Help Stefan CampaignCeltnet WebInfo eZine
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
In This Issue
- Window on the Web
- Featured Article:
Monetizing your Site with ClickBank - Classified Ad Board
- What's Hot in ClickBank
- Comment
- Business Tip
Top Sponsor
Window on the Web
Some of the money I raised this time was done via eBAY and others through sales of my Recipe eBooks which includes my Guide to Spices eBook and my Recipes of Africa eBook. Please have a look at these, and if they interest you buy a copy...
But that's enough of me... You're really here to learn information about internet marketing and how to increase your income from the internet! I'm going to reveal to you some of the secrets of getting traffic to your site. I'm also going to let you in on a little experiment I've been running over the past two months on how the extra traffic can be turned into extra income...
Dyfed
Editor/Publisher
Email me @ editor@celtnet.org.uk
To celebrate the launch of my Celtnet ClickBank Ads Maker site I'm offering this week's subscribers to this eZine a very special offer. Subscribe to the eZine and recieve 5 internet marketing eBook free. Each with full resell rights. Just sign-up to this newsletter and announcements below:
Even better I'm going to tell you in the article below exactly how you, too, can monetize your website with the tools I'm going to give you.
Mid Sponsor
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Feature Article
Going from Internet Marketing Wannabe to True Internet Marketer
by Dyfed Lloyd Evans
It's a truth of life... Internet marketing is hard. Especially if you're relatively new to the game. You need to get yourself a web presence and you need to entice visitors to your site. Indeed, the only real way you will make money on the internet is if you have traffic.
Personally, I started-out with an information-based site and grew my traffic organically. Only then did I begin adding more commercial-oriented pages to my site... And even these were basically information-based. In essence I had a large site with lots of content, some of it geared towards making an income from AdSense... But by no means all of it was. For a long time I was getting a regular monthly check from Google, but was giving me only a meagre profit over and above the costs of web hosting, maintaining my domain name and the monthly costs of my DSL line. It was good that I could cover these costs each and every month, but I was putting hours and hours of work into my site and I really wasn't getting any meaningful profit. Indeed, if you count the hours I was working then I was effectively losing money!
It took me a long time of trial and error to get where I am today. Now I'm making a more than modest profit and several schemes I have running should explode that profit over the next few months into something really meaningful. Of course, part of the problem was that I'd become complacent. The trickle income was OK for me and I was having fun writing more content and playing around with web technologies (I'm a programmer by trade, but internet-based applications weren't my stock in trade).
Then I met someone and got married. The complication was that she's a Liberian and a refugee in Senegal. She survived the civil wars in Liberia and in Sierra Leone and somehow managed to escape with herself and her new-born son across much of West Africa. Having seen how she and the other Liberians in exile in Senegal live I was determined to do something for them. This was the kick in the pants I needed to get going on trying to make some real money from my site.
The first thing you absolutely must have is traffic. If you don't have any traffic then you simply won't and can't make any real money on the web. It really is as simple as that. I reveal all the tricks I've used to make my website a success in my eBook: How to Maximize your Web Traffic. This has just been newly-updated with some of my latest tips and tricks and is well worth a look. There's even an affiliate program! Here, though, are two tips for you for free! Increased traffic to your site basically means either joining a paid program or getting as much free traffic as you can. Free traffic means getting good back-links to your site. There are three very easy ways to do this: the first is to join as many bulletin boards relating to your topic of interest as possible and to begin posting there. Use your signature to display your desired URL. Always, always, post articles to the big article sites... They generally allow up to three URLs in the signature space. I aim on writing and submitting two articles a week. Which means six back-links a week and a minimum of 300 every year (more if your article is syndicated). I also aim to write at least one press release and to release this to six or seven of the top free press release sites. These are often syndicated and can give you lots of back-links. However, this is a short-term solution only. Good for about a month. After that the number of back-links will drop again. But it's a good strategy to give your site some quick exposure (and to get in indexed by the search engines).
I've been using these approaches very successfully for my ClickBank Ads Generator page, as well as several other web pages on my site.
But the big experiment I've been running lately is comparing how Google AdSense ads and the three formats of ClickBank contextual ads I run from my site: ClickBank AdSense-like ads; ClickBank AdSense-like ads with Images and ClickBank RSS feed ads (find out more about the ads on my ClickBank Ads Information page. These are all designed as replacements or adjuncts for Google's AdSense ads. Indeed, the ClickBank contextual ads are designed to look like AdSense ads. The image-based ads are a little more complex in that they contain product images, but they're still AdSense-like.
