So if weve got a newbie who wants to build a site quickly and easily whats the best way for them to do that
Well, there's a few ways to do it. One of the little pieces of software that I used to use, and I recently changed but it's still a very nice little piece of software is FrontPage, Microsoft FrontPage. And we've used that for years to build all kinds of sites. And I've taught students how to use FrontPage since 2001.
And it's a nice little tool, but fast forward to today, because there are some new types of site builders out there. There's one online called EZ-webbuilder.com and it's a cool little tool, it's something that I came across probably about three or four months ago, that a friend of mine actually owns the license to it, up in this area in Vancouver here. It's an amazing little service. 29.95 a month, they give you a ten day free trial, you go on and play with it and kind of get the feel of the whole thing, see how it works.
There's other tools out there, use blogging software that's becoming more and more popular. That's another way. I'm not much of a blogger at this point because I've got kind of my little system that I follow. But I would say mostly, probably an online site builder, something like EZ-webbuilder.com is probably the best way, especially for a new person.
Not that, saying a new person, that it's a substandard service because I'm using it now myself, it's a very advanced service, but it's very simple to use. I actually just based my entire, the third edition of my Affiliate Marketer's Handbook on that new site builder because it's so powerful.
So besides getting the natural traffic, what other tools do you use?
I do some opt-in, not a lot, I do. I'm starting to dabble in the area of paid searches which is where Rosalind is. I actually have met a student of mine who's in the natural search area who's actually an expert in paid search. He lives in Perth, Australia. You got to love the net, I ran into them at one of the conferences, and he's an expert with Google AdWords, and he's been kind of giving me the lay of the land. So I'm starting to get a lot of traffic through paid search, which is a new thing.
I don't do a lot of list building at present with my affiliate sites, although I might, I might start to move into that area a little.
I'm not really convinced. I think people are getting enough email. People are sick of email. I'm sick of it. Everybody I talk to is sick of it. I know there's money to be made with it. It's just not something I've needed to do, or really I'm not interested in at this point.
- Anything like opt-in lists?
Once you get the traffic to your websites, what's your sales conversion ratio like?
You know, it's all over the map. It depends completely on how good a job I've done with, you know, getting targeted traffic to my site, but it also is completely, in direct relationship to how well that merchant produces, you know converts my visitor I sent him into a sale, so I've got some sites that convert at nothing. And sites that convert up to 15, 20%.
But typically you're probably looking at, it's probably not much different than anything else, probably around 2%, 3% when we're talking natural search here.
If you've already evaluated that vendor's sales page and you think it's pretty good and it converts at nothing, what do you do? Dump the product?
Yeah, if you know. I'm actually dealing with that right now, one of my sites, where I'm sending amazingly targeted very good traffic, and I've actually been on the phone, first thing I'll do is pick up the phone and call the merchant and see if we can figure out what's going on, whether it's something I'm doing or is it, are they dropping the ball.
And one of the things that I'm doing now, that I actually never used to do, is I'm starting to really build relationships with the merchants that are converting because you can usually increase your conversion rate. The ones. there are some dogs out there, no matter what you do, I don't know what it is, they just, they won't convert, those ones, it takes me two seconds to delete them from the site, another 10, 15 minutes to go in and find another one to replace them.
So I'm a lot quicker to do that now than try and convince a merchant who's maybe not that interested in increasing his conversion rate, to finding one that actually is.
You mentioned that the hip replacement one brings in, you know, 20 bucks a day or so, do you have any other ClickBank products that make more for you?
I have a few, I'm pretty. I've got a couple of sites that are based around earning income from the net. So they're keywords like "make money online", "earn extra income", "work from home", and any variation of those words.
So there's a few products in ClickBank that I do like, I used to share my sites with people, I don't do that anymore, just because of competitive reasons, but let me just pull up one of my sites here. Again, I look for sites that are, for products that are, books that have not been quickly thrown together.
Do you look for the most popular ones or.
Sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah, I know there's a couple up there, a couple of the top ones right now are the ones like the Rich Jerk. I don't actually market for him but it's a great marketing technique, I think the guy's hilarious. I mean talk about gutsy. "I'm a jerk, buy my book".
And then I think Rosalind's pretty close to the top there. She's been doing well. I like to market a lot of the little tools, because I deal with a lot of webmasters who are looking for, you know, tips and techniques, little pieces of software that maybe they want to add a forum to their site and they want to add a little tool that will help them, you know, boost their rankings a little bit. Those type of things.
Here's a classic one, I'm sorry, I'm not on my site, I just clicked through to one of these others, but here's probably a good one, I'm on BecomingAProfessionalOrganizer.com, ClickBank merchant. "Comprehensive Start Up Business Kit to Becoming a Professional Organizer".
Another thing I look for is a nice cover, a lot of guys will take the time and actually organize a nice cover for their book so people can have a look at the cover. It makes a representation that it is a book.
One of the kind of complaints I have, one of the merchants, the VitalityHouse.com that I mentioned earlier, he's got a great site, it's a great product, he actually converts reasonably well, but he doesn't have a picture of the cover of the book, which would right off the bat increase the conversion rate, because now people, just by glancing at it they can say, oh, hey, this is the book.
What kind of commission level are you looking for?
That's an interesting question, especially with the ClickBank merchants because I don't necessarily look for the really high ticket ones. I know some guys are offering 70%, 50%. 50% seems to be about the norm, it's actually... it's very generous. I mean it's amazingly generous.
