I’ve launched a new course with a friend of mine Mark Dickenson, called ‘Video Commission Formula‘.

The course is all about affiliate marketing via YouTube videos. The great thing about YouTube is that the videos rank really easily in Google and in a fraction of the time a website does.

We also teach list building with YouTube videos in the course. There is a huge scope for targeting various types of affiliates offers, ranging from Clickbank products to CPA and even physical goods too.

We are doing a launch special discount of $47, which expires next Thursday midnight.

This is by far the easiest method of affiliate marketing I have ever mastered too. Anyone should be totally able to get results with this.

Here’s the link to the sales page:

==>Video Commission Formula<==

Enjoy!

Matt

Video Commission Formula is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

So why do I like drop shipping then? There are a number of reasons this business model is attractive to me, which I’ll break down and explain now.

No Shipping & Handling

Having been involved with affiliate marketing for many years now, I’m somewhat addicted to the idea of never touching products myself, never having to worry about shipping and returns. With that said I don’t think you should discount business models that do involve this, as you can make great money with ecommerce, whether drop shipping or not. However drop shipping does indeed get around having to deal with stock, which is great.

For those of you who don’t know what drop shipping is, let me quickly explain. Drop shipping is where you have a relationship with a distributor and they agree to ship any sales you make from your store, direct to the customer. Some countries refer to this as ‘direct shipping’, but it’s the same thing.

Once you have a good relationship with your distributor, you can often ask them to place your company’s sticker on the box too, so it looks like it got shipped from you.

So you can see how drop shipping really is a form of affiliate marketing, the only difference is that you handle the money from the customer, and then you buy the product from the distributor at a lower price and the difference is your profit.

Huge Opportunity

There’s a massive opportunity with ecommerce stores, as the trend to buy online continues to grow. The US Census Bureau recently started that they estimate the third quarter of 2011 brought in $48.2 Billion, which is almost 2% growth from the previous quarter.

The thing about ecommerce stores is that if you pick the right niche, there can be a huge amount of products that you can drop ship. Which also means a huge amount of keywords you can target for SEO, and often the competition for keywords can be a lot easier, compared to battling it out in a popular affiliate niche.

Another important point, is that with your own store you will build a customer base over time, which you can get repeat sales from, if the niche leans towards repeat sales of course.

Google Loves Ecommerce Sites

It’s no secret that Google does like quality ecommerce stores. They like sites that are the point of sale for the customer, provided the site is legitimate and professional. With all the Google Panda updates in 2011, which were aimed at quality, ecommerce stores can tick all these boxes pretty easily. I did a recent post on SEO Quality Score, where I explained some of the key quality indicators that Google are looking for on sites. If you read that post, you’ll see how an ecommerce site can provide a lot of these quality factors with ease.

Another advantage of drop shipping, is that you can use Google Adwords for more traffic. Google came down pretty hard on affiliate sites using Adwords over the past few years, however ecommerce sites they encourage.

Easy to Find Distributors

One of the most common stumbling blocks people face when looking to get into drop shipping sites, is finding suppliers that are willing to drop ship for them. However from my experience this is not hard at all, and I think it’s more of a mental block that people have. Sure you do have to get on the phone and make some calls to companies and explain what you want to do, but trust me, it’s not hard to do!!

Let me encourage you, by telling you about a real scenario that happened to me this very week. I’m not going to give away my niche, however one drop shipping site I’m working on now will be selling major brands in the niche. So the first thing I did was Google for a few of these major brands, so I can find their sites and phone numbers.

Next, I called them up and asked to speak with someone that had information about their distributors. The receptionist put me through to someone, I explained to that person that I wanted to sell their products in a new store I’m building, and could they provide me a list of their distributors. They were more than happy to, and so I had my list. Next step, I called all of these distributors and asked if they would drop ship for me. Some said no, but one said yes, and they also stocked all the brands I needed, so that’s all I needed!

The other option you can use is Alibaba. This is great service for finding suppliers all over the world. Not all of these suppliers will dropship, but again some will. So in closing I think drop shipping is yet another great way to make money online, and hoepfully this post helped you understand a little more about how to make money drop shipping!

