At Affiliate Incubator, one of the speakers was Mike Koenigs, of Traffic Geyser. You’ve heard me talk about Traffic Geyser before, but he really opened my eyes to a different way to use video.
This week I’ve been working on videos, pretty much straight for three days. I’m nearly done. However, my new approach, instead of spending a lot of time creating one video, is now to spend my time creating tons of videos. I’m aiming for 15, all about the product I’ve chosen. Oh, did I mention I’m doing this for an affiliate product?
So your first question is probably how in the world can I create 15 videos about someone else’s product? A very good question indeed.
What I did is I bought my target product, and read through it carefully (it is an ebook). I took notes on any questions or things I thought people might not know about it. I then did a bit more research on my niche, checking out About.com for the top five most common questions regarding it. After all was said and done I had roughly 15 frequently asked questions. I then went through and wrote a 100 to 150 word answer to each of them. It takes roughly 40-60 seconds to read that number of words.
Next I created a bunch of title slides, introducing my question, answer (ie No, but…) and my URL. Then I went to stock.xchng and downloaded pictures (for free, with free-use rights) for every part of each video. I have roughly 6-10 pictures per video. The pictures don’t have to all relate strictly to your overall topic, just to the sentence you’re saying at the time. This actually gives you a lot of leeway to use different pictures.
My next step is to get some royalty-free music to add to the videos. Because each video is no more than 60 seconds long, I think I’ll buy three different full length songs, then hack them up into sound bytes to use with each video, so each video will be slightly different. I’ve used PremiumBeat.com in the past and was happy with them.
So the plan is the finish off the videos, create a squeeze page with an opt-in form, create an autoresponder series, then submit all 15 videos twice on Traffic Geyser using their timed delivery. That should give me about 120+ videos out there; a far cry from my previous 25 or so. Plus, and this is key, for each video I will be identifying uber-popular competitors on YouTube and matching titles and tags. So each matched video theoretically will show up just after the popular one, and hopefully gain more views that way.
So there you have it. Initially I thought I would wait until I was all done and had some results to tell you about, but this way is more fun for everyone I think. Part of the purpose of this blog is to give you a window into what I’m experimenting with, and to show what works and what doesn’t. I’ve got high hopes for this, but I’ve been wrong often enough before.
As you might be aware, I’m currently at the Affiliate Incubator seminar in Dallas TX. A few days ago I promised to try to keep you up to date, so here’s my token attempt. Though quite honestly, I would prefer to be implementing ideas right now =). Consider it a sacrifice for your sake.
Although there were many very cool things mentioned today, I thought I would pick one and tell you a bit about it. Russell Brunson talked about how you can give away your product for free, and still make a ton of money doing it.
About a year ago, I came across this site called Project Payday. Being the sucker I am, I followed it through and bought the product. I noticed at the time they had all kinds of other offers on there, but it wasn’t until Russell pointed it out that I put it all together. They’re using offers from TrialPay.com to subsidize, and in all likelihood, outperform the sales revenue of their actual book! Go over there and have a look.
The idea here is that you come up with an ebook or something else of value, then at the end of the pitch, when you tell them how much it is, you can spring this on them as an alternative: “Or, sign up for one of the following offers and get ______ for free!” So if they go and sign up, they will be redirected back to your thankyou page where they’ll get the free ebook. The beauty is that these cost per action signups will often payout $30 to $40, which in many cases might be double the value of the actual ebook you were trying to sell!
Immediately after this you can spring an upsell on them as well where you can simply use a better version of your product, ie audio or video or print, and charge twice as much. Here again you can give them the option of getting it free, if they sign up for two offers.
In this way you can make $80 or more giving away free stuff! How cool is that? In a weak economy, people still want stuff but they are less willing and less able to hand over the money necessary to get it. However, if you give them an alternative in which they only have to spend a few minutes of their time, and then they get what they want for free? Sure some won’t bother. But you can still offer to sell it to them.
This is a great way to use public domain works or products that won’t sell on their own.
I discovered a really cool site today that all you pay-per-clickers are sure to appreciate. It’s a free tool which analyzes your ad data and tells you which one makes you more money!
