Here’s my video review of Affiliate Cash Snipers. I included an explanation of what Affiliate Cash Sniper is, what it does and how it works. I even show you the software in action… creating a sniper and hosting it on my website for you to see what it looks like and how it works. Highly recommended!

The Affiliate Cash Snipers product is server-side software which you simply access with a username and password. After logging in, you create “Interactive Filter Widgets” to promote affiliate products from one of several merchants such as Amazon, Wal-mart and JCPenny.

Amazon-Example-Widget

The widgets are modelled on the drop-down menus that are commonly used on merchant’s websites to help customers find the products they want to buy more quickly. (see the example from Amazon, right)

You can place the widget, which is basically an interactive advert, on any webpage… either your own, or someone else’s if you have permission or buy the advertising space. The widget contains your affiliate link, so any sales resulting from clicks to the merchant will generate affiliate commissions for you. I made a diagram showing how the concepts works. The idea is that the interactive ads get a better response than banners, and because the visitor has made selections about the product they want to buy, and they land on the specific page for that product, there’s a better chance of a sale being made and affiliate commissions earned.

affiliate-cash-snipers

The best part of the Affiliate Cash Snipers system is that all the server-side coding is totally hidden from you. In the video, above, I show how simple it is to create a widget to promote telescopes on Amazon. After logging in, you just select Amazon as the merchant and drill down to the required category, then decide whether to include an image in your widget or not and a few other customisation options. When your happy with your choices, the server gives you javascript to copy and paste into a website. The sniper I created was done in just a minute or two, and I put it online for you to see at Affiliate Cash Sniper Example. You can see a picture of it, below…

Instant Product Engine Review (and my bonus)

Instant Product Engine

In the past, I’ve made thousands of “easy” dollars selling products I had resale rights to. Offering extra products to existing customers and subscribers is an easy way to make bonus profits… and resale rights are the BEST way to get extra products to sell. Basically, they’re a HUGE shortcut and can save you weeks of creating products and graphics or thousands of dollars in outsourcing costs.

Instant Product Engine is a NEW system from Eric Holmlund and Naveed which goes BEYOND resale rights. It’s an online rebranding engine which lets you rename the product, rename the author and generates brand new, unique graphics for your new product package!

I Bought Instant Product Engine

This system has been 3-years in development. I was in beta, which launched about a year ago, so I know it’s spent a long time cooking. I also upgraded from the beta to a full VIP member (see purchase proof, right)

How Instant Product Engine Works

You get access to an online system which lets you EDIT the product name and author name of an ebook-based product. It then generates unique graphics for the renamed product along with all customised files ready for you to download… in under 10 minutes! You get the new product package with PLR rights, so you can sell it and keep all the profits. Not only that, but there are FIVE products in the Instant Product Engine launch offer. Those five products are…

Product 01 – CPA Secrets Revealed

CPA Secrets Revealed is the ultimate cash generating machine. I have taken great care to jam pack every juicy bit of insider’s information into this easy to follow system. I’ve incorporated all of my own extensive marketing experience into this breakthrough system and combined it with the secrets that only the top 1% marketers know

Product 02 – Social Media for Internet Marketers

This product is for those who are not taking notice of the social media phenomenon and are marketing themselves and their business in the same old way, which could result in their abject failure to become the success they deserve to be.

Big business doesn’t know how to talk to their customers. They only know how to pitch and sell. That’s why entrepreneurs and small businesses have a much greater chance of succeeding in the social media realm.

Product 03 – Blogging Ultimatum

New ebook reveals the hidden money-making tactics that you should be utilising with your blog.

There’s a ton of flexibility available in blogs that you’re probably unaware of, and you can utilise WordPress blogs for much more than just a blog… In fact, you can utilise WordPress as a content management system (CMS), and with the inclusion of any number of amazing plug-ins, create membership sites, shopping malls and much, much more.

Product 04 – Content Magnet

Learn everything that you’ll ever need to know about article marketing…from keyword density, link stuffing, to the best article directories to submit to for higher Google rankings…and more

It doesn’t matter if you’re totally clueless about article marketing.THIS is guaranteed to fill you in with the knowledge, guidance, and ability to go from the bottom of the search engines to the very top…And stay there, for good!

Product 05 – Super Affiliate Marketing Strategies

The missing key to success that will transform struggling, broke affiliates into overnight high-earning super affiliate sensations!

