Posts Tagged ‘affiliate marketing’
Hey again.
It hasn't been as long since my last post as it seems to be. But it has been a while.
You see, my host (not my site) got hit with malware and it's been a PITA. Oh well … I won't bore you with the details. All I want to say about it is don't ever take a friend's recommendation when you choose a host, no matter how attractive the deal may appear. Do your due diligence and research, research, research.
But on with the point of this post:
One of the very few training products I currently feel great about recommending to you has just gone on sale, and I wanted to let you know about it right away.
This will be for 5 days only, and I don't expect the price will ever be this low again.
For the next 5 days, Mike Johnson is offering his very impressive Profit Marketer Membership at a very special discount. This is a complete internet marketing training solution, from beginner to advanced, that includes over 95 training videos, over 80 premium WordPress plugins, over 100 premium WordPress themes and a live Niche Finder and Keyword Service all integrated into an online WordPress installation, upgrade, management and backup tool.
This is the ultimate membership for anyone wanting to build a serious, money-making online business. I don't know of anything else like it anywhere. But it is simply too much to go into any more detail here. You'll want to see this and evaluate it for yourself.
Take a look:
http://www.mythospheres.com/recommends/profitmarketer
As part of an effort to be of more of service to my subscribers, I've decided to start sending out more informational content — hopefully on a semi-regular basis.
Weekly, maybe? We'll see.
The length and quality of the writing, as well as of the information, may vary considerably. It will depend on what else (and how much) is going on with me, but I'll simply postpone and omit if I feel it's necessary.
So … this may eventually become a full-blown marketing newsletter. But for the immediate future, I expect it to be fairly short and to-the-point articles about various aspects of online marketing (and perhaps offline, too, occasionally).
My subscribers will find resources that pertain to the discussion (when available and when I feel comfortable recommending them) at the end of these soliloquies. (Soliloquies? Fancy word, yeah?) I will be putting these resources at the end so as to not interrupt the flow.
Some of this information (and the aforementioned resources) may prove to be "old hat" to some of my subscribers. Since I don't have a very complete picture about how much or how little experience various folks have, I have to go with the basics at least some of the time, right?
But if you are, or become, a subscriber and are patient with me. I know, sooner or later, I'll get around to providing some information that even the most seasoned marketer will find extremely valuable. Just don't expect it every time out.
Okay?
This will be for my subscribers ONLY and will not be published here, at AWeber, or elsewhere.
So if you haven't signed up yet, please do so and watch for my next email, most likely in about 12 hours or so, in which I will begin by discussing …
Don't you just love cliff-hangers? LOL.
To your continuing success!,
Richard D. Farley / MythoSpheres Development
Have you heard of ClickTale?
As all online marketers know, this game's all about traffic and conversions. But how can you be sure your conversion strategy is the best it can be?
One way of course would be if you could watch your visitors and see how they respond to differing parts of your sales message, i.e., your web page(s). Well, ClickTale won't let you do exactly that, but it does come fairly close.
ClickTale can provide online businesses with some very real insights into customer behavior. Many marketers are already finding this an excellent resource for helping to improve the performance, usability and conversion of their websites. Every mouse move, click and scroll is tracked.
There are also what ClickTale calls "heatmaps" and behavioral reports that complement traditional web analytics.
Definitely worth checking out. Sign up here for your FREE subscription,
To your success!,
Richard D. Farley
As I'm sure you know, being able to drive sufficient traffic is a major element of success for just about any form of internet marketing or online business. So I want to tell you about a guy that knows how, who has a system he developed himself through trial and error and from which I have benefited in my own business.
His name is Bill McRea, and he calls it 'Marketing on the Fringe 2.0.'
I took his original course, 'Marketing on the Fringe 1.0,' and was so impressed I am thinking about signing up for the new course even though I'm expecting a good percentage of it may be the exact same information as his original course.
So what I'm saying is, you REALLY need to check this out.
Why?
Well, I won't ask you to suspend your better judgment and swallow whole every miniscule mote in his sales copy, but Bill's "traffic machines" are the real deal, and this new course is the next level in his traffic machine revolution.
They are almost COMPLETELY automated, and they do drive the traffic. Since taking the first MOTF course, and implementing only some of Bill's suggestions, I have sites that are driving at least 10 times the traffic they were before. Frankly, I need to cut this post short so I can go implement some more of his suggestions.
Bill's letting people in the door to test the system for just $5 right now. But I don't expect that offer to last very long. So you've got to move on this.
Those of you who know me, know I've only rarely been this promotional or this enthusiastic, so you also should know I'm really serious this time.
Check it out right now, okay?
(Edit:: Nov 21 2009 – I owe most of the recent increase in my traffic to what I learned in his first course. Not all directly of course as I've continued to build on that knowledge, but I wouldn't have ever had the knowledge to build on in the first place if I hadn't taken his course. Bill told me this morning that he is almost sold out and expects to be tearing this down soon. Now maybe that's just a marketing ploy, and maybe it's not. In my experience, Bill usually means what he says, so to be on the safe side, you should fork over that massive $5 for the 7-day trial and check it out now if your current traffic strategy isn't all you hoped it would be.)
http://mythospheres.com/recommends/McReaMOTF2
To your ever-increasing success!,
Richard D. Farley
Now that the dust has begun to settle, I thought it might be appropriate to offer an opinion about Mike Filsaime’s AffiliateJump.
First things first. This post is not about promoting AffiliateJump. Nor is it about trashing Mike. (I won't name names, but there is actually another marketer out there who has also reviewed AffiliateJump, is misrepresenting a few things, and is being very unfair to Mike.) I simply bought into the program and this is my honest assessment.
