[Ostrogoth]

(06-03-2016 03:21 AM)jake1720 Wrote:  

I spent a lot of time on it a few years ago. Had a little success but it seemed for every person making $1,000/day there were 100 more making nothing.

To me it seemed like a lot of luck along with persistence, skill, and the ability to large scale test (large bankroll). If you can make it, that's awesome.

Definitely not easy.

There's no luck involved. I can tell you that.

The top affiliate/cpa marketers (as with the top anything) are damn good at what they do. Market research, ad creatives, targeting, finding offers...they're spending considerable time putting that together.

I don't know where this idea comes from that they're sitting on their asses all day (well, technically they are lol..). Really, they do EVERYTHING except product creation and delivery. And it's actually the best training if you do want to one day create your own products.

[RichieP]

Way to misinterpret my post. I have no stake in SEO vs PPC. True, there are shady and unshady ways to do both.

I see you have two posts and are singing the praises of PPC aff marketing. Waiting eagerly for your $27 ebook on the subject.

[Ostrogoth]

(06-03-2016 06:32 PM)RichieP Wrote:  

Way to misinterpret my post. I have no stake in SEO vs PPC. True, there are shady and unshady ways to do both.

You made the comparison between PPC affiliate marketing, and using an authority blog (ie...SEO), with the latter being somehow inherently more ethical...

Actually, here's what you wrote exactly:

Quote:

You can absolutely still make money in a more whitehat way with an authoritative content website with affiliate links to relevant products,

How would you get such a website to rank without SEO? And why is this more whitehat?

Quote:

I see you have two posts and are singing the praises of PPC aff marketing. Waiting eagerly for your $27 ebook on the subject.

Well, I hate to disappoint--but you could be waiting a long while.

[RichieP]

My mistake. Waiting for your affiliate link to someone elses $27 ebook.

[Ostrogoth]

(06-03-2016 06:53 PM)RichieP Wrote:  

My mistake. Waiting for your affiliate link to someone elses $27 ebook.

Yea, see I don't promote ebooks...the margins aren't high enough. I tend to focus on physical products with your odd subscription here and there.

[jake1720]

(06-03-2016 06:24 PM)Ostrogoth Wrote:  

(06-03-2016 03:21 AM)jake1720 Wrote:  

I spent a lot of time on it a few years ago. Had a little success but it seemed for every person making $1,000/day there were 100 more making nothing.

To me it seemed like a lot of luck along with persistence, skill, and the ability to large scale test (large bankroll). If you can make it, that's awesome.

Definitely not easy.

There's no luck involved. I can tell you that.

The top affiliate/cpa marketers (as with the top anything) are damn good at what they do. Market research, ad creatives, targeting, finding offers...they're spending considerable time putting that together.

I don't know where this idea comes from that they're sitting on their asses all day (well, technically they are lol..). Really, they do EVERYTHING except product creation and delivery. And it's actually the best training if you do want to one day create your own products.

Luck is like 1/4 of it (whatever ratio you want to give it). Hard work, persistence, and a few other factors of course are also necessary.

Examples:

You get fucked by the FTC because you made a gray area claim? You had to be a bit unlucky to have them target you when there are so many people they can go after.

You launch a product and your supplier overseas goes bust? There's another.

Launch a product and it goes viral? Lots of free traffic. Good luck event right there.

Of course luck matters, but if you aren't already putting in the hours you have no chance.

[worldwidetraveler]

I think the biggest mistake affiliates make is going for the one off sell. Sure, you can make a lot of money. You also bust your ass to get your campaigns working for that specific traffic source.

Chances are you will be losing money in the beginning until you tweak, tweak and then tweak that campaign more until it is profitable. I am talking about the campaigns that have potential, not the ones you will have to go through and ditch to find that potential.

Once you get it working, you scale the mutha out of it and bank your money until the offer gets pulled and then you're off to the races trying to find another offer that converts.

