the goose

It has become more and more apparent to me over the last year that my marketing skills needed a serious upgrade.  The Sprint events have evolved from a product development exercise to an almost purely market analysis exercise as we have all learned a little more about what it takes to make some money online.  Last week Dan from www.travelaffiliate.ie asked me what I thought of the http://www.arbitrageconspiracy.com/. I had to admit to not know much about affiliate schemes at all.

So, a combination of a sleepless night and slight anxiety in not having any content for the next Goose Forum, lead me to purchase the http://www.affiliatearbitrage.com/ system.  I found it by Googling for “CPA network”.  While I was typing in my payment details, the first thing that came into my mind was “I wonder if this thing is actually a hoax?”.  $97 dollars is a lot to give away to someone you don’t know from a bar of soap.  Thankfully, it wasn’t a hoax.   There was however an immediate up-sell as soon as I had purchased the initial product.  The up-sell was to their ‘members area’.  Advertised as $4.75, it became clear just before buying that this was actually a subscription which ran to $64 a month.

The course comes in the form of a series of videos (14 of them), slides and tools. There are a couple of more up-sells to other products inside but for the most part I was relieved to at least had some value for my money. The first two videos were pretty much introductory but the quality of the presentation was good, complete with a video of Steve (half of the two man team) talking to camera.  The guy seemed pretty genuine and I was looking forward to getting stuck in.  By the end of the second video however it was clear that there was an exercise in managing expectations going on.  While the initial sales page appeals to the readers inner greed, promising hundreds of thousands of dollars of un-adulterated profit, the internal forums and advice were pitched ‘keeping with the program’ and ‘not giving up too early’.

Is it wrong to sell so hard on the landing page and then not follow up with the same level of exuberance once they have your money?  I’m not sure.  It’s probably less a case of right and wrong and more a case of what works and what does not.  The hard sell no doubt works better for them than a more ‘balanced’ soft sell.

The third video finally got into some ‘meat’.  The program is very focused on a website called www.clickbank.com.  Clickbank is an affiliate network containing thousands of sellers who pay for referral fees to those who market their products.  In broad strokes, the process works like this.

1. You select a product that you would like to market on Clickbank.
2. Set up a web page with some ’sales copy’ on it which includes links to your selected product.
3. Drive traffic to your account (by either creating interesting content or advertising using adwords etc).
4. You receive commission for anyone who buys via your site.

It makes sense to pick the right product to market before you go any further.  There are two strategies provided.  The first is a rule of thumb using ‘clickbank gravity’ and a product referral fee of $30.  In other words, if the clickbank gravity is 100 or more and the product offers at least $30 in commission they recommend going for it.

The second approach is a more of a analytic spreadsheet approach and they provide the framework for evaluating the products available.  I found this pretty good.  I can see if you are doing any amount of pay per click advertising then you should be able to save yourself a bunch on spend.  It is however pretty technical and there is a fair bit of fudging around with excel.  Luckily, the presenter keeps it all nice and understandable.

As well as demonstrating how to use paid tools (primarily Market Samurai), there is also a run through of how you can do the same thing for free.  Following on from identifying a good market to attack, he then moves on rather mundane concepts like web hosting and registering a domain name.  Video five spends about 10 minutes on this and there isn’t a lot of detail provided but probably enough to figure it out with a bit of time and effort.

The authors admit there is a tonne of work to be done but who really expected something for nothing in any case.  By the tenth video, for me, things really started to get interesting.  The steps to stick with or dump your campaigns are laid out on a plate.  The rules are there, you just have to follow them.  For me this is the real meat.  You can find out how to use tools and techniques but it is the market experience that really seems valuable.  Smiple rules like “if you have spent double your sales – in the first few weeks – you should be able to make it work” or “dump the product if you’ve spent 4 times your budget”.  How else are you supposed to decide what the cut off point for a campaign is if you aren’t working from some sort of proven strategy.  I say proven – of course I’ve no real proof of this  – but it is obvious that these guys haven’t just come off the internet marketing boat.

Moving on to the sales page, there is more of a focus on marketing techniques.  Two methods are mentioned briefly, comparison style sites (which provide various sub-sites all pointing to the same product) and testimonial sites.  The example used throughout the demonstration is for an acne treatment.  In this case our intrepid internet marketeer puts together a testimonial style site (www.myacnestory.net).  There is a bit of a hop skip and a jump at this stage and if you don’t know how to put a HTML page together – you might be a bit lost.  Its assumed you know how to upload pages to a webserver and edit HTML.  There are a number of decent tools recommended (one of which is free) for doing this but all the same – I wouldn’t want my granny to have to do it.

Things don’t really get any less tricky with the adwords management.  This is not intended as a primer on adwords and while there is enough information to get you started, it all starts to get a bit technical.  Of course this is a technical subject so there isn’t really much that can be done about that.  It is interesting to see how a real ad campaign is managed by a pro however.  All the same, this stuff is pretty advanced.  I’m wondering if hiring someone from elance might be a better way to manage all of this for you.

There are very clear steps outlined however.  Step 1, step 2 style guides give you an explicit set of rules to follow.  That is appealing and means if you are willing to spend the time juggling excel you can do it for yourself.

The final part of the series starts to focus on how to ’scale’ a winning niche that you have managed to find.  I wasn’t too impressed with these.  I guess there just ain’t any silver bullet.  SEO, content network advertising and a couple of other ideas were proffered.  The course finishes up with some emergency advice for when your ad campaign goes bad as well as some general financial management tips.

All told, I was pretty happy with the course.  There is definitly some pieces which I’ll be able to user in our own adventures but its probably demonstrated just how much hard work there is in finding and capitalising on an affliate program that works.  On the other hand, if these guys are to be believed, there is serious money to be made.