Before I convey that assessment though, for those who may not know what AffiliateJump is, let me begin with a little background:
CPA, or Cost Per Action, marketing has been gaining momentum lately. Perhaps for good reason — after all, CPA is all about generating leads (freely submitted contact information from potential customers) and offers you the chance to make money, significant money, from a single customer. Some CPA offers pay as much as $200 when a customer signs up.
Further, you don't actually have to sell the customer anything. You simply send them a link.
Many Internet marketers are promoting CPA these days, and certainly some are making some serious money.
But the problem for many has been how to get accepted by the CPA networks. This has proven difficult for some as many of the networks require, among other things, a proven track record and a demonstrated ability to generate traffic, certainly two requirements newbies, and even some more experienced marketers, can have difficulty with. Additionally, there is the problem of choosing which offers to promote as well as how to promote them.
Mike Filsaime's AffiliateJump promises a turnkey workaround for these challenges. For example, you don't have to be accepted by the CPA networks. By simply buying into AffiliateJump, you are guaranteed to be "accepted" automatically.
Through AffiliateJump, your offers will be available to you through an easy-to-use interface, and you can build "websites" to promote those offers in just a few minutes, or actually, even seconds if you're not too particular. Not only that, but you don't have to buy a domain name to do it. That's all taken care of for you.
Then all you do is promote these "websites."
Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, yes and no.
While the folks at AffiliateJump seem to be working on some of the shortcomings, as of this writing there are definitely some problems. For one, the "websites" — or actually pages — that AffiliateJump allows you to create will all be located at similar domains (there are several available, but still a fairly limited choice). For another, the domain names, being limited, will not necessarily have much to do with the names of the products you'll be promoting, which means you could have a more difficult time driving traffic to your site.
You are given a choice, and with care you can get somewhat close in some cases, but certainly not all, and the closer the domain name comes to the name of the product or service that is being promoted, generally the better. Search engines seem to like it much better when the domain name and the content somewhat agree.
Another drawback, but another thing the folks at AffiliateJump claim to be working on improving, is that the pages generated are extremely similar, both in appearance and content (they don't have to be exactly the same, there are some customizations available, but they are very limited as of this writing).
Here are a couple of examples:
If your browser doesn't support frames and you would like to view the example page, Click Here, then use your browser's Back button to return to this review.
If your browser doesn't support frames and you would like to view the example page, Click Here, then use your browser's Back button to return to this review.
While the pages are attractive enough, it means all the other AffiliateJump members will be promoting pages that may be identical to, or vary only in minor respects from, the ones you are promoting, and it means the sites will look very similar to the search engines. Very similar, as opposed to identical, might not be a fatal drawback, but keep in mind that many of those very similar pages are likely to be hosted at the exact same domain name. So, you know, if that's not fatal either, it's certainly not good.
It could be a major problem, in fact, in terms of attracting visitors to your pages. While a Google rep very recently said Google does not actually penalize duplicate content, he also explained that the effect is often the same, and it is a truism in internet marketing at this point that the search engines don't like duplicate content, for whatever rhyme or reason. So if, say, a hundred, or a thousand pages all look extremely similar, it is likely only a few will get any attention from the search engines and the rest will be left out — and given Murphy's law, probably yours, and that would mean no search-engine-generated visitors to your offers. Of course you could drive traffic through advertising, but keep in mind that for every product or service offered, you'll be competing with every other AffiliateJump member for the exact same offers.
Another drawback is the price. To be able to create 100 offers, you'll pay. At the time I signed up, it cost $200 for the initial setup fee (refundable, but only after you have earned $1000 in commissions) and then $99.95 a month thereafter. There were cheaper options, but hardly worth having in my opinion, as they were so limited in terms of the number of pages you were allowed to set up and promote. Additionally, there are some of my long-time internet marketing acquaintances who are, rightly or not, outraged that anyone should be asked to pay for the opportunity to promote the offers of a CPA network in any case, and while AffiliateJump may yet prove itself very worthwhile for some, or in one sense or another, they certainly do have a point.
It seems odd that these matters were not given more thought from the start, especially considering Mike Filsaime's experience. It would be tempting for a cynic (or realist?) to surmise that AffiliateJump has been designed to make a lot of money for Mike, rather than having been designed with any real concern for creating any real opportunities for its members; however, as I said at the outset, I'm not about trashing Mike here, and also as mentioned before, there does seem to be a sincere effort on at AffiliateJump to address many of these issues. Recently, they have also been adding some training videos.
I'm not prepared here and now to pass a final judgment, and I am going to reserve the right to recommend and promote AffiliateJump at some point in the future if things improve enough; however, some of my continued evaluation will depend on how long I decide to remain a member, and in conclusion, newbies, and less-experienced marketers — who are clearly the primary target customer base for AffiliateJump — are, in my opinion, the ones least likely to be able to profit from AffiliateJump, so I'd warn most to stay away, at least as it stands now.
Meanwhile, if you are truly interested in CPA marketing, which admittedly can be highly lucrative, I'd like to suggest something you may find more worthwhile.
To receive an email about my recommendation, and a full explanation as to why I recommend it, please enter your name and email below. And yes, we (my company) may, very occasionally, send you another recommendation or notice of opportunity, but we certainly will not SPAM you or waste your time, and you will be able to unsubscribe from the list anytime you like simply by clicking on a link that will be included in any email we may send you.
Best regards,
Richard D. Farley
