Aminology

This is the first post in the new ‘Ask Amin’ category.

This question was asked by Nick from Illeat.com (a blog which he claims to rarely update), the man behind AdGridWork .

Hey Amin

Got your contact info from nickycakes and while I was chatting with him on the phone today, he mentioned that you had a guy that you get decent quality articles from. I was curious if you’d mind sharing as I’ve burned through about a dozen writers in the past month and all have had the literacy of 12 year olds. If not, maybe point me in the area that you hired your writer at?

Thanks in advance,
Nick

Hey Nick

I outsource most of my content from elance.com - and because of elance’s system which allows you to really look into the providers background (what projects they’ve done, how much they’ve earned, the feedback they’ve received, where they’re based, what skills they have, etc), the content I end up with tends to be of a good quality, as I make sure I choose a provider that is well qualified to do the work I require.

There are a few writers I go back to if I need more content in a specific niche, but I normally don’t use the same writer to write content for more than one niche.

It may be a good idea to hire foreign content writers with expertise but relatively poor writing skills who charge much less than their western counterparts, and then get another writer that is fluent in english to make changes to the content so that it reads well. If you’re picky with the content you receive (like I am), try and find at least one good writer you can rely on to go over your content and edit it so that it reads well. If not, be prepared to either edit all the content you receive yourself, or accept it as it is.

For example, I recently posted a project on elance requesting a large amount of content on a health related niche. Out of the 10+ bids, one provider really caught my eye. The amount they wanted was roughly the same as the other bids, but they claimed to have over 9 years experience as a professional healthcare writer. So I checked their profile, went over to their feedback page, and sure enough, they had completed a large number of health related projects with consistant ratings of more than 4/5. I took the provider on for my project and I received the content by the deadline I had set. The one problem I did have with the finished content was that although the english was fine, it didn’t really feel good to read. In this case, I actually edited the content myself. I’m normally too lazy to do this all the time, so I usually just pay another writer to edit the content.

I’d like to also add that with elance you can really formalise the whole process: include business terms which must be agreed upon before the project begins and set ‘milestones’ where certain work must be sent. Elance also has an escrow system which means that the provider will not get your money until you release it to them, which you can do once you have received and reviewed all your work.

Digitalpoint is also a great place to get super cheap but (all too often) super poor content. I wouldn’t recommend outsourcing your content on forums unless the provider is clearly established or unless you simply want to use the content for SEO purposes.

Cheers,
Amin

Two weeks ago Nickycakes started a contest where anyone could win his Xbox 360 by being the first to make $1K with Advaliant after signing up to the network through his referal link. I thought I’d give it a shot, so I signed up and got approved the next day. I actually expected some big shot affiliate to hit the $1K mark pretty soon, but after the ‘cakes posted his update two days later, I knew I could do better than those already in the lead.

I was the first person in the contest to hit $1000 in earnings with Advaliant. You can read Nickycakes’ post here.

I made my $1K by running debt relief ads on Facebook. I made and tested dozens of ads. Here are two of the more interesting ones I posted which despite having poor CTRs, managed to get a good volume of traffic without getting slapped with $1 clicks.

This ad did best when targeted at 25-45 year olds in the United States. I had a 0.06% CTR on this ad, which was the best CTR I managed to get in this particular campaign.

This ad was targeted at all college kids in the United States. I had a weak 0.02% CTR on this ad, probably because of the mention of a zip submit, but it converted well.

I kept these going until I won the contest, upon which I killed them and scrapped the campaigns because the profits were eventually simply not worth the ad spend.

I will definitely be working with Advaliant in the future, my account manager Geoff Marcy is a top guy to work with too. In fact, Advaliant sent an Xbox 360 to Matt Marcin who came second in the contest. Matt definitely deserved it more than I did, because he made the $1K in less than 24 hours, while it took me 3 days to hit the $1K through Facebook. Having said that, Facebook did severely limit the amount of traffic I could have potentially done, for the simple reason that lunatics are running their social ad system.

A big thanks to Nickycakes and Advaliant for this contest and for each sending out an Xbox 360 to me and Matt!

Affiliate marketer ‘aim’ from the Wickedfire forum started a thread on “why affiliates are the bitch of the industry“. His post was targeted at affiliates who operate within the CPA area, and he was certainly on the ball with a lot of his points.

Posts like this are important because it gets affiliates thinking outside of the box. The more you promote as an affiliate, the more you experience, and the more you experience, the more you understand about how the whole system works.

I invest most of my time and money into creating and marketing my own informational products. My marketing campaigns in the CPA area are primarily for me to gain a greater understanding of affiliate marketing so I can in turn apply it to my own business, and gain inspiration for future projects.

There are certain types of offers which are prevalent in almost all the major CPA networks out there. Ringtones, cash loans and weight loss products would be a few good examples. While I personally don’t like to promote the more shady and ethically questionable offers, there is an abundance of good quality offers that can not only be promoted, but also replicated.

Let’s use a health product as an example.

