The Pitch: The idea here is that only limited stocks of the product are available! You’ll have to be quick and buy before they’re all gone! When the product is an ebook or digital download where limited sales are not realistic, you might see a back story about how “this incredible new programme is going to totally dominate Google and put SEO out of business, that’ll lead to Google fighting back and closing this loophole down! To prevent this, we’re only giving away 52.. 47 more copies!!”

The Scam: These claims are very rarely legitimate. The purpose is to create a sense of urgency, that if you don’t buy now you wont have a second chance. This is because a long time ago sales people learned that if the reader doesn’t buy the first time they read your sales pitch, on an impulse, then they are very unlikely to come back. A commonly used method for this trick is to install a little javascript or php script to track the visitors IP and generate a new countdown timer for that IP with a message like “$20 off if you buy in the next 24 hours!”. Inevitably, if you come back 24 hours later the message will reset. Because of this, you usually only see this on sales pages of relatively little or unknown sales guys that aren’t worried about their reputation.

2. Testimonials

“Your Bluestone Brand Buttscratcher Saved My Life!”
Mrs. F. Icticious

The Pitch: Testimonials are a quick and easy way to add the appearance of credibility. The idea is that the testimonial comes from an outside or third party source or a customer who was so pleased with the amazing product that they just had to let the sales guy know how much the product helped them make buckets of easy cash. All lending to the idea that this is an unbiased review of the amazing product.

The Scam: The vast majority of testimonials on sales pages are offered during the product testing phase and follow a trend where the product owner offers a free copy of the product in return for a testimonial. This is typically done on a forum and immediately biases the recipient to create a positive review (you wouldn’t turn around and bash someone who had just given you a free product, would you?). Another commonly used testimonial bait is to offer a free link back to the recipients website for their testimonial. Again, if you think you’re going to get a free link, you’re going to write them a damn positive testimonial.

In many cases the testimonial will simply be written by the website owner themselves and may use a”personal” portrait photo, usually sourced directly from iStock. This way they can write whatever they want about the product without the risk of having to put up a photo of some ugly mug customer, and they don’t even need to offer a link or a copy of the product.

1. I’ve made $535,677 from this unethically easy programme, just look at my paypal screenshots!!

The Pitch: The idea is to convey the fact that the product has lead to the sales guy becoming so incredulously rich from his product that he falls asleep on a blanket made of 20 dollar bills, that it takes him half an hour to scroll to the bottom of his PayPal incoming payments screen. This usually completely ignores the logical fact that if he were making this much money he wouldn’t need to sell the product in the first place.

The Scam: Once upon a recent time, virtually every sales page on the net had PayPal screenshots with either a month-by-month layout or a total-to-date shot. Due to the saturation of this technique and the fact that you’d have to be a top notch idiot to believe that they weren’t cooked up in Photoshop in 17.5 seconds means that the PayPal screenshot is less common these days. But it is still out there, and it’s just as fabricated.

The basic overview and idea is to create a niche website with some content, build some incoming links and traffic flow just as you would with any regular site, then get in touch with and pitch to businesses offering different plans which they can rent and then use the influence and benefits of your site to help grow their existing business.

Let’s take Massage as an example niche. First we spend a few weeks or a few months building a nice Massage site with WordPress or XSitePro or perhaps just HTML and PHP, however you create websites already, this method will slot in. Typically I will build a WordPress site, because it’s what I’m good at. So I install WordPress and style it with a nice Massage image header and add some colours that fit into this category. I’ll install all my standard plugins which help SEO, communication, link building and more. I’ll install a wordpress forum and create several massage related topics in there. All these steps take me a total of around 30 minutes to an hour.

I then find some common Massage questions people are asking in massage forums and on massage sites. I’ll use these questions to write 40 or 50 articles which people are genuinely interested in in this area and are searching for the answers to. Once I have close to 50 articles I use WordPress’ built in future-scheduling feature to make it post one article every week, thus giving me a years worth of articles being posted to my site on autopilot. I can hire someone to write me 50 articles for around $200, depending on how important the quality is. If I’m short on cash I’ll write them myself in 3 or 4 days and gain the benefit of ensured high quality.

While my first few articles are publishing I’ll spend the first couple of weeks building incoming links for free from directories, forum signatures, commenting, article submission and Social Bookmarking. This takes a bit of time and effort but gets the site on the radar and usually to pagerank 3 for free. Next I’ll spend a few hundred dollars for some advanced SEO, buying links, a Yahoo! directory listing, some press releases and more.

In most circumstances I’ll spend a month and around $400 on the site and I’ll end up with a good massage site with pagerank 4 and a few hundred visitors per day. This is a pretty common strategy and at this stage most people would sell the site for shy of a thousand dollars and repeat the process. So next is the twist that earns me at least three times as much as everyone else.

I rent the site out. I spend a good chunk of my time getting in touch with massage businesses from around the world. These can be local massage parlors, a masseuse house in Germany, a site online that sells massage oils, or just about any business that is related to my niche. I tell them that I have an excellent and well positioned (in terms of SEO) website that revolves around their business and would be excellent at generating them leads, traffic or an advertising platform. Like most cold calling, I’ll get a response from around 10-20% of the people I contact and I’ll have to work pretty hard before someone will rent from me. But once they do I’m generating $50-$250 per month for virtually no extra work. If I can put together a PDF file as a report which details my growth details (in terms of traffic and SEO over the past month or two) and show examples of how I can use my site to generate them more business, they’ll be interested and buy in.

