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Day 14 - Making Money American Idol Style
By Mike Mindel | August 15, 2007
This summary is taken from Day 14 Training of the Thirty Day Challenge.
A Warning
Today I am going to show you how we initially make money.
But I want to be very careful about this.
As soon as I mention what I’m about to say, a lot of people are going to jump to all sorts of conclusions.
These consclusions will be wrong.
So please, keep an open mind and listen to the whole lesson of day 14 before we continue.
Hear me out right through.
Mmm K?
Where Are We?
We’ve done our market research, we’ve narrowed down to our keywords, three articles (or pieces of content) for each keyword.
I still want you to go to your Bloglines and check out your feeds looking for new articles.
Again we want you to come up with three more pieces of content (action point 1).
No need to do it all at once. You can spread them throughout the day.
Wordtracker GTrends
Notice in the toolbar that the new Wordtracker Gtrends tool is available
You can click on that link and it will take you directly to the tool
NB: This is a mashup between the free Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool and the Thirty Day Challenge GTrends process.
Please note that due credit is given at the bottom of the tool here
So it looks like good old Wordtracker. The only thing that gives it away is the thesaurus.
We type in our keyword ‘Speed Reading’ and click Hit Me
We’ve all seen that before. But what’s this on the right?
Check this out.
Click on a bar graph and you’ll see this
and this
An entire summary based on the Thirty Day Challenge GTrends process!
We’ve got Google Competition of 679 and searches/day of around 10. Which is a keyword we would reject normally.
But for the purposes of our ongoing explanation we will carry on using it.
You can also click on the links at the bottom of the GTrend summary
Lets click on the affiliate link which takes us to Google
Very useful for today.
Each search is now in spearate tabs on Firefox so you can jump between them
and we can also click on the Google trends link
which takes us to the full Google trends page for ’speed reading free’
including the Languages section and the English comparison bar we’ve talked so much about
and see the comparison for yourself.
You can close the screen with the escape key and go back to your results.
NOTE: Eventually the ‘male yeast infection’ keyword will lose its power so we’ll add in a whole bunch of results. We won’t have to reveal them but just rotate them through to remove the distortion.
“speed reading free” +affiliate
We need to see if there are any affiliate programs for ’speed reading free’. Some fascinating results including some of the Thirty Day Challenge blogs!
Notice this adword
Lets pop over to ClickBank.com…
ClickBank
Their url is just simply http://www.clickbank.com.
ClickBank is an affiliate marketplace. That means that people offer
their products up for affiliates to sell and make a commission.
You can either sell your own product or promote someone else’s.
Now we want to click through to their Marketplace
and have a look at this page…
We want to see if there are any affiliate products with ‘Speed Reading’ (with quotes)
Look at all these products related to ‘Speed Reading’
A whole bunch of them.
Among the list we can see:
- 16-Minute Speed Reading Audio Program
- The New Science of Speed Reading
Nice.
What Are We Doing Here?
It’s a test.
In the old Thirty Day Challenges we used to do fly catching, where we capture a prospects name and email address and also give them a question.
It gave us an idea of the market.
It was a very clever technique and still works very well in the context of list generation.
But the problem is it still don’t prove to us how many people would look at something and then convert to buying.
Gary Halbert put it best when he said
At the end of the day, the only true test of a site, is whether someone is prepared to get out their wallet, open it up, pull out their credit card, type something in, and actually give you money.
That’s the ultimate test. There is no better test.
I (Ed) really took that to heart. I want to eliminate all risk.
The way to eliminate all risk and make money during the process (which is why this whole thing is inspired by American Idol) is to sell an affiliate product.
Lets Sign up
Let’s click through to the first one
and sign up (I’m using my own details and not Ed’s for obvious reasons)
listen to any audios
have a read through the sales letter
and use your Google Notebook to capture any useful snippets.
This is an Affiliate Program
We could sell this product for this person and they will give us money.
If we go back to the ClickBank market place we can see
they will give us $14.06 or 60.00% of the sale.
But also a 64.0% referred rate (not refund rate).
Referred means the percentage of sales that are generated by affiliates. A very interesting number indeed.
It means 64.0% of all the site’s sales are generated by affiliates.
Let’s look at number two
Yoiks. That’s a 72.0% referred rate.
What about this one
This one only has a referred rate of 5.0% so the seller is doing most of the selling.
It’s fascinating. This is what market research is all about. The internet allows you to do this in ways that you could never do before.
It allows you to examine what is going on between people’s businesses.
The is NOT an Affiliate Process
This is about testing. We want to see if people will pay us money in this marketplace.
Remember: it’s all well and good to have traffic. But what’s step 3 in our symphony?
