Secrets of Affiliate Marketing Contest

Written by Zac Johnson
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Last week I mentioned there was a new contest in the works between Market Leverage and a few other blogs, including this one. Instead of the usual prizes, Market Leverage has a few new ones up for grabs. One winner will be selected from this blog to win their choice of either an iPod Nano, or a Flip Mino HD. The top three winners (across all blog entries) selected will then receive an Amazon Kindle, $100 ML Rewards card, and $50 iTunes gift card. Winners will be selected on January 5, 2009.

What is the contest & how to enter?
Step 1: If you haven’t already, join Market Leverage.
Step 2: Look at the offers with in the Market Leverage network, and do a short write up or video on how you would promote an offer.

The concept of the contest is to “share your secrets” of affiliate marketing, but I don’t expect anyone to do that. Instead, you can talk about your ideas or how you would promote an offer if you had more time, ad money or resources. The idea here is to possibly inspire others to act and make money on ideas that you simply wouldn’t have time or the resources for.

Why you should enter!
Honestly… the amount of contests and prizes that are constantly going around is massive. However, the actual amount of people that actually take the time to write something up and enter are minimal. You can easily walk away with one of these prizes with little time and effort on your part.

Here’s my quick sample entry:
Market Leverage has an offer for a “Hollywood Profiles Casting Calls”, which pays $25.00 per signup. Here’s my quick idea on how you could build up a site and profit from this offer consistently. First you should create a new web site or blog that is targeted towards amateur spoof videos on YouTube that show people re-enacting movies or celebrity impressions. Categorize the site so people can view videos based on different categories (look a likes, movie spoofs, acting). Enable the ability to have visitor leave comments or send the funny content to friends. You can then place links throughout the site that say, “Think you are Hollywood material?” or “Do you have the looks to be a celebrity?” and they would send the user to the offer.

This is a short and simple write up of the concept, but you get the idea. An even more in-depth established site with almost the same concept is Taltopia. This social network is built up of talented members looking for their 2 mins of fame. The idea and concept is there, but it’s a project I’m not interested in started… so I pass this idea off to you.

Winner Selection
Winners will be selected based on the quality and originallity of their submission. One winner will be selected from this blog post, by myself, and will have the choice between the iPod Nano or Flip Mino HD. Three other winners will be selected by Market Leverage from all submissions to the contest, from this blog and all participating blogs. (all prizes listed above)

The final details:
i. You can only use Market Leverage as an example network in your submission.
ii. Submit your entry by a text or video comment on this blog entry. For video submissions, please upload your video to Youtube, tag it with “Market Leverage Share Your Secret” and submit the link to your video in the comments section of this post.
iii. All entries must be submitted by 7pm on December 31, 2008.

– Join Market Leverage & Enter the Contest!

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17 Replies to “Secrets of Affiliate Marketing Contest”

  1. Hey Zac, how are the winners determined? Is it a random drawing or is it based more on who you or MarketLeverage thinks has the best idea? I'll enter either way, just looking for some clarification. Thanks!

  2. <a class="replyTo" href="#comment-92558" rel="nofollow">@Luke:

    One winner (for the ipod nano or flip mino hd) will be selected from this blog, by myself. The other prizes will be rewarded to a selection of winners from across all participating blogs, selected by Market Leverage. All winners are selected on the quality of their submission.

  3. Awesome! Here's my entry:

    I found a campaign for "free healthy samples" on ML, and I would promote it by first joining groups of bargain/freebie hunters on different social networks, and sharing the link as something that I found that they may all be interested in. Second, I would probably throw together a quick 'freebies' blog and put the creative all over the site. Third, I would find related forums where people discuss frugality and saving money and essentially repeat step one. You know what? It works. Slowly, but it works 😀

  5. Hey Zac, I will enter but will do it tomorrow. I just got out of a nasty tattoo outline for a sleve I am doing and my arm hurts like hell.

  6. Thanks for hosting the contest, Zac. I love that you provided an example, too! Hopefully that will help inspire some other great advice and affiliate marketing secrets. Good luck everyone!

  7. Here are the steps I would take to start promoting an offer from Market Leverage, the offer I have chosen for this example is the AB Rocket offer. I choose this offer because I think anything related to health will always have a market online. Get ready though, this is not going to be a small comment but the over all outline I will be showing you here I personally know works as I use it myself.