It's a grind and I wouldn't recommend working that way.

What I would recommend is picking a market. A big market with a lot of people spending a lot of money. There will be plenty of products to pitch with affiliate programs.

You're job is to get leads that you can pitch those many different products too. Instead of sending that lead to the sales page, you will capture that lead's contact details and then send it off to the sales page. Now you have someone that will be interested in a ton of different products if you picked your market right.

Getting a lead costs money. Sometimes a lot of money. That is why it is extremely difficult to make typical dick/diet pill campaigns work.

By the way, I would stay away from those types of offers especially with monthly recurring payments. The FTC watches that shit like a hawk now.

Right, back to those leads. You have much more options when selling to that single lead multiple times.

Pick evergreen markets (health, wealth, sex) that hardly change. Run those leads through a sales funnel starting off with a lead capture page. After they sign up, hit them up with the sales page of your first program. Or better yet, start giving them free information before you hit them up with a sales page.

Then run them through many of the problems they will have and products that help them solve those problems.

You won't have to grind as much doing it this way compared to the dick/diet/acai bullshit ways.

After some time, you will see what products are converting crazy and then can make your own product to keep 100% of the sales (unless you set up your own affiliate program). You slowly build up a real business will long term revenue. This isn't much different to what the product owners are doing. You're just doing it with their products. The only catch is you can't tap into your own affiliates until you get your own products.

[Ostrogoth]

^Right.

I never direct link for my campaigns. I don't think most smart affiliates do either.

If you're doing that, you're basically a traffic broker. And eventually those traffic sources dry up, or become too competitive...

The smart way is to build your email database. In a sense, I'm an email marketer first, and an affiliate second. I just use the affiliate offers to cover the cost of my paid traffic campaigns. The money is in the back-end...mailing offers for YEARS down the road.

Even better if you focus on a niche that you'd like to go into business one day yourself, then you're basically building an audience which you can launch your own products too.

[worldwidetraveler]

(06-03-2016 08:57 PM)Ostrogoth Wrote:  

^Right.

I never direct link for my campaigns. I don't think most smart affiliates do either.

If you're doing that, you're basically a traffic broker. And eventually those traffic sources dry up, or become too competitive...

The smart way is to build your email database. In a sense, I'm an email marketer first, and an affiliate second. I just use the affiliate offers to cover the cost of my paid traffic campaigns. The money is in the back-end...mailing offers for YEARS down the road.

Even better if you focus on a niche that you'd like to go into business one day yourself, then you're basically building an audience which you can launch your own products too.

Exactly. I've seen enough affiliates grind it out the hard way which is why I posted what I did.

I have my own products that I sell. I sometimes use affiliate products for my upfront lead acquisition expenses as well.

Typically something that compliments my software program and then I start showing them how to use my program to put what they bought into action. If they didn't purchase then I can hit them up with another problem my program can help automate.

I love software because it's very easy to sell when you show them how it fixes a problem in a fast, automated way.

As I said, the affiliate stuff shouldn't be much different to what the product owners are doing.

[Tyler Belfort]

(06-03-2016 08:04 PM)jake1720 Wrote:  

(06-03-2016 06:24 PM)Ostrogoth Wrote:  

(06-03-2016 03:21 AM)jake1720 Wrote:  

I spent a lot of time on it a few years ago. Had a little success but it seemed for every person making $1,000/day there were 100 more making nothing.

To me it seemed like a lot of luck along with persistence, skill, and the ability to large scale test (large bankroll). If you can make it, that's awesome.

Definitely not easy.

There's no luck involved. I can tell you that.

The top affiliate/cpa marketers (as with the top anything) are damn good at what they do. Market research, ad creatives, targeting, finding offers...they're spending considerable time putting that together.

I don't know where this idea comes from that they're sitting on their asses all day (well, technically they are lol..). Really, they do EVERYTHING except product creation and delivery. And it's actually the best training if you do want to one day create your own products.

