Andrew Collinson Blog

I recently bought an internet marketing product and have decided to share with you what challenges and victories I have with it as I go through the training.The course is said to run for 12 months with one tutorial a week delivered via a pdf file I get via an autoresponder email.

You might guess that I am now an affiliate of this product.This is true.But rather than go and put an affiliate link on this site straight away I am going to resist the urge until I actually start making money with it.Then and only then could I say in all honesty that it is worth buying.

I think many people put up affiliate links,I admit I do it,for products they have never tried and tested and wonder why they get no sales.

I should add the affiliates on this blog I have used: Perry Marshall’s Guide to Google Adwords,and the products of Ann Sieg and Mike Dillard.

But anyway back to the course.

The course is a membership site and costs $27 per month so $324 over 12.

I am up to week 7 and have hit my first problem.

Back tracking first the first 5 tutorials are about getting ready to set up a sales page which means learning how to buy a domain name and set up a hosting service.I knew most of this already though I had not heard of the domain name service before Namecheap ( no that is not an affiliate link though it could be!) slightly cheaper than say Godaddy which I have used up to now.

As for web hosting I have gone with Hostgator I find the dashboard better to work with than Godaddy.

I also had a few technical problems about uploading files via FTP .Hostgator have a messaging service where you can chat with someone about a problem you have.I only had to wait about 30 secs before someone came on and had a solution for my problem immediately.
One problem was uploading pdf files.If it won’t work with Firefox try Safari.( i am a Mac user of course).

Once I had the domain registered and a host in place it was time to upload some web pages.

The course advises you to buy what are known as PLR ebooks. These are information products that someone has written which they then sell and you are allowed to change the books around a bit and then sell them again under your name.This is legal.

The trick is to get a product that is about a subject that there is interest in ,and it should come with a sales and thank you page.

The sales page is the one you upload to your web host and then and have Clickbank take the orders.

I have a HTML editor in Dreamweaver and was able to change the ebook and the sales page so that it was acceptable to Clickbank.

Yes a real person at Clickbank will check your site and see that it meets their standards.One of the things that I picked up was that you must offer a 60 day money back guarantee if the buyer is not happy with the product.
Now my guarantee was was 90 days but Clickbank wouldn’t accept this, they wanted 60 days, no more no less, even though my offer was better! So just make sure it’s sixty days.

You as a vendor with Clickbank must pay a one off registration fee of $49.95.I have paid this but my product is still not live as yet.So just be patient.

Now the problem I mentioned right at the start of this post.

The course recommends I offer a free ebook just to get names on my list.To do this they recommend I create a lightbox pop up page.

This is a page that appears on the sales page for my main product after after ten seconds.Now the course recommends we use Aweber as the autoresponder but I use Getresponse.

Now aweber have a good pop up page creator that allows quite a bit of copy to go on the pop up.The Getresponse one has only limited functionality .You can add a bit of text and that’s all.

Getresponse have told me that I would have to create my own code for a longer pop up page.

I’m not techie enough to do that so I am going to go over to Warrior forum and ask for a quote to do it.

That is where I am at now.Anyone got any other solutions for solving this problem?Let me know.

Thanks
love and peace

Andrew

Thanks for coming back,please feel free to post any comments you may have.

Google has some great tools and one I’ve found really useful is Google Reader.

This tool allows you to bookmark blogs and websites but unlike a browser bookmarking tool it shows the first few line of a post so you can quickly decide if you want to read it or move onto another.

So here is a short video about this tool and how it can save you time when surfing around your favourite sites.Enjoy

For people looking to make money online affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods to achieve this.You are essentially selling other people’s products by driving traffic to a merchant’s website.If a customer who clicked from your site to the merchant’s then buys a product you get a commission.

You don’t have to deal with the customer at all.Shipping and customer service is handled by the merchant.

Now you can go from one merchant to another and see if they have an affiliate program but that would take too long.

Much better to go to an affiliate marketing network program company who gather together a large number of merchants on one site,and you the affiliate marketer,can search for businesses who operate in the niche that interests you.

Then you sign up for that merchant,grab the HTML code for that merchant and put it on your website or blog.

Now the big two in affiliate marketing are

Commission Junction
and
Clickbank

which both have a huge amount of merchants to choose from.

