Benjamin's Affiliate Marketing Journal

[markus]

I'm wondering how Benjamin is doing these days...

[SEOidiot]

Last i heard he was having fun as a new father i think ..... hopefully the two emails he gets from this will tear him away to let us know

[Benjamin_Maker]

I'm Back!

I know that I have been MIA for a while again, but I have been busy working on my keyword software tool and new website/blog.

I am now ready to share it with the world and also get back to helping the forum that has been a great help to me.

If any of you are interested in the keyword research tool I wrote, it is availabe free.  I won't post the link unless you give me approval, but you can PM me if you want.  You will especially want to use it if you have a Wordze account because it uses their API and goes out and determines the actual search volume for a keyword on Google, plus the competing web page count to give you some indication of competition.

I would appreciate any help in spreading the word.  Like a good affiliate marketer, I want to get it in as many hands as possible just for the exposure to my blog.

As far as actual affiliate marketing goes, I am starting to turn the corner.  I have found a product that seems to convert and I have built a small email list (around 1500) that grows by 10-20 people per day.  I am going to ramp up my PPC traffic now that I have something that is converting and hopefully start making a profit, rather than losing money on PPC.  ;-)

I will give a more detailed post in a few weeks on how the campaign is doing.

Best Wishes,

Benjamin

P.S. I hope everyone has been doing well and I look forward to being more active.

[Benjamin_Maker]

SEOIdiot has given me permission, so I wanted to share my new tool/blog with everyone so that you can download it and benefit from it (especially if you have a Wordze account).

I have made help videos on how to use it and I am working on a video that will show how to use it to make keyword research on an affiliate offer very simple and efficient.

The tool has only been released since Thursday and there has been over 200 downloads already and this is on a new site that had 0 visitors because it was brand new.  I am very pleased not just with the number of downloads but people seem to really appreciate it and find the value in it.  One guy wrote me and said it was the best free tool ever  (that might be more high praise than it deserves, but I appreciated it).

Anyway, hopefully you will find it useful and it will help make you money.   

You can learn more or download it at   /gtrends-made-easy

Best Wishes,

Benjamin

[creativemeasures]

I just wanted to comment quickly after reading through your diary Benjamin.

I have to applaud you on your growth as an internet marketer. To read through this, and watch as each month your knowledge grew, to a point where now you are releasing a program, and maintaining a blog, and producing video. This is a truly an inspiring thread.

Good luck on your continued success, and thank you for sharing your experiences and insights. You have made some points that I have neglected to focus on in the past year and half of my marketing adventure. Thank you for that.

[markus]

Looking forward to your campaign update!

[markus]

From your first post;
"...being an affiliate with Bluehost and then signing up through your own affiliate link, I used that idea and signed up with Hostgator as an affiliate through Commission Junction.  They give you $100 for a new client signup.  Hopefully, they won't have a problem that the new client and the affiliate are the same."

How'd that work out?

[IrishAffiliate]

Great to have you back with us Benjamin!
Since you mentioned email marketing - would you share your experience as that is something I've never tried before but have been considering?

And yea, how did it work with the host?

[Benjamin_Maker]

CreativeMeasures - Thank you for your kind words.  I owe a lot of people a lot of thanks as they have been kind enough to share with me, especially here at affearners.  They always treated me like I was part of their forum family, even when I was a complete newb 1 year ago.  Although, I am not where I want to be, I am definitely headed in the right direction and I feel that 2008 is going to be a year of success for me in this business.  I am determined, even more so as I have watched my newborn son grow these last 9 weeks, to make a living doing this so that I can spend as much time with him as possible.  I wish you much success in your endeavors and hope I can help you in some small way.

Markus - I got screwed on that deal with Hostgator.  They never paid me, but rather paid some other affiliate.  I sent them several emails and they never would tell me anything other than my signup showed up under another affiliate link.  So, either somehow my cookie got messed up or they just wouldn't pay because I signed up through my own link.  I was pretty disappointed about that.  Although, I have used my own affiliate link a few times to purchase stuff from other places and have had no problem getting paid.

IrishAffiliate - I have this big mastermind plan that one day will come to fruition, but the start of the plan is with one site that I developed.  It is meant to be a content site and I wanted to try to build a list from the visitors.  Because I am horrible at getting natural traffic due to the fact that I hate trying to build links because of the time it takes, I have been using PPC to drive traffic to this site.  My first attempt to build a list was horrible.  I was paying too much for traffic and getting maybe 1 to 2 opt-ins per day.  So, I scratched that plan and completely re-designed my opt-in landing page.  I will admit to you that I "borrowed" a design that I knew had decent conversions for it's own niche and changed it out to fit mine because I figured it couldn't do worse than my design.  That made a huge difference.  Now, instead of less than 1% conversion on my PPC traffic, I was getting 15-20% to opt-in. 