Sound straightforward, kinda like a no-brainer which you think you already know how to do? Might want to think again. The premise behind this is that most marketers create ad variations, split test, and then the one with the strongest click through rate (CTR) carries on to round 2. That’s a good guesstimate of performance, but at the end of the day, we don’t really care how many people clicked our ad, do we? We care about how many people performed the required action! So we really need to take conversions into consideration too.
So how do you do the math to get a useful result out of all the numbers? Glenn Livingston from Super Split Tester has created a cool tool to do it all for us. Simply enter in your numbers and it will tell you, along with a confidence interval, which ad actually adds more to your bottom line. You might be surprised, the ad with the lower CTR might actually produce more sales per thousand impressions than your previous star performer!
I was searching for something online today (I can’t even remember what) and somehow I came across TrustedGurus.com. I read the (non)sales letter and signed up for their forum (its free, they’re not actually selling anything).
It looks like a great idea. The premise is that the forum members will comment and vote on “trusted gurus” in various industries. The only people allowed to vote are those who have actually purchased a product from a guru, and are thus qualified to properly and impartially review it.
Currently the only gurus that are listed belong to the internet marketing industry.
The reason this site caught my attention was partially because the post I recently wrote about Google Snatch 2.0, and how I was quite disappointed with it, was still quite fresh in my mind. A site that provides a trusted, impartial, third party opinion as to the credibility of these gurus could be quite valuable to those of us who habitually (compulsively? hmm… fodder for a different post) spend thousands each year on info materials.
The site is not selling anything at all, has no affiliate links, and is not out to make a profit in any shape or form. You can read it all on their homepage. Their sole purpose is to bring some credibility to some of these guys out there. I think the more people that get involved with this project, the better it will become.
Are there any “gurus” that you trust implicitly? Meaning you’d buy pretty much anything they came out with, without even reading the sales letter, you just knew it would be that good? How about people you would avoid at all costs? If so, please leave a comment below.
Currently there aren’t that many people active on the forum, but I’m sure it is growing, and I think the idea is a valid one. Why don’t you go check it out?
These days it seems like there is no shortage of review sites out there, promoting this product or that. I recently had the opportunity to listen to Russell Brunson on a webinar and he was talking about a different spin on the old trick. It was new to me anyways, so I thought you might benefit.
The idea here is that you pick the affiliate product you’re going to market. I’m assuming you have an idea how to pick a decent product, if not let me know and I’ll post about that later on. So, assuming you’ve chosen a decent affiliate product to promote, the next step is to find out how it fits into the value ladder.
The Value Ladder
Russell talks a lot about his value ladder. In brief, the steps are as follows:
Some sort of freebie
Some sort of text based ebook. Could be free or cheap.
Audio based version of the same thing. Could be worth a bit more.
Video based version of the same thing. Again, worth more.
Home study course developing the niche a lot further.
Seminar, could be a webinar.
Workshop. At this point we’re talking about in-person events.
Live coaching.
Direct one on one coaching with yourself.
That’s the value ladder in a nutshell. I know, you’re sitting there thinking, how could I possibly get all that going for me? Well, it takes quite a lot of work, and the good news is, you don’t have to have it all working for you to take advantage of the concept.
So you’ve got your affiliate product, (note the affiate product - you don’t need your own product to make this work), the next step is to figure out where on the value ladder your chosen product sits.
Let’s pick a mid-level internet marketing how to product for our example here, just because there are so few of them out there ;-). Let’s call it Affiliate Cash Grabber. It is an in-depth guide to affiliate marketing, and it really has a ton of great ideas and content.It is a mixture of video and ebook.
The first step is to see if you can get a copy of it for free, from the author. Try the WHOIS information on the site the sales page is listed on. You should find a phone number there. Give it a try. Barring that, you can try the contact email.
If you’re utterly unsuccessful at getting a free copy of the product, but you really want to promote it, you might want to consider buying it yourself. Use your own affiliate link, so it doesn’t cost you much. If the product is on Clickbank, you can ethically use your own links as long as your account has processed sales from more than five different credit card numbers. Don’t do this on a brand new account, but rather from an established account you’re using for other sales.
Sit down and immerse yourself in their product. Chances are you will learn something you never knew before. Take notes. After you’re done, create your review product. This will be essentially a Cliff Notes version of the product. You can talk about what you learned, or how you think this could be applied, or how you know this is going to help your own business, or whatever. You get the idea.
