I was starting to think this would never happen, but Saturday came along and I hit my first sale via an article! $17.98 commission from a product that was not really my main focus at the time, but thanks to my new approach of fishing for promising niches it paid off nicely.
I want to start by showing you how tracking works to find the article that the sale came from. You can read more about how I track this information on my Clickbank Tracking post.
The first step is to log into your CB(clickbank) account which should bring you directly to your “Daily Snapshot” screen. If not, just navigate to the “Account Home” tab within the CB site.
This is what you should see…
Click on the colored bar next to your earnings for that day to bring you to this next page….
The important part in that picture above is the TID(Tracking ID) box. Because I added a tracking code to my affiliate link I was able to find out exactly what article produced this sale.
Why is this important?…
Because it’s telling me that the method I used to write this article was good enough to have someone read it, then click my affiliate link, and finally make a purchase from the vendors sales page.
What do I do now?…..
Now I will focus more energy on this product with more articles. And as I know what type of article approach converts readers onto buyers, I’ll use a smiler article format on the new articles and hope that they will do exactly the same.
My Crab Boat Affiliate Marketing Concept
I covered briefly upon this concept in my previous crab boat marketing post. I’m now starting to refine it a little with more ideas and techniques.
Here is a diagram of my new technique and the idea behind it.
The Concept:
Buyers are the Crabs;)
The Boat/Vessel is your general idea.
The Bait is the method you use to catch the crab.
The Idea:
I get a general idea of a product that may stand a good chance of getting me some sales, and some well earned affiliate commissions at the same time. But the problem is I do not want to have to spend hours upon hours researching the market thoroughly and all that jazz!
So what I decided to do was use some bait in the form of articles/blog posts to instead have the crab(buyers) hopefully find me. I wrote several articles(bait) about a few different products, got them published and then left them alone to give them a chance to work their magic.
Of course I helped some of them along with social bookmarking along the way, but I did not go overboard with link building or anything like that.
I have several different tasting baits(articles) just waiting to be eaten up by the closest and most interested crabs. All I had to do then was let it soak and keep checking back for bites.
As soon as I get a crab(sale), I will then follow it up by dumping more smiler tasting bait in that exact same area knowing that it seems to be a hungry place to focus much more of my time and energy upon. This means that I do not have to guess or spend wasted energy researching niche/market ideas, instead the direction in which to go comes from the buyers themselves.
My Progress:
With the first sale now upon me using this concept, I have to sat that I was very surprised. The sale actually came from an article I did not bookmark or promote in anyway, and it only has about 15 views to its name.
This product was in a niche I held no hope for, from the little research I did it seemed I was just wasting my time writing one article about it. But following this concept I stuck with it anyway, and obviously now I’m glad I did.
Phase 2 which is to dump more bait(articles) into this products niche will be fun to do. If this works out I could have found a great little niche to concentrate my energy on, and hopefully get a little closer to my $200 a week goal!
Going to be busy for the next couple of days!
New iMac
I took advantage of the Black Friday online deals last week and finally ordered myself an Apple iMac! A long time in coming, but much needed as the computers I have now are starting to turn into fossils and interest the local archaeologists!
Hopefully should have it on December 16th!;)
Off to work!!