A good way to market this is offer different packages. Package A. at $50 per month offers them their own company logo or banner and a method for collecting customer details (a registration system you can export and give them contact details & leads), Package B. is $100 per month and offers them the same with their company colours styling your site and various links pointing to their existing site. Package C. is $200 and allows them to edit the content of your site, put up their own info and company details, write up articles, etc.

One of the beauties of this model is that once you have the basics down pat and know what you’re doing you can duplicate it with a new niche within a few weeks and start making cash within a month. If one of your contacts decides they no longer want to rent your service (though typically once they start seeing the benefits this doesn’t happen) you can contact someone else and bump up your prices as your sites rankings and traffic increase.

Another very cool benefit is that while you’re setting up your site or while you’re transferring to a new client you can sell affiliate products, paste in your AdSense code or sell advertising space for some extra pocket change. If you run out of clients or get fed up with it, you can still earn cash.

Yet another awesome incentive for adopting this business model is that if at any time you need an extra cash boost you can sell a few of your sites. Since your sites will be earning you cash each month over a period of time they’ll grow as you add to them and build more incoming links. After a year you could have a majorly profitable website on your hands and since you have a huge list of business contacts in your niche you will have no shortage of businesses wanting to buy your website. Depending on how well you do you can easily earn $5,000 or more from selling a reasonably sized website.

The numerous side benefits and possibilities from this business model are truly staggering and at no stage will you be short of new ideas. Since you have the ability to kick your clients each month and offer it to new businesses for increasingly larger monthly sums you’ll soon have a very low maintenance, very high income, always growing business model with huge room for experimentation so you’ll never get bored.

A month or so ago I wrote a WordPress plugin for CPALead.com^aff which is a third party system that allows you to put pages of your website behind a survey which your readers must complete to reach the page, in return for which you gain a small commission.

However, I realized that I hadn’t given CPALead its due and figured I’d take this opportunity to give it a more analysis and provide some tips and tricks on getting the most out of it.

CPALead has two main methods for generating income. First up is what they call the Active Survey Display which simply displays a list of all the surveys available in their system. This isn’t very popular, and since there is no incentive for your readers to complete a survey unless you create one by other means, this tool is hardly used at all.

The next method is the Premium Content Tool. This is what sets CPALead apart from other third party CPA networks. It allows you to put a simple piece of javascript on any page of your website which then hides that page behind a survey. If your reader is interested or has reason enough to complete the survey, you earn cash.

A third and slightly less fundamental method for generating income is CPALeads referral program which works like other affiliate systems in that you gain a commission of 5% of the income generated by people you refer to CPALead. Since this is less than most referral systems and drastically less than the 50+% you can expect from ClickBank products, it isn’t really worth spending much time on, but can always net you a few dollars extra.

What are Some Best Practices for CPALead

I’m often asked how people make so much money with CPALead when others make only a few dollars per day and it has to be said that there is a huge gap in the earnings of people who use CPALead. Some people will earn a dollar per week while others will net a thousand or more per day. The difference truly is in the method of marketing.

While the amount of traffic sent to your CPALead page is up to you and you alone, the commission can be affected slightly and the conversion rate will be totally different depending on the action you take. Here are some top tips n tricks to get the most out of CPALead:

1. Use A Splash Page
One of the biggest reasons that people don’t complete surveys is that they don’t understand that doing so will give them access to valuable content. For example, people may link to your CPALead page with something like “Click here for free videos of the new South Park” but when the visitor arrives they’re presented with a survey splash screen. 9 times out of 10 they wont even bother to read the text and you lose a potential commission. This may also happen when users are directed to your page via search engines.

To solve this and greatly increase your conversion rate, add a splash page. On this page put a simple description of the content offered. If you’re offering a video, take a screenshot of it and show this. Next, make sure you detail the steps that your readers must take before getting access to the content. Be meticulous about this, detailing exactly what the user must do and giving as much information as you can.

Finally, add a link to the content page. It is best to add this link after the description so that your readers are more likely to read it before continuing through.

2. Understand That CPALead is a Niche Tool
Many of the complaints I hear about CPALead are from people who are using it on blogs, dating sites or other sites that just wont work with this system. Your readers must have a reason to complete the surveys and so unless you have content people are after you’re not going to make any cash. If you use it on a blog or article website you’re mostly just going to piss people off.

Some good websites to use CPALead with are:

• MMORPG and browser games where you can offer extra points or bonuses for completing a survey a day.
• Social networking sites or even forums where you can offer membership.
• Download sites offering eBooks, images or other files.
• By far the most profitable sites are video sites. Offering all the episodes of a TV show, for example, then hiding each one behind a gateway is a great way of doing well.

3. Pay for Traffic

Another mistake that people make is not using PPC campaigns to vastly increase the amount that can be made from CPALead. Since the main factor that determines how much you earn is traffic, it stands to reason that more traffic will equal more profit, right? And the single fastest way of generating large amounts of traffic is via PPC.

AdWords is the most popular of these, but instead I recommend Yahoo! Publisher Network or Microsoft Ad Center (the Yahoo! and Live.com versions of AdSense) because they usually offer equal amounts of traffic for less. So long as you pay less for traffic than you earn back then you will make profit.

Your profit from CPALead can be represented with a simple formula:

Profit = Traffic * Coversion Rate/100 * Commission

So, for example, if your site merits 100 visits per day, your conversion is typically 50% and your CPALead Commission is (and it pretty much always is) 50c, then your CPALead income formula would be 100 * .5% * $0.50 = $25.