Side Note: Experiment

On a side note, I’m doing a small experiment with this post, and seeing where I rank for the search term “make money drop shipping” without doing any link building myself, just relying on Google +1 and the other social links below. If you liked this content, then I would appreciate a Google +1 from you. This way we can all track the ranking of this page in Google and see if it makes much difference. As of now the page is indexed, and is in position 30 in Google USA, so it will be interesting for us all to see if these social votes move the page up. I’ll update this post in a week or so and let you know what happened.

Experiment Update: 29th Nov 2011

OK I said I would update you all on this little experiment above, so here’s what happened.

When I first published this post, it got indexed virtually immediately, which all my posts do, and it came in at position 30 in Google USA for “Make Money Drop Shipping”. That phrase is not super high traffic, but when you blog you want to aim for keywords that you can rank for that get to the top with little backlinking. Not all my posts are done like this as I mostly just want to put out content that I know you all will want to read, but anyway, moving on…

…after a few days when the social votes started to come in, the post moved from position 30 to position 18, where it stayed for another day. Then more socail votes come in and the post jumped up to position 4 in Google. It stayed at position 4 for a few days, and just now when I checked it has bumped up to position 2 in Google, however this may different depending on where you are in the world, for me right now it shows position 2.

I do have a considerable amount of social votes on this post now, over 140 Google +1′s and over 440 Tweets plus 32 Facebook likes!! Not bad going considering the post has only been up a week.

Conclusion: Although this was not the most scientific of experiments, and just something that popped into my mind after I wrote the post, from the movements in Google, it did show some pretty clear trending upwards as I gained more and more social votes, until it got almost to the top. So I think it does show positive signs of these social votes being a clear ranking signal to Google, which makes sense too, because alot of social votes show that people like your content, and hence it must be good quality.

I may do another one of these experiments soon and see what the results show us all.

Thanks

Matt

How to Make Money Drop Shipping is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Recently I held a free 2hr webinar with my list, which was a question and answer session. There were some great questions asked from all the attendees, and I did my best to answer then all.

If you weren’t able to attend the webinar, you can watch the recording now, the link is below for you.

There were quite a few questions about Google and the Panda update, and in particular how it affects affiliate marketing sites, and I was able to share my insights on this matter.

I try and hold these sessions as often as I can, as my way of helping my loyal subscribers with their online marketing.

Enjoy the webinar, and I’ll be updating the blog soon with more juicy tips for you all!

==>Click here to watch webinar replay<==

Question & Answer Webinar Replay is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

In particular if you live in the USA and have been affected by the laws in some states such as California and Colorado, stopping people from doing affiliate marketing, then you want to read this post as it provides a solution for you.

What is Viglink?

Before I explain, I first need to give credit to Sara Young, who recently explained Viglink to me on a webinar I did with her this week, you can check out the replay for that here: Webinar.

Viglink is a service that makes becoming an affiliate for 100′s if not 1000′s of merchants a lot easier. There are two very obvious advantages of using this service.

The first one is that if you live in a state in the USA which has that annoying affiliate tax law, then you can still be an affiliate if you join via Viglink, because technically Viglink is the affiliate and not you, even for places like Amazon.

A lot of people I know who live in California find it really annoying that they can’t be affiilates for as many places because of this law, and if you fall into that category then perhaps Viglink is for you also.

The other major advantage is that getting accepted to be an affiliate by merchants with Viglink is easy, as once again Viglink is the affiliate getting approved.

What this means is that if you’re new to affiliate marketing and have problems getting accepted by merhcants to promote their products, then you can get around this and get automatically approved by joining via Viglink.

For example, if you join up at Commission Junction, what you have to do is apply to each individual merchant in that network, and often times merchants reject applications, if the applicant is not experienced, or perhaps doesn’t live in the USA, which can be really annoying! However Viglink solves this problem.

Tracking

Viglink provides powerful tracking aswell, which means you can track all your affiliate activity from one central hub, which I can see the benefit of. Speaking from experience, being an affiliate for dozens of places can get a little messy.

Viglink provides access to over 12,500 merchants across 20 different networks, so you should have no problem finding something to promote as an affiliate. The service is very straight forward to use too, you just paste in the codes on your Worpdress blog posts or whatever sites you have and off you go.

