Affiliate Marketing 101: bootstrappin’ myself.

December 12, 2007 · Filed Under Affiliate Marketing 101 Series · 2 Comments 

affiliate marketing tips

Ok, first I should specify that “affiliate marketing 101″ in this case is not a course where I teach you all the tricks of marketing affiliate products. Instead it is a series of my own learning as I go, and take you along with me…hopefully learning something as well. Or maybe even contributing and teaching me something.

There are tons of blogs and sites out there telling you how great affiliate marketing is and how much people can make, how much they make and how much they can teach you how to make for a one time low fee of xx dollars. Even the open and honest bloggers will give tips and offer up help but rarely share the real meaty details. Those bloggers are appreciated but for a complete noob to affiliate marketing, like me, it doesn’t answer the silly little questions that come up and even the most open and helpful blogger seems to never share actual sites, landing pages and campaigns they are doing. One exception is Zac Johnson (my hero!). His “Super Affiliates Guide to PPC marketing” is a collection of post showing tips and ideas with detailed information which makes actually learning and grasping this stuff a somewhat reachable goal. Really open and genuinely looking to help people. But even he doesn’t post actual sites and landing pages or real specific details on live campaigns ;). His series is the inspiration behind this noob series of mine.

It’s understandable why almost no marketers out there show you their live campaigns and live landing pages/sites. If they are actually doing well, posting all the specifics to the open public could pretty much kill your campaign or at the least cost you more with the extra direct competition. Thing is, most people that read blogs and get tips will want to just copy exactly what is working for the other person rather than taking that knowledge and translating it for their own ideas and offers. That is where the learning comes in…anyone can follow a ordered list of steps and just input a given set of variables and probably do ok with a proven campaign. But if they don’t take the effort to use the information on their own projects they will likely never make much money. There are other good reasons why you shouldn’t post your campaign details, your sites and landing pages or give out too much information in general as well. After all, even if you want to help people, when it comes down to it, you are training your competition and showing them all your moves. But since I don’t have any moves or tricks yet and since I don’t have any profitable PPC campaigns I don’t mind sharing as many details as I can. I don’t know if you will learn something from me or not and in fact maybe you will become just a little dumber from reading my tests but regardless I will share the ugly and hopefully positive details for this. I’m very open to tips and advice and I am sure any other readers would appreciate any real advice you may give. So please feel free to add your thoughts to the comments.

This first installment of my “Affiliate Marketing 101″ will deal with the eBay affiliate program through Commission Junction (www.cj.com) since right now is a pretty good time to grab some of the holiday shoppers and filter them through your links. The site will hopefully be good enough to eventually get indexed but because of the short amount of time before Christmas, PPC is the plan…which is yet another specific area in marketing I have no experience at all so you can learn that with me as well ;).

Since I am such a noob, I’m going to go with some of the easiest ways to get a site online and getting my links on the site. So for this site I will be using WordPress and an ebay rss plugin that dynamically post live auctions and links to them using my affiliate link (more on this later). It’s the easiest way I can think of, for someone with my lack of experience, to get a site up and running in no time.

Here is a breakdown of the steps I have taken for my site so far:

Step 1. Find a niche or product to build the site on. Rather than do a generalized “store” site, I am going to choose one primary product to make the site around. That should make it easier for a noob like me to build my adwords campaign around and hopefully get better quality scores and better conversions. Though to be honest, I’m pretty much talking out of my arse since I am still trying to learn how to track actual ROI (return on investment).

So how do I find or choose a product/niche? Promoting a product that you actually like and enjoy is probably a good place to start but isn’t necessary. Just choosing something that is in demand is a decent start. There are plenty of tools out there to find out whats hot right now as well if you can’t decide on something. Holiday seasons makes it easier to consider “gift” type products but we can assume that competition will probably be higher on everything as well. Here are a few of the many great sites to find what has the most hype at any current time:

Well looks like an easy pick is the iPhone. There is probably a ton of competition trying to push it but also probably enough demand during this season to offset that and for everyone to get a piece of the pie. At least that is how my little marketing mind works. I assume the extra competition all gunning for the same high demand products will raise advertising cost but I don’t know enough yet to know how to avoid that yet. For now I’d rather find a product that I can easily market and hopefully get easier sales off of than something I have no idea how to sell. If I can get a profitable campaign going that is pushing something as popular as the iPhone then it will give me some motivation to try some other less known offers. If I lose my arse because I don’t know what I am doing and the competition kills me then I can just use that as an excuse and not let it get me down ;). Bad way to do business but I’m new enough to this to not mind too much.

So I decided that my first product to build the site around will be the Apple iPhone.

