Welcome to

As you know, I’m fairly scathing about all the over-hyped IM eBooks out there. Most of them are very basic newbie guides telling you how to set up an Adwords account and send the traffic to Clickbank. In practice, this is a good way to get-poor quick rather than get-rich quick.

One of the products that was getting seriously over-hyped pre-launch was DayJobKiller.

It was with some guilt therefore that I purchased a copy last night.

It’s really Affiliate Project X Part II in that it expands on some of the techniques used and introduces some new techniques. There’s really nothing earth-shattering in there although I did have some aha moments when I realized I could boost the income on some of the PPC campaigns I have running.

Does it work and is it worth the $77?

It’s expensive at $1.12 a page for the 69 pages, although it’s all content and no fluff.  It will be more expensive if he raises the priced as promised.

I guess the value of any make-money ebook can be judged as to whether it makes you any extra cash. I implemented one of the techniques in an existing Adwords campaign and also created a new campaign based on a different technique in the guide. It took me about 2 hours to read the book and set everything up. In the 14 hours the campaigns have been running, I’ve made an extra $18, just under a quarter of the cost of the book. On that basis I guess I have to say it was a success. There’s no reason why these two changes won’t continue to make me money for weeks and months to come. There’s another technique in the book that I will try over the next few days that I’m pretty excited about as well.

It’s not a book for PPC newbies, but if you can create an Adwords campaign and open an affiliate account on your own without bursting into tears, you should find something of value.

If you want to try it yourself, here’s my shameless affiliate link.

Let me know what you think.

Need to make a quick $1,000,000? Just follow these easy step-by-step instructions:

1. Sell a few Clickbank products through Google Adwords. You can buy one of the many guides for this or just stick some random ads up. Try and pick some decent products and you will probably only lose a little. Lose? What? Yes, lose a little but it’s an investment as will become clear. Bid a high price for each keyword so you get lots of traffic. With a little bit of luck you will soon be making sales of $1,000 a day. This is pretty easy with Adwords and Clickbank. Your costs will be about $1,200 a day.

2. Do this for 10 days. You are now down about $2,000. Bear with me, it gets better. Take some screenshots of your Clickbank account proving that you earn $1,000 a day. Even better if you take a photograph of the Clickbank check when it arrives.

3. Have an Indian ghostwriter produce a guide for newbies about how to use Adwords PPC to sell Clickbank products. Nothing complex, just cover the basics about opening an account and creating ads. Attention, interest, desire; you know the stuff. Plagiarize one of the many other guides if you get stuck. The one you bought in step one will be fine. Another $200 down for the writer.

4. Build a website with a compelling sales page and a big red headline about how you are making $477,777 a year working in your underwear at the kitchen table. Don’t worry about the math; you are going for the low-hanging fruit. You can use a variation of this - laptop under a straw umbrella on the beach, or show a picture of somebody surfing and holding a laptop. Maybe you could be a single-mother of nine (children, not years) working only 37 minutes a day after being abandoned by an abusive dead-beat husband.

Tell them how you got out of debt using these amazing techniques which you will only reveal to 500 397 167 97 17 people. Tell them the price MUST go up next week because your partner insists. Look through the top-selling products on Clickbank if you need some ideas.

Display your Clickbank earnings on the site at least twice and a picture of the check. Make sure you have pictures of expensive cars and houses on the site as well. Have a friend write you a testimonial or two about he too now has a girlfriend because of his amazing wealth. No friends? Just make up some testimonials then. Put the testimonials in a big yellow block.

Put a squeeze page in front of your sales page to capture their name and email. Send them ever more hype-filled emails at least twice a day until they buy or unsubscribe.

Never mention the cost of advertising on Adwords This is a big no-no. Make them think it’s all profit. Sell your guide on the website for $197 or $297 if you can include a couple of videos showing you setting up an Adwords account. Put plenty of padding in the guide and videos so it looks like good value. If you add an MP3 with you talking, with the sound of the ocean in the background, about how rich you are, you can display a picture of 3 CDs and charge $397.

7. Sell 7,000 copies through affiliates on Clickbank. This isn’t hard, the top products sell far more than this.

8. Retire with $1,000,000.

UPDATE: For the two people who have emailed me wanting to do this - it is a JOKE.  You are reading the wrong blog if you take this seriously. Sigh.