Depending on where the product is on the value ladder, you want to create a product that is one step down on that same ladder. Now, because Affiliate Cash Grabber (I hope that isn’t a real product) is both video and ebook, you can pick what method you want to use. Video might be a good choice, because it is perceived as higher value, and it might take less effort to create a quick review on video than to produce a written report. Take your pick.
Once you’ve decided, you create your product and use that as your giveaway on the squeeze page. You then upsell from that free product to the real deal. It is a lot easier to sell to someone who has already “done business” with you, even free business, than to get someone completely cold to drop their MasterCard on the digital counter.
Alternatively, you can use a service like Traffic Geyser to upload your review video to a ton of different video sharing sites around the internet. If you do this, make sure you put a title in your video somewhere, showing people how to find your site.
So there you have it, the Value Ladder approach to selling an affiliate product in a nutshell. Once you’ve got everything set up, you’ll still need to promote your site in the usual fashion, however this method should give you a good edge over the competition.
As promised, here’s a post exclusively on Traffic Geyser for your enjoyment. (Having said that, I hope you enjoy it!).
For those of you unfamiliar with Traffic Geyser, it is a really cool bit of software that allows you to submit a video clip to over 40 popular video sharing sites. It also strips out the audio and submits that to podcast directories. You can then attach keywords and a description to the video, and the idea is that it very quickly gains top rankings in the search engines, piggy backing on the popularity of the major social networking sites. Ideally, you target low traffic keywords, so you still really need to do your keyword research.
I signed up for Traffic Geyser a few months ago, and here’s my experience with it so far.
I didn’t have a product of my own to promote, so I simply picked an affiliate offer I was promoting to use as a guinea pig. I made a short (1:30 min) video about the product (its a financial product). The video was literally the cheesiest thing you’ve ever seen; I basically went to the their application form online and did a Camtasia screen capture of it while talking the viewer through a few key points. I then told them to go to my website, where I’d setup a special landing page for the video so they could then apply for themselves. It was the same landing page I’ve used in PPC campaigns promoting this product, just tagged with a different SID. At the end of the video I simply put my URL on the screen for a few seconds.
Now, I submitted this video about three months ago. Within a day or two, I already had one or two first page hits. I think DailyMotion.com was the first up. Anyways, just to check on this, to make sure it is current and good info for you, I just typed in my keywords while writing this post, and today, three months later, I own positions number 3, 4, 5, and 9 on the first page for my money making keyword. Interestingly, DailyMotion is no longer on the first page (I didn’t look past page 1) but YouTube is now in #4, and Technorati has scraped the video from YouTube and is #3. Also, some blogger has scraped my YouTube video and posted it on his site, so it is gaining even more exposure. His page is #5. How fun is that? My own page is number 9.
Anyways, Traffic Geyser costs around $100 a month, but I’ve been watching it closely and this short video has pretty much covered my costs for the last three months. In fact last month left me with a few bucks leftover. Now all I need to do is start creating more videos!!! (Don’t ask why I haven’t done that yet, I haven’t figured it out either.)
All that to say that Traffic Geyser is well worth the money, and if you only put a tiny bit of effort into it, you will reap the rewards.
The cool thing is that you really don’t need your own product to benefit from this. It applies just as much to affiliate marketing as it does to marketing your own products online. It is basically a great way to drive targeted, interested traffic to your site, for free.
Oh, I should mention that the biggest drag about using this software is you have to create accounts for yourself for all the video sharing sites. I only created accounts for about half of the sites, the ones I knew best and figured had the most starpower. It took me a couple hours. Alternatively, you can pay to get a complete set of accounts made for you by Traffic Geyser. It’s probably almost worth it. Once your accounts are created though, you can save the profile so you never have to enter that info again.
I’m planning on creating more videos pretty soon, I’ll keep you posted on their success!
Apparently fall is conference season if you’re into marketing. Dan Kennedy is doing his InfoSummit 2008, Armand Morin just announced his BigSeminar 12, and Russell Brunson and Stu McLaren are co-hosting the Affiliate Incubator. I’m sure there are many more happening, but I’m not on everyone’s mailing list =).
