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Making Money with Other People’s ClickBank Products?

Trying to make money with other people’s clickbank products?

It’s not as easy as it looks. Here’s one guy’s experience:

I’ve been getting my ass handed to me by Google trying to promote "successful" clickbank products. Seems the product owner and one affiliate are making sales but not me even with good ctr and position. Tried direct linking and also landing page. Still no sales. I do believe you that this works, however, for every clickbank product that ranks fairly high it seems there are always other affiliates already kicking it. How does someone like me, a newbie, compete with the dozens of other affiliates, LIKE YOU? How many people can play this game like you and sustain numerous losing campaigns before a winner comes along? So far every product I’ve picked seems to have a few successful affiliates already, so what makes me think I can beat them (you) if they’re more savvy marketers than me? I really struggle with the selection process because it just seems like a roll of the dice

What’s hilarious is Andre Chaperon – full-time internet marketer since 2003 – spent a month working on a campaign and documenting. At the end of the day, he managed 18% ROI. He blames it on a mistake setting his PPC prices, but making a mistake seems to be part of the territory. There are a lot of things to go wrong.

For me, it’s like chess. A great way to practice hunting big game.

The Opt-In Email Marketing System

This tip comes from one of those hardcore marketing sites. What do I mean by hardcore? They are selling marketing education to marketers or even to non-marketers (hardcore giveaway in the excerpt below: dubious punctuation and capitalisation).

But as our clients move to building prospect lists and incorporating informative sequential autoresponders, we are seeking ways to get more people to offer their information. It’s not easy.

But one answer was sitting right in front of us. If we can put a search box on every page, why not an opt-in box?

What should you have on every page of that website???? Answer: An Opt-in form.I’m as serious as a Heart Attack and a MAJOR Stroke combined. Your Opt-in Form should be on every page of your website, it gives the surfer/visitor multiple chances to Opt-in to your service, free report, eCourse etc.I don’t know what you’ve been told in the past but the above steps Blows Everything Else Out Of The Water when creating a presence on the internet and garnering Opt-ins.

Speaking of which, where is the opt-in box for Foliovision?

Coming soon…

Using robots.txt to avoid CMS Duplicate Content penalties from Google

Many people are focused on duplicate content penalties. I’ve haven’t seen the duplicate content issues as big a problem as people make it out to be but here are some very helpful tips on handling vBulletin to reduce any chance of duplicate indexing.

1) disable the "search engine friendly" archive. All this does is create a duplicate copy of your entire site, which is what we are trying to avoid.

2) Add the following entries to your robots.txt file This will stop bots from crawling pages they don’t need to crawl:

Code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /archive/
Disallow: /attachments/
Disallow: /calendar.php
Disallow: /clientscript/
Disallow: /cpstyles/
Disallow: /customavatars/
Disallow: /customprofilepics/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /private.php
Disallow: /register.php
Disallow: /sendmessage.php
Disallow: /sendpm.php3) eliminate the " « Previous Thread | Next Thread » " bread crumb at the bottom of threads. This can be found near the bottom of the "SHOW THREADS" template. The problem is that these two links create two additional copies of threads (e.g. /forum/showthread.php?t=87654&goto=nextoldest). This is bad, very bad and how many people actually notice these links actually exist let alone use them? Oh and yes DP needs to kill these two links.

This is good advice for any CMS. Just use the robots.txt file to handle the principal crawlers and keep one’s site out of trouble. Some of these shopping sites should do the same thing with their multiple access points to the same material.

Editing WordPress Pages with Ecto

As most of you know by now we are big users of Ecto for editing our weblogs, across all platforms including WordPress and Typepad. Lack of Ecto support for WordPress is one of the main reasons I stuck with Typepad so long. Ecto just makes things so much faster and more convenient.

One very large irritation when using Ecto with WordPress is the inability to get a hold of the Pages section via XML-RPC. Developer Adriaan Tijsseling is tired of questions about why doesn’t this work, pointing out quite curtly in his Ecto 3 progress notes that it’s not in his power to fix:

Pages isn’t in the API for editing blogs, so if you want to edit pages, you have to ask WP to allow editing pages via the API. It’s nothing any blog client can implement.

There are two solutions out there. One is to modify the core WordPress files, specifically wp-includes/functions-post.php.