This is the perfect guide for affiliates that want to take their earnings up to the next level, and create a long-term income they can rely on. I have taken great care to jam pack every juicy bit of insider’s information into this easy-to-follow system.

Of course, those are only the default names… you get to call them whatever you like… and custom graphics are created around the name you choose!

Why Is Instant Product Engine Special?

Instant Product Engine SOLVES the “giant problem” of PLR… that everyone usually ends up selling the same product, under the same name and with the same graphics. By changing the name, author and graphics with just a few clicks, you get a UNIQUE product package and NO COMPETITION in the marketplace.

The re-branding is done ONLINE, in just a few minutes, with just a few clicks. Click Here For A Video Walkthrough. For EACH product you get…

Products (PDF, worksheet, checklist, process map)
Graphics (customised)
Sales Letter (customised with your product name throughout)
Download Page (customised with your product name)
Squeeze Page, Thanks Page and Short Report (to build your email list)
Template (if you want to add more pages to your website)
Source files for all (Word docs)

Instant Product Engine Is Great Value

This 7-day launch offer is insanely good value when you consider that your other options are…

1: pay ghostwriters to write ebooks , graphic designers to create graphics, and copywriters to write the sales letters!

2: do all the work yourself and invest weeks of your own time.

As I said, this is a great shortcut and, even better, is one that IMPROVES on PLR products by letting you rename them and creating custom graphics based on the new names!

Start your New Year with a BANG with these five product packages branded with your own product name, author name and custom graphics!

My Instant Product Engine Bonus…

Just to make this offer even sweeter, I’ll throw in the following unique bonuses.

1: My brand new “profiting from PLR” video to get you up and running quickly. (value = $47)

2: My brand new “Massive PLR Profits” report for you to sell or giveaway as a signup incentive. (value = $47)

Both bonuses will be ready by the end of the promotion and delivered via email on Jan 3rd.

To claim your bonuses, just…

Empty your cookies
Buy the product… Click Here For Details (make sure the Affiliate ID = scamfree when you order)
Send your Clickbank receipt to fabbonus AT googlemail.com

That’s it. Your bonuses will be sent on Jan 3rd!

[below I've posted my new PLR primer report. If you'd like an editable version of it plus the rights to re-write it and re-use it just order "PLR Jackpot" by clicking this link, then send your receipt to: fabbonus AT googlemail.com . As a special thank you, I'll also send you access to a $47 report called "Pay Per View Riches" to give you some jump-start methods for traffic generation]

What Are Private Label Rights… And How To Make Money With Them!

Private Label Rights (hereafter called PLR), are the rights to take something, usually a product or report, and edit it in addition to being able to sell it yourself and keep the profits. Having PLR rights to an ebook usually means you can re-write it to make it unique, add your name to it as the author or even just “salami slice” it into smaller chunks of content for your blog or website.

Sometimes it’s easiest to see what PLR is by comparing it to what you get with Resale Rights. If someone sells you resale rights (sometimes called reprint rights) to an ebook they wrote, you have the right to re-sell the product at your website and keep the profits… you don’t own the writer of the ebook any money beyond the original payment for the resale rights. However, you cannot edit that ebook. So, if the author sprinkled affiliate links throughout the ebook, any affiliate commissions generated by the ebook would all go to the author.

By contrast, with PLR rights, you could edit the ebook to change the affiliate links to your own, thereby earning money from the sale of the product and also from the affiliate links within the ebook. You can also “re-package” the content as an audio, video or physical product. That’s why PLR rights are considered more valuable… because you are able to edit the ebook and replace the author’s name with your own, add in or replace text and edit affiliate links… as well as re-packaging the product if you like.

Just for completeness, Master Resale Rights are the rights to not only sell a product and retain all the income, but also sell Resale Rights to the product. Generally the sale of Master Resale Rights dilutes the value of the Resale Rights and if you’re considering buying Resale Rights, be cautious if Master Resale Rights are being offered too. Usually, the only limitations placed on someone buying PLR is that they can’t give away the product, sell the source files or offer any distribution rights (PLR, Resale Rights etc) to their customers.

What are the benefits of PLR products?

The major benefit of buying PLR products is that they are massive time-savers. It’s common to buy the rights to a product and receive not only the source file for the product, but also a pre-written sales letter and “thank you / download” page, complete with graphics and perhaps a squeeze page or affiliate signup page. Creating all those elements of the sales process yourself is usually beyond most people who will have to outsource the graphic-design or sales-letter writing, even if they’re happy to write the ebook, which can take a long time on its own! So, the time savings are huge and allow you to start selling products much, much quicker than if you had to create everything yourself.