Ofcourse Viglin does make money from their service, and although free to join, they get a small slice of your affiliate commission per sale.

So if you want an easier way to get accepted as an affiliate or a way to get around a tax law issue in your state, or maybe just want a central hub to track all your affiliate activity, then perhaps check out Viglink.

Viglink is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

When ever I start a new project, whether it be an affiliate marketing site, lead generation, adsense etc…. I prefer to get my site looking just the way I want it, and therefore like to get a WordPress theme customized, which I’m about to explain how to do. You can get amazing looking sites, just the way you want them for a little as $50-$100 dollars too.

The first thing I do is have a look around at what my competition is doing with their sites in Google already.

For example, recently I set up a new lead generation deal, which is still affiliate marketing, just not using affiliate links, but instead capturing the leads and selling them. So the first thing I did was find a wordpress theme that I liked, a paid premium one, but nothing expensive. There quite a few good premium theme sites out there, such as Woo Themes.

What I do is find one that I think will work for the niche and the style of site I’m building, in this case lead generation, and my next move is to look at what other people in the niche are doing with their sites already, and take screen shots using Jing of half a dozen sites, so that I can pass this onto a WordPress designer to customize for me, which I’ll get to in  moment.

I’m not going to give away the niche I’m in for this lead generation deal, so instead, let’s say it was for “Bankruptcy”. What I do is look at about a dozen sites, and take screen shots of the ones I like and mark the image up with the things I like, which is super easy and quick to do using Jing. Below are some examples:

So once I’ve found what I like and captured images, or video, I’m now ready to approach a WordPress designer to take my paid premium theme, and customize it to just the way I want it. Some people prefer to use the themes out of the box, but I must say I prefer this style, because it doesn’t cost that much, and you get exactly what you want, and if your site is important to you then it’s worth getting it spot on!

Finding a Good WordPress Designer

The next thing you need to do is find someone who can take your theme and transform it into what you want. There are a few sites you can go to, and I like odesk.com and also elance.com. For this example, let’s stick with Odesk.com

The first thing I do is head over to the Odesk and click the “HIRE” link on the home page. The I select “web design” from the categories:

Then filter the results so you have a lot less to look through. What I do is reduce the hourly rate to $10 and under, and also in the search box type in “wordpress”, as the image below shows:

The next thing you need to do is read their profiles and especially look at their previous work and see if they have done any WordPress customization, and also check what their feedback has been like.

Also if you can find someone that is a coder AND a graphic designer then this is perfect as they will be able to make graphic changes as well as customize the code so the theme works they way you want it to.

Once you’ve found someone, contact them and ask for examples of previous work. On that note, look for someone who actually does have a work history, which you can filter for on the right menu filters.

Getting What You Want

I’ve had my fair share of crappy results when trying to get a website I want, and I’ve learned that in order to actually get exactly what you want, you absolutely must provide examples of what you like, as I showed above, and provide as much detail as possible.

Sometimes I’ll record a video in Jing and also 10 or so screen shots, and send all of this over to the developer, so that I reduce miscommunication and help the guide the contractor to what I want. If you do this you will get what you want in most cases.

The Price

The price you pay depends on how much work is involved. However if you provide your contractor a theme to start with, that you like but just want some tweaking down to it, then it is a lot less work, so you can expect about $50-$100 for something like this.

One more thing to keep in mind, if you can’t find a WordPress developer that is good with graphics, then you’ll be able to find a designer in Odesk also. I’ve one WordPress developer who’s very good, but he doesn’t do graphics, so what I do is get some basic graphics made, which might cost $25 and then send them to him to use.

That’s all for this update folks, that’s how I get the website I want.

Getting the Website You Want is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

Hi, my name is Jackon, I’m an internet marketer,  starting my affiliate marketing journey in 2009.

Fast forward to now I do SEO for clients and also have a variety of affiliate sites and Clickbank products. I was making a really good income before the panda slap, but I’m currently in the phase of rebuilding after Google sent a big panda and kung fu’ed a large portion of my profits. So why am I being so honest about my online income? Because I’m going to tell you something that you need to know if you want to succeed online. I’m going to talk to you today about one of the MOST IMPORTANT things when it comes to online marketing success.

