The affiliate site was going nowhere and I was losing interest. To do it well would have required an enormous effort. Entertainment had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it didn’t hold my interest.
I read in one of the myriad of marketing materials I had downloaded this tip: “Make your site a blog.” Advantages include:
No need to create an organizational site design; just post articles and the blog software will organize them.
No need for an elaborate visual design effort; just pick an available template and modify it as needed.
Customers are familiar with blog formats these days, particularly as a way of presenting fresh, evolving content. They will be likely to return.
All excellent reasons. So I created Necessary Virtues Personal Finance Resources as a step in that direction. The topic interests me, as I am someone with a few lingering debts, and my fiancee gave me the idea of developing a debt reduction calculator for online use that would be better than the currently available products. I’m going to be working on that, but in the meantime the site is a framework into which I’ll be able to fit the calculator. Here’s how I introduced the new venture.
I’ll write more about the site’s evolution another day.
affiliate marketing niche marketing Posted by junkie as affiliate marketing, niche marketing at 4:49 PM EST
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Continuing the current daily chronicle. I’ll return to the historical one after a bit.
Yesterday and today I ran some trial ads in MSN adCenter and Google AdWords. I started at the ClickBank directory and looked for programs that claimed high conversion and reasonably high commission payout. One that looked good to me was 500 Lovemaking Tips & Secrets. The site owner claims it’s selling like hotcakes.
There’s an interesting quirk to report about MSN adCenter. Well, first of all, it’s still in beta. I’m not even sure how I got an invitation, but it hasn’t been opened to the general public quite yet, I don’t believe. The reporting leaves something to be desired. I placed the ad there for the 500 Lovemaking Tips & Secrets, which showed up in a pending status. Then I started to see clickthroughs recorded in my redirect database, several dozens of them, and I could see that they came from MSN. The reporting still hasn’t caught up, and I’ve filed a bug report.
Anyway, between Google and MSN I’ve now recorded about 120 click-throughs. These are going directly from my ad (wherever it gets served by those services) through my redirector to the site of the book’s publisher. No site of mine intervenes. It’s as if the publisher were advertising directly, except my affiliate code is passed so I should get the commission through ClickBank. Well, with 120 clicks there are still zero sales. I wrote to the publisher to ask him what conversion rate he typically sees. He says around 1%. So either I’m a little unlucky or he’s exaggerating.
The economics look like this. I’m paying around $0.15 per click. The commission per sale is $15.57. So the break-even point conversion rate where the commissions ought to pay for the advertising in the long run is 0.96%. That’s too close to the 1% the publisher claimed. It’s just too slim a margin to be attractive.
So I paused those campaigns and looked around on ClickBank for something better. I found the Sit Stay Fetch Dog Obedience Training site. The commission is $25.60 per sale and the conversion rate claimed by the publisher is better than 2%. Let’s do the math for this one. Break-even conversion at $0.15 per click is around 0.59%. In other words, I could pay for 170 clicks at that rate with the commission from one sale. That’s much more attractive. If the conversion is even 1%, not the claimed 2%, and the cost per click is as much as $0.20, I would buy 1000 clicks for each $200.00 investment and get back $256.00 in commissions. I’ll take those numbers every day of the week. And if the conversion rate is higher and/or the cost per click lower, it gets even better.
If this sounds too bloody easy, it probably is. This will be my next campaign. I’ll try it out and report back the results.
By the way, if anyone reading this is moved to sign up with ClickBank and try it out for themselves, please do me the favor of using my ClickBank referral link when you sign up. It doesn’t cost you anything, and I’ll get a small cut of your future activity there, if any.
affiliate marketing technical Posted by junkie as affiliate marketing at 8:49 PM EST
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Okay, I’m going to fast-forward here to some more recent events. I had intended to give an orderly history of the last two months or so, since I didn’t blog this contemporaneously, but I’m going to write about this while it’s hot. If anyone is reading, you’ve probably been waiting for me to get to the dirt, so here’s some.
A couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to invest in one of the $49.00 marketing material offers. It’s not that they wore me down. This one offered a bonus that I couldn’t refuse. Like most of these offers, the headline program sounded relatively useless: an ebook claiming to reveal a strategy for making $1,000.00 in 15 days. But I had already determined that pay-per-click advertising was going to have to be part of my business plan, and the ad for this offer made this claim:
Bonus No. 1: $1,985 in FREE Targeted Advertising From Popular Pay-Per-Click Search Engines. I’ve made arrangements for you to get your hands on $1,985 in free advertising from pay-per-click search engines. If you don’t know, pay-per-click advertising allows you to decide exactly what type of searchers will see your ads and visit your website.
So that’s what pulled me in. I had originally answered an ad that looked something like this:
Stop Risking Your Money On Advertising!
Snowball your sales with no upfront cost or risk – with lucrative joint ventures. $49 foolproof online profit system takes just 5 hours per week. Developed by a real world Net millionaire.
Click Here
The copy about the free advertising is on the main sales page for that offer.
(Full disclosure: The links in many of the example ads I post here are redirects to my branded affiliate links. That means that if you click on one of them and make a purchase, I may receive a commission. I’m not encouraging you to do that. That’s not the purpose of this blog. But if you wish to buy any of these programs, because of what I write or in spite of it, I may as well be the one who gets the credit. There is no disadvantage to you if you buy something through my link. The price is the same for everyone. I’m not here to promote these things; I’m here to give you the truth about them as I see it.)
So the first thing that happened after I completed the purchase was that I received the confirmation email to log onto the download page. It didn’t seem to work. It took me to a login page, but when I entered the username and password, and clicked submit, the URL changed but the page display did not.
Only slightly daunted, I thought of trying it in IE. Firefox is my usual browser, but I know there are a few sites that just like IE and nothing but IE. (Funny how many of these are in the msn.com domain, but that’s another story.) Lo and behold, it worked just fine in IE. So I dug a little deeper. Turns out that the first tag on the page was <htmll>. Yes, really. Two l’s. IE couldn’t have cared less, but Firefox quite rightly refused to display it.
So I submitted a support ticket to their site, where I not only reported the problem but gave the root cause and solution. Felt pretty pleased with myself. Thought I deserved at least a nice thank-you.
Then I started looking at the one bonus item that I thought would make the whole package worth the $49.00 I had paid, the list of free pay-per-click advertising deals worth $1,985.00. Remember, the ad copy claimed: “I’ve made arrangements for you to get your hands on $1,985 in free advertising from pay-per-click search engines.”
Well, here’s the reality. It is a list of names and URL’s of pay-per-click search engines with terms of the introductory deals they offer to new customers. There are no special links, no special deals arranged by Shawn Casey. These are the same URLs anyone would use to get to these sites and the same introductory deals available to anyone. Furthermore, the web page listing these has a copyright date of 2004, and, as you might expect, much of the information is out of date.
Some of the sites listed no longer even offer pay-per-click advertising. Some of them have no introductory offers anymore. Some of them still have offers, but they’re not nearly as good as the terms mentioned on Shawn’s list. For example, the list says that Blazerunner give you $25.00 to sign up. Not so. They require a minimum $25.00 deposit. The list says that iTotalFind gives a 100% matching bonus on new deposits. Not so. They now give 10% on a $50.00 deposit and up to 20% on a $1,000.00 deposit. I could go on.
So where is the $1,985.00 in value? Not here, I think. And where are the “arrangements” he made? Well, er, he didn’t.
So I entered my second support ticket to point out this situation. I heard back rather quickly from a customer service representative who said that she had forwarded both my messages to Shawn Casey himself and that she would let me know when there was a response. That was last week. This morning I checked on the status of the tickets, not having heard anything, and found them closed with no further notations. I reopened them both. I heard back from the rep, who was a bit less cordial this time. She offered me a refund. Stay tuned here to see whether it ever comes through. I said that what I really wanted was what I had paid for, but I doubt that there is any intention to update that list. I hope so, but I doubt it.
