The Honest Way

After my last post Make Money? What’s What!, where I made a valiant attempt to set the record straight as to what really needs to happen if your want to make money online, I think its time to bring things right up to date with the new eBay affiliate changeover.

Today is the first day of the new system where the eBay affiliate program is taken away from its traditional home at Commission Junction and placed firmly at the feet of its originator - eBay.

That means some big changes for those using the editor tools to generate live eBay listings on their websites. I’m affected too in a reasonably big way as I’ve been quietly building a lot of sites based soleley around the eBay editor tool software. Those of you using BANS may have different issues here, as your CJ PID will only work for another month and then you’ll have to have migrated everything over to your eBay affiliate id.

BANS is not my speciality, so I’ll leave it for Vic to explain.

What is my speciality is the eBay editor tool that generates BANS-like windows to ebay live auction listings that I’ve been placing in my sites.

I’ve been waiting patiently for today to happen so I could sign-up for my new eBay affiliate account at the eBay Partner Network. That was pretty painless and now I’m a fully fledged member of said network. But the thing I was holding my breath for was the new id that I could place in my editor tools generated eBay windows so that I could transfer my payments from CJ to eBay.

But to my dismay, when I got to the new editor tools page, the message “…coming soon” stared back at me. There was no link and no editor tools to get into. ¡Joder!

So it looks like I along with the lord-knows how many other marketers will have to wait for our precious tools to become available so I can start making more money from my sites!

That’s as far as I can go right now, until I know more about ths.

I’ll post an addendum when I know more…

***********

Ok, I know more!

I just logged back in and the editor tools are up and running. This is so cool!

First you need to create a campaign id for the site or page you’ll be displaying the eBay listing. That’s as easy as entering a website name and some unique identifier that is relevant to your site. You are given a numeric campaign id which you need to copy.

Enter the editor tools page and log in with your ebay account name and password (NOT your new affiliate user. Fill in the boxes as before - its all the same except when you get to the bottom of the page. Where you used to put Commission Junction in the drop down box then enter yoru PID, you now enter eBay Affiliate Network and then enter your campaign id in the box. Then create your page.

I just set up a new page and loaded it into my website and it looks great!

Now I just need a decent stream of organic traffic to come see what I have on offer on my site!

Perfect. I’m as happy as Larry. Sorted!

Now the hard work begins with setting up a lot of sites with the eBay editor tools software and then figuring out how to get traffic to them. My niche affiliate marketing site is already set up to host several subdomain niche sites which are all separate websites in their own rights. There are a couple that I’ve worked quite hard on in order to bring them up to speed quickly and that’s my designer bag site and my sunglasses site. At this point there’s not a lot of point deep linking to all the sub-pages for both those sites, as they need to get placed in the serps.

For that, I’ve been getting links for them slowly and naturally as possible so as to get them growing naturally. Its a long term effort as with most things on the Internet. If you try to rush things, you’ll just get sent straight to the “box” from where you’ll do no business. One more site to provide a link for as it is already getting traffic from one of the other search engines and could do with being placed in Google’s pages and that’s my diabetic shoes site. It’s exciting that this site is already producing clicks, but so far no successful bids. That’ll come in good time, I’m sure as its getting a nice trickle of organic traffic of around 20-30 uniques a day already.

To add to these sites, I’ve been buying some new .info domains while GoDaddy are having a 99 cents sale. That’s too good to resist, as each domain is a potential link producer as well as host for more eBay listings.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

In affiliate marketing there is nothing more powerful in terms of promotion than by writing an honest review of a product that you want to make money from. I’ve just done exactly that with an honest review of the “Get Google Ads Free” product.

If anyone’s interested in trying this for themselves, the steps are pretty straightforward. So by putting in a little effort in writing the review and some associated articles anyone can promote any affiliate product and expect to make some affiliate commissions for their trouble.

First you need an affiliate product to review and promote.

I chose one straight from Clickbank. By taking the top product from the list I got the hottest product of the moment and then wrote a review of it. The product is “Get Google Ads Free” and I published the review on a page on my Make Money site at this link:

Get Google Ads Free Review

If you want to have a look for yourself, I’ll wait… but do remember to return here after you’ve read it!

You’ll notice it’s a pretty unbiased review of “Get Google Ads Free” and gives the bad points as well as good ones. I added a couple of nice banners to liven the page up a little plus the all-important affiliate links directly to the sales page, which are cloaked to prevent affiliate link theft. You may also notice that there is no sales pitch in there, just a review and link. It relies on people’s curiosity to take them to the author’s own sales page where he can do all the selling.

