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- Aug 14th, 2007
- 1,260 Comments
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What is an affiliate thief? Well it could be you and me.
2 categories:
1) Clickbank Thief. Deserves its own category. Most affiliate programs DO NOT allow you to purchase and earn for yourself a commission, or rather, spare yourself at least 50% of the expense. Clickbank does. If you notice affiliate marketers pining for your purchase with their amazing bonus offers, it is in large part due to this.
2 caveats:
a) In order to receive the money from clickbank which you accrue while buying items with your own affiliate link, you need to have made sales through several money mediums, 2 types of credit card, + paypal, so unless you are actually also selling to the public at large, you will have a hard time getting hold of your money… ( I speak from experience People!)
b) When it comes to Internet Marketing, once you are clued in enough to realize you can legally do this, it is usually since you have purchased so many IM products and still not found success or that which you find worthy of devoting enough time. Honestly, there should be some allowances for those people who are really interested in testing out a new product, but keep saying NO MORE BUYING, but cant help it every time a product launch is froth with irresistable copy, and underneath is really a sub par product, that you somehow already own something similar in your OWN NAME in a jumbled up collection of products you bought resell rights for!
2) Human Nature.
People do NOT like to see others succeed. I dont know why. If you knew that an item would cost the EXACT same if you were to click on their link and help them earn a few bucks, or if you were to clear your cookies, or open up another browser and NOT buy it through their link.. then WHY oh WHY would you NOT help the individual who sent you there? I find myself guilty of this if it’s a fellow IM’er who I know and I dont want them to know that I am yet again purchasing more products.
Human Nature is a funny thing. When I was auditioning for the NEXT Internet Millionaire Reality Show, I asked people in the Stomper forum (during my trial membership) to vote for me. One woman wrote.. I gave you a 9, since I wanted to reserve the right to give someone else a 10. Lady you can give us all 10′s, I mean GEE WHIZ… some people… none of those videos deserved even a 9
!!
Sorry for that little tangent…
I recently read a report that recommended using http://www.pinurl.com to mask your affiliate links and allow your link to be cookied and avoid people working HARD (yes, some people spend time on stealing your commissions, with NO benefit to them whatsoever).. You just paste the affiliate link and they supply you with a nice truncated code that is indiscernable.
For example. Lets say I wanted you to sign up to Clickbank, so you could sell the items from their marketplace and make tons and tons of money , but instead of mentioning the word Clickbank, I would refer to it as ‘a treasure trove of available affiliate products with skyrocketed commissions that will result in easy no brainer residual income for you’ (good copy on the fly eh? 
). YOu may be intrigued to click. So which link would get you more:
http://pinurl.com/27i (What pinurl provided for me)
or
http://theresults.aff20.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=BLOG (the actual affiliate link)
or
http://getstartedtodayonline.dreamhosters.com/recommends/clickbank.html (this is a very popular way to indirectly bring visitors to a site via an affiliate link)
or lets be honest… after seeing one of the last two choices, would you just click http://www.clickbank.com and cut out (at not cost to you) the affiliate marketer?
Are you an affiliate thief?
~~ andrea
P.S. I have been testing out different solutions to combat affiliate thief’s. The first Affiliate Cloner is really easy to use and creates really short and sweet links.
The second, Affiliate Link Cloaker is like the Ferrari Enzo of tools to fight the affiliate theif’s. I have been using it for nearly 1 year. It’s really good at creating professional links that don’t look like affiliate links. Go beat up the affiliate thief today and make them cry rivers and earn more cash!
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- Aug 9th, 2007
- 42 Comments
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As a professional blog imitator, I cant help but notice all the stuff happening on the side columns on many blogs. In my spare seconds, I check out these sidebar features to decide what I NEED to add to my site.
My coolest find? Ironically the one I rejected for a long time. I just didnt see the need to have a few faces of my recent visitors. Well dont judge a book by it’s cover!!
Check out the far right column of this blog – MyBlogLog. It may just appear to you as a list of people who have come round this blog, (all those links go to people whose faces I have seen visiting my site.. this is my thanks back!) but it turns out… it is SO much more. This baby is so neat, I feel like a voyeur on my own site! Once you add the code to your site, they offer crazy stats on your site. I realize Google Analytics probably offers what they offer + more, but it cannot be as simple and easy to understand. Even from Google.
With the stats, I can tell which links were clicked on, and how many times. I can tell which pages were viewed. I can also tell on which sites people clicked to find me, and what time of the day. EVERYDAY.
Here is just a handful of searches on Google that resulted in a click to my site. This means I either showed up in the top 10 (or very near it!) for that keyword:
Google Search: how to email course
Google Search: sales page copywriter
Google Search: rich schefren negative
Google Search: adwords still good ?
Google Search: some easy online steps to make gold in wow (World of Warcraft?? How did that happen!)
Google Search: andrea yager
Google Search: the attention age doctrine part ii
Google Search: next internet millionaire trailer
Google Search: mailing marketing glossary 1
Google Search: adwords salary
Google Search: next internet millionaire reality show videosThis information may not excite you, but with the correct blog and a nice amount of traffic. it could be very powerful.
Since I started writing this post, I realized that feedburner also started offering these stats for free. I just turned them on, so I cant speak for them yet.
What cool sidebar features have you discovered, benefited from, recommend highly, or advise to avoid?
~~andrea
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- Aug 6th, 2007
- 21 Comments
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Fortunately and Unfortunately I need your help. The last few days my blog had some server issues and now that I am able to post, my baby decided to sleep 8 hours in a row last night (yah!), leaving me on the verge of a breast infection today (blah!). I am in pain, and waiting for the tylenol to do what it can. The added bonus – my car has no a/c and I live in the Middle East and I was out all day in 100F, so I am just barely alive. Can you help me finish my thoughts today (or buy me a new car !)?
