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Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing’ Category

Big Mistakes Made in Affiliate Marketing

By Mohnish On June 2, 2009 16 Comments

You must have heard about the positive things about affiliate marketing. But do you know the negative side of it? There are a few things that can kill your affiliate marketing website before you started. Here are a few tips that you should take care of while running a affiliate website:

1) Do not pick up a dead product
One thing you have to make sure is that you do not pick up a dead product. No one buys a dead product no matter how cheap it is. Today, If I compare the Apple iPhone with some cheap ePhone (just for the sake of naming it), I won’t get any sales. Why? I won’t get any sales before the product is dead. There is no/less demand for the ePhone compared to the iPhone. Since the ePhone is cheaper than the iPhone, I won’t even get a good affiliate commission. (You might get a good affiliate commission but not always)

2) Too many products of the same category
People won’t buy the product via your website if there are too many of them with the same category. If I’m listing web hosting offers, they should be to the point and simple. They should be compared in such a format that even a newbie would understand which product you’re trying to promote more (of course the one with more affiliate commission! ๐Ÿ˜‰ ). Simple yet important rule: Keep it simple.

3) Knowing your keywords
Many people don’t take the advantage of the free marketing tools available on the internet. Use these tools and get the best keywords. Add them in you’re title/meta tags and see the results.

4) Quitting too early
Alright, so it’s been 2 months and you have no sales. So what do you do? No! Don’t quit! It’s only been 2 months!!! It’s been about a year for Sensonize.com and it just started making money with the affiliate ads. Wait for as much as you can. Keep working. Add new features/content to your website/blog everyday and see the results for yourself!

Feel free to share your opinion in the comments section. My next post would be about the things new bloggers should keep in mind when they start blogging. Do subscribe to my blog to stay notified about upcoming posts.



Evil Affiliate Marketing

By Mohnish On February 20, 2009 9 Comments

The concept of Affiliate Marketing is simple: Refer a buyer to the seller and get a cut of the sales.The problem is sometimes a reader won’t click on the affiliate link right away. However, instead of coming back to your blog to find the affiliate link, they just directly enter the URL of the seller and buy the product. The seller made a sale but you just lost an affiliate commission.

This is the reason why I always hide my affiliate links. You will see my affiliate products name as it is with an internal link, but when it redirects to my affiliate link it loads the page before leaving the website. I.e My affiliate link is never revealed until the destination is reached completely ๐Ÿ˜‰

Once you get a reader to visit the affiliate site, your affiliate cookie/ID will be set on their computer. Once the cookie is set, you don’t have to worry if the reader doesn’t buy or sign up right away. They can even leave the site and come back another day (even if they don’t use your affiliate URL anymore). As long as they make a purchase before the cookie expires, you’ll get your cut of the sale. Most affiliate programs offer a 30 to 90 day cookie.

Embedding The Cookie With An IFrame

An iFrame allows you to embed another HTML page inside the current web page. What you do is load the affiliate page into your current page with an iFrame but make the iFrame so small that the readers can’t see it. Here is the code to do it.

<iframe src=”http://your-affiliate-url.com” width=”1″ height=”1″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”></iframe>

The above code opens up the targeted affiliate link in a tiny 1×1 pixel window within your website. The window is so small that it is not visible to your visitor but the cookie gets set! ๐Ÿ˜‰

Now you can say “Hey! Buy Hostgator web hosting for 1 cent” without using your affiliate link in your post but you will still get your commission ๐Ÿ˜‰

Yes, this is a very evil way to set an affiliate cookie on a reader’s computer. Because of the evilness, not all affiliate programs will allow you to do this. You need to check with the program to make sure they allow the embedding of an invisible iFrame. Most affiliate programs wonรขโ‚ฌโ„ขt allow this and will ban you if you try it.



Affiliate Marketing rocks but CJ sucks!!

By Mohnish On February 20, 2009 14 Comments

Many of you guys might have noticed that I have taken off the CJ ads from the blog because they refuse to pay me the affiliate comission I made. Reason? The advertiser says that transactions worth $15,000+ were fraud!!! I mean c’mon!! FRAUD? When I ask them what do they mean by ‘FRAUD’? They say that those transations were duplicated or were made by illegal sources. I understand their reason of illegal sources but why won’t they pay me if the transactions were dupilicate? I mean c’mon! If they store a cookie into the visitors computer and the vistor orders twice does the transaction become FRAUD? In fact, they should pay me double the amount!!