Then my promotion of the review begins.

In order to drive traffic to the review page, I’ve blogged about it here and in my other blogs. I’ve written an article to be spun it out to a few article directories. That will get the page indexed quickly by the search engines as well as generate some traffic to the review page.

Then I’ve visited some of the better message boards (the ones that allow ads) and post in them.

I’ve put up some small banners in my blogs and Squidoo lenses to spread the word from my own camp.

While there are other good methods to use, like safelists and traffic exchanges, I don’t much like them as promotional methods so I’ll pass on them, but if you like them then go right ahead and use ‘em! The more different ways you can spread the word there about your review page, the better.

I’ve used social networking and pinging to promote my blog posts which will get some more interested traffic.

So far, my affiliate promotion of “Get Google Ads Free” is a work in progress, so lit will be interesting to see how this works out over the next couple of weeks or so.

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

Affiliate Marketing works best when you focus on just one niche and then promote it well.

That statement is quite true, but if you pick the wrong niche then all that hard work could come to nought and you’d be joining the rest of the 95% of unsuccessful internet marketers. That is far too easy to do for most people - me included!

So how to you beat the odds and create your own success from affiliate marketing?

My honest way is probably not most people’s way, because it entails a lot of work. As I’m accustomed to that, it doesn’t really faze me, so I just push on regardless. Here’s my way to show success and make money with affiliate marketing:

Take the first statement in this post and turn it on its head!

I mean don’t settle for just one niche and put all your energy and enthusiasm into it - pick a dozen niches and work at them all! True, you can’t possibly give them all 100%, because you will spread yourself too thinly. But by hedging your bets and picking a cross section of niches that you can sell affiliate products in, you stand a chance that if one niche fails the next will succeed!

But how do you do that? Doesn’t that mean buying a lot of domains and building a lot of websites?

No and yes to thos two questions. No, you don’t need a load of domains, just one. Yes, you’ll have to build a lot of websites, but don’t despair - it can be done quite easily.

Take one .com domain - make it generic. Its tough to find good .com domain names, but possible. You don’t want a long name if you can help it. Then get professional hosting that allows you to create unlimited subdomains - Hostgator are the best for that, and the host that I personally use and this site is hosted on. Then simply choose your niches, do your keyword research and then generate yoru subdomains based on the best keywords.

As for building websites, just build one simple one. I built a single page site with an external stylesheet and used basic PHP to include modules for the main page - so there’s a header file, a footer file and side-bar file (bigger sites also have a menu file for multiple pages). That’s so any changes you need to make can be done in one file only - that saves a lot of work later on.

Then create a generic template website that you’ll use for all your niche subdomain sites.

For each niche site, just change the header, links and wording and then start adding your reviews of affiliate products to each site. Once each site is ready to go, start promoting it by publishing articles to GoArticles.com and EzineArticles.com - two of the best article submission sites. That will generate high PR back-links to your site and get it indexed with the search engines fast.

Then get busy with all the other promotional methods that I’ve blogged about in past posts and get traffic to your sites. I

f you can’t be bothered searching for all the information you need to get high traffic levels to your sites, you can get this fantastic eBook for a paltry $4.97 that will tell you exactly how to get all the traffic you’ll ever need for free: Free Traffic Explosion.

Then watch as things start to happen - affiliate sales start appearing and things start to escalate from there. That’s if you’ve done all the work I just told you to do, of course!

Congratulations, you have joined the 5% of successful internet marketers!

Terry Didcott
The Honest Way

          

You are among the first to hear about this (and potentially profit from it).

I’m sure most of you have heard of QVC, the cable TV show that advertises just about anything from gadgets to appliances to jewelry etc and sells them for an absolute bargain price every day! This show attracts an amazing amount of viewers in every country it’s screened.

Well, a similar phenomenon is about to hit the online world.

I just heard about this and was impressed enough to jump on it. Its called DealDotCom and they have what looks like a killer affiliate program to just die for! I just signed up myself as an affiliate and would love to extend the offer to you too. You can click on one of the links and be nice to me by signing up with my link - then start promoting it yourself and get people to sign up with yours!

The best bit is: It’s free to sign up!

Just like QVC, they sell consumer goods at bargain basement prices. As an affiliate, for every customer that you send there who buys, you get paid! The site is in pre-launch at the moment but is about to go live any day now.

So what are you waiting for?

You can click here: DealDotCom to go to their site.

Terry Didcott
THE HONEST WAY