Following up from the first article sale came sale number 2 on Monday with a commission of $13.18. This second sale came from a different product than the first, and yet again it was from one of the products I did not really give much hope for. Shows you how much I know right;)

I now have two different products that both made sales via an article, so I entered phase number two of my plan which was to focus my attention and effort on the products that are selling right now.

I spent most of Tuesday writing 4 more follow up articles for each one of the products that made a sale. Each product now had 5 total articles including the one that made the sale pointing to the same product, only this time I focused on different keywords for each one of the articles I wrote.

To keep the creation juices flowing I then decided to round off my day by writing two more articles for a new CPA offer I picked up on Commission Junction. This CPA product is a lead generation offer that will pay me for every qualified lead I bring to the products site, who then submits an email and other information required for me to make that commission.

That took my total article count for Tuesday to 10! It was a lot of writing, and just more proof that it really does help to actually know something about the subject you are writing about.

I have a total of 63 articles now live at various article directories, however both sales came from ArticlesBase which seems to be my favorite site to submit articles to at the moment.

Over the next few days I’ll be tracking stats from the articles to see what kind of changes they bring if any. I’ll also bookmark and build some back links to the new cpa offer articles as well hoping to get them as many views as possible to promote this offer.

Last weeks total sales were $32.36, which is $167.64 short of the $200 per week affiliate challenge target. This week so far $13.18.

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!!

]]> http://www.flopidle.com/925/afilliate-challenge-first-article-sale-made/feed/ 0 http://www.flopidle.com/866/affiliate-challenge-first-sale-8-40/ http://www.flopidle.com/866/affiliate-challenge-first-sale-8-40/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:01:55 +0000 admin http://www.flopidle.com/?p=866

Yesterday right after I published my previous post, I went back to check my Clickbank account only to find a sale made! This sale did not come from an article, it actually came from an email broadcast to an old list that I left for dead. That will teach me!

But I guess you don’t really see how important a list is until you get results like that. It happened almost instantly as soon as I sent out the email!

Even though this sale did not come directly from an article, I can still show you where you can find your tracking id’s in Clickbank.

The most simple way to get to the transactions screen within Clickbank is to click on the colored bar right next to your earnings for that day…

Click the bar that’s circled in red, which will then take you to this next screen.

This screenshot shows you the time of the transaction as well as the date. But the important part is outlined in red, that just happens to be your tracking id(TID).

I used an id of AWEBLINK which was to let me know that it came from an  AWEBer LINK, however this would have been a pretty poor tracking id had I sent out many broadcasts to different lists for the same product.

But as this was the only email broadcast I was sending, and because it got a sale so quickly after I sent it, I knew exactly where it came from.

Had I been sending this broadcast to many lists at the same time I probably would have used AWBRLI4 as a tracking id, which would have let me know this information…

• AW = Aweber
• BR = Broadcast
• LI = List Initials
• 4 = Number Of Broadcast Email

If I made a sale from one of my broadcasts using the tracking code above, I would not only know that this came from a broadcast email, but I would also be able to tell what list it came from, and what broadcast number it was as well.

This would allow me to realize that this particular list my prefer a certain type of email content, so then I could modify follow up emails with a similar approach.

So a big lesson learned about the power of a list!

GOOD NEWS: No sale, but my first opt-in for this challenge! This was a nice boost because it practically happened just a few hours after I created my landing pages for my products. So now I at least have one person going through my follow up email sequence.

I spent today building links to my articles in the hope that this would improve on their search engine positions, meaning more traffic and views, and hopefully opt-ins for me? I think I’m going to make Monday link building day;)

What I wanted to do today is cover where I stored my 2 new landing pages, and why I did it.

Subdomains Not Submarines

For some strange reason a while ago I bought a boat load of domain names with the intention of actually using them for something. That “something” never really materialized, and neither did content for those domains either. So they just sit there unused and under appreciated like my bank manager;)

Anyway it dawned on me that I could use the abandoned domains for a good cause, which would be my affiliate challenge landing page cause.

But I had 2 problems….

1. I didn’t want to use them all for this challenge, just in case I needed them for something else.
2. Their domain names were not exactly optimized for my products.

My solution…….

Submarines!!!!

