Internet Business Blog

One simple reason…  It works!

One of my websites offers an information product using the 7 Dollars script and anyone can promote it without needing to sign up to anything.  All they need to do is to append their PayPal email onto a special version of the website URL and then they receive the proceeds of any sales from their referrals.

One particular affiliate decided it would be a good idea to spam a large number of people with his affiliate link. Judging by my website stats, if only a single-digit percentage of people actually followed his affiliate link then at least tens of thousands of people would have received his spam email.

Of course, this kind of action goes hand in hand with being reported to blacklist controllers such as SpamCop and eventually my host came knocking on my door asking me to deactivate the affiliate’s link.  This, I duely did.  Anyone following his link was then greeted with a message informing them of the situation, but also giving them an unaffiliated link to the products sales page just in case they were interested in it.

This resulted in a number of sales of which the proceeds went into my pocket instead of the (spamming) affiliate!

As his emails had been reported, I got to read a copy and was surprised that anyone would actually click through and buy, but they did.

So, there you have it.  Spam pays.  Period.

Private Label Rights material can be a great way of getting content and products that you can call and sell as your own. It can also be a great way to spend good money on a load of rubbish.

As I see it, there are two main problems with most PLR material I come across:

1. The quality of the written content is poor. A lot of what’s produced is from the hands of cheap labour and this usually means it’s sourced from countries where English is not the primary language. It is possible to have a board vocabulary and a good grasp of English grammar, but often you need to be able to think in a westernised way before you can write content that reads like westernised content.
2. It’s already been distributed across the Internet so you can forget about it being original content in the eyes of search engines. It also means that it’s usually no good for submitting to article directories because someone else will have already beaten you to it.

Both of these problems result in the need for a further investment of either time or money or even both as rewriting the content to some degree is required before it can be used to benefit you.

Why do these issues exist?

As happens with many maturing markets, as demand increases for PLR products, the number of suppliers also increases. As the number of suppliers increase, people start thinking a step higher in the food chain, moving away from the end consumer and towards supplying the suppliers instead.

For the end user, this means instead of getting material that’s been produced by their supplier and supplied to a limited number of people, they’re getting material that’s being offered by any number of suppliers to even more end users. Therefore, the chances of someone else already using the same content increases greatly because instead of having one supplier selling 100 copies of an article pack you might have several suppliers each selling 100 copies of the same article pack.

If you’re publishing the same content as hundreds of other people, whether or not you believe in duplicate content penalties will be irrelevant because you’ll still be competing for all the same keywords as the other publishers.

For these reasons, I don’t believe you should consider the majority of PLR material on offer today as ready-to-use.

What do you think of using PLR? Do you use it yourself? Are you happy with the quality of the written content?

I’ve read suggestions from many Internet marketers that the best way to make money as someone selling their own products or as an affiliate is through a mailing list. That said, it doesn’t mean that you can’t make any money without a list. It just means you have to take a different approach.

The benefit of having a list is that you have the opportunity to build a relationship with a subscriber and perhaps even an existing customer. By opting into your list, they’re literally giving you permission to send them emails and who is to say those emails can’t sometimes ask for money in exchange for goods and services?

The process is simple, you send subscribers interesting and useful newsletters to read and occasionally recommend a product you think the reader will find beneficial. Rather than report your email as spam, your reader might just snatch your affiliate link right out of your hand and run towards the checkout with their credit card in their hand.

Make no mistake, an established mailing list can prove to be a very valuable resource. They aren’t bottomless wells of gold, though. They need nurturing and they can take time to build. Send too few emails and they might forget who you are. Send too many and you’ll just drive them away. That all seems like hard work. Maybe even the kind of work that holds no interest for you. After all, not everyone wants to build a relationship with their prospects through direct email.

Fortunately, there are other ways of making lots of money as an affiliate; ways that don’t have to involve mailing lists.

Some people say that the period around Christmas tends to be slow for sales. Christmas a slow period for sales? The same time of year when the stores are packed with crazy shoppers hunting for the perfect gifts? People aren’t just crafting gifts from junk they find in their garages, they’re spending money!