John prefers that we not modify any core files for the sake of future compatibility (we got burned on this on what is now a very difficult upgrade on another CMS platform).

Andrew Grant has come up with a WordPress plugin to allow all sorts of games with keywords and to improve compatibility with Windows Live Writer (whatever WLW is).

His plugin has some side benefits:

Static WordPress pages (e.g. ‘About’) can be edited via Ecto / Windows Live Writer.

I suspect we’ll go this route. Unfortunately I want to edit my pages now (and need Ecto to do so efficiently).

We’ll get there.

Online Video for Clients

This is a great commercial website which has really taken advantage of online video – they call it Topskips TV but it’s really just rubbish bins.

A very visual demonstration of their rubbish containers of different sizes, it’s certainly easy to watch.

Topskips TV has convinced of the value of video on the web. It certainly beats all those terrible camstasia cameras recorded computer screens.

We plan to bring video to most of foliovision clients websites in the new year.

Finally, we’ll go full circle – from television producer to web design company to online marketing company to television producer!

Foiling Email Harvesters and Coping with Spam

A very interesting discussion at Slashdot earlier this month about how to stop spam.

There were many suggestions involving images with obscured characters, but that's just not acceptable for business.

A lot of these suggestions are fine for personal sites; but if you're actually in business they aren't practical.We use Javascript. You don't want to make life more difficult for the person trying to correspond - the point is to raise the cost to the spammer. If they have to add a Javascript parser to their spider, it's going to slow them way down. It's not going to make financial sense for them to do a custom solution for each site (and if they do, the "image" methods will break down as well).

What do we do for our own clients to lighten the spam load?

Keep reading Foiling Email Harvesters and Coping with Spam

Forums for WordPress sites: bbPress

Time for some forums for client sites.Second I wanted to introduce an old friend you are all probably familiar with from our support forums, bbPress…. It has some pretty cool features, such as tagging, RSS feeds, Akismet spam protection, AJAX interaction, but the team focused the most on creating something fast and light.

Immediate help with images

If you need to get some images up on your website in a hurry, here’s a bit of code which is extremely straightforward: Lussumo Filebrowser.

The filebrowser is a lightweight PHP application that allows you to thumbnail images and view them in a web browser. That’s it. Short and sweet.

While it’s too lightweight for what we are doing, some of this might show up in our future foliovision applications.

Keep reading Immediate help with images

A Short History of Free Proposals

Veerle Pieters lashed out recently at freeloader clients. The client in question would be a big client (city website in Belgium).

That particular city wasn't content with a design mockup alone oh no they even had the audacity to state that the design revisions to that mockup had to be free too. You only got to have the nerve to think that's normal. This pisses me off and I have one clear message to all those freeloaders "stick it where the sun doesn't shine"! I don't work for free! Somebody has to say it out-loud.

Time to put a stop to it

The purpose of creative pitches are to give clients a better understanding of the creative capacity of the selected agencies. To me it is a lame excuse to not browse around in the portfolios and let someone else do the work for free. I wonder what goes on in the mind of the people who write that stuff down, do they expect the freebies in everything else also? From what understand it is not only a Belgian problem but an international one.

So when was the last time that somebody did a day of work for free for you? Think about, let a painter do a few rooms as a proposal and maybe you'll order the rest later. Good luck in finding one that will do so. Those RPF's are 8 to 10 pages if you are lucky and doing everything to the letter it will cost at least a day of work.

From my time working in major advertising agencies, I know we do these things free all the time. We used to call them pitches. The creative department (I was television production) would end up staying all night for a couple of nights doing mockups, phony storyboards, new looks. The account executive types would be putting fat binders of research together.

Keep reading A Short History of Free Proposals

Eastern European Success Stories for the Taking

For the company lunches, I just bought an enormous 10 litre Tescoma home profi soup pot.

I was curious about the company who made this fine piece of stainless steel.

Looking them up Tescoma in Google coughed up this great case study of the company history. It turns out that Tescoma is a about a ten year old company which went from water coolers to cookware, selling tens of millions of dollars of cookware around the world.

Keep reading Eastern European Success Stories for the Taking

Foliovision Principles

To make the web work for you. What do we mean by that? Your website will work to expand and support your business, seamlessly.

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