I felt that was a huge success for me and boosted my confidence that you could get people to opt-in.  The change I made was that I had a very simple page with red text at the top and a few bullet points telling them what they could learn if they signed up and that was it.  No pictures, no other offers, the page didn't have to scroll, very simple and not distracting.  My previous attempt had WAY too many distractions and links they could click.  I used crazyegg to track where people were clicking and saw that it was all over the board.  That taught me a lesson, that if you are paying for traffic, only allow them to either click on your offer or hit the back button.  Don't give them other choices and water down your chance for conversion.

Now, to the point that you are probably interested in, which is the actual email marketing.  I used aweber and built a series of emails that shared good information, but also were laced with affiliate links.  The truth is that I have built my list to about 1,500 people(and growing) but I have had poor conversions on the affiliate offers.  I haven't found the one offer that strikes a chord with my audience.  But the nice thing is that I can keep trying until they either opt-out or buy something.  As of right now, I have spent more on PPC than I have made from the list.  But, I still have the list and as long as I offer value to them and can get them to read the email, then I know eventually I will find the right offer.

To Summarize my thoughts on Email Lists:
1) They are great in the fact that you can keep marketing to them
2) The open rate for the individual emails really depends on the headline and even then I have never had it above 50%
3) In my experience, the first follow up email has received almost a 50% open rate, but then it steadily drops from there to where my sixth email is only getting about a 10% open rate.  I don't know how that compares with others and I have to figure out a way to increase it.
4) I think list building is dependent on your niche, it doesn't make sense for some.
5) If you can build a list without having to pay for the traffic, then you will definitely be profitable from it. 

I hope that helps, if you have any specific question that I failed to cover, I will be glad to share my experience so far.

Best Wishes,

Benjamin

[dink]

Boy howdy.  You're doing great Benjamin.  Keep it up.

[Benjamin_Maker]

Thanks Dink!

I still remember that you (and a few others) took the time to give me some great advice early on, and I have always appreciated that.

I'm doing my best to make sure that advice was time well spent on your part. 

Best Wishes,

Benjamin

[dink]

Gotta love your new avatar too.   

[IrishAffiliate]

Thanks for your reply Benjamin, very informative. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors. 

[markus]

Benjamin

In hindsight, anything you'd do differently?

Plans for your next move?

[Benjamin_Maker]

Hey Markus,

If only we had the advantage of hindsight when we actually started something, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing.

Looking back on what has been almost a year now, there are a lot of things I would have done differently.  However, I have the bad habit of wanting to learn as much as possible about something before I commit to a certain method or area.  Unfortunately, Internet Marketing has almost an endless sea of areas, which caused me to wander about learning the various methods of how people make money.

First, you start with all the different colored hats (black, grey, white).  Then you can apply the various hats to different methods of getting traffic (ppc, viral, linkbait, seo).  But first, you need to figure out how you want to monetize the traffic (adsense, affiliate, dropship, your own product) and what market you want to monetize(endless options).  Of course, you have to figure out how to get conversions from your traffic once you have the market and monetization figured out, so there's another science in itself.

For a person like myself who feels the need to know the details of each of those areas, it has been a whirlwind of a year.  I have immersed myself in forums, podcasts, gone to conferences, purchased a few ebooks & courses, and experimented in various ways trying to find the magic formula.  The good thing about what I have done is I do feel like I have a great base of knowledge in a lot of different areas.  The bad thing is that I am not an expert in any of them.

What I would have done differently

So, what I would have done different is to focus on 1 way to get traffic and 1 market with 1-2 monetization methods and worked at it until it was profitable.  What I ended up doing is trying a lot of different methods & markets and never focused on one.

Next Move

My next move is what I wish I would have done to start with and what I am doing right now.  I have decided to focus on PPC traffic because it is easy to get but also easy to lose money on.  I have decided to focus on CPA offers as my monetization method because I want my traffic to be exposed to the least resistant method (besides adsense) of conversion.  I will not name the market, but I have focused on a single market.  Now, I am honing my landing page and my ads to make the campaign profitable.  Once that happens, I increase the traffic and hopefully really start making some good money on the campaign.  Only after this campaign is profitable and I have built it to a peak level do I move on to the next one.

I will update everyone on how this campaign is going over the next few weeks as I let it play out and hopefully, perfect it.

Best Wishes,

Benjamin