Luck is like 1/4 of it (whatever ratio you want to give it). Hard work, persistence, and a few other factors of course are also necessary.

Examples:

You get fucked by the FTC because you made a gray area claim? You had to be a bit unlucky to have them target you when there are so many people they can go after.

You launch a product and your supplier overseas goes bust? There's another.

Launch a product and it goes viral? Lots of free traffic. Good luck event right there.

Of course luck matters, but if you aren't already putting in the hours you have no chance.

That's called variance, not luck, which becomes a zero-factor across a large enough sample size.

[BlackHat]

Wow the filipino guy I outsourced the website to did an amazing job! It looks great. I should be ready to launch my first product in 1-2 weeks..
The best part is that I'm going under budget and ahead s of schedule so far. It's costing much less than I expected and taking quicker.

[RichieP]

Hmm seems you may be genuine Ostragoth, apologies for the cynicism. Please keep contributing good stuff.

worldwidetraveler:

That is an awesome strategy. I'm wondering about product creation. Are there any basic decent resources out there for that model you mentioned, e.g:

Traffic -->lead capture --> email sequence --> sales page

I have an idea for a simple health info product I'd like to test. Addresses a burning problem that people will throw money at to fix. A couple of sites about but no slick products that I can see. Would like to start cheaply, test quickly, and grow if results are good.

Any good resources on best practices here? What common pitfalls or mistakes should I try to avoid?

Thanks!

[jake1720]

(06-04-2016 02:43 PM)RichieP Wrote:  

Hmm seems you may be genuine Ostragoth, apologies for the cynicism. Please keep contributing good stuff.

worldwidetraveler:

That is an awesome strategy. I'm wondering about product creation. Are there any basic decent resources out there for that model you mentioned, e.g:

Traffic -->lead capture --> email sequence --> sales page

I have an idea for a simple health info product I'd like to test. Addresses a burning problem that people will throw money at to fix. A couple of sites about but no slick products that I can see. Would like to start cheaply, test quickly, and grow if results are good.

Any good resources on best practices here? What common pitfalls or mistakes should I try to avoid?

Thanks!

Write a sales letter without actually having the product. Post an ad on FB or other platform and test clickthroughs.

If the results are good you know you may have a real winner.

[RichieP]

Thanks jake, yeah the gist of it makes sense.

In terms of testing whether "results are good". How do I validate that?

The PPC is gonna give me some CTR, CPC and traffic estimates, assuming I know how to build a solid campaign.

Then I match that up against an estimated conversion rate and price point to determine profitability? Seems like those are both highly uncertain, no? Or are we just looking to verify traffic volume and CTR at first?

[BlackHat]

Well on a seperate note I'm working on another project. I will start an essay writing service but it will cater to Turkish students. A lot of Turkish uni students have a hard time writing their English Essays. I think this is a good niche. I'll outsource the orders to article writers on BHW . Since I have contacts on the ground I'll also be able to do plenty of offline advertising.

I'm thinking of buying this script

http://www.fatbit.com/essay-writing-website-script.html

What do you guys think?

[poledaddy]

(06-02-2016 12:23 PM)captain_shane Wrote:  

(06-02-2016 12:02 PM)BlackHat Wrote:  

(06-02-2016 11:59 AM)captain_shane Wrote:  

I can't find the article right now, but I remember reading about a guy who made 70 million in less than 2 years selling dick pills to people. He mainly used direct mail and found an extremely targeted list of people. These people would then sign up for a subscription at around 60$ a month and the average person used them for 3 months.

The money isn't in affiliate marketing, it's creating a product yourself and getting a list of people to sell to. Facebook's advertising can be incredibly targeted. Here's a quick one for asian males that I did in less than 5 mins.

- United States
- Ages 35-60
- Male
- Asian American
- Online Buyers

That narrows it down to 49K people. I imagine a different list can be much more powerful.