I touched on choosing which Clickbank affiliate programs to promote in my post Picking Clickbank Products which described how to calculate the refund rate for a product.

I like Clickbank, in spite of the bad press they have been receiving recently in the forums,  and they now account for a large chunk of my income since I switched from Adsense.

I have to admit that when I started looking in their marketplace for products my selection was pretty random.  I searched on a keyword or browsed their categories and picked something related to my blog topic.  My commissions were random as well.  Maybe I would get nothing one day and not very much the next.  By a long and painful process of eliminating non-converting and otherwise dodgy products, my Clickbank commissions slowly started to improve and now I’m very happy with those twice-monthly checks. 

The problem is that it can be difficult to identify the bad products.  I really didn’t know what to look for in the early days.  In the hope that I can save you some of my early failures and frustrations, these are the factors I now consider when looking for a new product:

The Sales Page.  We’ve all gotten used to, and fed up with, then long hype-laden sales pages that are used to sell us a ebook from the latest  self-styled guru.  Why do the internet marketers continue to use them?  Because they work.  These people are professionals.  They make thousands a day from a top-ranking ebook on Clickbank.  So read the sales page.  If you are tempted to buy the product then the sales page is a winner.  If you are muttering ‘what a load of drivel’ halfway down the page, move on.  Your customers certainly will.

Leakage.  Nothing to do with diapers, this is what happens when the reader is diverted to another product or page.  The most obvious thing is Adsense on the sales page.  If you see this run away.  Fast. You aren’t here to make Adsense income for somebody else.  Another potential leakage problem is if it’s possible for the customer to order via another method other than Clickbank.  Look for PayPal buttons or 800 order lines or mail in forms.  You won’t get commission for any of these.  Are there ANY links on the page that send the visitors to another site or another product?

Squeeze Pages.  All the gurus are raving about the list.  The money is in the list they tell us.  So everybody sets up a squeeze page, one that captures your email address before they show you the sales page.  That’s fine but what if the customer doesn’t order directly from the sales page but order from a link in the numerous follow-up email they are destined to receive until the end of time?  Do you still get commission?   Most vendors are very good about this and make sure they redirect email links to the Clickbank order page where, hopefully, your affiliate cookie will still work.  Unless it has expired of course or been overwritten by another affiliate link.  Others are less conscientious.  You can’t tell by looking at the page so you will have to sign up for their email list and wait for the link to test.  Or ask the merchant.  If they don’t reply, move on. 

Stealing.  There’s really no other word for this but a small minority of vendors send visitors to their order page via their own affiliate link.   I wrote to Clickbank about one vendor who was doing this very brazenly.  Clickbank never replied and the vendor is still doing it.  Caveat emptor.  To test this use your own hoplink and go through the sales page to the Clickbank order page.  If you are being credited for the sale, you will see your affiliate ID at the bottom of the screen.

Gravity.  This somewhat mysterious figure that you see on the marketplace listings next to “Grav:”.  According to the marketplace FAQ:

“Gravity: Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added. “

I think this means that the more distinct affiliates earning commission, the higher the gravity.  The higher the gravity the more likely a product is to convert but it also means that you have more competitors also promoting the product. 

Referred Percentage.  Look  at the %refd in the marketplace listings which are the fraction of publisher’s total sales that are referred by affiliates.  I’m cautious if this is 100% which means that the vendor hasn’t sold any products on their own.  If the referred percentage is high and the gravity is low then only a limited number of affiliates are making all the sales.  The may well be a very good reason for this (and probably is) but I like to investigate further when these two figures are unusual.  I’m even more cautious if this is less than 40% which point to a minority of affiliate sales. 

Relevance.  Is the product a good match for your blog or site?  Both subject and level?  If your blog is aimed at marketing experts are you trying to send them to a beginners guide or vice-versa?

Refund Rate.  Calculate the Clickbank refund rate.  The lower the better but never more than 20%.  This is not just to increase your net commissions but as an indicator of a quality product.  If you care about your blog, it’s important to make sure your recommendation is because you genuinely believe the product is a good one - not to make a quick buck.