Clickbank tends to offer more digital products such as ebooks and software whereas CJ offers physical products.

There are two others I use right now they are:

Affiliate Window

and

Buy.at

both of which are UK based so tend to have mainly British merchants.

I recommend you start with these big players first.If you really get into a niche,then do a Google search using ” xyz company+ affiliate program” and you should find if that company has such a program.

The alternative is to go to the company website and see if a program is offered.Sometimes you have to go into the site map to find details as the merchant is  looking for people with above average determination!

For more advice on affiliate marketing go to Mike Klingler’s Marketing Mergewebsite.

How to use keyword.An important topic.The first thing you must do is make sure the keyword you intend to use is actually used by people when using Google.

You may think that you have a great title for a blog post or web page but if no one is using it,then you are not going to rank on Google or any other search engine.

Take the title of this post.Notice I used the single “keyword” not the plural.Why?Because a free Google tool told me the single version is used more often than the plural.

The tool in question is the Google Adwords Keyword tool which you can find here

Just type in the word you want to use Google will give the monthly search figures for that and other words that closely match it.You may find a word or phrase you had not thought of ,but is used more often.

You need that keyword phrase in the first sentence of your body text,and perhaps one more near the end.But don’t overdo it or it will look like keyword spamming and Google will penalise you with a low search result ranking.You can find more great advice on keyword research by reading this blog post by Renegade Super Guide Marie Leonard

If you have a blog then make sure you install the All in One SEO Pack to you blog which you can find here this allows you to change the title of the blog to something more appealing to the search engines.

The content of the blog remains unaltered but you get an even better chance of high ranking.

So do your keyword research first before writing your post.

Your partner is success.

Andrew

Lead generation.We all want more leads.

To get those leads we must show up on the search engines,because if you are not known by the search engines, you are invisible on the internet.

You can create the best website there is,with hugely compelling copy but it will count for nothing if the Google,MSM and Yahoo spiders have not had a look at your site.

So how do you get search engine rankings?You need two things:keywords and backlinks.

Think about what you do when you search for something on the internet.You go to Google and type in a word or phrase in the search box.

Then Google goes and finds sites that have that word or phrase on their site.

So the first thing you need to know is what words or phrases people are using to find things on the internet.

To help you with that process Google has developed it’s own keyword tool which you can find here.Type in a word that you think relates to the central theme of your site and Google will show you how many times a day that word typed into Google.Not only that it will list variations of that word.The trick then is to use this list to create web pages n your site.

Take one keyword and make it the main subject of that page.In this way you are more likely to be ranked high on the search engines as Google puts the most relevant pages to that keyword at the top of the list.

If you want an even deeper list of keyword I recommend Wordtracker that also offers a free keyword tool  here.

Then keep adding pages to your website or blog using a different keyword for each page.This is part one of your search engine optimization strategy for lead generation.

The second part is backlinks.

Backlinks are links on other websites that link back to your website.The more you have the better.But they have to be a certain type of backlink.

You must link back to your site from a site that is well regarded by Google.An example would be Squidoo.com which is a free web page creation tool that is well regarded by Google.You can see here a live Squidoo page on lead generation online .Create valuable content on your Squidoo lens then link to your web page or lead capture page.This will raise the status of your page on Google and get it higher up the search engine rankings.

Ideally you want to have one way links from the page that has high ranking back to your page,but not the other way.Google gives greater importance one way links.With two way links Google thinks you may have an agreement with the website owner of the other site to exchange links in order to lift rankings.

You can go on the internet and find these link exchange “farms” where people just exchange links with each other often between sites that have no relevance to each other.

Look for quality links and this will boost your search engine rankings.

Have a great day

Andrew Collinson

If you want to learn more about lead generation and search engine optimization I recommend the Renegade University which you can find here

Here is a video I did on Mike’s product Building on a Budget which is great if you are needing to generate leads but money is tight. There are lots of free resources you can tap into such as Ezine articles which you can submit at Ezine.Com or press releases through 27-7Pressrelease.com.

Google Adwords is something you should stay away from at this stage because it can eat up your monthly budget in days if you don’t know what you’e doing.

Anyway here is the video,let me know what you think.