Organizing Your Tasks

In the introductory videos, Steven from Affiliate Marketing Diary, Steven talks about how to organize your day to tasks.  I found the method he suggested to be very efficient and I will try incorporating that in my efforts.  Each day about 2-3 hours are spent on the task which is just about the time I have. He organizes his week somewhat like this.:

Day 1:  Research 3-5 Products and do keyword research.

Day 2:  Article Research with the mentioned resources and more.

Day 3: Create Presell pages if necessary and start writing articles for marketing.  You need to write about 3-5 articles per product.

Day 4: Continue writing 3-5 articles per product.

Day 5: Finish up writing 3-5 articles per product.  Publish your articles on ezine articles or any other article directory.

Day 6: Review past campaigns.  Check profitability.  If something is profitable, write more articles for it.

I will probably tweak this to incorporate my own style, but I think this is a very useful daily action task list that he has provided.

Article Writing Tips from Affiliate Marketing Diary

I just went through Steven’s tips from Affiliate Marketing Diary. A lot of the information did overlap with other works I have read on the subject but Steven presented the information in a different way using video and taking the viewer through the whole process in a very detailed manner.

Some of the tips that I got from viewing some of his later videos that I would like to keep in mind:

For each 3-5 articles that you want to write, try to print out about 10 (or more) articles to do your research from. Highlight the relevant info from the articles that you printed out. You can use various sites for your research including www.ezinearticles.com, www.contentrover.com (which searchs goarticles.com and prweb.com and it shows the keyword density in the search results), google blog search, and wikipedia.

The article itself should ideally be about 300-500 words. It can take either a review or a tips format.

Keyword density is how often your keyword phrase appears in your article. Search engines use this to determine the relevance of your article. The ideal keyword density is 3-5%. Anything more than 5% is considered spamming by most search engines. You can check kewyord density at www.keyworddensity.com. A keyword density of 3-5% amounts to occurence of your keyword about once every 125 words. It is better to keep the keyword density on the lighter side and use multiple more related terms (that showed up on your keyword research like wordtracker (freekeywords.wordtracker.com) or related terms that you saw on www.kwbrowse.com) or other forms of the keyword like synonyms or plural to singular. The 3-5% doesn’t include the title or the resource box. I am going to look into this more in the future as I get more exprienced but I believer there is a term referenced to this called ‘Latent Symantec Indexing’.

Some tips for formatting your article include:
1) Use your keyword phrase in the title and if possible squeeze in a more competitive keyword phrase in there too.
2) Use your keyword phrase in the first sentence of your article. Steven mentions that some people bold it and it might be a possible SEO technique. I haven’t heard this mentioned before so I would look into it. I’m not sure how it will look to the reader.
3) Use your keyword phrase in the body of the article.
4) Sprinkle related keywords throughout the article.
5) You can use bullets within the article and this helps increase the readability of the article. You can use them as headlines or all text
6) Use your keyword phrase in the last paragraph of your article.
7) Put your keyword phrase in the resource box.

The resource box will be the most important section of your article because you try to sell your link here. If possible, try to promote an affiliate’s free report or your own if you have a presell page. Free reports whether as pdf downloads or 5 day ecourses will most likely get the user to click on your link. If a report is unavailable, try to create compelling copy (using words like amazing, controversial, etc) and curiosity to get the reader to click your link. Also in your resource box, us both anchor text and a hard link for your site.

Ray Edwards 5 Power Boosting Tactics to Increase Sales

I listened to a series of videos by Ray Edwards.  He goes over 5 power tactics of copy writing that can boost sales:

1.    Seductive headline that get people to read your ad, headline, email

2.  Copy can kill your sales — Write in conversational language

3.  Start the romance — Demonstrate that you care and trigger the principle of reciprocity

4.  Word of mouth — authority transferrence

5.  Talk in your own voice – proofread your copy – take out the points that don’t flow, that interrupt your reader, read your copy outloud.  Do not read it in your head.

Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon

Ok…so I had to review this.  I’m on a mission to go thru all my collections that are collecting digital dust and collect nuggets from them – for myself.   Secret Affiliate Weapon was one of the first books that I got that got me introduced to the world of Internet Marketing.  Unfortunately at that time, I really didn’t pay that much attention to it and I was being bombarded by way too many emails and  was encompassed by something else.  Anyway, after reviewing this book again, I’m amazed at all the simple information that was included in the report.  All of the basic stuff in one place.  But in a way it took me a while to absorb it and now I am more learned and can understand all this information in a much better way.

The nuggets I took away from this:

1.  A successful marketer maximizes the efficiency of one campaign before moving on to the next.  This is a biggie for me! I need to complete my projects.  I get too discouraged at times in the middle of my project and just jump.  I need to follow through because that’s where the success is!

2.  Track and test.  The Ultimate Affiliate Marketing guide has a list of options for tracking. 

3.  List of ezines to look for partners and affiliates. 

4.  Learn how to presell – you don’t want to write a sales pitch.

5.  www.sitepronews.com – if it can pick up your article, you’ll reach a very targeted ezine of thousands. 

—Ok I have a question that needs to be answered.  Can you publish the same article in multiple directories? —

6.  Choose long tail keywors – around three to four terms per phrase.

7.  According to Ewen Chia, as an affiliate PPC is best used as a lead generation tool.

8.  Already start having ideas of back end products that you would like to promote.  This will make a better business plan.  You capture their email and then you can contact them and try to sell them more products.