Green Tea Extreme is an offer that you can find on the NeverBlueAds network. The payout for this product is $25/sale, so it’s pretty clear the advertiser is making much more than this with each sale.

After spending huge sums of money into marketing the product, an inquisitive affiliate marketer would start to think beyond the payout and reflect more on the actual business model itself:

“If I’m making so much money as a single affiliate, how much is the owner of the business making?”

That’s certainly the question I asked myself soon after I got into affiliate marketing, and it is the reason I prefer to have affiliates working on my affiliate program rather than be an affiliate and work on an advertisers program. You have got to remember that the advertiser has many affiliates promoting its product, so no matter how much you’re banking on that particular product, the advertiser is banking at least 10 times harder.

So how do we go about replicating this specific business model?

I’ve only just pulled this offer out of NeverBlueAds, and I’ve never promoted the product before, but I still have a basic idea of how I could go about doing this myself.

As we are not dealing with digital and informational products here, the product creation stage becomes much more complicated. Which is why we avoid it altogether.

I would go ahead and import the product instead. And the easiest and quickest way to do that would be through Alibaba.

So I go on Alibaba and search for ‘green tea pills‘. The search generates more than a dozen green tea pill products to choose from.

Here’s one item that looks interesting:

Green Tea Soft Capsules

Because I am using this is an example, and have no interest in promoting and selling green tea pills (at the moment anyway), I haven’t gone ahea and asked the supplier for a quote. But I know for a fact I can get the pills MUCH cheaper than the commercially available ‘Green Tea Extreme’ pills.

In fact, I did a similar search some time ago for weight loss pills, and discovered that weight loss pills can be imported very cheaply, no where near the prices they are being marketed and sold at right now.

What’s even more insane is that we can find many suppliers that offer ‘private labeling rights’. This means that the actual goods will be sent completely unbranded, with permission granted to you to label it under your own company brand.

‘Green Tea Extreme’ could just as easily be one of the cheap green tea capsules we found on Alibaba.

With the goods and branding completely sorted, we come to the real meat of the action. The marketing process. I need not go into this any further.

Why?

Because as an affiliate, that’s where your real skill lies. You’ve worked with the networks, you know how things roll, and you know how to market anything.

Seasoned affiliates can market practically anything on offer in the networks.

What most should realise is that they can use their affiliate marketing expertise to push their own product even better than the advertiser they are working for.

… is when you least want to. It makes you a much stronger writer.

Or you can simply outsource.

I’ve been dripping with infinite wisdom lately.

If you’re promoting a product as an affiliate or even as a product owner, then make sure you continue targeting not just the well converting keywords, but also the actual URLs that are displayed on the organic search results from these high converting keyword searches. Many people still mistakenly enter a website url into a search box, and since many web users set Google (and still Yahoo) as their home page, it would be a waste to not actually bid on competitor URLs as keywords.

This technique is particularly effective for ‘product review’ sites. For example, if a user searches for www.guitarguide.com, then an advert for a review on the actual product would typically yield a high CTR and healthy conversion rate. You will of course need to create many ad groups, with each ad group targeting a different product.

You don’t even have to be an affiliate to do this.

If you own the URL in question, then go ahead and set up an ad campaign targeting the site. My recommendation is to go with a (seemingly) independent review site, as opposed to sending the user directly to your site as they intended. This is because sending visitors through an intermediary site which strongly endorses the product (while appearing as neutral as possible) greatly increases the conversion rate, increasing the possibility of a sale or lead.

If you haven’t signed up to a CPA network already, I strongly recommend you try NeverBlueAds . The interface is excellent (much better than Copeac and CPAEmpire in my opinion), the offers are categorised and listed how they should be, and you get a top Affiliate Manager too.

What I like in particular about the network is how they call up each new applicant, it’s their way of making the affiliate/network relationship more personal.

So there I was, chilling for a bit on Facebook, when I noticed a ‘tooth whitening’ advert on the usual Facebook ad spot.

Being the curious marketer that I am, I clicked on it to see how exactly the blog was being monetised. The link took me to a blog, which although looked fine, had a strange post on viagra. And literally a second after I noticed this, the page automatically redirected to medsmaster.com, a viagra site.

What’s interesting is the way in which this advert passed Facebook’s manual ad review. It seems like the marketer first waited until their innocent teeth whitening help blog was approved by the Facebook mods, and then inserted a redirect script into the main index page taking visitors to the viagra site.

Shady.

Content can be produced relatively cheaply these days. Articles are charged per word, and are priced not on the originality and value of the article as a whole, but on the uniqueness of the content. For online marketers, any content which contains a good distribution of their targeted keywords and doesn’t get flagged by the big G as ’spam’ or ‘duplicate’ is good enough.

This approach is pretty standard for content that is published on the web for free in order to generate CPC or CPS revenue for the online marketer. I’m sure many online marketers still continue to buy cheap content, monetise it with adsense ads or affiliate links, and earn peanuts for their efforts. And if you are one of those guys and already pay for low quality content, you might as well go all the way and start churning out bot generated scraper content on a massive scale.