Step 2. Next I would need to decide on a domain. I’ll assume you know how to register a domain and have hosting and all that. I’ve read quite a few times that having the main keywords in the domain is important. But I’ve also read that domain age can be important for better trust levels with Google and quality score for adwords. Which is true? Or which is more important if both apply? Who the hell knows…that is the type of confusing stuff that there never seems to be definite answers by anyone. So for me, I just decided to use a domain that I already had rather than register a keyword rich one. Maybe it will hurt the campaign or maybe not but I planned to put something on the domain anyway this works.

Step 3. Building my site. Using cPanel hosting with Fantastico makes it incredibly easy to install WordPress. WordPress is great because it is very easy to get up and going, has tons of great plugins and TONS of great free themes which makes it really easy to make great looking sites super quick. WordPress is also known to be liked by the search engines so maybe it will help me get indexed and ranked later as I have more time to add more content and optimize things. One downside is even with great looking themes it can still look like a blog. That’s not automatically a bad thing but if you are going for the “store” portal type thing it may look less professional. On the other hand if you set it up like a product fan site with convenient links to great deals that you “found” it might build just as much trust. But the main reason I am using WordPress is the ease of setting it up and customizing it and easy of adding my affiliate links.

There are a ton of great free plugins that I can install but the main one I need for this is the one that makes it super easy to add my ebay affiliate links. I used a paid plugin called BayRSS ($37 for unlimited domain use). I bought it a while back but hadn’t used it until now. It makes adding specific, or general, eBay items (as well as amazon) to your post with your CJ affiliate link very easy. You just input your CJ PID and Amazon Associates ID and set the options to what you want (such as how many items to list and how much to make the minimum item and ending time). Here is a peak so you can see how easy it is to setup:


BayRSS Options

So a quick rundown of what I did:
- install WordPress and find a theme to use that fits my product/niche
- install the BayRSS plugin and decide on the settings
- made a basic post trying to drop keywords and add the BayRSS code below the post.

Here is a how it came out:


<br /> Gadger

So now, the step that breaks all the rules…here is the link to the site:
Gadger.com - Ipod Deals Online

As you can see in the main post, I added a bit of text and then the eBay and Amazon code with the product keywords I wanted and they are dynamically updated with the BayRSS plugin. BayRSS then adds auctions according to your keywords and settings so I will always have live auction links that have a couple bids and ending soon. I also added an Amazon widget from the Amazon associates center to the sidebar. Lastly I added ad an Adsene block. To be honest, I’m not sure if it is a good idea to have Amazon and Adsense on there or if it would be better to only concentrate on the eBay links. I guess I hope they click on the most profitable links but assume if they at least click on something rather than just leaving it has more potential. I guess that is something I will learn as I get more experience and assume it depends on the types of offers being promoted. Sometimes Adsense may pay as much, or more, over time for some niches. Might help if I knew how to better figure out the ROI and solid conversion levels heh.

I’ve only used BayRSS for eBay affiliate feeds so far but there are a couple others that come highly recommended. Maybe once I get this campaign going I can test out the others and report back on them too. Here are a couple other scripts/plugins build to take advantage of the eBay affiliate program:

  • BANS (Build A Niche Store) ($97) - Probably the most popular of the three. This one is not a WordPress plugin but instead a standalone script that builds a whole site/store. There is a rather large and active forum for support and help. If you don’t want to use wordpress this is a good option. BANS creates fully operational standalone store sites.
  • phpBay Pro ($39) - Another WordPress plugin that works like BayRSS though it supposedly can also work as a php API that you can incorporate into other types of sites/sciprts.
  • BayRSS ($37) - BayRSS is what I used for the project above. As far as I know it is only a WordPress plugin so you will need a wordpress site to use it.

The added bonus of promoting an eBay affiliate store is it has multiple revenue possibilities. You earn commission both when new users sign up and use eBay but also a cut from eBay when they collect fees. That can add up quick and the coolest thing is the CJ cookie last 7 days (30 days for new users) so even if you get someone to stop by eBay to check out the item you are promoting and they don’t buy there is still a great chance they may go back within those 7 days and buy something. Even what they buy during those 7 days isn’t related to your product you still get a commission. That can be very powerful for times of the year like this where there are going to be a lot of people buying a lot of stuff on eBay. You might actually be able to make more just by filtering users though your links to get your cookie on their machine and get a piece of their holiday shopping craze. I plan to run my test campaign for 2 weeks or so. That will give me 2 weeks of direct traffic from my adwords campaign as well as an extra week of cookie action for those that come through later in the campaign. I assume there will be the most sales in these coming weeks before Christmas and then another week or two after where people who got cash for Christmas will be picking out their own toys ;).

That is all as far as setting the site up. I’ll be posting the next installment soon that will go over the actual campaign I will setup and detail how things go. Although I intend to share as much data as I can I need to check the TOS to see if I am allowed to post all my stats or not. I probably won’t post the exact keywords I use either but will show how/where I decide to find them.

Let me know what you think of my “super cool affiliate site” and if you notice any major mistakes I might have made.

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