So if you’re in doubt or have never used PPC before, work out the above figures using free traffic then find out how much 1,000 hits will cost you via PPC. If the amount of profit you make from 1,000 hits is more than the cost of that traffic, buy. If not, find a cheaper keyword and create content to offer in that niche.

4. Pay for Content

Paying for traffic is probably the biggest and most important step in earning from CPALead, but paying for content can also bump up your profits and lower the time you spend putting things together. The web is awash with sales pages for products which people genuinely want but don’t want to shell out $47 for. If all they had to do was fill out a survey, the chances are they would, right? So why not pay someone $100 to write a couple of eBooks on a popular topic? While they’re doing that put together a splash page and a website to hold everything together. Once you have the eBooks, throw them up and start buying traffic. Viola! So long as your traffic costs less than you earn you should quickly make back your costs.

All considered this may sometimes take less than a week. If you use PLR material you can do it in a day.

5. US Traffic Is Best

CPALead hooks up with companies offering surveys from all over the world but the vast majority are from the US, UK and Canada. Since some surveys are only available to certain countries (most companies only want the information of people in their own country) often times you’re wasting your traffic unless it’s from USA, UK and Canada. If you use the tip above and pay for PPC traffic, this is easy done. AdWords, as well as most other PPC systems, offer an option to only pay for traffic from certain countries or geographic locations. Use it and cut out the wasted traffic.

While CPALead isn’t going to become universal like AdSense and you wont hear much about it, for those who use it correctly it produces vast amounts of easy income. I’ve seen people make several thousand dollars profit per day simply from a couple of eBooks and a lot of PPC traffic. Try it out now^aff and see for yourself.

One key technique used with affiliate marketing is to write reviews for the product you are marketing with your affiliate link in the text. This is a good approach because the sorts of people who read your review are people who are already interested in buying the product. If, for example, I wrote an article entitled ‘Toyota Widget x300 Reviewed’ then you can bet that the vast majority of the organic (search engine) traffic that comes to that page will be people who are interested in buying a Toyota x300 model Widget. Sometimes all it takes is hearing a good review and they’ll commit to buy. Since there’s a handy link to the sales page on your blog they’ll click through and viola, you make an easy commission.

The problem with this is an ethical one. Since you are interested in seeing a sale being made, you are likely biased towards writing in favor of the product, even if it sucks. This is a horribly common place problem which means that the extreme majority of product reviews on the internet are biased.

So you should just disregard any review with an affiliate link in it, right? Well unfortunately it’s not that simple. The best reviews are always from those who have used the product for their own needs and sometimes affiliate marketers of the product are the only people in this category. There are also cases where affiliate links are masked and so a reader doesn’t know they’re giving a commission to the affiliate marketer and hence don’t know whether the review is potentially worthless. And then there are paid reviews.

Paid reviews are reviews, usually blog entries, that are written by the blogger for a commission which don’t contain an affiliate link and sometimes go to great lengths to appear as though they are unbiased and genuine product reviews, even when the webmaster may never have used the product in his or her life. Companies like these because they know that many people don’t trust or don’t use affiliate links any more and if an article is seen on a prominent website which raves and glorifies their product, that’s likely to end in more sales for them.

DooYoo.co.uk is a great example of a site offering paid reviews. They pay anyone and everyone 50p (around 75c) for each review and an additional 1.5p or 2.2c each time another dooyoo member reads your review. The minimum cash payout is £50. Alternatively you can receive Amazon.com vouchers or make a charitable donation.
Being honest however, 50p per review is less than other paid review sites can offer. The difference with dooyoo however is that it’s easy to sign up and get going with. They also have an active moderator base and if your reviews are good you will be noticed and receive bonuses.

Ciao.co.uk^aff is very similar to DooYoo whereby they offer small amounts of cash for member reviews. The amount you earn depends upon how other people in the community rate your review.

Epinions.com is a vastly popular product review site which pays members for their reviews. The unique thing about Epinions is that they’ve worked hard to make sure even negative reviews generate income and use a Yahoo! Answers style community trust model to make sure honest reviewers do well. Unfortunately they use an ambiguous pagerank style formula for working out which reviews generate the most sales for associated companies and as such the only way to work out how much reviews are worth is to sign up and try it out, which I haven’t done and as such can’t comment on.

PayPerPost.com^aff is another paid review site which maintains a relationship with thousands of companies and has a marketplace where these companies offer, what it calls Opportunities, to review Product X from Company Y in return for cash. PayPerPost.com boasts a huge inventory of companies and products and reviews can net upwards of $1,000.

Most physical products like clothes, toys and games don’t suffer from these bias review problems because they can be seen and handled and more and more people will check out YouTube to see the product in action before they buy it.

So how can you determine whether a review is legitimate or not? Here are a few key pointers. Does the review contain an affiliate link? If so then the review may not be legitimate and may be fabricated to encourage sales. Is the review exclusively positive? In most cases a good writer will include some of the negative things about a product in a review as well as the positive whereas a paid review will usually contain insignificant or trivial negative aspects or will be exclusively positive. Are there outrageous claims that don’t have proof or evidence to support them? A scenario which I see all the time is where a product is advertised and the sales page boasts titles and claims like ‘How I make $10,000 per week from this simple method!’ with a plethora of PayPal screenshots which when investigated usually turn out to be copied from the hundreds of other sites sporting the same images. A very good rule of thumb to remember is that if a product sounds too good to be true, it almost always is. If you aren’t put off by claims like this then at least do some research before investing your cash. If the site has forums, ask the members questions. If the site has testimonials, check up on the customers and if possible email them for a response. If the site has none of these or no method for getting in touch with people who have actually used the product then simply don’t buy.