Subdomains!!!!, sorry about that;)

What’s a subdomain? Well here is a regular domain…

www.yourmaindomain.com

And here is a subdomain….

www.SUBDOMAIN.yourmaindomain.com

Most of the time you see sites use a subdomain for their support or customer service side.

www.support.someBIGsite.com

I however use them for my landing pages on the same domain, which allowed me to add a targeted keyword into my domain name, even though the main domain name is not really related.

www.product1keyword.mydomain.com

www.product2keyword.mydomian.com

I thought that this would be a little more SEO friendly than a completely unrelated domain name to pass visitors too.

What this method allows me to do is create as many landing pages as I want on one domain, which saves me buying even more domain names. And it also allows me to add related keywords into the domain name URL. So if this method takes off I can apply it many times over to more products without it costing me anything.

Using my hosts HostGator I can use unlimited subdomains, but you should check your own host to see if you can also set up a submarine;)

How To Set Up A Subdomain

Log into your websites CPANEL -> www.yoursite.com/cpanel <- Notice you only need main domain name for this.

Once inside your cpanel(control panel) what you want to look for is this…

Yours may look a little different, but just keep an eye out for SubDomains then click on it.

All that’s left to do is enter your products related keyword where it says “enter subdomain” above. Now this will be blank on your screen, I just added the text above to show you where it all goes.

Once you are done hit CREATE.

You should then be able to enter your new subdmain URL into the browser bar…

www.newsubdomain.maindomain.com

This should now bring up your new subdomain page waiting for you to add files and content to it just like you would a regular domain. But that’s for another post soon;)

Give it a try! If you get stuck, let me know below.

Things are slooooooow, I would show you other affiliate accounts but they look pretty much the same right now. I may need to re-think my tactics and adjust as needed to actually make this $200 per week by the New Year.

My article views are still on the rise which is a good sign in the right direction ->

The totals above are spread out between all my articles, but at least three of them are getting more views than the others, this is probably because the article topics are in competitive markets which would probably be the reason for the high numbers.

But i’m also noticing really good CTR(Click Through Rates) for a couple of the not so popular topic markets, these products I picked because they were more specialized with less broad appeal. My CTR on these articles even with the lower viewing numbers have been far greater than my most popular articles, almost as much as 50%.

Conversions are yet to be tested until I make a sale from my current articles;)

What I might decide to do is only concentrate on just two products rather than spread my time over 4-5. My initial thought was to let the articles do the talking, meaning that if I had a couple of article that kept on a making sales I would then focus my attention on those products alone, dropping some of the others that are not performing the same.

I have now switched over from Wal-Mart Ads to USFreeAds, this is because I was unable to see any real numbers hit some of my Wal-Mart ads, and I’ve used US Free Ads before and had some good results with them. But I will still give Wal Mart ads more research time now and again.

I’m thinking I may need to increase my article count and maybe even build a simple landing page to capture the emails of those that are not quite ready to buy. I will probably start with the specialized products first to see how that converts, then I may build a small site for each particular product itself.

This would be a lot of work because I would also have to write follow up emails for each product, as well as carry on with article creation, which is why I may need to limit my promotional products to just two for now, at least until they start to convert and make a profit then I will just rinse and repeat for the rest.

As this is all in the name of research I’ve decided that’s what I’ll do. I will build a mini-site for the product I feel will do the best, and I know more about. If I am going to write a lot of material I better know what im taking about at least. I will then direct article links to my landing page and not directly to the vendors sales page for each article I create.

Looks like I am going to be busy:)

]]> http://www.flopidle.com/849/affiliate-challenge-update-still-no-change/feed/ 0 http://www.flopidle.com/832/affiliate-challenge-update/ http://www.flopidle.com/832/affiliate-challenge-update/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:39:07 +0000 admin http://www.flopidle.com/?p=832

$3.73 from Tuesday which was unrelated to any articles, but I’ll take it anyway;) In another Clickbank account I also made a sale of $23 for The Kindle King which has actually been its first sale since the product went live!

My articles this week seemed to all get a big boost in views over the later part of this week ->

Now what I can do is track my CTR(Click Through Rate) by using the trackingID’s I assigned to the articles when I created my Hoplink, and because every article I write has a unique id I can then find out which type of article I write gets the most clicks.

Once I get that first sale via an article, I will create a post showing you how to track by tracking id where it came from. But first I need that SALE!;)

Another good thing to happen this week was being able to get my articles submitted and live right away in ArticlesBase, once you get to a certain number which I believe to be around 20, you then do not have to wait for approval anymore.

In the next post I will spend some time on Market Samurai and how I use it to track the rank of my articles. Until then, fingers crossed for the first article sale!

