hi guys. I'm kinda new to the whole marketing thing. No, I'm completely new. I've been reading a lot of affiliate marketing guides when this year started out (somewhere February). I got a clickbank account, found some products, I wrote a few articles (4, to be exact) and it didn't go anywhere. Again, I had completely no clue how much it had to take to make it here. Anyway, I gave up and just focused on school instead. (college right now). It was only until two weeks ago that I heard a friend of mine made some money online. I was completely shocked and jealous. Although he did something totally different (he sells his services), when he mentioned this site I checked it out. I browsed a little bit till I saw the word clickbank again. Then, I began browsing here. I found so much info, i could feel my head heat up. Now, I have a new respect for this way of marketing and want to take a second shot at it. I was hoping you guys could help me get to my first sale. If anyone could provide a good, fast route to take in order to get that one sale maybe my remaining doubt will be satisfied. I love reading the posts on this forum. Just wonderful people with great insight. So, hoping to hear from you guys. Thanks PS - petehols: your thread is the main reason why i became interested on AM'ing again. If this ever gets off the ground for me, I'll owe it all to you. Cu dos to you man.
If you found so much information then why did you come about asking how to make your first sale? Just can't glue it together? Al.
well, it is said that first million is the hardest, so is the case with first sale. So, you should make a pl an first. Then proceed systematically. Don't do anything hay wile, you will lose interest again. Note down what you want to do: article marketing, blog, forum posting,landing page creation and driving traffic.... or you want to spend money on ads like google adwords. make a plan then start your move
it's a long way to do your first sale :S but after doing it you'll do the second one and so goes on so good luck..
@precious007: yeah, i've found a lot. the problem is that i don't know what to do first. that's why i'm here asking for which is faster to setup. I honestly don't have a specific one to get into, so any one of those methods would be good for me. But if someone can suggest a method that can make the first sale the fastest (without investing money btw), then i'll be glad to hear it. @miis1771:exactly, it's always the first. Anyway, I can't make a plan yet since i'm really all over the place when it comes to choosing my method. That's why i decided to ask for suggestions. Then maybe I can build my plan off of that method. @ddevil05: i know right? well, thanks man. @realbrands: what do you suggest i do to get that free traffic? what method worked out for you? thanks for the advice btw thanks for all your comments guys. hoping to hear more from you. Jerome
Define "fast". I just now started making sales, and I still don't make them regularly, so I'm in no position to teach. That being said, I can tell you what I did to get both my first PPC sale and my first article marketing sale. My very first sale with PPC- and so far only sale- came from this crappy squidoo lens. I put it up for a total of five days as I was paying for the campaign with someone else's credit card and didn't want to take them too far out of profit. Anyway, I spent $5.00 a day, bid on the keywords: become a game tester (23), becoming a game tester, get paid to play video games (4), how to become a game tester (3), how to test games (2), how to become a video game tester (2), becoming a game tester (17) The parentheses show the clicks from each keyword. I sent all the traffic to this crappy squidoo lens called The Best Video Game Testers which I made in about half an hour. There's so much wrong with it, yet the second day of my campaign I made a sale- my very first sale, for a $30 commission. The product was the Gamer Testing Ground (first one on that lens). Here's the full summary of the adwords campaign from last month: I had a fair click through rate, but it was declining every day, and if I had spent more then it probably would've gone below 1% since those ads weren't particularly engaging. That being said, I learned a lot from that excursion into Adwords. Anyway, my article marketing campaign I won't disclose the niche and my articles, keywords etc. because I'm still working with it a great deal and adding more to it. I'll just say that I technically started (threw up a blogger blog and began writing articles) on the 30th of August. I wrote about 20 articles on the niche through September, and then kind of got bored and went to other niches. Bad idea as two weeks into October that campaign got me a $25 or so sale. Now I'd sent about 200 hops to the merchant page, which had also garnered me about 25 order form impressions, so I guess it was bout time I got that sale (to be honest, I think I should have several more sales but the merchant page kind of sucks now that I look back at it). Nonetheless it was pretty cool seeing that in my Clickbank account kind of randomly. Not saying this is the best way, or the only way, or even a good way to make your first sale, but this is what I did. I will say the keywords I targeted for my article campaign were probably unnecessarily long tail and only get about 30 searches per month each, and I still don't rank on the first page for all of them (and a few of the articles have dropped down). As for my PPC campaign, I know I should have focused on one product instead of offering three choices, and got a self hosted set up and an opt in form, but I was more experimenting than anything else. My next campaigns are going to include all of the above and I'm going to really track conversions. Needless to say that's a long time coming. Anyway, good luck on getting your first sale. Hope this helped in some way, even if it's just "What NOT to do!".