Problem with facebook is most lucrative products are against their TOS.
Like Adult,Weight Loss, Making money

You can get around it by using a cloaker, but it isnt an easy task.

You can advertise dietary supplements on FB. Here's from their TOS:

Supplements: Ads that promote acceptable dietary and herbal supplements may only target users who are at least 18 years of age.

I'll second this - I work in-house for a weight loss company and most of our ad spend is on Facebook as it performs better for us than SEM. We can't mention specific weight loss numbers but we can talk about losing weight. Sometimes we will get disapproved manually but talk to a rep and get re-instated within 24 hours. Might be tough with low spend campaign but if you focus on "healthy living" rather going hard on weight loss pitch that's what I would recommend.

[RichieP]

delete

[RichieP]

(06-04-2016 05:26 PM)BlackHat Wrote:  

Well on a seperate note I'm working on another project. I will start an essay writing service but it will cater to Turkish students. A lot of Turkish uni students have a hard time writing their English Essays. I think this is a good niche. I'll outsource the orders to article writers on BHW . Since I have contacts on the ground I'll also be able to do plenty of offline advertising.

I'm thinking of buying this script

http://www.fatbit.com/essay-writing-website-script.html

What do you guys think?

Good idea for a service (depending on your morals!). Rich kids pay loads to get good grades / get entrance to a good program. Hah I'm surprised there's a done-for-you solution for that.

The key will be the marketing - offline advertising on the ground sounds like a good move.

You wouldn't need the done-for-you marketplace at first, just put up a simple writer's website with good copy and make a few sales, get your marketing sorted and test the pricing. Then maybe you can scale it out.

[Ostrogoth]

(06-04-2016 05:05 PM)RichieP Wrote:  

Thanks jake, yeah the gist of it makes sense.

In terms of testing whether "results are good". How do I validate that?

The PPC is gonna give me some CTR, CPC and traffic estimates, assuming I know how to build a solid campaign.

Then I match that up against an estimated conversion rate and price point to determine profitability? Seems like those are both highly uncertain, no? Or are we just looking to verify traffic volume and CTR at first?

At the end of the day, the only rubric that matters is cost-per-acquisition (whether that be a lead, or a sale).

The smart way to test this would be to direct traffic to a similar affiliate offer if there is one. (There likely is if you search Clickbank). Kill two birds with one stone. Test market demand whilst covering your ad spend.

You could also put together a condensed freebie version of your report together (or perhaps the 1st chapter), and have people opt-in to get it. Then, send out an email blast letting them know when the final paid version is ready.

[worldwidetraveler]

(06-04-2016 02:43 PM)RichieP Wrote:  

That is an awesome strategy. I'm wondering about product creation. Are there any basic decent resources out there for that model you mentioned, e.g:

Traffic -->lead capture --> email sequence --> sales page

Besides copywriting books, I really couldn't tell you about resources.

It really isn't that difficult. You don't have to have it perfect to be making sales.

Drive some facebook traffic to a landing page with a video saying pretty much the same thing as your facebook ad.

Here is your problem, there are 4 ways to fix that problem, sign up to the right and then you will be shown a video showing how to fix your problem.

They sign up and then you show them the video that shows them the 4 ways to fix that problem. At the end of the video, you simply tell them most people also have problems in such and such and if they are interested, check out the link below. That link goes to the sales page.

You already helped them fix one problem and now they will be more inclined to think you will be able to help them with some of the other issues.

The email sequence can be reworded from the sales page. It's really that simple. Most people gloss over this stuff so when you hit them up with the same information, worded differently, it's like they see it for the first time.

Part of your market research should be looking at the people who are leading the market. Click on their ads, sign up for their landing pages (if they have any), read their emails, check out their sales pages. I sometimes purchase their products to see what other products they will try to upsell me on.

Keep folders of all of the sales pages, landing pages, emails... Really, they have done all the research and probably tested a ton. All the benefits and doubts are listed right there for you to copy.

