I’ve recorded a movie debunking the Google Thin Affiliate Site Myth.
Watch the movie and draw your own conclusions. Does Google really hate thin affiliate sites that provide relevant results to specific long tail keyword searches?
What do you think? Please comment below…
Ken McArthur is currently accepting listings to his Affiliate Showcase site for free.
(it normally costs $59 to be reviewed)
So if you have an affiliate program, get your skates on and visit this page.
You can tap into the 45,709 people who have Affiliate Showcase accounts and who may choose to display your products on their pages. 
(I’ve just added my affiliate program… the one with over a million dollars in sales tracked)
I’m wondering if these guys have an affiliate program, because this is going to be a hot product.
(”Mind control software which allows computer game players to move characters just by thinking about it has been developed by technology companies.
One game, which is due to be in the shops in a few months, is based on the schoolboy wizard Harry Potter where players are able to lift boulders and throw thunderbolts simply by concentrating on making it happen.”)
:-)
If you ever want to know how to write a quality newsletter, check out Internet Marketing Secrets by Michael Campbell.
Not only is the content 100% useful, but the newsletter itself makes a great case study for someone wanting to write a newsletter. Check out the headlines in the latest issue…
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1) Traffic Generation Experts Part 1
2) Why the Best Meat is in the Tail
3) SEO Tools for the Firefox Browser
4) Benefits of “Jiggling” the Web
—
Did you notice how they’ve been cleverly crafted to make you want to read the whole newsletter? Did you also notice the SEO aspects, so that when the newsletter goes online it has a good chance of ranking for “traffic generation”, “traffic generation experts”, “SEO tools”, “SEO tools firefox”?
Michael then has a lead piece where he mentions the audio part of the newsletter (available here and also on iTunes.) So, not only are his subscribers getting a text version, but also audio content. Presumably that means subscribers are finding Michael’s audios on iTunes and other places (podcast directories?) and he’s gaining new subscribers from those sources.
After the audio section, Michael crafts an affiliate promotion. If you’ve ever wondered how to pre-sell and give content at the same time (not an easy task!), check this out…
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The Best Meat is in the Tail
(Quality headline. Invokes interest and is amusing)
I’ve been saying it for years… in 1999 I told you to focus your sites on product makes and model numbers. In 2001 I told you to go either ahead or behind the retail curve. (It’s called the Long Tail now.)
(Establishes how long Michael has been teaching Internet marketing to his audience)
In 2003, I told you how to build mininets out of thematically related sites. I showed you how to link the sites together. I also diagramed the first ever thematic internal linking structure.
“Start with a generic home page, link it to targeted category pages, which link to highly focused make and model number pages.” (Which - depending on who borrowed the idea - are now called virtual real estate, spokes and nodes, themeing, silos or pyramids.)
In 2005 I told you to build landing pages for PPC ads. To target “buying phrases” like “nokia n80 lithium battery” and avoid the generic terms like, “cell phone.”
(Highlights how Michael has been on the “cutting edge” of Internet marketing and usually ahead of the curve, for many years.)
There was one student who listened to everything I said. Look at this testimonial he sent me back in 2004.
“Mininets and have been responsible for an explosion in my online revenue. It’s really about site building, cross linking, and monetization. Your ebook put me over the edge and synthesized that for me.” **this testimonial for Michael re-emphasises how he’s the “authority figure” in this context**
You probably never heard of my student because - like most good students - he stayed under the radar, quietly building a successful web empire. He went from humble beginnings to become a Jedi Master of marketing. And he does very well for himself. His name is Dave Tropeano.
(Strongly positive introduction of “student”.)
Now Dave is sharing what he has learned. A true character trait of success. Having enough abundance and confidence that he’s willing to share his wisdom in a new affiliate training system called, “Long Tail Cash.”
(Endorsement of the “student” by the “teacher”.)
Recently Dave told me, “The original inspiration for my course and my approach to affiliate marketing comes from Clickin it Rich. It tries to be a successor to your ebooks.”
“It’s a basic plan for people to follow, by marketing vendors, makes and model numbers. I’ve had great success with this and owe a lot of it, to my years of reading your newsletter and listening to your advice.”
That pretty much sums it up. I’ve watched the videos Dave produced, and they are certainly “inspired” by my ebooks Clickin’ it Rich (CIR) and Revenge of the Mininet (REV). If I had rewritten them in 2008… that’s probably what they’d look like.
(The killer point… Michael endorses the product and says it’s what he would have written. The credibility and authority he just built up now transfers to the product he’s endorsing.)
So if you liked my works, and were looking for the modern equivalent of them, then take it from Dave Tropeano, the student who became a master, that is willing to share all he has learned.
Long Tail Cash is the best affiliate marketing course you can get right now. So if you want to learn affiliate marketing, invest in yourself, invest in this knowledge. Slather it into your brain. For an investment in yourself always pays the highest dividends.