Purchase.  If you buy the product you will reap rewards far in excess of the cost.  Only by having read the ebook or used the software can you write a genuine review.  It’s apparent from many reviews when the reviewer has not even seen the product.  Just look at the many fake review sites for some examples.  A genuine unbiased review will give you many more sales than a couple of paragraphs of sales hype.  If the commission rate on a product is 60% and you buy through your own link you will only have to make one extra sale to cover the cost of the product.

Just by following these simple guidelines I now rarely have a dud product.
 

I’m going to use blogger.com for the niche blog case study.

There are lots of reasons I shouldn’t:

1. They will delete a whole account seemingly on a whim with no recourse.

2. Most blogs get labeled as spam sooner or later with an annoying and time consuming procedure to reinstate the blog.  This seem to happen with most of my hand-written original content blogs after 20 or so posts.

3. If, by chance, the blog becomes popular, you are stuck with myblog.blogspot.com forever and your credibility may suffer.

4. You have less control over the format and links

However, there are some perfectly good reasons as well:

1. It’s free.

2. It’s owned by Google and shouldn’t be banned from their index anytime soon.

3.Because it’s a subdomain of blogspot.com there’s a  possibility of getting some search engine love based on the popularity of every blog on that domain.

4. Blogspot.com should be firmly out of the sandbox

Obviously there are many other free blog platforms with similar advantages and disadvantages such as wordpress.com but I’m most familiar with blogger.com.

Disclaimer. The above SEO points may be total hogwash.  I’m not an SEO expert but my experience is that blogger.com/blogspot.com blogs don’t seem to suffer the same sandbox effects as a blog hosted on its on domain.  Since this is a short-term, make some cash quick experiment, this is important.  For a longer-term project it may not be an issue.

I would like to use the hungry school approach to finding a niche.  Find potential visitors with a problem looking for answers.

This is where you come in.  There are well over 200 people reading this blog most days and I figure you can do some of the work.  Use the methodology in this post (or any other techniques you use) to select a niche with eager customers. 

I will build the blog around the niche I select from reader’s recommendations and – here’s the good bit – after it’s up and running and the case study has finished, I will transfer ownership of the blog to whoever suggested the niche.  It’s theirs to use as they wish.  It should be getting visitors and making money by this point.  All future income will go to the new owner of the blog.  Obviously only one person will get the resulting blog so make your suggestion(s) count.

Suggest topics in the comments section or shoot me an email at micah (at) bloggingonblogging.com.  I will pick whatever niche I think will do well.  Please give me the reasons you suggest a particular niche such as number of searches and competition in Google.

 

A great post by Burta on DigitalPoint on how he increased his Adsense earnings from $10 a week to $800 a week.

“I’m creating and building an asset that will not just be of value now, but well into the future. I’m not working on a snatch and grab model of trying to create one spam site a day everyday for a month to hopefully earning $1 from each site so that by the end of the month I can be earning $30/day… in life making money generally comes down to one thing – providing value, and sites like that are soon weeded out by refined search engine algorithms. ”

 

There’s a famous quote by Thomas Edison:

Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. I never did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident. They came by work.

He certainly wasn’t talking about blogging for a living but he could have been.  I’ve posted a couple of approaches to finding blog subjects.  Both of these are valid and will work.  Unfortunately just finding the perfect subject, one with lots of searches and little competition, isn’t enough. The subject is the inspiration, the one percent.  Building and promoting the blog is the perspiration, the ninety-nine percent.

I’ve often been asked how many blogs, and by association, bloggers, make money.  I really don’t have an easy answer to this question.  From my experience about a third of my own blogs go nowhere, a third make so-so money and a third really take off and earn the big bucks. I work hard on my blogs to get these results and still I fail a third of the time and break even another third. 

Often times it’s the blogs I really enjoy writing, like this one, which will probably never earn much.  I do know that the blogs I start half-heartedly, post a couple of times then get bored, rarely make a single cent.  There’s the odd exception but it’s rare.

Blogs need work, they need nurturing, they need promoting.  It can be hard to make post after post and see ten or twenty visitors a day.  Been there, done that.  I posted to one of my hobby blogs for a full three months before it made more than $10 from Adsense.  Man, this is getting depressing.  I guess I’m just trying to say that blogging isn’t easy money.  It certainly isn’t free money.  You have to put in the hours and the work to be a success.  Many of those hours will be learning what works and what doesn’t.  If that doesn’t appeal, go buy one of those get rich quick books.  If any of them work, send me a copy.