The point is this: if you’re going to have real, unique content produced by a real writer, then make sure it’s quality and don’t just give it away for free. Don’t hire any content writer to write you generic, keyword rich articles on a topic simply because you want to post it on your content site to help it rank higher in the SEs for the purpose of generating more money from ad revenue. If your site sells an actual product and receives affiliate traffic, then SEO articles help. But otherwise, don’t publish cheap content for free.

Instead of spending $100 on 20 cheap articles written by a cheap, foreign content writer, spend $100 on one long article written by a certified professional on your topic and turn it into paid content to be added as an addition to a bigger project you may have started working on. Invest money on content not so you can drive traffic to the page you post it on for the purpose of making affiliate sales, but to create something which has a much greater perceived value and as a result is appreciated and valued much more for the simple reason that it’s paid and therefore quality as opposed to free and therefore cheap.

There is far too much ‘free’ content on the web, free content which has been written for the sole purpose of having the site it is published on ranking in the search engines and generating ad / affiliate revenue. And believe it or not, the average web user isn’t looking for generic content or even better, bot generated content. They want real content to provide them with real value. And while more and more online marketers focus on churning out as much cheap or bot generated content as possible, there will be an even greater demand for high qualiy information - which is why online publishing will continue to thrive and web users will be more than willing to pay for access to high quality information.

If the niche is good enough for you to make money from ads or affiliate links, then it’s good enough for you to start charging for the actual content. More on this later.

Kudos to ‘the Cakes‘ for this reminder. I actually received an email from my Affiliate Manager about the offer (Instant Action Games), but needed a good kick up the backside to actually do something about it.

I started promoting CPA offers on Facebook back when they had just launched their CPC model. At the time the mods were acting like schmuks and banning pretty much every campaign which involved zip/email submits, which just happened to be the best converting offers. Anyway, I got tired of having my ads rejected so I left it there, until now.

I’ve been running this offer for an hour now and not only is it converting decently (7:1 click to conversion rate at the moment), but I’ve actually had the ads manually reviewed and approved. If you want more specifics on running the offer check out this post.

The information marketing industry is strange. You’ve got the ‘get rich quick’ scam marketer types that (financially) excel in the industry by exploiting the foolish, gullible and poor through tasteless yet rather insanely effective sales gimmicks, and then you have an angry super affiliate from the other side of the online marketing industry waving his fist in the air, denouncing all eBook publishers and peddlers and calling for a crusade to end the insanity of it all.

While it makes for good entertainment, I like to distance myself from both the phony marketer and anti-eBook crusader types. I am also an information marketer, but my approach is serious and reputable. I understand the necessity of good sales copy, but I don’t like over-hyped, everything-is-highlighted-and-underlined sales letters.

Publishing information as a product for sale is a business. And like all business models, there are the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

The good informational products offer long-term value to the buyer and long-term profitability to the publisher. High quality informational products are usually niche targeted and are written and produced by real experts. They provide the customer or member with the knowledge they were looking for, without asking them for an obscene amount of money. They are typically sold on a professional, non-scammy website with a simple, elegant design and a relaxed sales copy. Good information products thus rely on credibility, positive reviews and a general public approval within its respective niche. As opposed to poor quality products, they don’t rely on an over hyped sales copy to bring in the sales. Good examples of informational products are Seth Godin’s IdeaVirus and Brian and Tony Clark’s TeachingSells program, the latter of which actually offers multiple products through a variety of formats.

The Bad

Unfortunately, there is an abundance of bad informational products. These usually come in the form of an eBook, where the time spent on the actual product is a small fraction compared to the time and effort put into marketing the product. These products rely on positive reviews by unethical affiliate marketers that only care about making a good ROI. What seperates the bad from the ugly is the niche. No matter how bad the information product is, it will never truly be ugly unless it’s a ‘get rich quick’ product.

and The Ugly

The lowest of the low. These products are ‘get rich quick’ guides. They are usually not only of a poor quality, but they have the sole purpose of making the product publisher rich through the poor mans pennies. These products claim to teach noobs how to make millions, yet the authors of these products depend on selling the dream so they can pay their own bills. And what’s even more ugly are the affiliates that promote these products - most of these affiliate fully understand the underlying scam behind it all. A crap informational product can be identified by a heavily hyped sales letter with excessive use of punctuation, highlighting, underlining, and other cheap copy tactics. As a rule of thumb, the more overhyped a sales letter is, the more it is trying to compensate for the sheer garbage that is to await the fool that decides to invest in the product. Certain ‘internet marketers’ take pride in this and come public with their products under the illusion that they are real marketers or entrepreneurs. Alex Goad, author of Google Payload and Project Black Mask, immediately comes to mind.

I will talk a lot more about how I approach information marketing later on, from the basic concepts behind creating and publishing a quality informational product to different marketing tactics you can use to bank even harder from your product. I’ll also talk about why I totally recommend marketing your own goods rather than marketing someone else’s product or offer as an affiliate, so affiliate marketers reading this may want to stay tuned to read my alternative method of making money online. I’m speaking as an internet marketer who happens to be both an affiliate marketer and information marketer.