I was marketing Hostgator and $15,000 from $15,700 something were sales that I made for the popular web host, Hostgator. Now what happens is, many of us know that Hostgator offers a 1 CENT plan which is extremely popular. CJ counted those orders also as ‘FRAUD’ . That is non of my concern what the visitor orders when I send him to Hostgator. He can order the 1 cent plan or he can buy a dedicated server, my commission should be as it was fixed.The waiting time for Hostgator which I believe is 120 days is another negative factor. First they make you wait, then they claim that your transactions were FRAUD! Another negative factor is that you get $100 for a shared web hosting plan and you get the same amount for a dedicated sale. Their major negative point is that it takes about 30 days for CJ to clear the payment from your Indian Bank account. So yes, CJ is full of negative factors and I hardly see any positive factors for Indians or International affiliates.

What is next?
Well, I’m not at all upset about it!! Glad I came to know that CJ is a fraud before I continued sending clients and filled their pockets and waited for my payment which was likely never to come. In India, it takes upto 60 days to verify your transaction + 15 days for them to verify your commissions + 15 days to deliver the cheque and about 30 days for the cheque to clear your bank(The cheuqe is in USD) = 120 days of complete waste of time! I know many Indians make money with CJ, but is the time worth waiting? If you are in direct contact with the company, you can get your payment within 65 days of the transaction and via Paypal.

I will no longer join any Affiliate Companies since I have completely lost hope and trust in them. I joined CJ after seeing the positive responses, but those positive responses were of the people who joined CJ about 1 month back and were happy seeing their ‘Balance’ grow on CJ. Note: CJ adds balance even for the 1 cent/offer sales and then deducts it later, after 60-80 days.

I’m very dissapointed to say that CJ is a BIG SCAM. It might be paying its affiliate users but not all! CJ shows high hopes to newbies of $100/sale(even for the 1 cent plan) and then crashes them later!! If I placed the adbrite ads for 120 days on Sensonize.com, I could have easily made about $1,000 which is a very good amount compared to a double with CJ.

All you guys wasting your time on CJ think over again, is it even worth your time? Good luck!



Did I just hit the $10k mark? My secrets…

By Mohnish On January 18, 2009 3 Comments

BOOHOO! I hit the $10k mark on CJ! Ive made sales of $10,698.96 from all my websites on CJ.. ๐Ÿ˜€ But these are just sales that I made over all in the past 2 and half months.. I hope commissions are more or equal to this :Pร‚ย  So let me share my affiliate marketing secret today and how I made $10k worth sales within 2.5 months. I just hope that this continues forever.. ๐Ÿ˜€

My product will be Hostgator Web Hosting which I choose from my favorite affiliate network – CJ.com ๐Ÿ™‚ I choose this product because “Web Hosting” and “Host Gator” are reputed keywords and have a good PPC value.

Many people believe that the only way you could make money is with PPC networks. Don’t depend on income from a single source… Tomorrow if that source bans you(eg. Adsense), you will be left with no income at all! Please don’t apply this logic with your daily routine job, you might lose that one too! lol Instead of making money only with PPCs why not make quality Affiliate websites and make double the money? (PPC + Affiliate sales)

Step OneThe Domain!
First thing what you should do is to check out which domains are available on your keywords. My keyword is “Hostgator Web Hosting”, get the best domain that suits your product. I will use the Google Keyword Tool. I have got a huge list of keywords. So now I know which keyword is Googled the most about web hosting. Remember: You need to work a little bit hard to get visitors from search engines, but I will tell you about that later on. Make sure that you choose a dot com or dot net domain. Next is web hosting (I use Hostgator). Choose the correct web hosting for you which loads in all countries and can hold high traffic.

Step Two – Your Search Term!
Just make sure that your sure about your search term. My search term is “Hostgator Web Hosting”. Thats not it.. Some people search for various keywords which may be related to your keyword but doesn’t come in your domain.. So if someone searches for “Hostgator Hosting January Promo” your website wont make it to the 1st page. But you don’t have the keywords “January or Promo” so how will your website feature on the 1st page? For this you need to add some articles related to web hosting about which I will tell you later on in this article.

