This is the last day of training, but we have until August 31, 2007 at 11:59 p.m. Hawaiian time to make $10 and win the challenge. Several people have already made their $10, and many TDC records from previous challenges have already been smashed.
The Immediate Edge uses the same techniques we are using in the 30 day challenge to start all of its projects before they are taken into a cost structure. Testing phrase without having to pay for it lowers the financial risk of any project. It just makes sense to not spend any money until you know you have something worth spending money on.
If we’ve done everything we’ve been taught up to now, including all the directory submitting and other techniques to drive traffic and raise PR, and we haven’t made a sale, we can start researching other phrases in our original brainstorming list. We could also brainstorm another list and start testing new phrases. Review Mike Mindel’s Day 29 Summary blog post and review all training that you haven’t implemented (and maybe some you have to make sure you’re doing it right). Review the 5 biggest mistakes challengers make and correct those if you’ve made any. (I made some and have corrected them).
Next Steps
The Thirty Day Challenge will continue after August 31, 2007. There will be more lessons as time goes on, maybe once or twice a month or more often as Dan and Ed’s time permits from the Immediate Edge. Anyone can start the challenge at anytime, and the forums, blogs, and training will still be available, although a bit rearranged to support a continuous project.
The TDC has taught us how to do everything manually so we know how everything works. Having to do everything by hand teaches you so much. We have the basics, the fundamentals. Since we now have all the pieces to the puzzle, we need to learn from our mistakes. Success, especially early on, can make you sloppy.
Once you have a phrase that pays, you will move forward to buying your domain and getting your site hosted and set up, but you will have to start spending a little money at this point.
List building – we will cover how to build lists in a future lesson
Developing our own product – another future lesson
How to use Pay Per Click correctly and effectively – you don’t go here until you’re making money for free. PPC was the core to the first two thirty day challenges. You only pay when someone clicks on your link. Other advertising is much more expensive than PPC. Once you have a phrase that pays, you know how much you can afford with PPC.
Dan put up a flow chart, which he calls The Grand Plan mind map, in his pdf training document for today. Be sure to read his pdf and listen to the podcast.
Dan Raine’s Building an Affiliate Business Strategies “Affiliate Marketing is Dead” Article
Well, of course it’s not dead, it just gets bad press from “talk too much” marketers. The snob factor around affiliate marketing is certainly there, but at the end of the day, affiliate marketing makes money.
First, there isn’t just one strategy. There are a lot of them. Dan will be showing us the typical approach he takes when entering a new market.
Dan often finds topics to research later while browsing the web or doing research on another topic. He writes the idea down in his notebook to look at later. Whenever he’s looking for a new project, he goes through his list for ideas.
By researching a topic and looking at the long tail phrases to see their traffic numbers (long tail means 3 or more words in the phrase). If you have several phrases with traffic but little or no Google Adwords competition a few sites targeted at the long-tail phrase, you might have something worth doing. A major mistake marketers make is ignoring the long-tail phrases and trying to go for the big competition markets. Start small, around the edges with very targeted long-tail phrases. That’s what we’ve learned on the TDC. Once you dominate the outer edge long-tail phrases, you can move up and start to dominate the bigger markets.
Find a good affiliate product that allows you to build a list. You don’t want to give the product producer all the list info of the people you send to his site. You want the information for your list.
Once you have your list of long-tail phrases with decent traffic, you narrow it down to the top 30. From your top 30, take the top 10 (measured by traffic) long-tail phrases, then choose two phrases from the remaining twenty to pair with each one of the top 10.
This gives you 10 articles to write targeting 3 long-tail phrases each. Once time passes and things grow, your two secondary phrases may be worth branching out to their own property. You can write your own articles or outsource them.
Next, you register a domain name to host your landing page (see nameboy.com for ideas). We’ve used free blog hosting in the TDC, and you can always move a blog to a domain you own later.
If you collect names to build a list, you need to write autoresponder messages to cover a few days. You can build a few Squidoo lenses to cluster around your landing page with value-added content, and then you’ve got to put it up on the net live.
So, in this first phase, you have a cluster of content sites pointing to your landing page or to a list building page which then points to your affiliate product.
People find the lenses or articles in Google, they join the list (which offers them free content and tips) and then they are taken directly to the affiliate page. Then every day they get some content by email and are asked to buy the product.
To recap:
- Host your site
- Create content (articles, audio, video)
- Make a few Squidoo Lenses
- Go live
- Build your list by sign-ups on all content pages.
- Send emails daily or weekly with more free content and a link to the affiliate product and ask them to buy it.
Expanding Your Empire
Now you’ve got your foot in the door. It’s time to start prying it open and get more value out of your list.
There are more affiliate networks than just ClickBank:
- Commission Junction
- Amazon Associates
- LinkShare
- PrimeQ
- Hyrdra Media
You can fall into a trap of only using Clickbank because of the high commissions.
A. Take the initial visitor to the highest paying program first then try and sell them on other affiliate programs in the autoresponder sequence.
B. If you’re getting good results then you might go ahead and set up new content pages directly for the secondary affiliate product.
C. The next step is creating a load of related long-tail phrase articles and lenses, effectively doing the same thing as phase one but this time not collecting leads, just sending them directly to the affiliate page.
D. Link to subpages from your lenses and articles, not the main page, and vary the anchor text slightly. In the case of a blog, a single post is a subpage.
E. As time goes on you replace the affiliate product with your own product. And you don’t grow fast. Grow slowly to see if the phrase is actually a good, long-term business venture.
written by joubess