For a guy like me to be able to go in and find a decent product in ClickBank. If a guy is going to pay me 50% of his total retail sale, think about that, that's amazing. You've got my attention, and if he's got a product that looks good and actually delivers to the consumer, so I don't get. I mean, even if it doesn't, it's going to feed back on me anyway. So we don't want that. But there's a lot of quality products in ClickBank.
So if you dig through it and you find a guy who's paying you 30%, it's like, it's really a windfall. But even 25% is great, I mean think about it in a brick and mortar business, to have somebody, even in the sales business, offer you 25% commission of the full retail sale? That's unheard of, that's what's so amazing about the whole phenomenon of these digitally downloadable e-books on ClickBank.
I've actually watched ClickBank grow from right back probably in 2001, because I was marketing a book on there a long time ago. So I was on the merchant side, and I didn't offer that. I think we only paid 20, 21%, we still attracted a lot of quality people that were looking to market that type of book.
And it's really a gold mine. People go in to ClickBank and have a look around. It would probably be. if they haven't done so already, they'll be stunned and amazed at the opportunity in there for, you know, sales. It's unreal, for commissions.
Well, the cool thing too about the digital downloadable products is there's no overhead for the vendor, so they can afford to give the big commissions.
Absolutely.
When you're marketing, specifically in the marketing niche, the products we've been talking about most recently, how do you prevent your ClickBank ID from being stolen?
I actually use, now there's always ways around it. And generally speaking, most people are pretty honest and the guys that are going to come through and buy the product, that already understand that there's a commission to be earned and they would prefer to earn it than me, there's ways around it.
Generally speaking people are pretty honest and it's not, depending what market you're going after, there's not a lot of worry. But if I do want to protect it, I just use a little service called, and it's available and it's another one of these free services. Called AddMe.com.
They go to AddMe.com and I think it's on the left hand column, I use it all the time. AddMe.com and then you just scroll down their main menu on the left under promotional tools and then there's one, the second to last link is called All Tools, and you click on that and then there's two of them, there's CompactURL which, what that does, is it takes the affiliate link and you drop it in there and it takes it from a big long link and it changes it into a small link. That's called
CompactURL, it's a free service, and then you take that new link and you go back to the other tool below it called Link Cloaker, and you drop it in there, and then it cloaks the link. And then you take that code and you put that on your website. It works like a charm.
What do you think is the next big trend in ClickBank affiliate marketing?
You know what I hope they would do? I don't know if they're thinking this way, but, and I've never quite been able to figure out why they haven't, but it seems to be the logical next step for me. And one of those is to go to a two tier program, which means affiliates can refer other affiliates and earn an override on a single level. That would be one.
You know, I don't know if I have an answer to that. I don't really know, I would say, I mean obviously the whole focus towards quality content, as the masses start to come online, they're going to want quality content, quality products, quality e-books so, I would say probably quality... it sounds like it's not really a marketing thing but in actuality it is, because you know repeat visitors, repeat sales to the same customer, you have a customer base where you can sell them multiple products because you've built trust with them.
I don't know if that's really ClickBank's role. That's more the merchant's role, that's more our role. So, I don't know if I have a really smart answer for that.
OK, so after somebody's done listening to or reading this interview, what do you think is the first thing that person should do in their goal towards becoming a top ClickBank affiliate?
I would say, first thing they would do is go to ClickBank and have a good look around. But don't do anything. Get a notepad and a piece of paper and start digging.
One of the mistakes people make is they get into ClickBank and all of a sudden they see all these products and they figure, wow, I'm going to market this one and I'm going to market this one and I'm going to market this one, I think this one's good. Next thing you know, they've got, you know, 47 different products and they go and figure out a website and they try to put all those products on one website. And wonder why they don't make any money.
Where if they were to, once they've got their list, they start to prune it down to what they really want to work on. And they start to say OK, and they get down to one or two products that they're really happy with, and then focus in on those one or two products.
One is probably better than two. And then, because if you can figure out a way to make money with one product, this is what dawned on me years ago now, if I could make money with one product, I know I can make money with another product.
So let's start slowly here, and figure this out, and go baby step at a time and once I'm successful with the one, then I'll add two. And the second one's always much quicker than the first one. So once you get good at one, you can do the second one faster and the third one's even quicker and you get economy of scale going.
Do you have any final words of wisdom for them to keep in mind as they're going along this journey?
This is doable. For those that are listening to build a business on the internet. It's the real deal. It's hard work. Anybody that I've known that's made it, and I know piles. If they're honest with you, they'll tell you, they worked hard. They worked really hard. There was times when they didn't even know if they were doing the right thing, but they just kept going.
I could tell you stories of guys that worked for six months and almost made no money and was about, you know, had one emergency meeting left with his wife before he was going to pack it in. And then next month because of the work he'd been done and the search engines finally caught it, you know, he basically took off from there, and he's now, he's bought himself a custom home and he's paid off a lot of debt, and he's got a new truck and he travels all over the planet, and he's left his job three years ago, and he's free.
So it's just, depending on what they bring to the table, what you bring to the table, if you've got some experience. everybody's learning curve is going to be a little bit different because we all have different skills, when I got into this, I didn't. I was a carpenter by trade. So I didn't have a lot of computer experience, I had a little bit from the telecom stuff that we were doing, but generally speaking, I could barely use Microsoft Word, so my learning curve was like very steep.
Continue reading here: OK so what particular products do you promote from the Click Bank Marketplace
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