs are popular because an affiliate can make money just by giving away something free. There is no sale involved, and the affiliate referral commissions are often quite lucrative.

With PPL affiliate programs, the affiliate usually just needs to get their visitor to fill out a form requesting more information, or fill out a survey or opinion poll. In some cases, all the affiliate has to do is get the visitors to sign up to an email list, and they’ll earn money from these actions.

4. Pay Per Action (PPA) - This term is often used synonymously with either any or all of the above. With a pay per action affiliate program, the affiliate’s job is to get their targeted visitors to take a specific action. Sometimes that action is to buy something, sometimes it’s just requesting free information. Other times the visitors have to take a survey or sign up for an email list. The types of actions vary from one affiliate program offer to another, but just like the other affiliate payment types above, once the action is performed, the affiliate earns a commission.

That’s why I decided to make a shortlist of hand picked resources to guide your Internet Entrepreneurship path through Affiliate Marketing:

Forums

• 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Forums  by Linda Buquet. Not sure why your site is not converting? Still waiting for the first sale? Not enough visitors to your site? Feeling down? 5 Star Affiliate Forums it’s the “Affiliates doctor”, ready to heal you up and guide your path through the help of the great community around it.
• AssociatePrograms Affiliate Marketing forum by Allan Gardyne. It’s a friendly, helpful affiliate forum where you can find answers about getting started, how to earn more, affiliate networks, blogging and many more.
• The #1 Affiliate Marketing Forum :: ABestWeb  - probably the largest forum about affiliate business.

Blogs

• Shoemoney . There are plenty of Internet Entrepreneurs out there but Shoemoney has an unbiased view on making money online and he got famous for showing his over 100k earnings Adsense check 
• Problogger by Darren Rowse. Making money with your blog, best online money makers, and lots of tips and resources to run your online business.

E-books

• If you haven’t already bought an affiliate marketing e-book, well, that’s good as you can get most of the information for free anyway like Allan Gardyne’s “77 Ways To Get Traffic nearly all FREE” 

Conferences

• Affiliate Summit  is the place to be. It happens several times a year in different locations in USA, including the first Summit in Europe in London this year.

Magazines, trainings, statistics

• E-consultancy  - a generous list of studies, statistics and facts about almost everything that happens online
• Affiliate Classroom  - Step-by-Step Training For All Levels of Affiliates
• Revenue Magazine  - a revenue magazine which delivers the most integrated and personally relevant information to today’s online marketers

Social networking sites are also referred to as Web 2.0 sites. These are simply an extension of the community based websites you probably already use. Forum, discussion boards, and active blogs for instance, are all a form of social networking. They contain groups of people who are all interested in the same or similar topics.

The social networking sites which have become popular lately, tend to integrate a little more interactivity into the mix though. Some of them allow members to broadcast messages to each other; some allow uploading of pictures, videos, or audio files; some have hundreds of different discussion boards for members to talk on; some allow you to save and share your bookmarks with friends; and some even allow you to earn additional advertising or affiliate revenue from the content pages you add to their network.

One of the most important things you need to know about social networking though, is that each site has it’s own individual rules. In some places you might be allowed to link directly to an affiliate product or program for instance, while in others you may be restricted to links which lead to your own blogs or websites only. And there are some places which say you’re not supposed to link to anyplace where you’re trying to sell stuff.

By using social networking sites which allow you to link to an affiliate sales page, your own website, or a blog you run, you can dramatically increase the amount of income you’re making as an affiliate though. As long as you play by the specific rules for the sites you’re using, and you do your promotions consistently and well.

On forums and discussion boards for instance, you can’t usually just go in and post an advertisement. Instead, you need to join the discussions which are already in progress. Try your best to provide helpful and useful content to other members of the board, and be sure to post as often as possible too. In each post, you should have a forum signature which contains a small ad for what you’re offering. Link that signature to your website, blog or affiliate sales page. Then the more you post, the more that signature will be seen. And the more helpful and useful your posts are, the more other members will be inclined to click your links.

If you use a social networking site which allows you to create and share your website bookmark links, then you’ll want to link to your website, blog, and affiliate sales pages of course. Be sure to put a brief description on the links if you’re able to, because this can help entice other members to see what you’re linking to.

Meanwhile, in the past 3 months my net income has risen 20% even though I’ve only been working an hour or two per day since my son was born. How is that possible? It’s simple: Internet Marketing is very resistant to the economic woes facing other industries. Let’s talk about why.