Still waiting for that first sale in this affiliate challenge, if I had to pay bills doing this I’d be living in a tent! But not to get discouraged I’ll just increase what im doing, more articles, more niche blogging, it’s a lot of writing but the more you do it the easier it becomes.

A good sign today has been a big increase in traffic to a couple of my articles, I also checked the analytics in my Clickbank account to confirm an increase in my hops as well. At this rate surely even I can make a sale;)

For an experiment I’ve been using Wal-Mart classified ads, yes Wal-Mart are now in the online classified ads business, look out Craigslist right! For a couple of product ads I have received some decent traffic using the listings, no sales as of yet, but at least im starting to see some interest in them.

When posting a Wal-Mart Ad you have the same options as Craigslist, you have to select a region to post your free ad in. To narrow this down for me when selecting the best possible location to post in, I use Google Insights to enter the keyword for my product in the search box, then Google Insights will tell me by location the most popular places searching for my item.

Once I have a location idea for my Wal-Mart Ad, I then know where to post my listing, and this method seems to work pretty well for me. It’s also something you can do when using Craigslist too.

I wonder how much I’d get, and where I’d need to post a listing for my kidney?;0)

Not much of an update to bring you income wise yet, unfortunately its still at zero funds in this affiliate challenge but I’m hoping all the hard work going into this, will eventually turn itself around. At least then I will be able to show some progress!

I’ve been writing more articles as well as finding links to my other articles which will hopefully give them a boost in the search engines. So far my rankings in the search engines have been all over the place, one day I’ll be at #1, and the next day I wont even be listed.

I have also been trying to promote The Self Publishing System and The Kindle King as much as possible, I’ve been using forum signatures, Yahoo Answers, Wal-Mart classifieds and I’m about to try my second press release. My first press release was for The Twitter Technique and seemed to work out pretty well.

Persistence will pay off eventually I’m sure, I’ll keep writing as much as I can and hopefully will see some good results start to appear. If I do not really see any improvement closer to the deadline then I’ll have to move over to plan B. And I have no idea what plan B is yet;)

Nothing on the PayDar today, and I’m slightly behind on my article writing this week so I have some catching up to do! I’m still looking at writing at least another 20-30 articles by Sunday this week, but for today’s post I thought I’d cover how I’m going to track sales once they are made;)

After finding a Clickbank product to promote, and having an idea of what keyword I want to target in an article, I then follow the steps below to track what article and keyword a sale would come from.

Step 1:

For this example I’ll use the product above which is Satellite Direct, I’ll also use an example keyword and article title of “Tv To Pc” to target in the search engines.

Once you have your product and keyword in mind click create HopLink to get to the next step.

Step 2:

This part is where you get to enter your ClickBank nickname, and then a tracking ID which is optional, but I put it to good use in step 3.

Step 3:

For this step I used CB-id as my Clickbank NickName, and in the Tracking ID section I entered the following….

ABtvtopc

I’ll break this down to explain.

The first two letters AB represent the article directory, which in this case is ArticlesBase.

GO – GoArticles

EZ – EzineArticles

You get the idea right;)

The next part of that tracking ID is tvtopc which you guessed it, is the title of the article, and also the main keyword for that article.

Say I used the article title Get TV Onto Your Computer instead, what I would then do is this…

gtvoyc

Which is..

Get TV Onto Your Computer

I usually take the first letters of each one of the main keyword phrase words, you don’t have to type out the entire thing, all your doing this for is to identify what keyword/title made the sale.

Once you have entered your Clickbank Nickname and Tracking ID click create to grab your HopLink.

Step 4:

Now you have your tracking ID appended to your affiliate URL -> ABTVTOPC.

For every article you write you should create a new HopLink with a new tracking ID to identify what article made the sale. This allows you to focus on converting keywords rather than just make a sale from an unidentified article source.

If your article directory does not allow affiliate links in your article, you can still redirect that tracking ID HopLink via one of your own domains using PHP(I’ll get to using a PHP redirect in a later post).

Once you make a sale, check in your Clickbank transactions to find the tracking ID that converted to that sale. If you have a keyword that converts really well you might want to explore it some more to see if you can either improve its SEO rankings, or even start your own site based on that keyword. But whatever works for you;)

As soon as I make a sale I’ll show you how it all works anyway.

Any questions feel free to leave them below.

Thanks for reading my blog!