I’ve been involved in Russell’s mentoring program for a few months now, so I kind of get the inside track on their information. Kind of like an early warning system. Anyways, I’ve just registered for the Affiliate Incubator in September, and it looks like it is going to be a great seminar. It’s completely geared towards affiliate marketing, covering the usual topics such as traffic generation, pay per click, etc, but from new perspectives. I’ve been following many of the presenters for quite a while now and I know they’ve got tons of great strategies up their sleeves. I was on a webinar yesterday by Stu and Russell and the info they gave away there was really great stuff. A lot of new stuff I hadn’t heard before, and that was only the teaser for the seminar!
For instance, Mike Koenigs and Frank Sousa are the guys behind Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser is a really cool bit of software that allows you to submit a video clip to over 40 popular video sharing sites. It also strips out the audio and submits that to podcast directories. You can then attach keywords and a description to the video, and the idea is that it very quickly gains top rankings in the search engines. Ideally, you target low traffic keywords, so you still really need to do your keyword research. In fact, Traffic Geyser is so cool, I’ve just decided to do a post specifically on that. Look for that in the next day or so. Mike and Frank are truly video marketing experts, and video marketing is one of the biggest new waves to hit the internet in the last year or so.
I’m looking forward to what the creators of Traffic Geyser have to say, but the other presenters are also top of their field as well. Russell and Stu are both presenting, and what they have to say is worthy of their own posts. Look for that soon. Then there are a few “Mr. X” presenters that are being billed as revolutionary and controversial. All in all it’s shaping up to be a great seminar full of incredible new tactics that I’m really hoping will help explode my business.
So anyways, I’m going to Affiliate Incubator 2008 (Sept 25-27). If you’re planning to go as well, leave a comment below and perhaps we can meet in Dallas!
The other day when I logged into my Adwords account I noticed one of those fun alert boxes at the top, advising me that Adwords had a new feature.
Upon further inspection, it appears that Google has finally decided to let people see what sort of search volumes each keyword is getting. This is a great new source of data for internet marketers, who have previously been relying on all sorts of other sources which are then extrapolated to guesstimate total search volume.
For instance, to carry on from my last keyword research post, I’ll use “affiliate marketing” as the keyword again. Previously, if I wanted to research this term I would have gone to the free tool at WordTracker, and punched it in. They give a result of 546 people per day, which is something like 16,000 a month. Now this is only a small percentage of the real searches, so you always need to do some sort of rough extrapolation to figure out where the market was at. I read it was 1% somewhere, so if you multiply by 100 you get 1.6 million searches.
Well, what does Google data say? Google says that approximately 1 million people search for that term every month. So if you throw in Yahoo and Live/MSN the 1.6 million figure is probably in the ball park. Still, isn’t it nice of the big G to give us a sort of semi-firm approximately averaged number for our research?
Do you use pay-per-click? Are you into search engine optimization? Either of these marketing disciplines hinge on proper keyword selection. You want to be in front of your customer when they’re in a buying mood, not a browsing mood, right?
I’ve always found that keyword research is one of the hardest things to when creating an ad campaign. How do you find out which keywords make money, and which ones burn money? Anyone can add all the suggestions from a keyword tool into their campaign - but I guarantee they will lose money unless they take that a step further. So how do we find profitable keywords? Here are three steps to help this process.
Step 1
The first thing to do is have a little brainstorm session. For whatever product you’re promoting, try to get inside your customer’s minds:
What is causing them to be looking for your product?
What pain (problem) are they feeling or dealing with?
What questions do they have?
What solution are they trying to find?
Once you’ve answered these things jot down the different phrases you think they would use to find you.
Step 2
The second step is to use a keyword tool such as the free keyword suggestion tool at wordtracker.com. See if the terms you thought of are showing up on their lists, and find out how many searches are done daily for each keyword. The higher the better, obviously, though the highest keywords might not be the most profitable.
Step 3
Up until now, the information here is probably old hat for most of you. Here’s the golden third step. Head over to MSN’s AdLabs Online Commericial Intention Detector. Click on query, and punch in one of the keywords you think has potential. The web form will then spew out a number between zero and one. Here’s the readout for “affiliate marketing”
Result: NonCommercial (Query)
Probability for Commercial Query:
0.33748
As you can see, MSN thinks this phrase is by and large, non-commercial in intent. Having less than a 0.50 indicates non-commercial; anything over .5 (50%) is commercial in intent. The stronger or higher the co-efficient, the more profitable this keyword is likely to be!