Advertising

Television and radio are kept alive by the ROI (return on investment) of their sponsors, and the commercial web is no different. The advantage of advertising online is that it’s far more efficient. When a sponsor puts an ad on a television show or radio program, they can only be vaguely certain of who is watching or listening. Sure the networks provide their own research in demographics and how large their audience is, but much of it is guesswork and impossible to know for sure.

Also, results from TV and radio are very difficult to track. How do you know if the person who just bought your widget was motivated to do so by seeing or hearing your commercial? Again, it’s guesswork.

The internet is different. When you place an ad online, you can track exactly how many people saw it, precisely how many people responded (clicked-through) and exactly how much money you earned from it. You can work to refine and improve your ads to improve your ROI as well. It’s vastly superior to TV and radio in that regard.

So when it comes time for companies to tighten their belts, it only makes sense that they will focus on the ad medium that has the best ROI.

What does this mean for you, the Internet Marketer? It means that your advertising-driven web sites that use AdSense or other programs will likely remain relatively healthy during hard times. My own AdSense income has not changed much despite the economic troubles, which is no surprise to me. It’s also good news for anyone in the search engine optimization business (or related businesses such as pay-per-click), since they, too offer great ROI opportunities.

Selling Information

Another reason that Internet Marketing does well when other sectors are having problems is that people who lose their jobs in those other sectors often turn to the Internet to try and earn a living. When an industry starts having problems, people who lose their jobs in that industry often have a very hard time finding work in the same industry. If they can’t find a job, what can they do? Again, many turn to the Internet — the “new economy.”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of sharks out there ready to take advantage of these individuals. But for those of us who are honestly offering real opportunities and solutions, we find even more customers during such hard times.

Leveling the Risk

A third reason why Internet Marketing tends to do well even when things look gloomy everywhere else is because the Internet makes it much easier to level your risk. I have customers in 60+ countries. When one country’s economy isn’t doing so well, another’s is flying high, and so I’m less affected. A unique advantage of doing business on the web.

So stay focused on your online business, and remember that you’re in a better position to weather the storm than most.

The Blog That Resurrected My Rankings

I had a site devoted to a particular type of exercise equipment. The site was in the top 7 results for its keywords in Google for over six months. Unfortunately I had server problems and the site went down for a few days. Google crawled the site constantly because it was well-linked, and so big G knew instantly that the site was down. Since it stayed down for a few days, Google must have decided it wasn’t coming back up, and its rankings plummetted.

After the site did come back up, it reappeared in Google, but this time on the third page (ranking 25 - 28 for its keywords, on average). Its original page one rankings just wouldn’t come back. I shrugged it off as a lesson learned and basically forgot about the site.

Early last week, though, I was testing a tool I’m creating that helps you write and post blog posts to Wordpress blogs super fast. I decided to setup a blog on the site that lost its rankings, just to test it out. I made a bunch of blog posts (they were post-dated so they would show up slowly over time), and sat back to see what would happen.

To my surprise, over the weekend my site jumped back onto page one for its rankings. I hadn’t touched that site in months, and now it’s ranking better than it ever was — at #4 for 3 great sets of keywords. This, of course, has spiked my AdSense earnings for the site.

Another nice benefit of the new blog is that the blog itself is getting some additional traffic from Google, even though the blog does not have any external links directly to it. Google is applying the authority of the site itself to the blog. Since the site is well-linked, the blog is given a bit of “trust” by Google and is appearing in the search results as well.

Scraper Sites Can Help You Rank

On a related note regarding blogs and traffic, I’ve recently setup a blog that automatically creates a bunch of posts each day based on a variety of keywords. This blog is a test for a larger idea I have in mind, and the test is working great, with the blog having achieved more than 12,000 unique visitors in the last 5 days. The vast majority of the traffic has come from Google.

As part of that same test, I setup a second, similar blog that does the same kind of thing. Despite the second blog actually having more content, it has (so far) received no joy from Google at all (it’s not even indexed yet).

The difference is in the scraper sites that are referencing the content. The keywords that I’m creating content around for my successful blog is a scraper magnet — hundreds of scraper sites are auto-posting content from my own blog to theirs, and giving a reference link back to my blog posts to try and make it more legit.

How do these scraper sites know about my brand-new blog posts so fast? Because the blog is indexed by Google’s blog search, and many scraper sites scrape results from that blog search to post to their own blogs. They also scrape many other blog search engines, and since my blog pings those search engines when I make a new post, the blog’s content gets picked up and spread around fast.

Those links from these automated scraper sites have resulted in my blog quickly gaining hundreds of backlinks from all over the web, and that means great rankings for the pages of my blog.

