Thank God For The Bozos - June 2007
Thank God for the Bozos!
Indeed, “Thank God for the bozos of this world, for…were it not for the bozos, how would we know we are successful” – Mark Twain.
What a great quote that is to welcome you to June’s bumper birthday edition of the APD newsletter. Now, whilst I’m sure that may cause you to giggle a little, there is a serious point to opening up with this piece of
brilliance from the great Mark Twain.
You see, we are all successful compared to our parents. Thirty or forty years ago people were lucky if they had a television. I remember many of my family being crowded round the television on World Cup Final day in
1966 (yes, I am that old!). We lived in Wembley at the time and my Mum took me up to the High Street to see the Queen before the game!
True, it was a big social occasion and time for a great big party, but the point was…some of my family didn’t have a TV! It was the same year my Dad got his frst car, and boy did he have to scrimp and save for that car.
It took him years – no personal loans or credit agreements, he had to save and buy it cash. He passed his test in 1963!
Nowadays everyone seems to get a new car every two or three years – not then. A new TV every couple of years as the Plasmas get bigger and better.
The standard of living rises daily as technology creates new and faster wealth. Compared with 100 years ago we (the masses) live in absolute luxury.
We also live in the instant gratifcation society.
And…that brings me to a question I have been asked a lot recently.
“How can I make money quickly on the Internet without a product or service?”
Well, I promised you a bumper birthday edition this month, so sit back relax and inwardly digest!
I mentioned a few months back that Affliate Marketing is the way to go and I suggested for people wanting to start on this route that the Day Job Killer product was a good way to go.
I certainly know one person took my advice went for it. I was delighted when he mailed me with a link to his frst site a couple of weeks back. He grabbed the bull by the horns, brought DJK and did something with it.
It won’t be long before he starts to see the money roll in. Good for him!
He couldn’t really afford the outlay, but he knew he wanted more, so he made that quality commitment to get it.
Six weeks…that’s all it took him. Are you prepared to invest just a little bit of time and money in your future?
The lesson is clearly there, are you ready to follow? If so, this issue is a must read!
The reason affliate marketing is so popular is that you can earn online without having to spend time researching or getting involved in product development. You market a fnished product that someone else has
done all this work on.
This in itself is a massive time saving on your part, it is without doubt the most costly part of any business venture.
Obviously you need to do some research into the product and market to make sure you have a ready and willing audience, but the effort you have to put in is nothing compared to developing the product from scratch yourself.
Check out Clickbank for thousands of products you can market.
So, having found your product of choice, it’s now time to put together your plan of action. This is where, in my opinion, many people get it wrong! The frst thing you MUST do is set up a squeeze page. I’m willing to bet you’ve heard that phrase a hundred times and still don’t understand it.
It’s just a simple one page website that “pre-sells” prospects and has a mechanism to collect their email address or contact details in order that they can receive further information from you. It’s a mechanism to
start building YOUR list.
Why is this so important?
Well, it achieves three objectives.
1. It builds an opt-in list for you (remember the money is in the list).
2. You start to build a relationship with the prospects.
3. It allows you to cross promote other products.
4. It allows you to market the hugely proftable high ticket back end products.
Now, I know that may sound like a lot of work, but once you’ve set up the web page and the autoresponder that’s it. Each “campaign” will then run on autopilot for as long as the product continues to sell.
Rinse and repeat!
This is what you need to do to get started…
1. A domain. I use Biz Hosting. You can fnd them at www.biz-hosting.co.uk (Edit 2009, I now use Tom Hua’s Hosting Bay - much cheaper and much better service…you live and learn!)
They’re not the cheapest, but they are good. The domain is set up and live within 24 hours and if you have a query, they answer straight away. The control panel and stats are easy to use.
2. Then you need an autoresponder. I use . It’s very easy to use (especially if a techophobe like me can cope) and they are adding new video tutorials every day.