It’s conversion.
If people aren’t going to buy anything then that’s no good. So we can test.
Here’s a Tip
We’ve no idea which salesletters work and which won’t. The only we know if it will work will be to send it some traffic and see if it sells.
That’s what we’re going to do.
Will the Marketplace Buy?
We’re going to take these great keywords you’ve found. We will apply a process we will teach you over the next few days. We will then point the traffic from the keywords at the affiliate programs.
Do people do affiliate marketing full time? Absolutely. Bum marketing is an example. But even bum marketing didn’t have GTrends.
At the end of the day the philosophy is - you should own your own product - eventually. But product is part 4 of our symphony.
Until you’ve worked out whether you have traffic, 200 visitors per day and a marketplace that is prepared to spend cash we don’t touch product.
Other Places to Look for Affiliate Programs
ClickBank isn’t the only place to get affiliates. I like it because it is so simple to use and I’ve used it over many years.
But it’s not the only place.
But I stress this is NOT an affiliate marketing strategy.
We’re only interested in using an affiliate to test if the markets will actually spend any money. To confirm for us part three of our symphony - conversion.
Will someone make a few hundred dollars doing this? Absolutely.
Identifying keywords that will pay you off immediately is the holy grail of internet marketing. That’s what you have in your hot little hands.
The reason we’re doing this that we want to make sure that the market spends money.
How Simple is It?
Very simple:
Notice that ClickBank now offers recurring billing which is great!
That means if Ed joins the ‘doughnut munching secrets membership program’ through Mike’s affiliate link then Mike gets some affiliate commission - say 50% of the sale
The membership program charges monthly, so when it comes to next month, Ed is charged again.
But Mike still gets his 50% on that monthly instalment without Ed going through Mike’s affiliate link again.
Very… very… cool.
Some of You Have Never Seen This Before!
Imagine being able to sell someone elses product. You never have to talk to them, you never have to deal with them, never have anything to do with them whatsoever.
All you have to do is get a check. You don’t get a check from them, you get a check from ClickBank.
This is great as ClickBank are an independent third party so you make sure you get paid.
ClickBank are Not the Only Fish in the Affiliate Sea
The only judgment you need to make is ‘that looks good!’. Don’t worry too much about it.
You can’t tell right now. Nor can I.
I’ve looked at sites and think ‘that can’t sell’ and it sells heaps. And conversely I’ve seen what I thought was a magnificent sales letter and they sell nothing.
There is no way to know. The only way is to test.
Look for one you think ‘that looks good’ and that will do!
Now let’s look at…
Good Ole’ Amazon
Amazon sell everything! From 41 product categories.
Why isn’t Amazon recommended as a good affiliate program? Amazon don’t pay very well.
They pay you a tiny amount of the actual commission (up to 10% max).
But Remember Our Purpose
To see if the market will pay for anything. In that circumstance, Amazon is brilliant!
I use Amazon heaps to test markets for selling.
If people are going to buy from an Amazon then you can add your own value and they should buy from you too!
For example if I type in ‘Speed Reading’
then up comes many results.
Tons in fact.
Sign Up as an Amazon Affiliate
At the bottom of the Amazon home page you’ll see a link to ‘Join Associates’
So click on that link and you’ll see
Read all the blurb.
Associates earn up to 10% in referral feeds and Amazon offers monthly payments.
You won’t get rich selling Amazon stuff. But you’ll get rich by using Amazon to test your markets.
It’s a great baseline.
Click on ‘Apply Now’ and sign up!
Don’t worry about what to do with your Amazon affiliate code. We’ll show you.
We will show you how to turn searches on your keyword e.g. ’speed reading’ into something that will make you money.
Action Points
- Do another three articles (pieces of content) for your two keywords.
- Join the ClickBank affiliate program.
- Join the Amazon associates program.
- Find other affiliate products. Join the programs.
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Topics: Daily Summaries |
August 15th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Mike, thanks a lot for your posts. They are very useful.
Something wrong with HTML in this particular post.
Check it.
The problem starts from “Their url is just simply www.clickbank.com. />”
August 15th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
As usual, a wonderful copy for review.
August 16th, 2007 at 12:20 am
[…] Day 14 - Making Money American Idol Style […]
August 16th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Thanks. Fixed.
August 20th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
[…] It’s the American Idol approach to market research. […]
September 3rd, 2007 at 6:53 pm
[…] Day 14 - Making Money American Idol Style […]
September 24th, 2007 at 10:21 am
[…] If you’re not sure how to use it, check Mike Mindel’s notes […]
October 31st, 2007 at 3:06 am
Now signing up to amazon requires you to have a webpage, what if you don’t?