Hi All, I have been into building sites, SEO, and adsense for about 1 year, and recently have been looking at affiliate esp. ClickBank more seriously. I am impatient for success, and have some cash handy, so would like to dabble with PPC marketing to drive ClickBank sales. I'm happy to choose any niche, but I've had some success already with Forex using cheap traffic so I'll give Forex Trading Tips, Robots etc. a go. I am overwhelmed by the choices in how to do this, so I am asking for help to see what peoples opinions are based on their experience. For example one questions is whether to make the landing site like (a) a blog (b) a review site (c) a sales letter or (d) a magazine / journal lookalike? What do you think is best? Is it okay just to use wordpress to build this? Do you guys hire a graphic designer for the logo? Is it critical to capture email addresses from the beginning or can I introduce this later. I have aweber so no big deal technically, but if I take emails surely I need to create some kind of ebook incentive to sign up. Can I get a copy of some ebook cheaply or free for this purpose? I know keyword selection is critical, and recently read something about advertising is cheaper if you have the relevant words on pages. So I am comfortable with that. Does anyone use wordtracker to help find keywords? Or is it all done in Google using the external keyword tool and suggestions at the bottom of the page / as you type suggestions? How much wording should I am for on the presell? Will they get bored of 1000 words of presell, followed by a click then 1000 words of sell! Or is this the way that works? I get the impression that the best thing to do is reassure the buyer that the product is good, and remove any obvious doubts, such as telling them about the money back guarantee etc. What is a good $ amount to test that your system is working? Does it need $50 to say YES/NO or $100 or more? Thanks thats it for now, that probably 10% of the questions I have but these are the most important ones for me. And the rest I am sure I will learn through experience. Thanks in advance for sharing your insight and experience.
You ask a lot of questions and I can't answer all of them but I can give you some advice from my own experience. Yes capture their emails from right at the beginning. Do this by offering a high quality free report on whatever market you are promoting. Forex or whatever. Either write it yourself or use getafreelancer.com or elance. Then when you have a list you can email them clickbank offers provided it is on the subject they signed up for. Use google keyword tool or else Spyfu and/or keyword discovery. I think wordtracker is past it. I would use WP to make my landing pages. Blogs are great with your affiliate links and you can use Platinum SEO as a plugin to get more traffic. You can also do a sales letter using WP. If you are using PPC then you can target English speaking countries outside the USA or try Googles content network. Good luck.
1) I would go with a, b or d. A long pre-sell sales letter before the lp, which will also likely be a long sales letter will not convert as well IMO. I think its really important to have a professional looking page. It adds credibility. If you cant do this on your own, hire a cheap designer. Word Press is fine. 2) Capturing email is a pretty advanced tactic. Take it slow, but, plan for it. When you are ready, you can buy an existing PLR ebook and give it away as is or rewrite it. Thats the easiest route IMO. 3) PPC advertising IS indeed cheaper with relevant words on the page. In regards to adwords, it all comes down to quality score, which takes a lot of stock in the relevancy of the LP to the query. The higher your quality score, the lower you will pay CPC. For example, an ad in position 1 with a high quality score could actually pay less than an advertiser in position 2 (and so on). I've used wordtracker (you can get a free 7 day trial) and the google keyword tool. I actually prefer googles tool. 4) IMO, your presell should be only long enough to capture their attention and intrigue the prospects enough to click through. You can certainly do this in 1,000 words or less. 5) In terms of a test budget. Spend only what you are prepared to lose. Adwords (etc) can have a pretty big learning curve. There are a million things to know, but, if you stick to long tail keywords (opposed to broad, general) terms, using ad copy that includes your keywords, you should be ok. Stay away from the content network until you've gotten your feet wet.