While affiliate links don’t affect the price you pay or your service, and so wont be an issue for the majority of people, it’s important to get reviews and insight into a product before buying. This is especially true for electronic products like eBooks, SEO services and the likes, since the only evidence that many of these products works are customers who have already used them. Internet marketing is rife with biased reviews or worse reviews that are entirely fabricated and so when buying a product or service you should always be sure that the claims on the sales page can be backed up with hard evidence.

Here are a few of the methods you can use to make income from YouTube, how to apply them and how much you’re likely to make.

1. Affiliate Marketing

First up is affiliate marketing. This is a common internet marketing technique where you promote someones product with an affiliate ID in your link. Whenever someone clicks through and buys the product, you earn a commission. The best platform for this is blogging since you can hide the affiliate link (which potential customers are often put off by) and promote it in whichever way you like (through image links, text links, etc). However, YouTube, when used correctly, is also an excellent format for affiliate marketing.

The basic steps to making money via affiliate marketing on YouTube are to:

A. Sign up to ClickBank.com or another affiliate network.
B. Chose a suitable product in a specific niche or category.
C. Find or create a video that revolves as much as possible around that niche or category.
D. Upload your video and create a compelling video description (more info field) so that viewers natural want to click through.

Assuming a commission of $10 per sale and a typical yearly count of 30,000 viewers per video, this would mean that even if only 1% of the viewers for a given video click through and buy your affiliate product then you’d still make $3,000 per year from a single video. While the click through rates for YouTube will be significantly lower than other affiliate marketing mediums, the effort involved is usually much lower. You’ll also find that most of the techniques mentioned for article marketing (making a compelling bio box, etc) also apply to video marketing.

2. Promote Your Own Products

Another extremely popular method of use for YouTube is promoting your own products. There are a number of different approaches to this but the basic idea is to feature a product or service you are selling and show an example of it in use with a link to your sales page in the description field.

This can work with electronic products like eBooks. For example if you are promoting a weight loss eBook then why not tape a few testimonials. Or offer a copy of your book for free if someone agrees to take a quick video of themselves before and after using your product.

The real benefit though, comes when you create videos of your product in use. If you were marketing a physical product this would be easy, you would just show someone playing with your remote control car or your train set or whatever. For electronic products it’s slightly more complicated but still pretty easy. Let’s say, for example, that you’ve created an automatic Social Bookmarking Submission software package (a piece of software that lets people submit to Digg.com, StumbleUpon, etc at the click of a button). Using a free piece of software like CamStudio you can record yourself opening up your software from the desktop, submitting your site, and then opening up the results in your browser. This shows potential customers exactly what your product does, and exactly how to use it.

This is very useful and people do actively search for people using something they are interested in buying before making a purchase. By showing testimonials or the product in action you allow people to see your product in action and what people are saying about it as well as generating additional traffic towards your sales page.

3. Video Ads

Not so long ago YouTube and AdSense (both of which are owned by Google) teamed up and developed Video Ads. These allow you to embed videos in your blog or website using a custom embed code which adds adverts to the video. Just like with AdSense, you earn a small commission each time someone clicks through.

This is especially useful for websites with large amounts of traffic and/or videos. If you embed large numbers of videos on your site already you may see a large jump in your income using video ads.

One disadvantage of using this system though, is that you can’t chose specific videos to display on your site, instead YouTube choses which videos it thinks are relevant to your page from a list of channels and categories which are signed up to Video Ads (kind of like AdWords for YouTube). This is unfortunate and means that many different video content sites are experimenting with alternative ways to make money, some of whom share this income with their users.

4. Revver

Revver.com, while not specific to YouTube, is worth mentioning in this article too. Revver is very similar to YouTube, Daily Motion and other video sharing websites in that it’s simply a place where people can upload and share videos. The difference being that they automatically add ads to each video you upload and give you 50% of the income generated from these ads. These PPC ads work almost identically to AdSense and give you a tiny commission each time they are viewed and a larger commission each time they are clicked.

If you are creative and enjoy making videos online then Revver is definitely worth your time. They should also be checked out for those of us just looking to create some additional income online however, since they also offer 20% of the ad revenue for people who promote videos. This means that if you have an outlet for video content (a blog or website, etc) then you can make some extra pocket money by putting videos in front of peoples eyes. Since the ads are pretty unobtrusive nobody loses out.

Revver isn’t going to make you a fortune but if you have a few videos sitting doing nothing or a YouTube account you want to put to better use then it’s a great way to make a few pennies. Since you can just upload your videos and forget about them, there really is virtually no effort involved at all and it will probably earn you the price of a pizza or two each month.

Membership sites make up some of the biggest and most lucrative websites online and while selling membership takes a bit of effort and technical knowledge, the benefits are well worth the initial time investment.

How Much Can You Make?

The income potential of a membership site is unlimited. If your website or service is valuable and you have enough traffic then your monthly income can be enormous. Take a look at World of Warcraft for example. While not a website, it is a membership service. At $15 per month and with around 7 million players that’s an income of around $105 million per month, and the running fees are not that high.

A good example of a large membership site is RapidShare (http://www.rapidshare.com) which allows people to share their files with everyone and anyone. At around $10 per month with thousands of members, RapidShare is currently the 12th largest website on the net (according to Alexa) so you can bet they make a packet.

How Much Work Is Involved?

Setting up the technical side of selling membership and subscriptions on a website is relatively easy. PayPal has a built in subscription function which can be relayed to a script on your site which allows or refuses access based on whether the user paid the bill that month. Alternatively you could set up your own payment system and offer discounts for people who buy a years worth of subscription then simply store the values in an SQL database or whatever.