Go to the tool, and compare the output for “personal loan” and “personal loans” - you’d perhaps be surprised to see that the singular is scored at 0.67969, while the plural is scored at 0.89554. So although both look to be quite profitable, “personal loans” is the keyword with the highest commercial intent, of those two.
So now you run your list of keywords from steps one and two through this tool, to make sure that they are all above 50%. If you’ve got keywords that you think would be good, but they’re under 50%, ask yourself why, and see if there isn’t a small variation that can be made to boost the score. If you can improve on it, use the new keyword instead.
Now, I should clarify that although I’ve talked about this as being a way to find profitable keywords, I guess really it is just a method to find the keywords that people are using to buy stuff. This is great, if you are doing SEO. If however you are paying per click, profit takes on a new meaning, as you need to consider what your costs are for each keyword. Chances are strong that the highest rated keywords are also those with strong competition.
However, in all markets, the presence of sharks indicates there is prey in the waters; competition isn’t a bad thing, you just need to find a way to best them, and you’ll be laughing!
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on using Google’s Website Optimizer (found inside your Adwords account). At that time I mentioned I was running a split test on a couple different background colors for a landing page I wanted to test. After only a day or two I was getting some pretty interesting results:
“As a side note, I’m currently split testing a different version of the page which at least in preliminary results, the splits are outperforming the original by 26% and 55%. The implications of a successful outcome from a split test can really make a big difference on the bottom line!”
I wanted to follow up on this to see if we can learn anything from this exercise. The first few days seemed spectacular; I thought for sure I had stumbled upon the ultimate background color. Then as more results steadily streamed in, things gradually started to equalize. In fact, the two tested colors suddenly reversed their leads! Anyways, I continued to run the test, from May 7th to June 16th. You can see the results here.
I should mention that the Original in this instance was color code #333366. Google doesn’t give you an option to edit that title. So you can see that color #0099CC came out on top, which is strange, because to my eye it seems the ugliest of the three. However, I guess that is neither here nor there. FYI, the original is kind of a dark navy blue, combo 1 is a light sky blue, and combo 2 is a light gray.
I don’t know if you can draw anything too substantial from these results, because I am sure different background colors work better with different page content as well. However, on the page that I’m using, apparently combination 1 turned out better. It is important to note that Google still didn’t come up with a conclusive answer, only that there was an observed improvement over the original of 5.86%, and that there was a margin of error of plus or minus 2%. Having run this for five weeks now, the numbers have not really been changing a whole lot, so I’ve decided this is as far as it goes. If I wanted to confirm these numbers I might try re-testing with only the original and one alternative.
You can see that there were a total of 2443 conversions during this period (I only used traffic from Yahoo PPC for this test). That gives me an overall conversion rate of about 50.3% - from there I still need to get them to apply for the offer after clicking through.
You can get some insight into how this tool works by looking at the conversions/visitors column. I think that the way they’ve built this, Google takes the assumed favorite combination and tests the heck out of it, while giving an equal share to the original. You can see that combination 2 got less visitors than the first two, but that the first two got exactly the same number of visitors. I think this is Google’s way of testing a hypothesis. First give everything equal traffic, then as soon as things start to gel a bit, pick the original and the favorite and push them farther.
Anyways, for the time being, I’m happy having found something that offers me a 5.86% improvement over what I had, for no cost. As I laid out in the previous post, anything I can do to increase this conversion ratio will net me more profit at the end of the day. I’ve already spent the money to get the visitors to come; from here on the more that click through the better.
For example, if I spend $100 on PPC to get 100 visitors, and previously got 49 to go through to my offer, and if I know that each time someone views my offer it is worth about $3.00 to me, then before I was netting ($100 - (49 x $3.00)) = $47 profit.
Now, with the new numbers, it would work out to ($100 - (52 x $3.00)) = $56 profit. That’s a $9 improvement, per day. That’s nearly $300 a month. Not bad. Of course, assuming I was actually paying a buck a click, and actually getting $3 per viewed offer - these are just made up numbers for the sake of illustration. However, it is close to reality, and the principle still stands.
I don’t recommend you all go out converting your landing page backgrounds to 0099CC because of this - but I do recommend you think of something that might improve your offer and test the heck out of it!