Lots of very good advice in all the posts above, so I'll be brief and selective ... I think (d) can be best if it's very professionally done. (a) and (b) work very well for many people. Not (c). The sooner the better. Especially if you already have Aweber. I'm sure you can get give-away rights to free e-books but although I'm a currency trader myself, I'm afraid I don't know where (I don't use software and I'm not on these kinds of "lists" at all). Be careful with Adwords. The learning-curve is typically long, slow and expensive. I've found the hard-copy book "Adwords For Dummies" much more use than Perry Whatshisname or any of the other guides available online. It depends which way you're going. If you're trying (d) above, that isn't a problem. If (a) or (b) then not too much, and don't sell, just pre-sell. Sound objective. Either tell a personal story or review "objectively" mentioning all the advantages and some minor disadvantages which won't put anyone off. Don't overtly sell. Don't persuade. Don't convince. Don't answer "objections" in a way that anyone can see that's what you're doing. And beware the refund rate on some of those products (there's a reason for that, I'm afraid). Good luck!
It's an established way of trying to persuade people to become interested in what you're selling, by building a relationship with them, establishing credibility with them, and hoping that eventually, by your doing so, a proportion of the people "baited" with a freebie can be "switched" to becoming real customers. It works well (occasionally very well) for some people who are willing to expend the time, effort and energy on baiting and switching. I'm not criticising it. Many people make a successful living at it, have it down to a fine art and have most of it automated. It can genuinely work. A fundamentally different method, which I've found far more successful myself, is to try to attract only people who are already looking for what I'm selling/promoting in the first place. Not much "persuasion" required if you go about things that way.
You can try something like Reviews + Journal. Tell the visitors about your personal experience using the product and post reviews about different forex robots. The list building stuff can be done later, i guess... Regarding keyword selection, if you are using adwords, you need to have the right keywords. The adwords keyword tool is good. There are various advanced tools such as Market Samurai. I think Adwords will be enough to do the initial research. Your goal should be to get a big percentage of the visitors to click the Affiliate Link. So you should make it visible more often on the page OR the text on the presell page should flow towards that link. It should make them go to the recommended site. The presell does not have to be very long. This is all i know and can advise you. You can act on the useful advice provided by Alexa and others above.
Guys, The response to this has been amazing, thanks so much for your help. santi70 - cool thanks for the tip about elancer. Actually I have "hired" someone to do some content creation for me on DP right now, there seems to be quite a lot of talented people here. The spyfu tip is great too, looks very useful. YouCanDoItGuide - thanks your advice and especially the PLR idea. I had to look PLR up (never heard of it) but it looks like a good way to get a book done cheaply. Just need to see if there is anything in the Forex market. factchecker - I am going to split test. Would you recommend google A-B testing for that? As for knowing what I am doing ... I don't! My day-job isn't internet marketing, so I guess I can only learn by trial, error and reading this advice! I'll keep the budget under a tight leash. alexa_s - Great advice, I've seen some great posts from you on other threads so nice to have you post on mine . I'll give the Dummies book a try as it is only £11 from amazon, and comes with $25 free adwords, so won't really cost me anything extra. I have a question though - you said about freebies and building relationships, but the downside is it is hard to convince them to buy. How does this fit in with the mailing list? I was thinking the freebies are a compelling reason to join the list. Will I just be attracting freeloaders? And what is your honest opinion on Forex software? If you don't use it in your day-trading then I guess you think it sucks? Dyersco / jacky8 - thanks for your tips also. So thank again to all who has posted, more advice is welcome. Negative or postitive. As a thank you I will keep this thread up to date with how I am doing, but don't expect anything as good as peterhols! I have a full time job and other stuff to do too, so it'll be a month of planning / due diligence before I start the experiments.
A proportion. But of course you don't have to "convert" all your list into paying customers to make it worth doing - only a proportion. I think the more closely related the freebie is to the "sale products" the less convincing you have to do so the more viable it is, in principle? I've seen some spectacular failures with it ... such as people offering free e-books on nutrition/supplements as a way of building a list to try to promote a network marketing business in the nutrition/supplements industry(!!) on the "grounds" that they'll be interested in the products! (In reality, of course, it doesn't really make any difference how interested they are in the products: if they're not people already looking for a home-based business opportunity, all the time and energy spent persuading them to be interested in the business will be wasted. You can sponsor some of them, for sure, but they'll drop out within a year because it wasn't what they were originally looking for. Dumb example, but the one that comes to mind, sorry). I don't claim to have seen everything available, obviously! But everything I have seen sucks big time. From my perspective. I think this is because it's all based on "indicators". And "indicators" suck big time anyway. You can see a couple of my "illustrated trades" here and here, if you want! I'll say! Unless your name's Perez Hilton or someone like that, Adsense seems to me to be a way of making (comparatively) pennies, while giving people a reason to leave your web site rather than staying there!