The real work is in finding a market and creating a service worth subscribing to. Tests have shown that people don’t like to subscribe, especially on the internet, and prefer a one off payment. However, if you really have something to offer or something that people need, then subscription can be an excellent approach.

While membership sites like RapidShare don’t involve any time or effort on the part of the administrator, many membership sites do. A common practice is to sell subscription to a blog or a section of a blog and to serve up content there on a continual basis. An alternatively ingenius idea is to rely on user interaction to sell membership. An example of this is Experts Exchange (http://www.experts-exchange.com) which worked in a similar manner to Yahoo! Answers where anyone could post a question and then other members could reply with their answers. However, only people who paid for a subscription could view the answers. This caused a lot of frustration for people who came in through Google and eventually Google cracked down on these sites, but they still exist and still make plenty of money. They rely on the users to create content that other people are willing to pay for and so the upkeep and maintenance of these sites is minimal.

Selling membership and subscription isn’t the easiest way to make money online, and does require a bit of technical knowledge as well as knowing the basics of how to make money online. If you’re familiar enough with selling products online then there are a number of options to sell subscriptions or membership online.

PayPal has a very nice Recurring Payments suite. Using it you can create a button or series of buttons where your users can pay set prices for set time periods of membership and PayPal even offer a built in trial period function. Setting this up requires that you use IPN to keep track of your users after they pay. IPN is simply a method whereby PayPal sends a notice to a URL of your choice with the details of each payment you receive. For example when someone buys a months worth of subscription the IPN sends out a notice to your page with the price, time period, email address, etc of the user. You can set up your page to interpret and store this data in a MySQL database or wherever, and give them access to a section of your website or a newsletter or whatever you have in mind. PayPal will continue to bill the person until they decide they no longer wish to subscribe, at which point you can simply drop them from your membership list and delete them from your records.

As I said this requires a little technical knowledge. If, for example, you wanted to offer moderator status for the forums of your website you would first need to create a sales pitch page with a few buttons offering membership for say a single month and a whole year, with a hidden field which holds the clients forum username (ideally they would only be able to buy subscription while logged into your forums). You would then need to set up a script that can interpret PayPal IPNs and have it update the data for the chosen username and set them as a moderator. Another function would also need to be set up where the user could stop their subscription and/or delete all their information.

This is a rough outline of how recurring payments for online sites works but using these basic steps you can set up subscription or membership for virtually anything you can think of. In most cases the products and services offered will be electronic and cost you nothing to issue or maintain, and so other than the minimal PayPal fees it’s 100% profit.

The basic idea behind Affiliate Marketing is that you sign up to a product, site or service, after which you get a referral link which offers the product or service, sometimes at a discounted price. If the visitor decides to buy the product, you receive a percentage of the sale.

How Much Is It Worth?

The success and profit of affiliate marketing can be worked out in exactly the same fashion as Cost Per Click Advertising using 3 factors: The amount of traffic, the value of the product and the conversion rate. The amount of traffic is pretty straight forward; it’s the amount of people who visit your affiliate link per day. The value of the product is simply how much money you get from each sale. If the product is $40 and you get 50% of the sale from referrals then the value of the product is $20. Finally the conversion rate is how many people actually buy the product, expressed as a percentage of the amount of people who visit your affiliate link. So if 100 people visit your link per day and out of those 100, 7 people continue through and spend their $40, your conversion rate is 7%. Most of the major Affiliate Marketing sites will show your conversion rate in real time.

If you’re not part of ClickBank or any of the major affiliate sites, you can work these values out by putting a hit counter like Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics) on your site and seeing how many hits per day or week you receive. Then simply work out how many sales you make per day or week from your link and from this work out your conversion rate. The value of any affiliate product or link can be expressed as Profit = Traffic x (Conversion/100) x Value. Therefor if you post an article with a link to an Affiliate product which costs $20 and you get 50% the value is $10, if you receive 80 hits per day to that page and your conversion rate is 5% then Profit = 80 x (50/100) x $10 which is $400 per day.

You can expect to make a reasonable income from affiliate marketing, though perhaps not as much as other revenue streams can bring. Again, affiliate marketing is very simple and acts as a good introduction to the world of internet marketing but as soon as you work out the basics and have made a few dollars, you’ll probably want to cross the fence to the other side of affiliate marketing and instead create products for others to sell.

How Much Work Is Involved?

Creating an affiliate link is the simplest thing in the world and signing up to ClickBank or a specific affiliate product will take minutes. The real work is in driving traffic to your affiliate links. There are many ways to do this but the most popular is by blogging. By choosing a specific topic to Blog on, say Running Shoes, you can write just an article or two per day then insert a few affiliate links into your articles for whichever products are most relevant to that article, be they running shoes themselves, an e-book about running, or whatever.

An excellent technique which is often overlooked is to write reviews of products. This is useful because if you can get hold of the product and use it, you can simply write your opinion of it and perhaps add your own ideas. This means you can generate lots of articles without having to think about it too hard. The other benefit is that these articles, if you title them accordingly, “Nike XG Running Shoes: Reviewed”, for example, you will attract a certain type of visitor: people who already want to buy the product. These people are looking for information on the product in order to make an informed decision on whether to buy it or not. If your article provides some good and honest (don’t just write positive things) information about the product and then provides a link to buy it, the customer is likely to trust you and follow your link.