3. A simple website with a pre-sales message on it. There are many web site templates available on the Internet today and there was even a product launched just this week called “Instant Squeeze Page Generator”. Someone saw a gap in the market and moved quickly to fll it! The basic product is FREE, so go get!! What are you waiting for?
Do you start to see how easy it is to get ideas in this market place?? What a great example this product is!
Personally I don’t use it as I use either Frontpage or Dreamweaver and go from scratch. Instant Squeeze Page Generator will do a great job for you, but…if you don’t want to use it or don’t have the “pay for” HTML programs, or can’t afford them, you can use free HTML generators such as Sothink or NVU or Blue Voda (the best in my opinion).
4. The last thing you’ll need is to be able to cloak your affliate links. In my early days I constantly had my affliate links “hijacked”. I couldn’t understand why my conversions were so low. But, I found out that even
remotely “savvy” people could easily recognise an affliate link. They could then insert their own “code” or bypass the link all together.
So, now I cloak! Don’t make the same mistake I did – cloak from the start. You might hear some people suggest this is a “black hat” technique. I say it’s self preservation… and a “no brainer”.You can do this for free, here’s a useful link…
http://www.thatswise.com/free/lessons/0803.html
Or you can buy a tool to do it for you. It’s a little bit “techy” and I did try doing it for myself, but…in the end, I just decided it was easier to spend a little bit of money on a tool to do it for me.
What takes about 5 minutes to do manually takes 45 seconds with the tool I use.
I use Jim Edward’s Affliate Link Cloaker. It is incredibly easy to use and more than worth the investment of $59. That’s less than £30 in proper money.
Am I making this easy enough for you?
Once you’ve got these items together you then just need to write your copy and you are up and running as an affliate marketer.
Just one simple web page for each product you are promoting, that’s all you need. If you want to make your pre-sales page even more powerful, add a free bonus that can ONLY be sourced through your squeeze page.
This has the double-edged beneft of increasing sign ups and sales. It’s a powerful tool to use.
Not sure what to write? Well, simply go to the sales page of the product you are promoting and pick out a few of the more powerful selling points and use them to write your copy.
Keep the page short, certainly no more than 500 words and make sure you paste the capture drop-down box from your autoresponder into the page. Don’t mention the product by name on the squeeze page, leave that
to the actual sales page you’ll be directing the prospects to. Just show the benefts to entice at this stage.
You should have an autoresponder series set up so that as soon as anyone clicks on the drop down, they get an email with the information they need, that is to say directions to the sales site. Use the double opt in method in your autoresponder and offer a free gift as inducement to “sign up”. Tell them they will receive the occasional mail from you when you have something that will be interesting for them and…you are done!
As I have said many times before, over-delivering and offering outrageous value for money is the way to build a BIG business online. Follow this method and you will have built immediate trust in your prospect’s
minds.
Your autoresponder should be set up to maintain contact every 4 or 5 days initially. These messages should be pre-written ready for when you launch your campaign.
Just a side note about the content of your messages. Some people just market, market, market. I like to make sure I send out good and useful content about half of the time and market the other half. Yes, I do mix
marketing in with content, but I do like to make sure what I provide is useful and worthwhile – particularly as it’s free!
This month’s newsletter is, in my humble opinion, a good example of over delivering. It’s free, but the information contained herein is actually worth a lot of money. Especially to YOU, if you use it as the basis for getting your own affliate empire up and running!
Moving on, another major failing is that aspiring affliates set up one campaign and then expect all hell to break loose and their bank account to bulge with thousands of ££££s.
You have to learn by trial and error and fnd out what does and doesn’t work. Look at other marketers and what they do. Look at Google Ads and see the ones that are there week after week – they are obviously the successful ones.
Build a portfolio of products that you are promoting. Keep the ones that earn (until they don’t) and ditch the ones that don’t – quickly. An old maxim from my recruitment days – “If you’re going to fail, learn to fail quickly”.