Sorry buster, four articles is measly nothing. You need to be doing AT LEAST four articles per day for 10-15 days, to achieve something worthwhile. How many hops have you generated? Have you checked if your hoplinks actually work as intended?
Now now, don't suggest adwords to a newcomer! first, get a landing page where you review 3 products. squidoo ftw or if you have $ go with a .com (cheap at godaddy) and install wordpress on it. get targetted traffic to a landing page using article directories, web 2.0 sites, free hosted blogs. link these together and to a main EZA article. also link everything to your money page. before doing the above read the forums for a few days, dig through the ham to get to the bone. get the valuable info..... and then work if you fail, keep working! if you fail again, work more and see what you did wrong. eventually you'll make your first sale, even if it will be a refund (let's hope not)!
The easiest way is to pickup a product that you think it will convert for you and write some articles about it and submit them to ezine.. also you can try video marketing (download some videos from youtube -metacafe..) watermark them with your URL and put it on description adn reupload them to others videos sharing site. Dont use adwords as start , you can always try some free tips, and don't forget to search this forum , there is a lot of info here You should see your first sale withing 3 days with this methods
I would say commit yourself to a month of article marketing, writing 5-10 articles a day for a few products you feel comfortable promoting, and then see where you stand. Hopefully you will have made a few sales by then, and sales (for me at least) are an incredible motivating factor to do even more. There's a lot to be learned from various affiliate marketing forums, so do your research as well and learn how to identify keywords to target, develop effective landing pages, and more. Read+write=sales.
I think if you have the keyword research part of it down there's not much of a reason to not go into Adwords, given you have the budget. And if you sign up for an account, but wait a week or so to actually activate it, then they'll send you a free $100 in advertising. You can also scrape free advertising codes/coupons from other places. Really you're just trading time for money going with SEO over Adwords. Not saying you should do Adwords, and not stick with bum/article marketing, but don't limit yourself for no reason (do it cause you don't got the cash, not just because others say not to).
@Nanashi: thanks for the advice. I really appreciate the effort you've put into help me. Though I'm not thinking on spending any money for now (in getting this first sale), adwords is definitely on my list of future methods I plan on trying. Anyway, your next suggestion is article marketing right? yeah, I'm slowly leaning to that as almost everyone agrees. Thanks again and good luck to you too. @Smitten: yeah, after reading a few threads here on DP, I kinda felt stupid for just having those four articles and then giving up (did I mention they were promoting 4 different products? XD) if you don't mind me asking, how do I find out how many hops I was generating with those articles? @evilpuppy: do you mean that I make 3 landing pages for each of those three products? what's the landing page supposed to do btw? Anyway, I'm reading lots of threads right now and I don't plan on stopping until I get that sale. thanks for the advice and encouragement. @TheLasTSamuRai: I think video marketing is right for a novice like me right now, but I'll surely keep it in mind. thanks for the tip. @Crafty Blogger: How many products do you think should start with? I'm thinking on 3, but then again I'm here to listen to the opinion of others. thanks for giving me a few more things to look up, btw. appreciate it. @everyone: Thanks a lot guys for the great advice. Your replies have been nothing but help and motivation to me. a few questions came up when reading your responses: 1. How do I choose what products to promote? How do I base these products on? 2. Choosing products, making landing pages, writing articles, targeting keywords, pointing lenses, attaching backlinks, blog and forum postings, hop tracking: it's all being thrown around, can someone order them on what to do first, and so on? If anyone can help on this, it'll do a world of good, Again, thanks a bunch to those who took their time to share a little of their knowledge and experience with me. I aim to start by December. For now, I want to focus on a plan, a goal, and a process to get there. Hopefully I'll get it done by the end of the month. That's about it for now. Jerome
Oh yeah, and anyone can post links to threads that you think can help me, it'd be much appreciated. I've been reading a lot lately but might have missed some great insights, and any help I can get is help I want. Anyway, thanks again and hope to hear from you guys Jerome
@jpmcoy22, if I were you I would bookmark this page and follow all the tips discussed here religiously. In fact, I have bookmarked them and emailed the link to myself so that I don't forget it by the time I get home from work. If you are having trouble making your first sale, it makes sense to use all the helps and tips you can get especially from those who know what they're saying and backed it up with screenshots. So, follow them and before you know it, you will notice that awesome feeling when you check your account. Thanks guys for sharing all your tips.
