The Affiliate Marketing Backend
One of my favorite sessions at NAMS was by Nicole Dean. She went over several different ways to increase profit, including testing, repurposing and more. I’ve been doing some of that (and of course there are always ways to do more), but the one thing I hadn’t really worked on much was getting my backend in place.
What’s Your Backend?
And no, I’m not talking body parts here. The backend mainly comes into play when you are selling your own products. The idea is that you have one or more lower priced products and then offer more related and advanced products, coaching etc. to your existing customers.
Going From Feeling Inspired To Taking Action – Reflections On NAMS 3
I made it back from NAMS (Niche Affiliate Marketing Systems) in Atlanta yesterday. As usual I learned a lot and after spending some time playing with my daughter and resting, I’m ready to take action. It’s THE most important step any time you go to a conference, take a class or buy a course. I’ll walk you through my process to go from being all excited and pumped up with a brain filled to the brim with new ideas and strategies to creating an action plan and executing it over the coming weeks.
Going from Inspired To Taking Action
If you’ve ever been to an Internet Marketing Conference (or any other conference for that matter), you know how excited and energized you feel when you get back. You’ve learned a lot and are ready to take your business to the next level. I know I am every single time I come back from one of David Perdue’s NAMS events.
Tip # 1 – Take Notes
You may think at first that you can remember all those great ideas that you get while you are watching presentations and even while you have conversations outside of class – Believe me, you won’t. Conferences are notorious for information overload (especially the good ones). Anytime a good idea or action item pops in your head, make a note of it.
I usually keep my notes and action items right alongside each other. I simple write a Capital A (for action item) in the side margin whenever I write down an action item.
This time, I tried my friend Nicole Dean’s system of writing the action items in a different section of the notebook (i.e. the last few pages). It’s working out really well and I ended up with a to-do list at the end of the event.
Tip # 2 – Rest Up
When you first get back from a conference, you may be excited to get started, but you are also exhausted from the event, lack of sleep and traveling. Take a little time to decompress. I ended up playing and snuggling with my daughter all afternoon and evening and then climbing into bed early.
The ideas and action items are racing through my head that first night and there is just no way I can organize them right away. It takes a little bit of time to process.
Tip #3 – Make An Organized List
Now is the time to take out your notebook and go over the ideas and action items. Be sure to write down any additional action items that you’ll discover while going through your notes. I’m sure you will come up with plenty more.
By the way – do your best to always carry a small notebook with you while you’re at a conference. Some of my best ideas and action items came out of conversations with other attendees and instructors / speakers outside of the classroom.
Once you have a list, figure out what you want to have accomplished by when. Pick a date a few weeks out that has some meaning to you. It could be as simple as getting stuff done before that weekend 3 weeks out, or everything you want to get done before you go on your next trip.
For me, this will be simple. I have quite a bit of stuff I want to get done before attending Bob The Teacher’s SIMPLE event in Wilmington during the last weekend of February (more on that in another post).
Take out a piece of paper and write the date you want to accomplish things by at top, followed by a list of all your action items.
Next, make another list of things you can do TODAY. Sit down, get to work and see how many items you can cross off that to-do list today.
What were your big action items and aha moments at NAMS 3? What do your action items look like? I’ll start
I realized how much I enjoy teaching this online and affiliate marketing stuff and that I can truly make a difference sharing even the simplest of things. My action items are to
- Blog much more regularly on this blog.
- Create some short reports on affiliate marketing related topics like picking a hot niche, creating traffic, building a list etc.
- Create more Affiliate Niche Packs.
- Write guest blog posts for some of my amazing friends.
By the time I attend Bob’s event, I want to have at least 12 more blog posts up here and have written at least 5 guest post. I want to have an affiliate traffic short cut report finished that I started back in October and also write a report on choosing a hot affiliate niche. Last but not least I want to have at least 4 more affiliate niche packs available for purchase before I leave for the event.
In addition to this I also have some ideas and action items for my own niche sites, so I’ll be busy over the coming weeks. It’ll be a niche challenge and force me to get stuff done faster.
How about you? Take a moment to share your action items and to-do lists from NAMS.
P.S. If you missed NAMS 3, I hope you will join us for NAMS 4 this coming August.
Photo Credit – KSholle
Wordtracker Free and Paid Keyword Tool Review
As promised, this post will be all about the Wordtracker keyword research tools. Let’s start with the free one.
Free Wordtracker Tool
If you’ve been doing this for a while, you may remember the old overture/ yahoo keyword tool. Once it stopped working, wordtracker stepped up with their own free version. It can be found here. You simply enter your keyword and click the “hit me” button. Here’s what it looks like:
Google Adwords Keyword Tool Review
We are talking about keyword research this week and today I’ll give you a quick review of the Google keyword tool and how I use it. It’s a great free tool, but you do have to do some additional work to find out how competitive a particular keyword is.
Start by going to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – Enter a main keyword and be sure to leave “Use synonyms” checked. This will give you more ideas for further research. Enter the characters you see in the image to proof you are human and click on the “get keyword ideas” button.