Of these ad types the RSS-based ads were the easiest to implement as showing these on the website does not contravene Google's TOS (I'm simply aggregating a feed onto my website. It's just that the feed happens to look like a set of ads). If you want to see what these RSS ads look like, then please have a look at my Christmas Recipes page. You'll see the RSS-based ads on the right-had side of the page, below the AdSense ads. I'll soon be producing a complete package so not only will you be able to get the RSS feed from my site, but the code needed to display the feeds will also be published by me. Watch the announcement on this page!
To implement the ClickBank AdSense-like ads and the ClickBank AdSense-like ads with Images I had to set-up some pages that did not have any AdSense ads on them and then it was a matter of plugging the ClickBank-based ads in their place. I then used the techniques described above to publicise the pages and drive taffic to them (an example page is: Recipes for Bread. As you can see, there are 3 ad units (all I did was to replace the AdSense ads in existing code. But I place no limit on how many ad units, or the type of ad unit you can put on a single page.
All this was done in quite a rush and the system was only just up and running before I left for Dakar in mid December. I really wasn't expecting anything to come of it before the end of January, to be truthful. So I'll admit that I couldn't contain my surprise when I saw that I had a letter from ClickBank waiting for me on my return. Inside was a check and that check (just for 2 weeks' marketing to the end of December) was already twice the size of my usual AdSense payment. And this only from three types of Ads published on maybe eleven web pages in total! Now that wasn't a bad return.
If you can drive the traffic to your site then replacing standard AdSense ad units with ClickBank-based ad units can give you a real boost in profits. But the secret is traffic. If you don't have much traffic then you won't see an increase in income as AdSense ads and ClickBank ads work differently. With AdSense ads you get paid for every click a visitor makes on an ad. But with ClickBank ads you need someone to go to the site and actually buy the product you're advertising. However, AdSense ads only give you pennies for every click. ClickBank ads give you up to $40 in affiliate commission for every purchase!
Now, there are lots of ClickBank ads sites out there. Why should you use mine? Well, the first reason is economic. Unlike the other sites I grab images of each product/website. I upload the new ClickBank datafeed every weekend, so the products are always fresh and the information is up-to-date. Better than that, I also annotate and make available the site information by hand! So you get the best possible product description in your ads. I also test all the sites and if one is down or suspended they don't make it into the datafeed. Also, the ads are served from my server and the ads you see are randomized so each time a page is refreshed a new set of ads come up.
You can also define which type of ads you want to show on your website, along with the precise colour and size of the ads themselves.
If you want another reason to use my ads, apart from the purely financial ones, then I should say that a random 8% of all ads delivered gain my ClickBank nickname, rather than yours. Any sales from these go to my ClickBank account, however, I'm not attempting to line my own pocket here (unlike all my rivals) as all this money goes to my 'Help Stefan' charity. So, not only are you using my stuff to make yourself richer, you're also aiding the 'Help Stefan' charity in the process. I will soon be making a badge available so any webmaster/mistress using my ClickBank code on their website can show that they are supporting this charity, if they wish.
Well, that was a very packed article this week. Lots of information for you to digest (and I hope you found it interesting). As the data starts to come in from the various ad campaigns I'm running in more quantity I hope to be able to break it down into which ad types are making me most money. Just remember, your internet success is really down to your own work. But you can always do with a leg-up!
To your marketing success!
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About the author:
Dyfed Lloyd Evans
Do you wirte eBooks? Do you market eBooks? Do you want your own eBook store? If you have answered 'yes' to any of these questions then you have to visit the Celtnet eBooks. Here you can get the code to set-up your own eBook store, you can market and publicize your eBooks and you can even get help to sell your eBooks. Every resource for eBook authors all in one site.
Classified Ad Board
Is your ad out yet? Subscriber and co-op ads are listed on the Classified Ad Board. The board is refreshed every issue with a new batch of ads.
What's Hot in ClickBank
With so much of my focus going on ClickBank and ClickBank associated pages over the past few (and the forthcoming months) I thought that I should add a weekly digest of What's Hot in ClickBank to you, my loyal readers. Each weekend I update the ClickBank feed for my Celtnet ClickBank Marketplace, which then drives the various Free ClickBank search and Ads Code systems I provide. I've also started to perform analyses of the current against the previous ClicBank datafeed releases. Each time ClickBank perform a new release they analyze their sales and other data for that time period and they re-evaluate product rankings on this basis. New products come in, old products fall out of the system and product rankings go up and go down. I will soon be making a full digest of these data available so you can check which products have moved, how the products you are promoting are doing, as well as keeping you informed of any product price changes...
