It has now been slightly over three weeks into my ClickBank journal. I haven’t posted an update in a little while because things have been a little slow.

But I have stumbled across a few new promotional methods that have struck my interest and I am currently starting to test them out today. One of them I have read a lot about in forums from other affiliate marketers saying they have had a good deal of success with. The other is something I thought of myself and I am going to try and record my results here on My Life Finance.

The two methods that I am talking about are:

• Yahoo Answers - Nothing more than finding questions related to the topic of a product you are trying to promote and giving a useful answer with a link to an article or blog that has the affiliate link posted inside.
• Facebook MarketPlace - I am developing this strategy as we speak. Right now I’m focusing on the “work from home” niche and posting ads about work at home products. I post a job ad and link to a landing page or blog that I have set up for the product. It’s simple. And hopefully will prove to be effective.

I will keep you guys updated on the results of my findings once I have about a week or two worth of data to back it!

Thanks for reading!

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One of the hardest things to figure out when you’re first starting in affiliate marketing is how to promote the products or services that you’ve selected from an affiliate program in an effective way that will lead to sales.

It can be daunting to a new affiliate marketer trying to determine how to get started in the right direction, but there are plenty of promotional methods out there that anyone can learn in a matter of a few hours with some good research and motivation.

But if you’ve stumbled upon this article today is your lucky day.

I’m going to give you a list of proven, effective ways to promote affiliate products and services. And I’m not even going to charge you for it. Aren’t I sweet?

Ways to Promote Affiliate Products

• Article Marketing - This is also known as bum marketing. If you choose to write the articles yourself this can be a completely free promotional method. You can, however, outsource the work to article or copy writers who will charge you a nominal fee to produce quality articles for you (believe me when I say it’s cheap and the articles are of fantastic quality). Article marketing is considered to be one of the best ways to start promoting products. Basically, you pick out a set of keywords that are related to the product you are promoting and write unique articles for each one. You then submit them to a popular article directory like EzineAritlces or Articles Base. Not only will this drive traffic to your website, blog, or landing page, but it also builds valuable back links which eventually boost your search engine rankings.
• Ads on Ad Sites - This is another method that can produce excellent results if you do your research and learn how to compose a well written ad. Two examples of high volume ad sites that you should learn about and start off with are CraigsList and USFreeAds. If you really want to see results, I suggest upgrading to a premium account on USFreeAds. The options available for making an ad with a premium account are of much more value than using just a basic free account. And if you have the capital and really want to see a lot of traffic, upgrading your ad to a “featured ad” is a marvelous thing. I’ve split tested using a regular ad versus using a featured ad and I can attest that feature ads attract many times more potential buyers than a traditional ad.
• Free Blogs - This is by far one of the cheapest routes that you can take to promote affiliate products. You can build a very simple landing page on either a Blogger or Wordpress blog and submit it to RSS and blog directories to attract attention. If you choose this route, I highly recommend using a Wordpress blog simply because they are more appealing to the eye and rank very well is search engines. I will, however, say that this is NOT the best option to use for promoting products. If you were looking to buy something, would you buy from a website that expresses that it can’t even afford a few measly bucks a month for hosting their own website? Doesn’t sound too appealing, does it?
• Build A Specialized Website - Building a website with tons of relevant, useful content is probably one of the best ways to promote affiliate products. If you really want to bring in sales, make your site specialized in a specific niche. That way you can attract search engines more and eventually bring in more targeted traffic. The more quality content that you have related to a specific niche, the better. It helps to build up credibility and in the long run, back links.
• Email Marketing - This method or promoting is an age old technique that must of us see every day. How is it done? The most effective way to start an email marketing campaign is by creating a squeeze page, or an opt-in page. Offer a free report, a series of tips for a related subject, or even a free ebook and put up a submit form where all readers have to do is submit their name and email and they will receive what it is you have to offer. How does this help you promote affiliate products? Use an autoresponder to send out weekly emails with tips or parts of an ebook to your readers and at the bottom of the email use suggestive selling techniques to promote your affiliate links to your readers. If you can build a huge email list this can be a very highly effective way to produce sales of affiliate products and services. If you’re interested in getting started, be sure to check out Aweber’s autoresponder services.

This is all I’m going to go over for now, but I’m working on a series that will be available soon to help you get started and start making those sales! Be on the look out for it. Until then, do some independent research on the method’s I’ve describe above to learn even more about how each is done.

Hope this helps! Happy earning!

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The past couple of days I’ve been doing even more research. I’ve found a few ways of determining what products will be worth promoting for sales. They aren’t sure fire strategies, they have a few exceptions, but they do provide information that tells whether or not the product is actually selling for others.

ClickBank Gravity

When you click on ClickBank’s marketplace you will find thousands of digital products that are available for you to sell to make commissions. One of the hardest things to do when you’re first picking out products is figuring out which ones will actually sell.

This is where ClickBank has initiated a neat tracking feature called gravity. What gravity tells us is whether or not the product is actually being sold. The higher this number is, the better.

The only thing about products with high gravity is the fact that they are more than likely going to pose high competition because almost every affiliate out there is probably trying to sell these products as well.

Does that mean it’s a bad decision to try to sell high gravity products yourself? Not at all.

These products are proven to sell well. Just because there is high competition for them doesn’t mean that you won’t be able to catch profits from them as well. You may have to promote them more uniquely or work hard at optimizing your pages in order to rank well in search engines to catch a large amount of traffic, but these products are almost guaranteed to sell if you promote them correctly.

Most affiliate marketers aim for promoting products with a ClickBank gravity of at least 50, but I would say that you could go as low as 30 and with the right marketing strategy be able to see decent sales coming in.

