Marketing Rookie’s Plunge into Entrepreneurship

After much thought and research, I think I may have finally picked a couple of niche markets that I’d like to try out. I decided to promote some of the ClickBank products as an affiliate. ClickBank is basically a marketplace for digital products (ebooks, software, etc). I chose ClickBank since it seemed to have the most variety of products for me to choose from.

ClickBank has hundreds of products in every niche market and choosing the right product to promote can be a daunting task. How can we, as affiliates, know how “good” a certain product is without buying it ourselves? Fortunately, I may have figured out a way to distinguish quality products from crappy ones without having to fork over our own money.

ClickBank will take referral money away when the buyer is issued a refund due to dissatisfaction. Therefore, it’s obvious that we should find a product that has the lowest refund rate. Unfortunately, ClickBank does not openly reveal refund rates on their marketplace so it takes a little bit of extra work to figure this out.

When you visit the ClickBank marketplace and view the products available for sale, you are provided with some important payout stats. Here is a sample:

Let’s take a look at product #1. After a quick browse of their pitch page, I could find out that this product is selling for $29.95. ClickBank commissions are calculated at 7.5% + $1.00, so on this particular product, ClickBank takes about $3.25. At 75% payout, affiliates (us) are expected to make about $20.03 per sale. But the stats reflect a different number: $17.98 / sale. This average takes into account the returns and refunds on this product. After a quick math, we can determine that this product has close to 11% refund rate which tells me that this product is absolute crap.

Now let’s take a look at product #4. This product sells for $25, so after taking ClickBank’s commission into account, affiliates are expected to make around $16.60 per sale. The average payout is $16.40 which is about 1.2% refund rate.

So it’s pretty clear to me which product is of better quality. In a PPC marketing campaign, every cent matters so I would definitely not promote product #1.

Filed under: affiliate programs, clickbank | 357 Comments »

The first step to affiliate marketing success is getting the right traffic. The question is: how can we drive quality traffic to merchants to maximize conversion? There are several ways to generate traffic: 1) you can always pay for traffic, either via cpm or ppc marketing, 2) you can write articles related to your niche product and submit to a bunch of free article directories, or 3) get organic search engine traffic through websites that you own / build. After careful consideration, I decided to re-invest some of my current ad income into ppc affiliate marketing.

PPC Affiliate Marketing is basically a mixture of affiliate marketing and ppc (pay per click). This is roughly how it works:

1. Find a niche product to promote.
2. Buy some PPC traffic (i.e. Google Adwords) and direct it to a landing page with the product you are trying to sell.
3. Profit!

At first glance, this looks pretty simple but I disagree. Finding the right product to promote is not an easy task and I suspect it will take me several trials and errors to find the perfect niche. I also have to consider campaign expenses along with the possible products. If I decide to promote an ebook that nets me around 15 dollar profit per sale but if the relevant keyword bids on adwords cost me an arm and a leg, it’s definitely not worth it. I would also have to watch trends and analyze demand for these products and select my products accordingly.

Writing a good landing page is also something that I need to master. The landing page is where we entice prospective customers into buying. Without a doubt, this landing page is one of the most important aspects of your campaign.

So if we get good at Google Adwords, find the perfect niche product, write perfect landing pages, and learn how to not blow our PPC budget, we will be on the right track.

Filed under: affiliate marketing, ppc | No Comments »

Over the past year, I built a fair amount of websites to generate some income, most of it via Adsense. Lately, I realized that this was not a real business, especially long term. Adsense is notorious for banning honest publishers without an explanation and with the recent multi-click fraud attempts on one of my websites, I decided that it’s time that I move on and pursue a different field in the internet marketing game.

After careful consideration, I decided to jump into pay per sale affiliate marketing programs. Pay per sale affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web merchandise in which an affiliate is rewarded with every sale (usually a percentage or revenue share). The real difference between affiliates and adsense publishers is that affiliates follow a business model that is not nearly as volatile. The Adsense market changes as fast as the SEO market, which often times leads into a very unpredictable environment.

The biggest challenge in affiliate marketing is probably getting the right traffic that leads to great conversions. The next biggest challenge is finding the right (and profitable) niche to promote. Since this is my first “plunge” into affiliate marketing, I don’t expect this to be an easy ride.

Wish me luck =)

Filed under: affiliate marketing | No Comments »

Normally I wouldn’t post technical articles like this since I want to focus this blog on marketing but I felt the need to write about this one since I couldn’t find much info about it when I needed guidance. GeoIP is useful when you want only a certain demographic to access your websites. In advertising, U.S traffic pays the best, followed by U.K and Canada.

There are several ways to accomplish this, so the method I am about to go over is definitely not the “only one.” I will also be assuming that your server is running a linux distro and that you have root privileges.

First, you need to download the latest GeoIP API in C to your linux server:

wget http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/c/GeoIP-1.4.1.tar.gz

Extract the contents:

tar -zxvf GeoIP-1.4.1.tar.gz

Run “./configure” inside the extracted directory. This will make sure that this software is compatible with your system. After it is done configuring, run the commands “make” and “make install”

cd GeoIP-1.4.1
./configure
make
make install

Next, we have to install the geoip PHP extension. This is very easy if you have the php-devel package already installed on your system.

pecl install geoip-0.2.0

Create a new .ini file inside your /etc/php.d/ directory to enable the geoip extension module. You can also do this by editing the php.ini file but it’s neater this way. Call it geoip.ini and add the following lines in there.

; Enable GeoIP extension module
extension=geoip.so

Using this geoip module, let’s write a simple php script to only allow traffic from the U.S, U.K, Canada and Australia. If the traffic does not match this criteria, they will see a blank page. Add this code at the top of all the php pages that you want to limit access on: index.php, about.php, contact.php, etc. Please note that this will not work on regular html pages; this is for php pages only.

Restart apache and everything should be working as planned.

Filed under: traffic | 1 Comment »

Hello and welcome to Marketing Rookie. My name is Brian and I am an (aspiring) entrepreneur from Los Angeles, California. Marketing Rookie is a weblog (blog) aimed at those interested in internet business and entrepreneurship. If you are like me, you have probably thought about opening your own business at some point in your life.

While I currently have a decent gig as a system & network administrator, it’s not something that I would like to pursue for the rest of my life. I was never a fan of working for someone else. Operating my own successful business (being my own boss) is probably one of my main goals in life at this time. I currently run several websites ranging from a web hosting company to an entertainment blog. They generate a decent amount of income but definitely not enough for me to quit my day job. I would like to keep on building new products and websites that are helpful to the public and at the same time increase my revenue stream.

I decided to start this blog mainly to document my progress towards my goal, but also to motivate myself to work harder. I will also share some of the useful things and important lessons that I will surely pick up as time progresses.

As I am using a blog, this also means you can post comments, suggestions, criticism, and/or questions on every post that I publish. All comments are appreciated so don’t be shy.

One last thing I wanted to mention is that writing is not my forte. English is not my first language, so please bear with me if my posts contain grammatical errors or get too repetitive.

So that’s it for my intro post. I am glad you are here.

Now let’s make some money.

Brian

Filed under: general | No Comments »