You can also use this method to attract customers to your products by writing about other products. Say you have an affiliate link for Nike XG Blue Shoes but customers are searching and buying Addidas PW Red Shoes. Simply write an article with a title something like “Addidas PW Red Shoes – Are They Really Worth It?”. Then continue to write up a short review, but lead this on to your own product with something like “while Addidas PW Red Shoes are great for short bursts, I found that Nike XG Blue Shoes were much more comfortable and suited me a lot better for long distance running.” Again, add your affiliate link somewhere in the second half and people who are already in buying mode (they were searching to buy Running Shoes) have a review of the product they were searching for, as well as a seemingly better product, along with a link to buy it.

Links

ClickBank (http://www.clickbank.com) is the big daddy of the affiliate marketing world and has been the most profitable for both publishers and affiliates for a long time. It has some excellent statistics and some links will net you up to 95% of the value of the sale.

PayDotCom (http://www.paydotcom.com) is another popular and large affiliate network which has many real products as well as digital ones.

Click2Sell (http://www.click2sell.eu) is yet another and is set up in much the same way.

By succeeding in earning income with AdSense many internet marketers don’t bother to seek other forms of income online and restrict them to this inefficient and often very low income branch. A much more profitable stem is that of selling your own product from your website. The reason that this is often a much better and more profitable opportunity is that no third party company (i.e. Google) is taking part of your revenue. Furthermore, if your product is good and sought after then you’ll drive much more sales and income.

One group of products which everyone can create and market are eBooks. The hardest part of making money from eBooks truly is creating them. The latter pars

How to Create an eBook

Step 1. Find a Market
The first part is in actually physically creating the eBook and by far the most important step here is in identifying a valuable market. Even if you create an excellent eBook which has amazing information and answers all the questions someone may have about your chosen subject, you might never make a single sale simply because there’s no market for it. One of the first eBooks I ever made was called Social Bookmarking Explained and I was very proud of it. I spent several weeks creating it and it had a foolproof method for creating a large income from Social Bookmarking while putting in very little work. I was certain that this eBook would sell because it had genuinely valuable information and would make those who took it seriously a lot of money. I set up a website for it and made a sales copy and even drove traffic to the site. After 6 months I hadn’t made a single sale. Even after lowering the price to a measly $7 I still couldn’t shift it.

The problem, I later discovered, was that there was no market for this product. Most people already knew about Social Bookmarking and how to use it and those who didn’t didn’t think it was worth spending time and effort on. If I had went out and found a market and then created a product to market to those people, instead of creating a product and trying to fill the market for it, I would have made a lot of money. This is exactly what you must do and is one of the key principles of business: find a market, find out what they want, and supply it to them.

So, how do you find a desperate market? Well, someone a lot smarter than me once said that most markets come from one of the seven deadly sins:

1. Lust
2. Gluttony
3. Greed
4. Sloth
5. Wrath
6. Envy
7. Pride

For example, losing weight and dieting is a hugely profitable niche on the internet and these people are searching for a product to aid them due to their indulgence in gluttony, an advert for “Make $1,000 in the next 5 days with no work!” appeals to a person to indulge in greed and sloth, and so on.

Using these niches you can find hundreds of potential markets. The next step is to have a look on Google for your niche. For example let’s say we want to market a speed reading eBook. Simply by typing ’speed reading’ into Google we can immediately tell that there is a large market around this subject. There are over two and a half million sites which include information on this topic and if that isn’t enough proof then look at the Sponsored Links section. There are 45 adverts for products relating to Speed Reading. We can deduce from this that a large number of people pay for Speed Reading products on a daily basis. The ideal market would be one that has a large market but little competition.

Step 2. Create the eBook
After finding a market of people who are willing to buy a product in a specific niche, the next step is creating said product. The best way of doing this is to simply write the eBook yourself. Assuming English is your first language, this will save you a lot of money and you will end up with a much better product. A typical eBook can be anywhere from 50 to 250 pages and if you research and provide valuable information then it can take you anywhere from a week to several months to write your eBook.

An alternative and faster approach is to pay someone else to write it for you. If you have found a market which you know next to nothing about then this is a viable option. Ghostwriting services can be expensive but can save you a lot of time which you could instead spend on setting up and promoting your sales site.

Whether writing the eBook yourself or hiring a ghostwriter you should first create the skeleton of your book, much like a contents page. A good way to do this is find out valuable information that relates to your topic and include answers to any associated questions. For example if your topic is Weight Loss, Google ‘Weight Loss Forums’. Read through some of the weight loss forums and try to identify questions that commonly crop up, things that people are continually asking. The obvious answer here is ‘How do I lose weight?’ but try to find more specific questions, i.e. ‘What is the best way to lose weight with a high protein diet?’ or ‘How can I lose weight without changing what I eat?’. These can become chapters in your eBook and will also create good selling points because in most cases the majority of people who buy your eBook will be doing so to find the answer to a specific question.

Step 3. Convert to PDF
Virtually all commercial eBooks are in PDF format and I am frequently asked the question: How do I convert my eBook to .PDF? Luckily the answer is not only very simple but very free as well. Depending on the application you used to write your eBook you will search Google for something like “.doc to .pdf”. A number of free sites to convert your file to PDF will be available. If you’d rather do it offline then you can search a freeware site like Freewarefiles.com for the same thing.

Converting to .PDF provides a few benefits. First, it’s the commonly recognized format for eBooks and it looks and feels more professional for the person reading it. Second, it’s much harder to plagiarize PDF documents because you cannot simply copy and paste from them like you can from MS Word. This stops people from ripping off chunks of your text and makes it slightly harder to copy your work.