There’s further quality content in “3) SEO Tools for the Firefox Browser” and “4) Benefits of “Jiggling” the Web”. The latter, especially, gives some quality tips for how to use Web2.0 properties to get rapid links and search engine indexing. I love how he calls his technique, “Bleached white hat for my stuff… a little “beige” for the others”.
Michael is now using a hybrid system of his own written content married with the audio section where he interviews other marketers about different aspects of Internet marketing. For meontization, he blends both “sponsored ads” and an “advertorial” into the written newsletter seamlessly.
Simply an excellent example of how to write a top-quality newsletter.
I just took a while to review Ewen Chia’s Super Affiliate’s Club. I downloaded the Super Affiliates Blueprint ebook (quality), checked out some of the tutorial movies (very useful), reviewed the case study (excellent) and looked at the monthly PLR product (yup, that was cool too!)
Ewen is one of the world’s top Super Affiliates. He has over 373,000 subscribers to ONE of his autoresponders! I imagine that when he promotes a product, the whole server and sales system creaks as it tried to deal with the traffic.
I recommend Ewen’s Super Affiliate Club because 1: it’s quality and 2: Ewen knows the Super Affiliate world inside-out.
I just got an unsolicited email promoting “Get Google Ads For Free”. I didn’t promote the product at the time of release because, well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? 
But the spam got me curious. What was all the fuss about and is the product still being sold? So I did some research… checked out the sales letter and then the discussions here and here.
It’s interesting that Clickbank is still selling a product which claims to get you Google Ads for free, but in reality seems to just suggest you pay for your ads, then defray the cost of those ads through ads you place on your landing pages. That’s arbitrage, not free ads. The arbitrage idea has been around for a while, and the margins are small to non-existant.
As one guy said on the forum… “I bought it and asked for a refund, it teachs you how to sell banner space at your sites”
Doh.
There’s a dislaimer, in small print, right at the bottom of the sales letter, which says…
“the system it involves neither has anything to do with any “AdWords™ and/or AdSense™ credits or vouchers,” nor the direct provision by Google to the customer any direct free advertising at anytime; nor any free pay-per-click or otherwise paid-for advertising directly; but rather is a system that if applied correctly and properly and effectively, and as instructed per the author’s direction, may allow for the elimination of the burden of costs pertaining to that customer’s pay-per-click and/or otherwise paid-for advertising expense(s).”
(sarcasm on) Huh? So you mean you don’t get free ads? (end sarcasm)
So, if you don’t get “free” ads, what does this mean… at the bottom of the sales page…
“Now Google pay-per-clicks are FREE using my amazing secret!”
/sigh.
I’ve sent Clickbank this question… let’s see what they say…
“Why don’t you include a “refund” percentage for products listed in the marketplace? Adding that data would sort good products from poor ones thereby helping affiliates decide which products to promote.
Please let me know your comments. I think withholding this data is detrimental to the integrity of your marketplace.”
I just found an excellent calculator here which shows you the refund rate for a Clickbank product. It takes the info Clickbank shows you in the marketplace and does the calculation. For “Get Google Ads For Free”, affiliates should earn 75% of $67 (less the Clickbank fee), which is $45.73. But the actual earning per sale figure is $37.19. From that data the calculator suggests a refund rate of 18.67%.
Ouch. That’s almost one sale in five refunded. 
Check out this shocking information, hot off the press, from Tradedoubler, a UK affiliate network…
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The Currys program will therefore end on the TradeDoubler network on 30th May 2007.
Until this date TradeDoubler has been instructed by DSG to change the commission structure on the Currys programs to:
1% on General Sales and
1% on Reserve and Collect Sales
These changes in commission are effective immediately.
—
Currys has been a merchant under the Tradedoubler program for SIX YEARS.
Now we learn that Dixon’s Stores Group (who own Dixons, Currys and, I think, PCworld) decided to “put their affiliate business out to tender” (according to Tradedoubler) and, “effective immediately” the commissions drop to 1% (wow, a STONKING 1%!) to be followed by the end of the Curry’s program (at Tradedoubler) on 30th May 2007.
Wow. An immediate slashing of commissions and four weeks notice that the program will end!
I had seriously considered a business driving PPC traffic to Curry’s products. I think, depending on volume, the affiliate commission was up to 4%.
I’m so glad I didn’t waste my time and effort writing effective PPC ads, designing and building quality landing pages and earning commissions that, despite a 6-year track record, went up in smoke “effective immediately”!
Edit: I just checked the Tradedoubler merchant area and they’re still listing the old info. Depending on volume, you could’ve been earning 3.5% commission… so affiliates earning that would see their commissions shrink by 2/3rds immediately and the program closing in 4 weeks.
Tradedoubler say they’re aim is to “re-pitch for the business and we will do all we can to ensure we win the business back”.