Well I have got the adwords for dummies book - thanks alexa for the recommendation. It's reasonable so far, although it dates quickly - the links give point to different stuff and the process for signing up is different. The $25 voucher works . The book has been good for ideas on how to generate keyword lists for free, picking negative keywords etc. The main value for me is the lessons on marketing in general, market research etc. I am a coder by background so this is stuff that isn't natural to me, but I think that is where I will get a lot of value from the book. Based on Market Research, I may steer away from Forex, what I'll do is research a number of ideas and see what looks to be the most profitable. It's a way off before I start on adwords. I am experimenting on my SEO sites with clickbank & amazon and once I can consistently make sales there I will give it a go.
Well just an update. I have created my first site designed specifically for adwords to clickbank. It has a free ebook tease for email addresses (ebook is a PLR to which I've added some affiliate links). Now the niche is not Forex, I've gone for something else better (I hope) but I don't want to say what because if I do make good money, well, I want to keep it a secret . The niche is no secret, but the way I've set up my site is unique and I've not seen it done this way within the niche. Whether it works is another story. So of my $25 free voucher I have £11 after the sign up fee which shold get me something like 20-30 visitors, so I will see on this tiny sample how many email signups, hops, order form impressions and sales I get. I'll keep you posted. I managed to get a quality score of 7/10 on a fresh adwords account, which sounds good - but can anyone comment, is that a good score? Other things I will say about how I did it: It's a review site with a personal introduction and a photo. The photo is of the fictional character I am using to talk about the product, who is someone I think the target market would trust. This is about as "black hat" as I'll go. I set up my ad campaign to not target mobile, because I am guessing even if i get mobile visitors they'll wait until they are at a PC to buy, and so losing the cookie connection to my site I have uses phrase matches so far, as these seem the best to me. Broad would be too unpredicatable and match on phrases that might attract non-buyers. And strict matching would leave me with few hits. I used Inkscape (free software) to create the logo and some of the page layout graphics. I did all graphics from scratch except the affiliate promotional images, to create a unique look. All HTML and CSS was done in a text editor - and is XHTML compliant and works on IE, Firefox, Chrome, and hopefully Safari. This was hard work but I am confident about this rendering properly! Wish me luck and I'll keep you updated on the tweaks.
Thanks Ruddo Well so far I have spent £16 (budget is set to £10 per day, whilst I am learning). From this I have got about 30 clickbank hops, 3 order form impressions, 4 email addressed, but zero sales I have found out which keywords I can lower the CPC on though, so I am going to try simply paying less per click and see how i get on. For most of the keywords this wont work as they wont appear on page 1. I've also done more keyword research to bring up other keywords that hopefully will be cheaper, but still indicate an interest in this type of product.
Wishing you well with this - sounds like you're thinking everything through and there's obviously potential there. Disappointing (though perhaps not very surprising on small figures) not to have a sale yet: you'll feel a lot better when you get your first one. You're right not to disclose more details here, of course. Good luck! Looking forward to the next update.
Thanks alexa and phonescan, yes I put a bit more money into this but results have deteriorated and there is no more email sign ups. Perhaps lowering the CPC actually lowered the quality of visitor? I think the niche may be too competitive for a beginner like me so I have stopped and will look for a new niche. But not working on that yet as I want to do some more SEO work. So in a nutshell I'm bottling out of this one but I have a nice template ready for the next review site venture. I'm have a general problem selling on clickbank across many websites anyway and I need to figure out why. Loads of hops and order form impressions, but very few sales.
I would like to know also--I have tried Clickbank Pirate and some other Clickbank product promising to help you make money with no luck--how do you really make money with clickbank the easy way--if there is one??