• This has nothing to do with traffic.
• This has nothing to do with conversions.
• This has nothing to do with keyword research.

But this has everything to do with whether or not you’re going to make money online… or you’re just going to go through the endless cycle of buying crappy “make money online” products that claim to teach you how to make a full time income within 30 days.

So what am I talking about?

I’m talking about your mindset.

The way you think dictates your actions, which in turn affects directly what you do and when you do it. So what does this have to do with affiliate marketing you ask?

EVERYTHING.

I remember my first conversation with my mentor, Mark. I was so excited that I was able to get him on SKYPE and not only that, he actually responded, so that’s why I clearly remembered what he told me.

It went something like this:

Me: “What do you think is the most important thing to know about online marketing success? Conversions? Traffic? Affiliates? Tell me what methods I need to do in order to make big bucks online FAST”

Mark: “your mindset”.

Me: “…what?” (I was thinking, I don’t want some bogus Star Wars Yoda talk where he talks about “you do or do not, there is no try”, give me real methods that I can implement right now).

Mark: “the way you think affects whether or not you will succeed online”.

Me: “what?” (I was thinking, oh great, Mark’s going to go all theoretical on me and preach to me about some airy fairy concept that really isn’t going to help me much).

But guess what.

He was absolutely 100% right!

You might be thinking “why is Jackson telling me that his websites were smashed by Google”? The reason why I am telling you is this. The only reason that I was able to make an online empire in the first place was the way that I thought.I treated internet marketing like it was something that I’d succeed at. Or I’d die trying. And since I don’t plan to die any time soon, I’m going to try for a long time to make sure it works.

That’s why I was able to complete my first affiliate site within 4 weeks of taking Mark Ling’s course, when the entire course was structured for 13 weeks and at the time of completion there were STILL people in the forums asking “how do I decide what market I should enter”?

I didn’t say to myself “oh well, the course goes for 13 weeks, I should be a good student if I finished it in 13 weeks”… No, my mindset did not allow for that.

It was the way that I thought, that allowed me to rank for “forex broker”, “tarot reading”, “spyware blockers”, “registry cleaners” and “flight simulator” (prior to the panda slap) to be on my way to make a 6 figure income online at the time.

I didn’t say to myself “oh no, these markets are too hard to compete in, I should give up”… No, my mindset did not allow for that.

So do you think I’m going to let a little panda slap stop me from rebuilding my online empire? I think not! Now if you’re sick of reading about me, let me show you examples of other people who have succeeded. If you have ever spoken to Matt Carter (the owner of this blog), you’ll realize that he was able to get tremendous success online within a short period of time.

The way you THINK allows you to implement a step by step plan that results in taking proactive and positive action to build online websites that would in turn generate passive income. Your thought patterns force you to become problem solvers and get around issues that would have normally been “way too hard” to deal for the average person.

Let me put it to you another way. People who succeed online follow this thought pattern:

Overriding thought – I’m going to succeed at online marketing and I’ll die trying. So if they ever encounter a problem, they’ll actively go and “Google” the solution, go to “YouTube” the answer through a video tutorial or pay someone to fix it by hiring workers on Odesk.com or Elance.com

They are PROACTIVE at solving problems.

People who don’t succeed online follow this thought pattern:

Overriding thought – Let’s see if this works, and if not I’ll get a refund. So if they encounter a problem most of the time they’ll just think to themselves “oh this is too hard” and “I’m not qualified” then stop trying. Sometimes, they will go to forums, but instead of searching for solutions, they’ll go to forums complaining about a problem. After that, they’ll use their mind to justify their failure.

They are REACTIVE to problems.

What’s worse is that these people who fail, use their most powerful tool, their minds to make up excuses as to why it was perfectly acceptable for them to fail.

The only difference between these two kinds of people is the way they think. Your mindset, as I mentioned before (which Mark informed me a long time ag), affects the way you act and ultimately decides whether or not you’ll succeed online. So let me ask you this question.

How do you think about affiliate marketing?