Over dinner a few nights ago, there was a conversation between myself and Others who DONT get ‘the whole web thing’.
They agreed that when starting any new business venture, online or offline, solid good advice is to look around at others in your field, either in your ‘niche’ or just generally successful, and imitate them.
This is not to suggest common practice where I live – that you open a ‘felafel store’ next door to another ‘felafel store’ since they appear to be raking it in.
However, if you visualize the internet as it is.. the biggest strip mall EVER.. (you know what I mean by strip right?? I am out of the USA so long I just want to make sure this is the proper term! ).. that means we may all be opening up stores right ‘next to each other’ but the ENTIRE WORLD is our potential customer. That leaves plenty to go around, and room for very healthy competition!
The conversation continued…
Fine!! Agreed. Free Market Economy. Enough to go around. Snoop on your competitors, interview their friends and friends of their friends and milk them for details, do what you have to, but…
Why link to someone who is your competitor??
(Disclaimer – I cant shine the shoes of those ‘supposed competitors’ but a healthy self esteem cant hurt, eh?)
Reebok and Nike / Pepsi and Coke / Walmart and K-Mart – competitors for generations. Can you picture them helping the other out? That may have saved them a lot of Advertising money!
Naturally a Blog, with nothing to sell, except the persona behind it, cannot exist in a vacuum.
Are we reaching who we want/need to by reaching out to each other?
To be perfectly honest, I could be completely off here. As cathartic and enjoyable as I find blogging, it was (is?) intended to be another piece in the puzzle towards helping me reach my online goal$$. I am currently not in a position, with a young family, to be writing only for pleasure (of course it helps that it offers me pleasure). Are you?
How do YOU explain this unique online relationship?
P.S – as I was searching for my last link love…. check out this post (will open new window). How ironic to stumble across Garry’s post as I was writing mine..and frankly alittleLOT terrifying.
~~andrea
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- Jul 27th, 2007
- 76 Comments
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I want to write about something very important. I have split it into 2 parts.
One is practical and one is philisophical.
In order to not have one part get lost due to too much information, I am going to write the 2nd part in my next post.
First the practical:
In a post a few days ago, that was way too long, I mentioned the following attitude I developed after becoming aware of Internet Marketing, making money online, anything and everything to do with my newfound relationship between myself, my computer, and the impact it potentially had on my financial future:
“I would walk around very smug, looking at the regular rat-race crowd with pity that they were not clued into what I had discovered – like a hidden treasure….”
At the expense of everything else, with a full blown head, I slowly disappeared from my former life.
Ok, I said this was the practical post, so let me get to it. If it sounds cryptic it is because everything takes me much longer than I would like, and because I think most people will probably appreciate me just getting to the POINT!!
When I disappeared from my life, that included ignoring the local success I had built up for myself by opening a local ‘service’ business. I was constantly being complimented for ‘what a great idea’ and ‘keep us up to date on everything you do’. Yet that pot of gold at the end of the internet rainbow was tugging on me and I could not fight it!!
I gave the locals the excuse that I was busy having babies, which is not untrue, but it was just that – an excuse for running in the ground something that had helped support my family for almost a decade!
Thankfully I have always kept someone on staff to keep us from losing our reputation, knowing somehow, somewhere that I would be an idiot to completely dump it.
CUT to this past week. I had a client who BEGGED me to work for him. He agreed to all my terms plus My mom is in town to help with the baby. I had NO excuse. So guess what happened???
I made $600 this week!!
I am holding myself back from saying ‘Instead of constantly sucking more money into my online ventures’, since I have faith in these and KNOW good will and has come from it, but to have walked away from the computer, helped a local in a way few can, hear tons of !!!! (exclaimations ) from the locals about me being back in biz, well I just felt compelled to remind you fellow marketers on a mission:
Dont BITE the hand that feeds YOU!
I would have been the first to tell you to quit your job, and jump in. I believe we can all succeed online, but in some ways it could be like a lottery, and that may be too big a gamble for some people, or take longer than you can afford to wait.
Too many marketers burn the midnite oil, lose other opportunities, and destroy relationships, and their REAL true sources of income, for this unknown, and are unprepared for the fierce competition…
Walk slowly and patiently towards your goal, acquire online friends and mentors, and
be careful.
~~andrea
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- Jul 25th, 2007
- 69 Comments
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Just last week I blogged about being spammed unnecessarily by some lists. I signed up for good content, and do not begrudge the product pitches since these guys deserve to make their living too, assuming that I will still receive the content I expect. However, most have turned into a pitch a minute. Hence the question you will see at that post.
Moving on to my next Email Marketing question. I was debating with a friend:
Do reminder emails in a NICHE market (not IM) work?
I complained that the more repeat emails:
“in case you missed it”
“only 4 more bonuses left”
“Andrea, did you see this?”
only left me feeling that each email carried with it less importance, less content, and that I could afford to miss out on them, since they were becoming repetitive. When this happened, I actually began to miss out on emails with real content, since I became ‘used’ to NOT opening the emails anymore.
My friend insists that what I am saying is possibly true, but NOT in a niche market. In those markets, your subscribers continue to read the emails with relish, take you seriously, regardless of repeat reminders (for which they actually THANK YOU).
I disagreed with him until tonight. Tonight I am sitting in his shoes. I am hosting an event tomorrow and most definitely will be sending out a reminder email tomorrow. Not only do I know that the email will NOT turn off my subscribers, many, as just mentioned, will appreciate the reminder email, and possibly even remember that they wanted to send it to friends as well..
Moral of the story??
DO NOT DELAY.. Start A NICHE MARKET WEBSITE and BE APPRECIATED, NOT HATED like in Internet Marketing!!!
~~ andrea
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