How to Sell an eBook

By now you’ve learned how to identify a valuable market and create your eBook in PDF format, but how do you actually sell it and make some cash?

The simplest and best method that I know of is to use PayPal IPN. IPN stands for Instant Payment Notification and is a system you can use in PayPal so that each time someone sends you a payment, PayPal sends a notification to a URL of your choice. This notification is basically just a list of all the information of the payment (how much was paid, who the payer was, their location, the currency, etc). This is very useful because you can use this information to take action. For example if the customer has paid $10 for a product ‘eBook 1′ then you can send eBook1.zip to their email address. Alternatively if they’ve paid $5 for ‘eBook 2′ you can reject it because eBook 2 actually costs $15. Alternatively you can display a link to eBook 2 on screen, or whatever you like. The flexibility of PayPal IPN is immense.

You can download a free PHP PayPal IPN class from here. After you have your IPN class set up you simply login to PayPal and hit the Profile tab. In the third column you will have a link called Instant Payment Notification Preferences. Click it and hit Edit and enter the URL of the IPN class you just uploaded and viola. Now each time someone sends you a payment an IPN will be sent to that page and the action you’ve coded in will be taken.

If you wish to send out a link to your eBook by email, for example, then you could use something like this within the case ’success’: section:

`mail($p->ipn_data['payer_email'],’Your eBook!’,'Thank you for your payment, your eBook is available for download at http://www.yoursite.com/eBook.zip’);`

The third and final step is in marketing your eBook and supplying it to those who it’s aimed at. This is outside the scope of this article but the basic steps are to create a sales page with good copy and then to bring related traffic to that page. This will primarily be either organic traffic from SEO or paid traffic from Google AdWords. Another option is to create your own affiliate program or register your eBook with a third party affiliate site like ClickBank and allow people to sell copies of your eBook for a percentage of the retail price.

So, in summary the main steps to selling an eBook are:

1. Identify a market.
2. Identify the questions and wants of that market.
3. Create the eBook and optionally convert it to PDF format.
4. Set up a payment and delivery system.
5. Create a sales/pitch page.
6. Drive traffic to that sales page via organic traffic and/or paid traffic and optionally allow affiliates to sell copies for a percentage of your sale.

So what is CPA? CPA stands for Cost Per Action and is exactly that: You install some piece of software or interface and prompt your users to take an action (i.e. send an email to their friends). For each user who completes the action, you get paid a small sum. CPA typically revolves around things like signing up, sending emails and completing surveys, but the CPA world is as vast as it is unique. CPA works exceedingly well when you have a product or service to offer but which isn’t quite good enough to sell.

An example of CPA in action is my PHP Profit eBook which is an eBook that tells people how to make money from the PHP programming language. On the initial page I highlight the contents and benefits of the eBook and state that they can download it for free. So when someone who knows PHP and/or wants to make money online comes to this page, they are naturally interested and click the download link to the product. On the next page they are prompted to fill out a survey. They have two options: A. They don’t fill in the survey, close my site, and assumedly never come back or B. They fill out the survey, after which they can immediately download my eBook. I receive a few cents, and they receive their free copy of my product, everybody gains.

If I used AdSense on this page and still offered the eBook for free, I would receive less than a dollar a day. Conversely if I offered the eBook for a set fee it would be unlikely to sell very well because it’s not that long, isn’t an incredibly popular subject and the information within isn’t incredibly difficult to learn by experience.

Now, CPA isn’t perfect. Occasionally the survey is impossible to complete, or more often they fill out false information which doesn’t allow them access. Generally they then get frustrated and leave. This is one of the major problems with CPA networks and it can put some people off your site for life. However, if you ensure that you chose a good CPA network and can establish that there is a low risk of this happening then there are very few disadvantages of using CPA.

By having a mix of different revenue streams from one website you stand in a much more secure financial position as well as experiencing the benefit that any action you take that increases traffic to your site generally increases the income from all those revenue streams. Selling products, AdSense and CPA networks are just 3 of the many ways to earn income online, but they fit together very nicely and are all extremely easy to implement.

For those of you who would like to try CPA for yourselves I recommend CPALead (http://www.cpalead.com) which is in use on the PHP Profit page. Typically you will receive around $0.50 each time someone completes a survey and if you set it up correctly you will have anywhere from a 5 to 50% completion ratio. Note that my referral ID is kept in the previous link, this means that I will receive a small bonus if you sign up from the link above while there is no disadvantage to yourself. If you are cold and heartless and would like to sign up without giving me my small bonus you can do so here – http://www.cpalead.com.

First up what you need to do is find 20 to 30 businesses in your local area. This is incredibly easy and if you’re stuck simply skim through the business section of your phone book and write down half a dozen business names. It doesn’t matter what they sell or do at this stage. Alternatively you could walk around your town and take note of names as you see them. It really doesn’t matter how you compile a list.

Next you need to search for them on the internet and see if they have a website. If you can’t find them or their name is quite general (i.e. Auto Parts LTD) then put in your town or region as well (i.e. Auto Parts LTD, Saint Hill). If any businesses don’t have a website then you can take them off your list. If you do this for more than a few times you’ll begin to get a feel for which businesses are likely to have websites and which aren’t.