The second test blog I setup, however, has not attracted the scraper blogs and so hasn’t even been indexed in Google yet. It might seem strange that scraper sites can help you rank, but if they link back to the source of the content, they really can.

Trackbacks Are Your Friend

On a final note, I recommend setting up your blog to automatically post trackback links to the blog posts that you link out to. If you’re not familiar with trackbacks, it’s a simple concept: any time you link to an external blog post from within your own blog post, your blog posts a “comment” to the blog post you’ve linked to, letting the readers of that post know about your own post referencing it.

Now, not all blogs will approve your trackback link, but many will, and I’ve received literally thousands of visitors from a single trackback link appearing on a popular blog. So make sure you setup your blog to automatically post trackbacks to the blogs that you link out to — it can often result in a flood of traffic.

Have any more great blog-related traffic building ideas? Care to share your opinion about this post? Please post your thoughts in a comment below.

As it was mentioned above, there are a number of different ways that you can prevent yourself from joining an affiliate program that doesn’t pay. One of those ways involves choosing a well-known affiliate program. If you need assistance choosing an affiliate program, you can seek it online. There are a large number of online websites that give accurate and updated information on a wide variety of affiliate programs. There are also programs, which are regularly referred to as affiliate directories. These directories are actually in charge of running a company’s affiliate program. Many of these programs, which include LinkShare, come highly rated and recommend, as do the affiliate programs they have listed in their directories.

In conjunction with researching an affiliate program, you can also research the product that is being sold. A large number of customers write product reviews. Many of these product reviews, which can be both positive and negative, can be found online. You will also want to check out websites that are known as scam websites. Scam websites allow internet users, just like you, to post ways that they have been scammed and by whom. You can find information on poor quality products, individuals, companies, and even affiliate programs that are not considered legitimate. When researching an affiliate program or even a product, it is important to remember that nothing and no one is perfect. While it isn’t uncommon to find one or two negative reviews, you need to be cautious of numerous negative reviews.

Since it is relatively easy to avoid an affiliate program scam, you are advised to do so. If anything appears out of the ordinary or if you suspicions are raised, you are advised to use your common sense. In the long run, you will be glad with your decision to do so. Not only can avoiding an affiliate program scam ensure that you get paid, but it will also help you save your own reputation. The last thing you want to be associated with is an affiliate program that doesn’t deliver the products that they promise. In fact, your name or your company’s name could literally be drudged through the mud. While you may think that this won’t have a long lasting impact, it might just, especially if you plan on selling your own products in the near future. Even if your products are quality products, many consumers might remember you as the person who scammed them before.

Although it is relatively easy to spot an affiliate program scam, there are a few that might “fall threw the cracks.” If you later determine that you are involved in an affiliate program scam, or even just a program that is selling poor quality products, you are advised to get out as soon as possible. Severing your ties will help to ensure you get paid, as well as build a good name for yourself.

“Website hosting companies work by providing space on their own servers in a data center for use by the websites that they are hosting.”

Free Web Hosting

A free web hosting service works by putting advertising on their pages. Although there is no cost for the service, users will find their sites of limited functionality. There will be very little bandwidth and storage space compared to a paid web hosting service.

The user will probably need to post advertising for the host, and certain file types may not be allowed. Many free web hosting services also have a paid service and use the free service as a way to encourage people to buy their service. The paid service will have an enhanced package, which expands the features of the web host.

Shared Web Hosting

Another option is shared web hosting, in which a number of people share one web server and each person has his or her own website on the server. While this is an economical option, the security of each individual website may be compromised by the fact that they are used on a shared server.

Paid Web Hosting

Many people opt to pay a service to host their web domain. These paid services can cost as little as a few dollars a month. Depending on the nature of the company and the price the individual pays for web hosting, the domain comes with a certain amount of storage space and bandwidth for each month. The storage space, usually measured in gigabytes, determines how much information in files you can keep on the site.

Individuals looking for a web host should see how much space on their web files take up on their computers before entering into an agreement. The bandwidth is the amount of data transfer that visitors on the site can achieve each month. This number is also measured in gigabytes, and must meet or exceed the amount of data each visitor accesses, multiplied the amount of times visitors access the site each month. If the amount of storage space or bandwidth is inadequate, the owner of the domain will usually be able to acquire more for an added fee.

Top 5 affiliate programs

Web hosting is undeniably a growing industry with an increasingly stronger demand and wider need. If you are running one or more websites why not try advertising the best performing web hosts?