This is the strategy to build a long and lasting affliate income. Good luck!
If you want to get into this area more deeply, I can recommend Chris of DJK fame’s other products.
Affliate Project X takes it from the ground up. It does assume some basic knowledge, but some of the tips and tools Chris gives you in this product are very powerful. The reader I was talking about earlier purchased APX along with DJK and he is up and running. Yes, it takes some time to integrate all of the information, but it is well worth it if Affliate Marketing is the way you want to go.
If you are a complete “newbie” (I hate that word), Chris also has a product called Affliate Commandments.
This is a small PDF document (about 15 pages) that has twelve basic rules that you should adhere to when marketing as an affliate. They are, I guess, things that came to light after DJK and APX were released.
It only costs $9.97. Now, you may be asking, why should I pay out even more money?
Good question.
The answer is simply this. If you are new to this game this product comes with a complete newbie guide to everything “Affliate Marketing”.
What I’ve given you today is a “helicopter” view, a basic template if you like. This add on (to a $9.97 product – that’s less than a fiver in our money) is absolutely invaluable to someone starting out in Affliate Marketing.
It gives you everything, most of it in point and click detail. For a fiver it’s got to be one of the best value products around. It also gives you access to an on-line video presentation. Cracking stuff!
Now talking of copywriting, which I was about eight paragraphs ago. The Write For Riches product is due to be delivered any day. I’ll be mailing you out when it’s here.
This product really is the “be all and end all” of copywriting products. It is a comprehensive package of DVDs, eBooks and MP3 fles that cover every possible angle of advertising, copywriting and headline writing. It even has sales page generator and headline generator software included.
If you want to learn to write copy that will make you shed loads of dosh, you simply must get your hands on this product.
As I say, I’ll mail you as soon as the physical products land at the offce.
Now…as it is my birthday this month, I did promise a bumper edition, so as I hope I always do, I shall deliver!
I got some interesting “insider” information last week that I thought I’d share with you.
If you’re using article marketing or content on Adsense sites, this might affect you.
Google is currently mounting a sustained campaign against duplicate content on the web. So, if you’ve been using PLR content or software programs that “change” or “spin”content or you’re using articles from the
article sites – beware.
If you’ve noticed your ranking dropping like the proverbial stone, this could be the reason.
Google has always maintained it’s raison d’etre was simply to provide quality content for its users. And, being in the powerful position it occupies, it has decided it’s had enough of crap generated and duplicate content.
From now on, if you want to keep your ranking position, it’s not going to be any good at all recycling old and much used articles or content. What you use is going to have to be signifcantly different – unique as well as relevant.
The autopage generators and article spinner tools are dead – sorry.
Google is using a new algorithm which is called LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing to search out and destroy this type of content. It not only looks at words but phrases as well and it is able to contextualise. That’s to say it can “understand” the context in which a word or phrase, or even a theme is written and…it has over 600,000 phrases as its reference source.
They recently patented this algorithm and it is now in use. You have been warned! Your content MUST now be unique and relevant. The themes must now be consistent and it’s how the themes are weaved into your copy that is important.
If you are going to use PLR or article content, you are going to have to make sure it is at least 30% unique to avoid a duplicate content attack by Google.
You have been warned, keep a close eye on this side of your business.
Well, that’s it for my bumper birthday edition, pretty intense this month, eh? But…lots of useful and proftable information – if you decide to use it that is.
I promise to lighten up a bit in July!
If you have any comments, questions or observations, or indeed anything you’d like to add that might be useful…I’d love to hear from you.
I’ve been reading an old PMA book from the 80s this last week, just to inject a little bit of positive and it has some great quotes in it, so I’ll fnish with….
“Whether you think you will succeed or not, you are right.” – Henry Ford
Until next month, believe you can do it - get out there, do something and go for it.
As always…to *YOUR* success.
Cheers now…and have fun!
Derek
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