Quote:

I have an idea for a simple health info product I'd like to test. Addresses a burning problem that people will throw money at to fix. A couple of sites about but no slick products that I can see. Would like to start cheaply, test quickly, and grow if results are good.

I'd be a little weary about doing a product if there wasn't anything else out there. To me that screams not enough people or not enough paying people.

If this problem is part of a bigger market where they have more problems, then I would use this as a landing page problem to get them to sign up as I talked about above.

Quote:

Any good resources on best practices here? What common pitfalls or mistakes should I try to avoid?

Thanks!

This is really something that needs to be done and tested. Only through testing will you get any real truth. Even when you think you know, chances are you don't until you tested.

[RichieP]

NICE Thanks man. Very useful. Yeah it's that overall funnel structure that I'm not clear on, what you wrote is great.

Yeah Im so surprised there's no competing products also. There are some related niches though. Really keen to get started and test this.

Curious, what copywriting books do you recommend? Anything specifically related to Ads or digital sales-letter landing pages?

[captain_shane]

(06-05-2016 09:24 AM)RichieP Wrote:  

NICE Thanks man. Very useful. Yeah it's that overall funnel structure that I'm not clear on, what you wrote is great.

Yeah Im so surprised there's no competing products also. There are some related niches though. Really keen to get started and test this.

Curious, what copywriting books do you recommend? Anything specifically related to Ads or digital sales-letter landing pages?

Here's the book that was mentioned earlier in this thread. He gives specific examples of products that you can use to sell in a funnel. The back-end is the most important part here.

Example: Find a list of people that buy shoes that give them an extra few inches in height. Film a video about stretches and techniques to add height and copy someones supplement which will relieve tension in their joints. Target that list of short men with the video and supplement and get them on an autopay program where it refills their order for more supplements every month. Make sure the shipping and handling covers the cost of your product.

- $100 for the list of people
- $200-300 to make the video and supplements
- $1000 to send sales copy to the short men

Total cost = $1400

Video and Supplement - $59.99 + $7.99 for S&H
Supplement on Reship - $29.99 + $7.99 for S&H

So, you'll need to sell the initial product at least 20.5 times to recoup your initial $1400. If those same 20.5 people reorder your supplement for an average of 3 months after that, you'll profit $1844 on the back-end.

This is just a simplification of the process that he explains in the book.

[Jackreacher]

There are so many new things coming in everyday guys, new products, new software, abilities to make your own supplements, programs, prototypes for a new device, new chemicals and materials to play with, new marketing techniques. Dick pills is not my cup of tea, but it just goes to show you what's out there. What do you love? What do you want to do with your mind? It's a great time to live in. Even if it's also a time of decline. Enjoy it.

[worldwidetraveler]

(06-05-2016 09:24 AM)RichieP Wrote:  

NICE Thanks man. Very useful. Yeah it's that overall funnel structure that I'm not clear on, what you wrote is great.

Yeah Im so surprised there's no competing products also. There are some related niches though. Really keen to get started and test this.

Curious, what copywriting books do you recommend? Anything specifically related to Ads or digital sales-letter landing pages?

I would say most if not all that was recommended in the Copywriting post are great. I would also add John Carlton to the list.

I just finished rereading "The Ultimate Sales Letter" by Dan Kennedy last week. I read it several times already. It's more into direct mail but everything translates online. Direct response is direct response no matter if is through the internet or direct mail.

I would say to break down every part of your sales funnel and remember what you are wanting the customer to do.

If you are doing ads on Facebook, you are trying to get the people who would be interested in your product to click the link. That is the goal of that ad.

On the landing page, your video or copy is trying to get them to sign up for your email list. That is the purpose of that landing page. It isn't to make a sale.

Every email you send out is to get them to click a link and so on.

Your copy will depend on the response. Breaking it down into individual responses makes it a ton easier.

[RichieP]

Great advice, thank you. Much appreciated.