Step Three – Content of your website!
Google loves wordpress. But are you done with the buying the domain and hosting? I use Name.com for buying the domain and hostgator for web hosting. Now you have a wordpress website and you are ready to go! Your wordpress website theme should be nice and cool.. should not be too loud nor too light. Must be colorful and content must be visible. As far as website content matters, did you collect your articles on web hosting? Now what you do is a bit of “cheating”.. yep.. You time stamp those articles.. ๐Ÿ˜€ Show them like they were posted way back in 2005 and so on. How does this help? Google doesn’t see the WhoIS of your website, it only reads the publishing date of your article and content, older the content higher rank on your keyword(You must have seen XYZ.com which is not at all relevant to the keyword come on top of the search, this is because of the content age). Now make a post with your affiliate banners and little bit of content. My product is hostgator web hosting so I will list their uptime, space, bandwidth features etc. Also make categories and tags like “Hostgator Web Hosting for $4.99 January Discount, Coupon” Add names of months if your product has a different promo for every month. Make sure you link keywords from your (time stamped)articles to your post with the banners ๐Ÿ˜‰

Add another page for another product related to your 1st product once you start getting traffic. Since my 1st product is Hostgator web hosting, my 2nd product could be Lunar Pages Web Hosting (Only do this if you start getting 1 – 3 sales a day). Now you have a lot of time .. so why not add a Contact us page and a About me page stating that your website started 2-3 years back and some details about you and your product ๐Ÿ˜‰ This would help your visitors gain trust in you and also contact you for queries.. I’m sure you don’t wanna lose those *extra* bucks, eh? ๐Ÿ˜‰

The Secret!
In 3 easy steps I taught you to reach the top of google without working hard. So what is the secret? Well.. There is no secret ๐Ÿ˜€ This my friend, is what people call “Affiliate Marketing” ๐Ÿ˜€ Yep.. You will get the same content in the ebook which says “Make $10,000 online with affiliates in 10 days” on DP. But let me tell you the reason why your website is coming up in the Google ranks – 1) Your using wordpress and as I mentioned above, Google loves WordPress! 2)Your site is now 100% relevant to your keyword! ๐Ÿ˜€ Now just wait for few days and watch your bank balance grow..

Next is what?รขโ€žยข
Make more websites like these and make money online. Then maybe after a few months start your own blog and teach people how to make money online ๐Ÿ˜‰ Affiliate marketing is 100 x more time and money saving than PPC networks. So *beep* PPC networks and make serious cash with affiliate marketing!

Good Luck!
Written by Monty from Sensonize.com ๐Ÿ™‚



Affiliate Marketing – What does it mean?

By Mohnish On January 15, 2009 2 Comments

What is Affiliate Marketing?
In my opinion, affiliate marketing means the way you present a product for a company and make money when your product is purchased.

How to make money with Affiliate Marketing?
There are several ways to make money online with affiliate marketing.. I will target the main ones in this post.

1)ร‚ย  Website/ Content
What is basically a website/content method ofร‚ย  affiliate marketing? It means that you own a website which has quality visitors, good content and you blog/post about products or a certain niche and add your affiliate links/banners in them. Eg: JohnChow.com

2) Search Engine Marketing
Now what is search engine marketing? This can be done in 2 ways –

A) Buy Adwords/Premium Ads of a particular network and link it to your affiliate with a keyword. So what does this mean? When someone searches for your product keyword(eg. Web Hosting) your affiliate link comes up on the top! If the person who is searching for web hosting and your affiliate link is on the first page you will make money outta it for sure.. this is because, that person is in need of webhosting and is 99% going to buy it if your product is reputted! So spending $x/click for a keyword and making $100 confirmed is a good method of Search Engine Affiliate Marketing ๐Ÿ˜‰

B) SE Marketing with your website.. The best example I could give you is my website – Webhostingoffers.org. Now how this work? 2 things are important in this one.. 1) DOMAIN 2) CONTENT. If you have a good domain and content this is the BEST WAY for affiliate marketing which hardly costs you $5-6/month for hosting and $10/year for your domain. But be careful, many affiliate companies are against this method.

3) Email Marketing
Nothing special about this one.. people offer free downloads/products and make people sign up then bombard them with spam emails containing affiliate links.

There are many more ways, but the above 3 ways are widely used. If you know anymore feel free to post below. I will do more research on Affiliate Marketing and update you guys ๐Ÿ™‚ Till then, post your reviews and opinions on Affiliate Marketing and how you make money off it ๐Ÿ˜‰