If you want to learn more about my internet marketing journey, why don’t you take a look at Jackson’s super awesome marketing blog, so click here: Internet Marketing Tips

The Affiliate Marketing Mindset is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

I’m not 100% certain of the increase over Christmas, but I’m pretty sure it easily doubles if not triples at this time of year. If you postition yourself right now, you can get in on this massive spike in spending and come out on top.

The first thing you need to be aware of, is that if you’re doing an SEO site, you need to start right now in order to get rankings by early November, as most shopping is done in November and the first part of December.

There are also a few other things that play into our hands well during this time of year, that a lot of offline stores sell out of popular products, and this forces people to shop online in desperation to find the gift they so desire.

The next obvious question is, what products to promote on your affiliate marketing sites? The best thing to do is find out what’s popular this year, and there are a few ways that you can do this. One way is to go to Ebay pulse and see what’s selling. Ebay pulse provides info of the most popular products sold on Ebay. Alternatively you can go to a local department store and ask the sales reps in there what have been the most popular products this year. They’ll know if they’re the ones constantly refiling the shelves!!

Aside from these techniques you can just use your own knowledge of popoular products that would make good gifts. Toys are clearly a good one as these are popular gifts. You can also Google Trends, to see the trend in search volume of a keyword over time, and work out if this product is growing in popularity or not.

Below is a video I made to help explain how I go about this:

Christmas Affiliate Marketing Video

The key is to make sure you are targeting products that would make a good gift for someone, and that you can be an affiliate for.

The next step is to build your affiliate website and get it ranking in Google ready for the rush!

Ranking in Google for product names is a winner, so for example if there is a popular toy that’s selling this year, you would do well to rank for the name of this toy in Google and have a review of the product and affiliate links on the page to Amazon, or where ever else you choose. Even if you can’t rank for the exact product name, try and rank for a longer tail version of it.

The great thing about Amazon, is that you get commission for anything the customer buys in a 24hr period after clicking your affiilate link. So if they are the type of person who likes to do all their Christmas shopping at once, like me, then you will get commission on the lot!!

Start having a hunt around Amazon, starting in the Toys section, and even other large toy retailers and have a look at the products there. I’m sure you will find a few gems that you can whip up a small affiliate site on and start backlinking now in time for Christmas.

Hope that sparked some ideas!

Christmas Rush Affiliate Marketing Sales is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

So I have been backlinking a new site of mine, well actually 4 months old now, so not that new, and I noticed that one of the pages that was in position 7 in Google for a decent keyword had a spelling mistake in the URL! Pretty stupid mistake, and typical of me to be honest, as I have never one for attention to detail.

However having the exact keyword as your page URL does have a small SEO advantage and is worth spelling correctly!!

Anyway, I had backlinked this page pretty hard, and I couldn’t just change the URL now, otherwise I would lose my ranking, because all the links I had built were pointing to the URL that was spelt wrong.

However all is not lost, because you can call on the trusty 301 redirect, and redirect that wrongly spelt URL to a new correctly spelt URL page, and this is super easy when you use WordPress.

If you have fallen into a mistake like this yourself, and use WordPress like I do, then here is a plugin that fixes the issue in seconds: 301 WP Plugin.

Like all WordPress plugins, this thing is easy to use, all you do is tell it what page you want to redirect and also what page you want to redirect to, and that’s it, problem solved. What then happens is after a few days the wrongly spelt URL is replaced in the serps with the new correctly spelt one, and everything is sorted.

Not anything to mind blowing with this updates folks, but sometimes these little things can make all the difference, and perhaps one day you’ll need this trick too!

301 Redirects with WordPress is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

The study done by Wordstream, showed that insurance keywords came out on top and made up nearly a quarter of the total, and the highest CPC in this niche being almost $55!!

This study was designed for paid traffic marketers, which I’m not, however you can still use this information when doing SEO sites, especially if you are running Adsense on your sites.

