The Professional Affiliate

2006-10-09T19:39:00.000-07:00

Do you have a "Vision Board?"

I do. I have two of them, actually, that are on my wall. I love looking at them, and it helps to encourage me to achieve my dreams. Find out more about vision boards, sometimes referred to as dream boards, in this free e-book! It's actually about MLM's but it's a general concept, so you can apply it to affiliate marketing too.

mlm5steps.pdf

To Your Profitable Lifestyle

Katie B
The Professional Affiliate

2006-10-08T18:35:00.000-07:00

TrafficSwarm

Today, I'm going to talk about my experiences with TrafficSwarm. I've been experimenting to see how well it works (if at all) and I have noticed this. Adding sales pages to get a quick sale is not effective. It may seem obvious considering the kind of advertising it is, I have seen people do it.

However, if you make a sales page for your list, that does work. In fact, you should do that for any free exchange you use to advertise with.

I know this because of two experiments I tried. First, I used to have a list called Katie B's Free List, thinking that the free part of the title would a selling point as well. It was a mistake because I did want to give people access to free stuff but, as with every affiliate marketer, I needed to make money too.

I did get subscribers but because of the word free, my subscribers never bought anything. I hear a lot of people saying right now, well duh, you attracted freeloaders, but believe it or not I didn't realize that at the time.

I also put up my affiliate lead capture page for The Death of Adsense e-book where you were paid 50 cents per person who signs up to get the free e-book. I only had one signup, but that signup came from TrafficSwarm.

My point is, you should use free traffic exchanges and manual/auto surfs to promote your lead capture pages. Your efforts will be much more worthwhile and you're likely to make more money from these traffic sources than you would otherwise.

To Your Profitable Lifestyle

Katie B
The Professional Affiliate

2006-10-07T14:09:00.000-07:00

A Peeve about "Gurus"

I have a peeve today, followed by some advice. I am annoyed with the fact that the "guru" types constantly pitch expensive products left and right that aren't all they are cracked up to be. A lot of us aren't in a position to be spending a lot of money on marketing products.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's a wise thing to invest in products that will further your knowledge and expertise and help you become a better affiliate marketer, but you need to be selective about what you buy. I'm also not saying that every product that is $97, $197 or even more is crap, but you also don't want to go into debt buying products.

What I do when I'm interested in a product, but am not ready to buy, is add it to what I call a marketing wish list. That way, when I am ready to buy, I have a list of the products I was interested in and don't have to go search for it again.

What I would also try to do is have a marketing budget. When you make sales, you should put at least 10% of the money you made back into advertising, such as cheap pay per click ads, and maybe put another 10-20% of the money aside for buying another product to help you learn new tricks.

Now, I also think you can find a lot of good free e-books. In fact, a good chunk of my knowledge comes from those. Not all free products are created equal, though. There can be a lot of contradicting information between books as well.

But I'm here to help. I'll be recommending some of my favorite free e-books, as well some valuable paid products, to help you on your journey to becoming a super affiliate.

To Your Profitable Lifestyle,

Katie B
The Professional Affiliate

2006-10-06T14:44:00.000-07:00

The Coolest Thing Part 2

I think it was an e-mail or something that captured my interest that had a recommendation for this program. So I did what I always do when I'm thinking about buying a product, and you should do this too. I go to a search engine and I searched for "secret affiliate weapon forum". If you look up forums, you'll get a lot of unbiased opinions about the product, so you can get a good idea as to whether or not it's worth the price of the product.

After looking at a few forums, it seemed people were satisfied with the product, which surprised me because the product itself is cheap, about $10, and I'm used to marketing products costing a lot of money.

I went back to the sales page, read up on all the bonuses that come with it, and decided I was going to try it out. So I signed up and...

I was blown away!

It's awesome! My favorite part of The Secret Affiliate Weapon is Ewen's secret blog, which has a lot of good information in it and links to download extra free e-books. The product already comes with quite a few e-books and they were of great help to me.

It's a lifetime membership, so whenever he adds something to it, you get it for free. That's a pretty sweet deal if you ask me.

The best bonuses he offers are a $20 (500 visitors) advertising credit with Ad Voyager, which Ewen says is a great, cheap alternative to other expensive pay-per-click programs, and in his blog he gives you 25,000 free Instant Buzz credits. That's more than $35 of free advertising that he didn't even advertise as part of the membership!

Quick tip: Use your free advertising to get visitors to your lead capture page. You'll build your list quicker and you can still redirect the thank you page to an affiliate product.

So am I satisfied? You bet I am!

To Your Profitable Lifestyle,

Katie B
The Professional Affiliate

2006-10-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Coolest Thing!

Hey guys, I found the coolest thing! I came across a squeeze page about blunders that affiliate marketers make all the time, and it was advertising a free report. I'm always up for something free that advances my affiliate knowledge. So I signed up, checked the report out and it was pretty good! It wasn't the same rehashed stuff I've read over and over and it was something I actually learned from.

So far, I'm impressed and I see the author of the report is Ewen Chia. I've heard of him, but I had put him in that "guru" box, guru being a word that has a lot of negativity attached to it. So I checked out the program he was advertising called the "Secret Affiliate Weapon." I'd seen this page many times before but I always dismissed it as something I didn't care about. I do often read sales pages anyway to learn from them and to see what the offer is.

I think it was an e-mail or something that had some information that captured my interest, and it had a recommendation for this program. So I did what I always do when I'm thinking about buying a product, and you should do this too. I went to a search engine and I searched for secret affiliate weapon forum. If you look up forums you'll get a lot of unbiased opinions about a product, so you can get a good idea as to whether or not it's worth the purchase.

After looking at a few forums, it seemed people were satisfied with the product, which surprised me because it's cheap, about $10, and I'm used to marketing products costing a lot of money.

To be continued in the next post...

To your profitable lifestyle!

Katie B
The Professional Affiliate