[@Crafty Blogger: How many products do you think should start with? I'm thinking on 3, but then again I'm here to listen to the opinion of others. thanks for giving me a few more things to look up, btw. appreciate it.] Glad to be of help. I would say three is a reasonable number to start with, do two at least (in case one turns out to be a dud). What I do is generally ordered the following way: 1) Choose a product that looks good. This is a skill in and of itself. Generally you want something with a decent gravity, but not so high that the competition is fierce. I would say look in the 30-100 gravity range, but others may differ. 2) Do some keyword research on that product. Google's keyword tool is good for this and it's free (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal), but I find the MicroNiche finder to be well worth the expense (it was the first purchase I made once I got my first paycheck, and I wish I had got it sooner). In general I look for keyword phrases with low competition and a monthly exact search number of 1500 or higher, preferably around 3000 (or more). (To help figure out what your competition is, do a google search of the keyword phrase in quotes. This will give you a sense of how many pages are targeting that exact keyword phrase. Stick below 10,000 if possible. Also do a google search for the phrase without quotes and look at the results on the first page, especially the top three slots. If they don't have a PageRanks over three or lots of backlinks, then it is good to go. With MicroNiche, look for a website with a SOC - Strength of Competition- below 20, less than 10 is ideal!). 3) Decide whether you are going to create a landing page for the product or if you are simply going to redirect an url. It is probably best to do both, since if you are going to pursue article marketing many of the ezines don't allow you to link directly to an affiliate page, so you will need a landing page instead. For cheap redirects you can use an .info domain which only costs a buck or so the first year. You can create your own landing page either on a free site (Squidoo is good for this, as is blogspot), or use your own domain. 4) Start writing articles on the product using your low competition keywords you found earlier. Ezine articles is probably the most popular, but they are getting more strict about what kind of content and links they accept, and they also can take a week or longer to approve if your don't have premium status. But there are literally dozens of worthwhile places to submit articles to: ArticleBase, Buzzle, SearchWarp, GoArticles, and ArticleDashboard are some of my favorites. Your main goal with these articles (as an affiliate marketer) is to get the reader to click on your links in the resource box, and there are different strategies people pursue to do this (mine is to try to write a quality article that gets people interested enough to visit my landing page to learn more, and then convince them they need to visit the clickbank seller's page to purchase the product). For each product I promote, I try to write 50 articles initially (takes me about a week, usually). I write all my articles myself, and I usually target between 5-10 keyword phrases with these articles. Initial sales usually come from the articles, but I link each article back to my landing page website using the keywords as anchor text in my resource boxes (for those article directories that allow dofollow links), and my long term goal is to get direct traffic from Google searches so I won't have to continually spit out articles every day and visitors will arrive organically at my site. This can take a couple of months or longer, however, so for short term gain, article marketing is the fastest way to make some money. I don't use adwords, so I can't advise you on this, but I'm sure others can.
Thanks a lot man. This, together with some of evilpuppy's tips, are really answering my questions and then some. I'm curious with one thing, though. In petehols' thread, he made a lot of cash with plimus vs clickbank. Do you suggest I start directly on plimus? Hoping for you opinion.
Hey guys, it's me again. The past two days have been really fruitful. I've gotten a lot of info so far and taken notes on those not quite clear yet. I'm guessing 80+% ready to start trying your tips out. So here's the plan. It's kind of a prototype right now: I still want to clarify a few things that I'm not getting, so I'm thinking of starting out by the beginning of December. Hoping to have a witten plan (with products, keywords, a landing page, and maybe if possible, a few ready articles) by then. GOAL: $22,000 DEADLINE: JUNE 2010 (6 months from December) I know it doesn't sound much for the experienced, but for me who absolutely will be on the "learning-curve" part of my money making journey $22,000 feels fair. What do you guys think?
@Crafty Blogger: Your last post is a smasher. I am very happy that I bookmarked this page. In fact, the info and tips you discussed are some, if not the best I have seen anywhere on the web on how to promote a ClickBank product. Not only did you run through everything from keyword research with Google's keyword tool, you also covered what numbers are ideal to be targeting for on a monthly search for those keywords. I will try and put these tips into practice myself and they should definitely work Thanks again and I highly appreciate your taking the time to write that up.