The top 20 categories are listed below:

1. Insurance (example keywords in this category include “buy car insurance online” and “auto insurance price quotes”)
2. Loans (example keywords include “consolidate graduate student loans” and “cheapest homeowner loans”)
3. Mortgage (example keywords include “refinanced second mortgages” and “remortgage with bad credit”)
4. Attorney (example keywords include “personal injury attorney” and “dui defense attorney”)
5. Credit (example keywords include “home equity line of credit” and “bad credit home buyer”)
6. Lawyer (“personal  injury lawyer,” “criminal defense lawyer)
7. Donate (“car donation centers,” “donating a used car”)
8. Degree (“psychology bachelors degree”)
9. Hosting (“hosting ms exchange,” “managed web hosting solution”)
10. Claim (“personal injury claim,” “accident claims no win no fee”)
11. Conference Call (“best conference call service,” “conference calls toll free”)
12. Trading (“cheap online trading,” “stock trades online”)
13. Software (“crm software programs,” “help desk software cheap”)
14. Recovery (“raid server data recovery,” “hard drive recovery laptop”)
15. Transfer (“zero apr balance transfer,” “credit card balance transfer zero interest”)
16. Gas/Electricity (“business electricity price comparison,” “switch gas and electricity suppliers”)
17. Classes (“criminal justice online classes,” “online classes business administration”)
18. Rehab (“alcohol rehab centers,” “crack rehab centers”)
19. Treatment (“mesothelioma treatment options,” “drug treatment centers”)
20. Cord Blood (“cordblood bank,” “store umbilical cord blood”)

Planning Your Approach

Now that you know to find the top keyword niches, you need to plan your approach for ranking for variations of these root keywords for your websites. Obviously it goes without saying that trying to rank for something like “Insurance” would not be a good idea, because the competition would be way too high, however you could look for longer tail keywords in these high CPC niches, and try and rank for these instead.

Once you get traffic to your websites in niches where there is money being spent, you can monetize this traffic with Adsense, or even put your site for sale, or maybe even offer to sell it to companies who are well established to monetize the traffic in the niche.

Either way when trying to find top keywords it’s not a bad idea to look where the money is being spent!

When doing your SEO keyword research in these big money industries, you want to look for phrases that big authority sites are not purposely trying to rank for, as you’ll find it hard to outrank them. However there are opportunities on longer tail phrases if you spend time checking them out!

How to Find Top keywords is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing

The great news is, that after pursuing this guy for the past three weeks I finally managed to pin him down for a webinar, where I grilled him for his best Adsense secrets, and how is able to make so much with it.

The replay link is here for you to watch right now:

==>25K a month Adsense Webinar replay<==

In the interview I grilled my friend, on the following:

*what are the best adsense niches?
*what are the worse niches to avoid?
*what are the best adsense keywords?
*where should we place our ads for max profit?
*what sort of sites should we build?
*what are common mistakes people make with adsense?

…and loads more great stuff!! In the webinar he shows an example site, which I love because it makes is soooooo much easier for me to copy and the site he shows gets a click through rate on the ads of…20%!!!!!!

Google liked this site so much, that one of the Google Adsense account managers contacted my friend directly and gave him tips on how to maximize the earnings from the site…hence why the crazy 20% CTR.

That’s not all though, he then sold the site for $80,000!!!!

***WHY ADSENSE?***

There are some major advantages of monetizing your site with Adsense, here’s a few:

1.) To make money you only have to get traffic to click an ad, that’s it, end of story. You
don’t have to worry about the merchant doing a good job of conversion.

2.) The potential is ENORMOUS, as there are so many companies advertising with Google, so you don’t have to worry about finding offers to promote.

3.) Once you know how to make a few bucks, you can just rinse and repeat and keep scaling your income…which is what my guest explains in the interview.

4.) It is super easy to get approved for the adsense network, and you don’t have to worry about offers getting removed, like the CPA networks have.

Oh yeah, another cool thing, in the webinar, my guest explains that his highest ever payout for a singe click on Adsense was…wait for it…$48!!! I never you could make so much from Adsense clicks. This guy is a true Adsense master, and I highly encourage you to watch this webinar now. This webinar is content packed, no fluff, the kind I like.

Here’s the link again for you:

==>25K a month Adsense Webinar replay<==

Enjoy!

$25,000 From Adsense Sites is a post from: Internet Marketing Secrets, Affiliate Marketing Blog, Affiliate Internet Marketing