    Seeings how I am sure there are a lot of people like me who want to do PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising but just don’t have the budget to get into it this is a great way to start to build a solid foundation for yourself online for making money. I personally believe if you want to succeed online you need to build your income stream on a few different levels. A great place to start is by building quality affiliate websites. As I mentioned above I am going to look at the offer from Market Leverage for the AB Rocket. I am going to assume that all my research is going to tell me that this should prove to be a good offer to run with, but for all of your reading this keep in mind this is only an example and if you try and copy this exact layout for the exact offer it may not work.

    Step One.

    First thing you are going to want to do is check out what type of domain names are available that you can get that are related to working out or mostly working out yourAB’s, seeings how the product we are working with or starting off with pertains to your AB’s, It would be good to get a name that fits are product. To do this research, I use Google’s Keyword Tool. I will start off with a basic term like “working out” and see what other related keywords come up with the search. The goal behind doing this is to find a keyword phrase that fully relates to our product that has a steady amount of search traffic to it. Lets say we found a phrase using this tool that shows we have 2000 searches a month for it, and at a steady incline with a low AdWords competition. This term would be (example only) “working out abs”. Your next step would be to go to your hosting company ( I useBlueFur dot com) and see if that exact name is open in either a dot com or a dot net name. It’s not open but for the case of this example lets say that it is. Before you register that name you want to see who is all on the first page of Google for that term. Google it and take a look. I am going to assume you have the SEO plug in forFirefox so you can check the PR of sites, there back links and there domain ages. This information is important because if the first page of Google shows that all the sites are very old with high back links and PR, it is going to be very hard for you to rank that site and get a steady amount of organic traffic to it. So lets say everyone on the first page of Google are all lower then PR 3, less the 10000 back links and they are all younger then 3 years. When you were looking at the first age in Google you also noticed that all the sites that rank for the term “working out abs” all have some sort of weird name for there domain name. That is perfect and I will explain that in a second. Now I would register that name. While you are waiting for everything to go through and for your new site to be pointing to your server, its time to get some content.

    Step two

    Google your search term you want to get ranked for again, and get idea’s for original content. Get a few article’s together and also search for related news articles to your product. For now, just copy and paste the news articles links and titles and save them somewhere. You will use them later. Finish writing up your content articles (don’t forget to sprinkle your keyword phrase “working out abs” through your articles and do a complete review of your product “AB Rocket” with a few bad points but focus a lot on the good ones. Also grab some pictures for your product. Try and use a reporters view on your product, not a salesmen’s view.

    Step Three

    Now that your new site is pointing to your server and you can start building your site, install wordpress on it. Find a theme that fits with your site, but is clean. I like using the Flexx them from ithemes. Now that you have wordpress on your site and your ready to go, build your site, install your plug ins you like working with but also the wp-sticky post plugin. Your first article you are going to put up is going to be called “working out abs” and also post it under the category called “working out abs”and that post is also going to be your review of your product. With the sticky postplugin installed and activated, make that post the sticky one. It will always be the first post every visitor to your site sees first or your “sales page”. Your other articles just time stamp them to release over the coarse or a few months or so.

    When your building your new wordpress affiliate site make sure you add a privacy policy page to the site as well as a contact page. You will also want to grab some other offers from Market Leverage that fit with the niche of your site. Seeings how you are building a site about working out “getting in shape type of thing” you would want to grab the ML offer for the nutrients pill they have. Do a small review of it and build a page for it, repeat this step if ML has a lot of related offers. The more pages your site has the better you will do. Do the same keyword research for that page that you did for your sites name. Now, you have an affiliate site focusing on two products or offers from ML and you aretargeting traffic just with how you set things up. Regarding your news articles that you have links to and the headlines for you can either two do things with them. You can either build a page on your site called “related news” or something like that or you can hyperlink to thearticles from a widget in your sidebar. The only reason why you want these links is to show Google that you are linking to other sites that are related to your product.

    Step Four

    Now that your site is built, you have links to your products, maybe a banner or two, 4 or 5 pages built of original content and everything is ready to go, bookmark the hell out of that site and every single article you have on it and the pages too. Do this over the coarse of a week. A good way to do this is to use “Social Marker dot com” After that is done just leave it for a while.

    Did you pick up on the secret to ranking your site?