You should now have a list of about 15-20 or so businesses with their website URLs. The next step is to go to each website and see if they have any form of customer capture. The standard method for this is simply a free autoresponder script which new users must sign up to receive. You can get this service for free and for businesses it’s invaluable. It enables the business owner to stay in touch with his or her customers, send them offers, discount codes, or simply information on new and existing products. Virtually all sites which sell online have began using these in the past few years because they increase sales and help to keep customers loyal. Despite all this most small businesses do not use them, out of ignorance or false assumption perhaps. Who knows, the point is after you whittle out those with autoresponders (which usually turns out to be surprisingly few) you will end up with a list of 10-15 businesses with websites who you have something to sell to in return for some quick and easy cash.

So what are you selling? Simple: your expertise and knowledge and a way for them to increase their business sales and customer base using an asset which they’ve already paid for: their website. The third step is to send out an email to each business and ask them to contact you. Here is a sample email you could use:

***************************************************
Mr./Ms. XXX

My name is XXX and I am a local business consultant experienced in online sales and e-commerce.

I know your time is valuable, as is mine so let me get right to the point. If I could show you a way to increase your customer base and online sales almost immediately using a business asset which you already have, potentially earning you thousands of dollars, would you be willing to lend me half an hour of your time?

This free consultation can increase your sales by as much as 50% while bringing you new customers at the same time. Furthermore it can keep your existing customers coming back. All of this is possible using an asset which your business already uses and so the cost for you to implement it immediately would be absolutely free.

Please email me at XXX or call me at XXX at your earliest convenience to schedule a free consultation and to learn about how to begin growing your customer base immediately.

Yours in business,
XXX
Contact info
***************************************************

If you send this out to 10-15 businesses you’re almost guaranteed to get a call. An even better way to do this is by sending them a letter instead of an email. The bonus of this is that it is almost certain to be read, while emails are often seen as spam. Both ways are highly successful however.

When you receive your first call all you need to do is set up an appointment. So long as you’re professional and courteous it should be a sinch. The less you can give away at this stage the better however, it’s best to save it for when you’re face to face.

The final step is to actually have the appointment. What you want to do here is again, be professional and courteous and honest. Explain to them the asset they already have (their website) but aren’t using. Explain how auto responders work, how they’re being used internationally to drive up sales, stay in touch with customers and save on advertising bills (emails are free). At this stage a couple of things could happen.

• A. They will be ignorant of the online market or not understand for some other reason and shoot you down as some scam artist.
• B. They’ll understand but be reluctant or unconvinced and for whatever reason push you away.
• C. They will understand and see the advantages but will chose to implement your idea themselves, cutting you out. Note – This never happens.
• D. They will get it. They’ll understand that they can save shed-loads on advertising and standard mail and stay in touch with their valuable customer base while simultaneously expanding it. You’ll make a friend for life and they’ll be more than happy to have you back to oversee or install a system.

The vast majority of meetings you will have will fall under category A or D, but since it only takes a half hour of your time, what have you got to lose? Once you have an agreement or contract for your chosen sum of money to carry out the work all you need to do is edit their website and install an autoresponder system of your choice. You can find hundreds on the web, a good place to check is Hotscripts.com (http://www.hotscripts.com/search?q=autoresponder) where, in-case you’re on a budget, you can pick a good one up for free. Buy one of the commercial packages as soon as you make your first payment though, they have a lot more features and are far better tested for bugs and errors.

Another option which is much quicker and easier to set up and saves you a lot of time is hosted autoresponders. These are websites set up solely to send out emails to people who have signed up at your website. They are good because it means you can sometimes update your clients website in less than half an hour, but bad because the business owner will have less direct control and may even have to put up with an advertisement on the footer of their emails.

Personally I offer and explain both of these options and let the business owner chose. If they chose a hosted auto responder, great, I’ve just saved a half hours work. If not then it’s no big deal, but I also charge a little more.

The most common question people have after hearing this idea is “How much should I charge?” and this really depends on a few things including the type and size of the business, their website, their existing customer base, etc. Keep in mind that many businesses still send out all their mail by post and the only way they can maintain an idea of their customer base is by hiring people to do it and physically send out the post. So they’re spending money on wages, envelopes, stamps, printer supplies, and more. The other advantage of emails is that you can send as many as you want with as much information as you want and you have infinite flexibility. You can keep track of what your customers have bought and offer discounts to long term customers or customers who have spent more than $300 on your products.

As you explain this concept and these ideas to the business owner 9 times out of 10 you’ll see a light bulb switch on above their head and their eyes will light up. They’ll suddenly understand what all the fuss is about and have a plethora of ideas for other things they want. Which, if you wish, can lead you on to other things and sometimes get you job offers within the business too. A common request is for customer satisfaction surveys or questionaries which are equally as simple to set up and can earn you a few more bucks.

Whatever the outcome, you’re loosing, at most, an hour of your time and the cost of a letter. After the first few you’ll start to get a feel for it and be able to target businesses you think will respond well to the concept. The reason this works is because you are genuinely providing something of great value to the business and you’re able to do it quickly for very little cost. So long as you’re honest and professional you’ll see nothing but success.

Notes: This method is universal, it works with just about any business in existence because all businesses want to know who their customers are and keep in touch with them. The only exception is web design firms and things like this where most of them already have an auto responder. But the playing field is still huge, your local area included.

If you don’t have any experience with auto responders you should set one up on your own site and understand how they work and what they’re capable of. If you still struggle afterwards then you can always outsource the work and just ask the client for an extra day or two to set things up.

You’ll have far more calls and response if you send a letter than if you send an email. Additionally if you find out a bit of information about the business before you send the letter, like the type of company and name of the owner, you can include their name on the envelope and make the letter more specific to them. This will have a great affect and you’ll get a much better response. Usually you can find all this for free from their website, but if not you could even just call and ask.