Ha. Good luck with that, guys. And if you do win the account back, good luck getting any affiliates to sign up again.
This may be a bit “out there”, but it has important implications for making money online.
I’ve looked into using Pay Per Click advertising (PPC, primarily Google’s Adwords) to promote affiliate products and earn commissions on any sales.
The principle is simple… pay less to the search engines than you earn in commissions and you’re in business… profitable.
However, you have competitors thinking the same thing.
If you bid for high-traffic words and phrases, you have to pay more per click. Not smart.
So you look for lower-traffic words and phrases to pay less per click. If the words and phrases are highly targetted to the end-product, you will hopefully convert more visitors to sales and be more profitable than paying for high traffic words. Now we’re being smarter.
Guess what? Our competitors are doing the same thing, which forces UP the price per click, even though the traffic is lower.
This is like Spinoza said… “nature abhors a vacuum“… so you won’t find unbid valuable keywords! In a perfect system every keyword would be bid to its maximum value. If a keyword is valuable, it’s fully bid.
It there room in that system?
Yes, but only if you go the extra mile and extract MORE value from that keyword than is currently “priced in”. You could build advanced squeeze pages targetted to each keyword or capture names, emails and demographic data. But now you’re looking at a whole lot of work… will the rewards then be worth the effort? There’s no “easy money” available because the easy money attracts lots of competition… which requires you to work harder for the money, so the easy money becomes difficult money.
It’s like making money online in general… the barrier to getting online is tiny… you just need a computer and a web connection… so millions of people jump onto the Internet wanting to make money online, which raises the level of competition ensuring that there’s no “easy money”.
If you want to succeed as an affiliate, you have to work harder than most other people who want to make money as affiliates. If you want to succeed as a digital author, you have to work harder than most people who want to make money as digital authors.
Cause and effect.
However, if you think backwards… when Google Adwords first came along, when Adsense first came along, when the Internet first came along, then there was easy money for a short period of time… until the competition arrived. So, seeking out new opportunities could pay off handsomely. For example, finding the first nugget of gold in the Rockies… that was “easy money” until thousands of other gold prospectors turned up… then it became more difficult.
After mentioning Phil Wiley in a recent post, he dropped me a personal email pointing to this post at his blog.
In the post, Phil quotes from an email he got from Cody Moya. The contents are shocking. In order to boost his own affiliate sales, Cody suggests that people who have already bought a certain product ask for a refund and then buy again through his link in order to get his bonuses.
Ouch. That’s taking hard-earned commissions from other affiliates after they’ve been credited to the affiliate’s account. It also boosts the refund rate for the merchant, and costs the payment processor money to refund the transaction… which they’ll pass on to all merchants in higher fees. What’s more, it destroys the credibility of Cody. Can he really be that desperate for commissions to use such underhand tactics?
Definitely a step beyond acceptable affiliate tactics. Thanks for letting us know about it, Phil.
(interesting update to Phil’s post… “After reading my post Clickbank expert Harvey Segal reported it to his contact at Clickbank who quickly responded by suspending Cody’s account”.)
Clickbank said….
–> We have blacklisted this affiliate’s hoplink as well have suspended their account. It does take a few hours sometimes for the hoplink to be disabled after this has been done. They will also be notified that this type of activity is not tolerated by Clickbank. < --
Ouch! I guess Cody won’t be seeing his next commission check for a while. Congratulations to Clickbank for swift, decisive action.
How about this for an interesting clause from a well known affiliate network…
“Please note that if you earn commission whilst under consideration there will be two outcomes; if you are accepted you can keep the commission generated, however if you are denied the commission will be removed from your account.”
Oh, OK. So I can go ahead and promote a merchant whose affiliate program I’ve applied for while they consider my application, but if they turn me down, I get no commission regardless of the number of sales I may have generated.
Wow. That’s a good one.
OK, I may be throwing money down the toilet with this post… (not for the first time ,pdf link), but, hey, I love you guys, so here you go…
I haven’t put together a set of bonuses for Ewen Chia’s “Super Affiliate Cloning Program”, but I know some people who have. It wouldn’t feel right for me to promote a product offering no extra bonuses when I know people are basically offering their first-borns if you buy through their link. So here you go… compare the best offer and decide for yourself which bonuses you’d like…
Louis Allport…
http://www.AllportPublishing.com/SpecialOffer.html
Cody Moya…
http://www.codymoya.com/affiliatecloning/
Anik Singal…
http://clicks.aweber.com/z/ct/?RtezX.hNU7ZKiLC.5OCQPQ
What’s in it for me? Erm… Nothing.
If you’d like Ewen’s product, compare the offers, then empty your cookies. (see this tutorial for how to do that if you’re not sure) then revisit the site you’d like the bonuses from and order using their link.
I apologise to marketers offering bonuses with Ewen’s product that I don’t know about. The three above turned up in my Inbox, so I’m mentioning them.
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