Low Competition Products

There are products on ClickBank that have little to no competition. They typically have very low gravity ratings (i.e. 15-25).

These products CAN be sold. But you’re going to want to check out the sales page and even search for reviews of the products to see what their value is.

Many times these products do contain real value, they just have terrible sales pages. The sales pages don’t convert and don’t create sales which in turn provides a low gravity rating on ClickBank.

You can take these products and produce sales pages or squeeze pages of better quality and potentially see great results from doing so. Often times because there is little competition for these products you can get your sales page, squeeze page, articles, etc, to rank quite high in search engines because there aren’t a lot of people trying to promote them.

What I’m Doing

What I have been doing the past couple of days is a lot of keyword research using Google Adwords’ free keyword tool to locate prime keywords with monthly searches of  200 or more and then searching them myself in Google search to see how many competing pages there are for each one.

Many of these keywords produce results with millions of competing pages. Obviously it would be really hard to make a page that would rank well (i.e first couple pages of Google results) among millions of others.

What I look for are keywords that turn up results that have about 20,000 to 100,000 competing pages.

If you produce quality articles with good keyword density and submit them to article directories (i.e. EzineArticles, Articles Base, etc), produce Squidoo and HubPages pages, and maybe even a landing page based around these keywords, you’d be surprised how high you can rank in searches.

The better you rank in searches, the more traffic you receive.

More traffic = more potential buyers.

I can’t stress enough how important keyword research is. If you do it correctly you can see results quickly and in vast amounts.

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If you’ve come to this article you’ve probably heard the term “affiliate marketing” before and are wondering what it is or how it’s done. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many people have heard the term, but don’t know a thing about it. I was once the same and I have to say I am stoked that I made the move to learn about it and you will be too.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Well, to be plain and simple, it is nothing more than promoting and selling OTHER PEOPLE’S products. You are given the ability to sell products that you don’t have to create.

This is the beauty of affiliate marketing. There is no product to handle, no shipping, no customer service, nothing. All you have to do is produce leads that turn into purchases.

You have no responsibility other than driving traffic to the sales page.

Does this mean it’s easy? No.

Affiliate marketing is a job.

And no matter what you read online, a job is a job.

You do have to put time and effort into this in order to make money with it.

How Much Can I Make?

In all honesty, this is completely up to you. The more time and effort that you put into affiliate marketing, the better the chances are that you will make a sizable income with it.

There are those who make $200 - $300 a month with it just working part time. And there are those who make $2500 - $5000+ a month with it who use affiliate marketing as a full time job.

As with anything else you should set goals to achieve what you want out of it. I posted about setting and achieving goals a while back. If you want to make $500 a month, make sure you set a plan of action to achieve this goal. If you want to make $5000 a month, you’re going to want to do the same, but it’s going to be a much more lengthy plan of action of course.

It is possible to make a full-time income with affiliate marketing. There are many out there who have accomplished that. Again, it’s all dependent on the amount of time and effort that you put into it.

How Do I Get Started?

First off I’d suggest that you sign up for the three major affiliate programs that are available on the internet. They are completely free to sign up for and start using. They are:

• Commission Junction
• Clickbank
• Plimus

I suggest these because I use them myself and they are quality programs and are great to get started with.

The second step is to choose the products or services that you wish to promote.

This can be a tricky process, but if you check out Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook which I have posted about, you will find the most successful ways to pick out winning products and you’ll also find a detailed step-by-step guide to promoting them correctly to start earning quickly.

The third step, or course, is to start promoting. There are many ways to do this and I won’t go over that right now. We’ll save that for later.
That’s pretty much affiliate marketing in a nutshell. It’s fairly easy to get started in and doesn’t require you to pay for anything if you don’t want to.

Just to reiterate the point: affiliate marketing takes TIME AND EFFORT. It is a job. It’s a very rewarding job that you can do out of the comfort of your home.

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Yesterday I managed to write and submit two more articles. Both were for one product in particular. It’s actually the very same product that I made my first ClickBank sale with which I had posted about here:

• My First ClickBank Sale

I plan on promoting this product a bit more than the rest for right now. I believe it has a high value and will sell very well if I promote it right.

I worked on those two articles and a little bit of back linking yesterday (Day 9).

Today, which is now the 10th day of my ClickBank Journal, has been a bit on the upside.

The first article that I had submitted to EzineArticles back on August the 27th was finally approved! Yes, it took a whole 2 weeks, but it’s finally live!

I’ve been very frustrated with Ezine’s slow reviewing process. It’s only supposed to take a maximum of seven days to have an article reviewed and approved or denied there, but they’ve really been slowing down their approval times.

I’ve read on several forums that many people are experiencing this same problem and have moved on to publishing on other article directories.

Recently, I’ve been using Articles Base as my primary directory to submit to. I do still submit to EzineArticles, but as with any business, time is money. And having to wait two weeks to have just one article approved is a bit outrageous.

I may eventually stop submitting to EzineArticles entirely if I don’t see an improvement soon. I would hate to have to do that simply because EzineArticles ranks high in Google results and the traffic is generally much higher than any other article directory, but I can’t keep wasting time if I want to achieve my goal.

I also submitted a few more articles today. Most of which were again for the same product that produced my very first sale. I did submit them to EzineArticles, but I also submitted them to Articles Base. My articles that I’ve submitted to Articles Base have been approved as quick as within 4 hours and the traffic that I am seeing from them is picking up nicely.

I am in the process of writing a few more articles. I really need to pick up my article count. The more I have out there, the better. So, I will be focusing on developing more articles for the remainder of this week.

As always, I’ll keep you posted on my progress!

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