Personally, over the past 2-weeks or so I’ve made over $600 in affiliate commissions alone and no lists of any kind were involved.

“How?” You might be wondering.

The exact methods I use don’t really matter. Most will be using methods you’re already familiar with or can read about on numerous websites and ebooks. The biggest influencing factor I’ve found to affect my affiliate income is the audience I target with my promotional efforts. Rather than trying to convert people into buyers, I like to target buyers who have already made that decision to purchase and are on the way to complete the transaction.

Think about that for a second. Instead of trying to make a buyer out of someone who may or may not want the product you’re promoting, why not find the people who are already wanting to buy the product you’re promoting and then help bring the product closer to them?

Here’s a digram showing you the concept of how to position yourself for really easy affiliate income,

It’s that simple.

There’s no need to build massive lists and try to convince them to spend money. If you’re better with search engines than you are with lists then this is a great way to make money. Your target audience have already got their minds set to shopping mode. All you need to do is guide them through your affiliate link on their way to make their purchase.

If you’re still wondering how to do this, let me give you just one example of how to position yourself in between the buyer and the product.

A lot of people who are on the cusp of buying a product will use the a search engine to carry out research and often they’ll just search for the product name. This is just one opportunity for you to position yourself in front of the buyer, by presenting something in those search results that will attract their attention. It could be a review of the product or it could be some information revealing a problem with the product, but then offering a solution to that problem.

Just use your creativity, put yourself in the shoes of the buyer and ask yourself what you’d be looking for. Then promote your information so that it gets in front of the buyer using SEO, Pay Per Click, article marketing, etc. and that’s all there is to it.

Useful Tools

There are numerous tools that can help you as an affiliate and here is a shameless plug for one that’s helped me a lot; it’s my very own Affiliate Link Tracker; an affiliate link cloaker and tracker all-in-one that I developed after trying and deleting others on the market.

As well as the easy link management element, the tracking features are just as important in helping to improve promotional efforts and reducing costs on dead-end channels.

Some merchants provide more statistics than others. It’s important that you have some mechanism of tracking not only so you can determine which of your promotional campaigns are attracting clicks, but also to ensure the data provided by merchants is accurate. Without any form of measurement of your own, you’re left to rely on what they report and they may not necessarily always get it right.

Affiliate Link Tracker makes it easy for you to stay in control.

Today, I received an email from Article Marketer telling me that because their affiliate system was unreliable and not tracking sales properly they’d changed to using a new system. The old system had been switched off and the new system was now in place.

As an affiliate, this meant that all of my existing referral links were broken. Any affiliate links that I’d placed on my websites, on other people’s websites, in articles that were already syndicated across hundreds of different websites, in ebooks that were sitting on people’s hard drives and in the emails in people’s inboxes had been rendered useless. Can you imagine just how many hours of work goes into a well publicised affiliate link only to be obliterated in one swift move.

Fortunately for me, I can deal with this sort of situation in under 2 minutes and get on with my day as if nothing had ever happened. Just as I did when Text Link Ads changed their affiliate link structure again.

How did I do this and how can you save yourself from a potential disaster that could happen when you least expect it? The solution is to use URL redirects. With a suitable system, such as Affiliate Link Tracker, you can effortlessly manage all of your affiliate links and divert your affiliate marketing income away from the iceberg that is a change of referral tracking system.

How will you cope if the merchants you promote suddenly decide to change their affiliate link system?  Consider your options now because it happens more often than you might think!

In response to Paul’s question about using Affiliate Link Tracker for links from different website, I’ve put together a brief demo video showing how you can use groups to organise links in meaningful ways.

With a single installation of Affiliate Link Tracker, you could redirect all of your links and refer to them wherever you like (the redirects will, of course, only on the domain you install the script on).

The 50% offer is still good. Visit here, place an order and during the checkout enter the coupon, IMFOOL, to claim your discount.