Finding A Hungry Market

I was listening to a copy writing talk earlier this morning (recorded) by Andrew Cavanagh and it was just a basic introductory talk part of a larger series on how to develop good copy writing skills.  The basic point of the talk was that you have to find a hungry market and then tailor your copy to that market.  If you have a hungry market, you will be able to sell them anything.  So try to find the market first, and then work creating or locating a product for that market.  Tips on finding a hungry market are going to various forums and seeing what people need, even asking them if a particular item could solve their needs.  Also books are a good indicator of a hungry market – go and check what books are available on a subject and then go and read the blurbs from the books to get a good idea of answers to your research.  This is a good research tip as well.  Rather than just going on Google for your research you can check out existing books and their blurb chapters or pages or even the table of contents. 

Anyway, here is a summary of the best ways to find a hungry market – ones that i especially like are bolded:

1.  Use the phone book to contact businesses.

2.  Find niche keywords and check the page ranks of the resulting pages on Google.  Lower page ranked pages can mean that you will have an easier time getting free traffic.  This is another step to niche research that I didn’t think of before.  Yeah you are getting results, but what kind of results are you getting?  If you can get a page with a higher page rank then you can be sure to rank higher than these results on google (right?). 

3.  Search for the top ranking sites on google and check if they are capturing email addresses.  If they are, then you can market to their list and share the profits –> also known as Joint Ventures.  You can also pay for a solo – email.  An email that goes to their whole list.

4.  Check paypal stores.

5.  Discussion forums / google groups / yahoo groups

6.  Go to amazon and check books within your target market and see why the popular books so popular. 

7.  “Flycatcher technique” – from Google PPC take users to a page where you tell them you are putting finishing touches on a book and want to make sure all questions are answered.  If they send you their questions, whatever they are, you will send them a free copy of the book when you are done.  Build a list this way as well. 

Consolidating PPC Ideas

I’ve run quite a few PPC campaigns since I started and I must say that I have learned quite a lot in the past 2 months (or a bit more). 

1.  Bid on specific terms.  Bid on specific products.  Mostly people who search for specific products are almost sold on buying them. 

2.  Gather any kind of coupons or deals from your company to make your offer a better one.

3.  Research your keywords.  Even though you are bidding on specific products there might be slightly alternate versions of the product name or the public calls the product by a different name.  Research your product enough to find this out.  (I will post an example of this once I am done with my campaign)

4. Research your competition.  If you’ve already picked an affiliate company then make sure they offer the cheapest deal.  I learned that after I had started my campaign promoting a product for a big name.  I then realized that a smaller name company was offering a much cheaper and better deal.  If that is the case, see if you can become an affiliate of this company.  Once you’ve focused on a product, pick the company who is giving the best offer.  This way you can ensure higher conversions.

5.  If you can do ‘Add to Cart Links’, then do them.  This is where you can show your coupon being applied.  This will also increase conversions I beleive. 

That’s it for now.  I guess I might have a part 2, but these are some of the main points I’ve learned and hopefully they will help me by creating more successful campaigns in the future.

What I’ve Learned

ooglI sometimes find it hard to find motivation to write.  Although I know that only practice makes perfect and as it is my writing skills are a little rusty.  And I also need to organize the information I’m gathering from all the different books and articles I’m reading.  I decided to combat both problems with a combined solution.  I’m going to be writing posts about what I’ve learned from the various books.  These will mostly be nuggets of information but they will great in helping me organize everything I’ve learned and put it into one place.  Also, it will give me something to write about when I’m having writer’s block.  I could have had 45+ posts by now, but because of my sheer laziness to write I don’t. And each day that I don’t write, I lose the opportunity to grow my web presence, which ofcourse entitles to lost opportunity and lost money.  Anyhow, that’s it for today.  I must say I’ve learned an amazing amount in the past month and a half – mostly from the Warrior Forum, or thru it, but hopefully soon I’ll lay out a very focused game plan on how to approach the rest of 2007.

A New Lens on Fat Loss 4 Idiots

Well I’ve created a new lens on Fat Loss 4 Idiots based on what I learned from some books.  I really have to get some time here to write.  Anyway, check out the lens.

A Squidoo Experiment

Yeah, so like my last post said.  It’s all getting clearer.  I have to sit down and spell it all out. So much to write, but for now here’s my new lens that I made on personalized roses.  Let’s see what steps I can take to get the rank up there .  And searched on google!

Internet Marketing Fog Clearing Up

I thought I had gotten whiff of Internet Marketing in November, but it seems I learned about and placed my very first IM related order in the beginning of October. So that makes me almost 4 months in.  I’m starting to realize how things are done, whats spam, what’ not, what resources to go to, and I have to say I’ve found quite a few good resources over the past 4 months. Information overload still exists but to a certain extent the fog is clearing and I’m seeing what needs to be done. There really are so many things you could go into but I guess I need to do it one at a time for it to be done at all.  Otherwise I just think and get overwhelmed. I’ve been working on a sales letter for a product.  I’ve created the first draft of the sales letter but I know it still needs work so I’m just trying to learn a bit more about copywriting and how I can improve it.  Also, I’ve discovered squidoo and currently have a lens following my weight loss journey with ‘Fat Loss 4 Idiots’.