In the image below you will see the results for the keyword “affiliate marketing”.
Long Tail vs. Short Tail Keywords – What To Use When and Where
Before we move into reviews of the various free and paid keyword research tools I use, I thought we should talk about the difference between long tail and short tail keywords. The graphic on the left gives you a pretty good idea of how this works, but let’s look at an example as well.
In the weightloss and diet market that I am currently researching for a new Affiliate Niche Pack, obviously weightloss, diet and even terms like losing weight are short tail or main keywords. They are very hard to rank for and should only be used as your main site keyword – the one you optimize your home page for. In the weightloss market, I would even go so far as to say don’t go directly for the main term at all, but use a modifier instead like weightloss for women, weightloss for kids etc for your term.
Read the rest of this entry »
What Is Keyword Research And Why Bother?
All the great content you’re writing isn’t going to do you any good if no one finds it.
How will they find it? That’s what we’re going to be talking about over the next few weeks. Your first step is to do your homework a.k.a Keyword Research.
Let’s talk about this a bit for the next couple of days.
What Is Keyword Research
Let’s start by defining what exactly keyword research is. It’s the practice to use various tools and databases to find out how web users search for the topics, products and information we have available.
We then use that information to optimize our various web pages so they have a better chance at appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPS), preferably on page on.
Read the rest of this entry »
Building A Relationship With Your Readers Will Increase Affiliate Commissions
How would you like to make more sales and thus more (and even higher) affiliate commissions? Yep…thought so. Me too. That’s why I thought I’d share one of my best strategies with you today. It is building TRUST and we earn that trust by building a relationship with our readers.
T = Tell
Tell your readers about yourself, your day, anything that’s going on in your life. Give them a chance to get to know you. It will go a long way towards building trust.
Niche Business Ideas – Introducing Affilite Niche Packs
It’s been a little quiet here on Affiliate Treasure Chest, hasn’t it? No, I didn’t go goof off all week, I’ve actually been hard at work (I’ll goof off next week 
)
What I have been doing is what I love to do – doing research on a few affiliate niches. I constantly come across profitable niches, but don’t have the time (or desire) to explore them all. But I do love to take a look at some of the keywords in a market, what affiliate products are available etc. – which got me thinking…
… why not do the research and come up with some marketing strategies and then offer the whole “shebang” as a package? That’s exactly what I’ve been busy doing the past two weeks. As usual, I get a bit obsessed when I come up with a new idea which explains why this blog has been very quiet. I did get some more testing done on our copy cat restaurant recipes case study and should have enough results for another update sometime next week.
If you’d like to learn more about those niche business ideas, take a look at AffiliateNichePacks.com. So far I’ve put together packs on the blogging niche and the getting out of debt niche. I’m also wrapping up a crockpot cooking one that should be available later today or tomorrow.
With each pack I’ve included
- A description of the niche.
- A description of the target market.
- A list of possible affiliate products to promote.
- A list of 100 domains currently available.
- A list of 1000+ long and short tail keywords.
- A list of 100 article and blog post topics (based on the keywords).
- A list of 15 sample resource boxes to use in articles and guest blog posts.
- 2 detailed marketing strategies (beginner and advanced ) with daily tasks for the first 30 days.
- A list of available plr for that niche.
- A list of recommended resources.
Take a look and see if that’s something that could work for you and your affiliate business. I would love to hear what you think about the idea and if you end up buying an pack, I’d love some feedback on it as well. What do you like about and more importantly what DON’T you like about it and what can I do to improve it and give you everything you need to get up and running in a niche (short of doing the work for you 
)
P.S. Ready to grab an Affiliate Niche Research Pack? Pick one up today, read through and get to work.
Nicole Dean’s Blog Tour Guide – A Review
Nicole Dean is a great friend of mine and we “chat” via Instant Messenger almost daily. I remember early last summer I got a very excited IM from her. I don’t have it saved, so I can’t give you an exact quote, but it was something along the lines of:
“I know what I’m going to do this summer – and it will be a ton of FUN”.
I figured she just booked a really cool vacation with her family, but NO – Nicole was on a mission to really get her name out there (not like she isn’t already one of the brightest and nicest Internet Marketers out there), create a ton of traffic and most importantly get some super affiliates active in promoting her products (which resulted in quite a few sales for them and her).
Clickbank and Article Writing For Commissions – CopyCat Recipe Casestudy Update
One of the first post that I made on this blog was a little case study to get some simple affiliate commissions. It’s about high time I gave you another update on how that’s going and get working on our little experiment again as well.
So far, it has been a flop. Not because the system doesn’t work, but because I didn’t work the system. I got busy with other stuff and after setting up the first hand-full of articles, I didn’t do much of nothing. I am keeping an eye on the articles, ehow pages and hubpages I set up, but so far only one of them has been ranking at all and then only on the second page of Google which brings close to no traffic.
As far as stats….