So what about the “meat” of the program, the Mining Gold on the Internet book itself? Well, it’s actually not bad, though in no way is it worth $49.00 on its own, IMHO. It does a professional job of explaining the basics of such topics as what you can sell online, how to develop a business plan, elements of a marketing plan, creating a mailing list, direct advertising, search engine optimization, pay-per-click programs, no-cost and low-cost marketing techniques, affiliate programs, web hosting, and others. The information is reasonably accurate and well organized, but none of it will be revelatory to anyone who has been around the internet for a few years and has delved into these areas. It does achieve a fair level of detail in a few spots, such as calculating lifetime customer value and advertising ROI, but it leaves plenty of room for follow-up sales of more detailed guides, particularly in the areas of ad writing and campaign management.
And that’s the name of this game, folks. These self-styled “marketing gurus” have ever-escalating product lines that they will try to upsell to you. If you fail to make money by following the tips in their $49.00 product, they have one for $499.00 that will really help you be a success.
In fact, that’s what really prompted me to write this lengthy entry today. I got a phone call from one of Shawn’s minions this afternoon, who wanted to interview me to see if I would be the kind of person they would want to work with one-on-one to help me achieve the next level of success. He asked questions about my level of experience and the kind of time commitment I would make to such an endeavor. All that was fine. Then he asked me about my credit situation. That wasn’t so fine. I asked why the question. He said, “Well, you know that you have to spend money to make money. And the best money to spend is other people’s money. It’s the power of leverage.” I said, “If the first thing you’ll ask me to do to get into this program is to pay $1,000.00 for the private coaching and the materials, then I’m not interested.” Apparently that was the case, because he ended the call.
There’s nothing overtly misrepresentational about this, I suppose, but the way it’s presented is at best somewhat misleading. I didn’t like it. And I certainly didn’t like the two-year-old information in the “bonus” that wasn’t worth what they claimed. Isn’t that 14 years in internet time?
Bottom line, I do not recommend Shawn Casey’s programs, for the specific reasons given above. This is a factual account of my experiences and observations.
affiliate marketing marketing ethics marketing gurus Posted by junkie as affiliate marketing, marketing gurus, marketing ethics at 11:10 PM EST
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From a prior life in a consumer shopping site company, I knew a bit about affiliate programs, including the granddaddy of the all, the Amazon Associates program. So I did a little research about what topics seem to be hot. I decided on entertainment in general, and games, tv, and movies. I was particularly interested in satellite TV, since those affiliate programs have large payouts per transaction ($100.00 or so). So I put up a little site called Necessary Virtues: All Things Entertainment and waited for the affiliate income to roll in.
Actually, I wasn’t quite that simple-minded. I knew that the site in its first form was fairly lame, and I knew that I would have to find some way of attracting traffic, but I wanted to get something up in a relative hurry anyway and see what happened. As it happened, nothing much. And I quickly got discouraged. I knew that I would have to offer some added value or there wouldn’t be any reason for a visitor to stick around, click my links, and buy stuff. As for traffic, other than listing in Google and the other two or three top search engines, I knew very little about how to get it. That’s when I decided to look at what the marketing gurus had to offer.
affiliate affiliate marketing marketing Posted by junkie as general, affiliate marketing at 11:16 PM EST
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I had previously read a lot of the hype surrounding making money on the web. My impression was that there is a relatively small, inbred group of very aggressive “marketing guru” types who sell many of the same materials and/or the same ideas repackaged in different forms. Most of the advice, I thought, was about how to do what these gurus themselves are doing. Not a pretty picture when you consider that the market must become saturated at some point. Indeed, a great way to see the true value of much of the stuff they’re selling (which is usually in the form of downloadable e-books) is to look for the same titles being re-sold on ebay. Often you can pick up for pennies what is being hyped elsewhere for $97.00 (a very popular price point in this industry) or even $497.00 (another popular one). More specifics about this later.
So I knew I didn’t want to set aside much of a budget for this. I figured I could acquire or at least sample material about most of the available methods and services for little or no investment other than my time, which I had plenty of. This will be the chronicle of what I’ve discovered over the last couple of months and onward into the future. All of what I have and obtain I’ll endeavor to make available here. I’ll make it free if the terms allow it. You’ll be able to judge for yourselves what it’s worth without going to the trouble of collecting it all.
ebay free material hype marketing guru Posted by junkie as general at 9:44 PM EST
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