    In a few days after you bookmarked your site you should see that you are on page one of Google for your chosen term “working out abs” The reason why you are on page one so fast is for two reasons. First is that your are using wordpress. Google loves wordpress! The Second is, your site is 100% relevant to your keyword of “working out abs”. Your sites name is your keyword, your first article’s title is your keyword which is under the category that is also your keyword, and you have used your keyword in your meta tags. Google loves you nowbecause they know with out a doubt what your site is all about. I just used this exact method over this past weekend to take a 2 word (9 characters only) keyword phrase for a site name and place it on page one of google. I all ready have steady traffic to my site and clicks registering for my product I am promoting and one sale so far. Cool eh! The really cool thing about building a affiliate site this way is if youwatch Google trends, you can have a site placed at the top of searches for term before everyone else and be ready for the wave of traffic.

    What can you do after your site is built.

    Build more sites! If you set a goal of building 20 sites this way covering all different niches you will spread out where your income is coming from so if one niche or product lines falls off your not stranded with out money coming in. When you do get money coming in for your affiliate sales, bank it and use it for your PPC budget. When the time comes you have 1000 or so saved up, which ever product you have that is doing the best with sales and converting build a PPC campaign around it. Now that you have a site with good page rank that is converting your quality score for your campaign should be good because your already ranked for that term with your site. Ahh Haa! You guessed it, because of how you built your site using the keyword phrase or phrases you have you are now paying less in AdWords so by using this method of building an affiliate site you were able to pull off more then just one thing.

    Another Strong Tip!!!

    Don’t be stupid by putting adsense on your site. All you are doing is sending your traffic to MY AFFILIATE OFFER! Adsense is the absolute last resort for making money on a website. If you are going to promote affiliate offers, stick with them.

    If you like this method and need some help with it, by all means ask me. I will be glad t help!

  10. @Miguel Alvarez:

    There's a few differences from what I do to what Ed Dale taught. First off, I don't use wordpress direct. It sucks!! Writing original content is far better then the system of stealing other peoples content.Also notice that I did not state anything about market samurai. I found it does not work as well as just using Google's keyword tool. Also note, I am totally against adsense on an affiliate site. I am not about making a dollar nor am I about building up trust in people to try and use them for a bigger marketing scheme…..like Ed. Also, Ed taught you to find a niche that you liked or new something about then go from there. I don't do that either. I go with a product. Also, I never said anything either about Weebly or those other sites. You don't need to use them and they filter nothing for traffic. I only bookmark a site once and that is not for traffic, that is to get it indexed faster. Sites like stumble I find are bad for conversions so why waste my time with them.

    So you see, when you think more about it. It is not a summary of the 30 Day Challenge which I thought was a complete waste of my time. Out of 30 days, there was only 2 days of good information regarding the M/S Tool which has turned about to be a flop in my opinion and another money grab. But well see, maybe one day they will finish the tool. Also its data is off. I used it and parked a site 5 times on the first page of Google for the term "That tool" told me was good. I should of seen a minimum of 300 visitors a day from that data I got from M/S, I was lucky to get 5.

    Every site that I built (there was 3) that I used Ed's system on flopped. I started using my method above, and I saw results. I took what I learned, refined it to work for me and that is what is above.

  11. @Collin – Affiliate Marketing:

    Hey Collin… 🙂

    I didn't mean my previous comment to be any kind of offense. I really liked your post and I wish you luck on the contest for it.

    By the way, you're right… the method you described does have some variations from the 30-day stuff that make yours more effective. I agree that wordpress direct doesn't really work as claimed. It's a good way to keep stale domains alive, but really "nothing to write home about".

    Cheers!

    Miguel Alvarez
    https://Copywriting.com/

  14. Here’s my tip: (This is not really offer specific, but how to go about choosing an offer to market based off others success/failures)

    There is always people jumping the bandwagon to sell products/services of the established affiliate marketers. One of the best ways to get around this constant uphill struggle is to leverage other people and their hard work. There are ways to profit from this “publicity stunt”:

    1. When a new product is launched online, there will always be a period of huge search volumes. These searches come from people using all sorts of keywords to find the products and does their buyer research before handing over their cash. This is a great opportunity to get in front of these people as the new products are released to the market, and this works particularly well as keywords relating to new products have less competition in the search engines.

    2. Secondly, you can make money off other successful marketers indirectly. This is done by looking at how they are making money and modeling their system. All you need to do is examine how they are making money and model your own business around a similar process (do not copy other people’s work however, as this could land you in court).

    3. Post comments and add content to big sites. Spreading your content around the web is one of the most effective ways to get more traffic, but to truly take advantage of the success of others, your aim to get your content found on the big traffic sites where your target audience hangs out.

    Also wrote about your contest: https://www.dailydollarreport.com/zac-johnson-secr…

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