What this isn't is a list of all the top products for the week. Indeed, the top products probably aren't the ones you should promote as there's a lot of competition out there. Rather, what I'm presenting is a digest of the 'hot' mid range products. The ones that are on the up. I also support these product statements with an analysis of what people are searching for on my system. And you have to remember that I annotate all he ClickBank products by hand so my Celtnet ClickBank Search System ClickBank search system is one of the most comprehensive out there, and certainly better that ClickBank's own serach system. It's also the same system that drives my Free ClickBank Search Code, allowing you to put comprehensive ClickBank searches on your site.
Of the various searches performed on my site, two really stand out. The first is for anything to do with 'recession' and the second for the terms 'run car water' so you can see that the economic downturn and the increasing price of gasoline are the two things foremost on people's mind. The other top search now is 'beat bad debt'; a consequence of the Christmas over-spend no doubt. These seem to be the products to promote at the moment and if you can build a niche site around these terms then using these ad feeds for your site would be a real boon. Remember that it will soon be even easier for you to have these ads on your site as you can use an RSS feed along with your AdSense ads. I'll provide you with all the tools you need!
Comment
Multiple Streams...
I know that I keep on coming back to this same-old adage. But it's completely true... The only way that you can keep your head above water in terms of internet marketing is to garner as many income streams as possible. That way, if one of your products or marketing strategies fails for whatever reason you have others to fall back on. Personally, I have Google AdSense as my old stalwart, though I'm replacing this on certain high-traffic and niche pages with my own ClickBank Contextual and RSS Ads. ClickBank is becoming an important source of revenue for me. Both in terms of the various ads that I display on my website, but also in terms of marketing the products themselves — affiliate marketing, in other words. I write articles about some of the better products for my articles pages and I write a weekly digest for my ClickBank-based forum highlighting the week's biggest (and potentially most lucrative) products. Indeed, it's interesting just how many ways that various products from the ClickBank catalogue can be marketed, without directly selling them at all!
I'm also beefing-up various other campaigns and affiliate programs that I'm involved in, as well as creating a section of my site directly to do with affiliate programs and affiliate marketing: Celtnet Affiliate Central. This part of the site is undergoing rapid evolution and many more affiliate programs will be added to the listings soon!
As well as these more standard marketing techniques I also have an eBook store on my site where I'm directly selling Celtnet eBooks Store eBooks with resell rights, along with the store itself and the various eBooks I've written on and for this site. This eBook store also offers visitors the means to add their own eBooks to the store so they can advertise them and make sales. A novel feature, provided with any sales of the store system itself!
These are the current strings to my bow... They still require lots of managing and I have to do lots of marketing every week but my income is now increasing month-on-month and two years down the road I see myself having made enough to be able to sell the website and to be able to retire on the accrued profits. Just in time (I hope) to be able to enjoy the first few years of my first child's life... (Well, we can all dream!)
Business Tip
All it takes is Work
In the con-artist's book they say that if anything looks too good to be true, then it probably is. The same goes for internet marketing. Like everyone I've been suckered into the 'get rich over nigh' scams. But none of them work. To be brutally honest, you need to put in the hours and the hard graft to get anything out of this game. That's the true reason 90% of all start-up internet marketers fail. The problem is that you're starting from the ground up and you simply don't have the advertising dollars (or the experience) to take a lot of the short-cuts that many of the bigger players can.
Which isn't to say that you can't make rapid progress. Indeed, it took me almost two years to get a web platform that I could begin to make money from. But that was my problem, more to do with how I started and expanded my web presence than anything else. With what I now know I could cut those two years of learning down to four or five months. I'd have also worked much harder on publicizing my website than I did which would mean that I was starting from a larger user-base, rather than having to grow my users and expand as I was developing my products. Then I would also probably have made efforts to grow my list much quicker than I did. But that's all by the by...
Above all else I would have written articles from the get-go and I would have made more efforts in terms of sales, using blogs, using articles and using press releases. Once my income stream was properly on-line, only then would I explore paid advertising systems and sources.
That's it for this week, ladies and gentlemen. Check back next week for more from the world of CeltNet.