How can you make money from PLR products?

Basically, you make money with PLR by selling the products you obtain rights to. If you have an existing customer list, offering PLR products adds another revenue stream to your business… especially if you put the offer in your autoresponder follow-up sequence. If you don’t have a customer list, you can offer the product to your prospects list at a low price to start building your customer list. If you don’t have a prospects list, you can try to find PLR offers that allow you to give the item away (usually reports, like this one), or write a short report yourself and give it away in exchange for your visitors email addresses… then, on the page people see after submitting their email addresses, show them an offer for a PLR product on the same topic as the report.

You can use the PLR product to enter different markets, such as selling via Kindle, reposition it as a video product, reposition it as audio and sell it on iTunes, reposition it as a physical product and sell it on Amazon using CreateSpace.

What pitfalls are there to be wary of regarding PLR?

There are some things to be aware of regarding PLR. Firstly, you’re responsible for the sales process and customer support for any PLR you sell, so it’s wise not to offer PLR products in many different niches and markets unless you’re willing to support customer queries on many different topics. I wouldn’t recommend selling PLR on how to grow specialist roses unless you know about that topic because the first customer to ask you an on-topic question will be a cause of embarrassment!

Secondly, depending on the offer, many people may buy the same PLR product as you. It wouldn’t be good for your reputation to sell a product to a new customer that many other people are selling, especially if it’s a small niche… the customer may well end up buying duplicate products and getting irate. By the same token, people who don’t change a PLR product at all are only left with the price to compete on, which results in a “race to the bottom” as everyone with the rights tries to offer the product at the cheapest price. In some jurisdictions, the people offering the rights are not allowed to set a minimum price for the product, which results in copies being sold on eBay for pennies.

By far the best use of PLR is to re-write the product, at least partially, so you have a unique product, re-name it and tweak the graphics for it so that you can genuinely offer a product no-one else is offering. Most PLR products can be improved by expanding on sections and doing a good rewrite.

Thirdly, there’s often junk on the Internet. I know, it’s hard to believe, right?

It’s very important that you don’t buy PLR products based on price. Good PLR costs a lot of money to create when you consider the product ghost-writer, the sales letter author and the graphics person all need paying as well as co-ordinating them all and then bringing the product together for sale.

Buying from a legitimate PLR source means you’ll get good quality PLR products and can confidently buy from them in the future.

So, if you’re looking for a short-cut to a quality product… here’s a summary…

1: Get quality PLR (from PLR Jackpot)
2: Re-write the PLR to improve it. Rebrand it with a new title and either your name or a ghostname.
3: Sell the product to your existing contacts, or reposition it to sell as a new media (audio, video, physical).
4: Stick to products in a niche you know.
5: Place offers for your PLR products in an auto-responder sequence to cross-sell to your other customers in the same niche.

Thanks for reading, and best of luck with your PLR sales!

JV Notify Pro

It’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s been around online marketing for a while that “product launches” are a successful method for maximising sales and profits.

If you can organise and execute a good product launch, especially in the Internet marketing niche, you can expect a quick windfall of sales, profits AND build a list of customers at the same time. 

Interestingly, all online product launches use roughly the same “recipe” to generate sales. Contrary to what most people believe, selling products online is a difficult task… people can’t touch the product, they may not know or trust the merchant to deliver the product, they may be concerned about security etc etc. Just looking at the shopping cart abandonment stats (anything from 55% to 71% depending on which survey you read) gives you an idea of how hard it is to convert prospects to sales. To generate the most possible sales, a product launch recipe uses…

New Product: Newest = Best
Coming Soon: Anticipation
Limited Quantities: Act Now!
Offer Deadline: Act Now!
Testimonials: Everyone Loves The Seller / Previous Products!

But, I’ve left out a specific “ingredient” of online product launches. Do you know what it is?

Email promotions from affiliates and JV partners: Sales Amplification

There are many ingredients for a successful product launch, but one of the most important ones is an army of affiliates ready to promote your offer. If you’ve ever seen a product launch from the point of view of a “JV partner”, you’ll have seen how much effort goes into marshalling the efforts of the partners, from personal emails containing product review access, to “copy and paste” email content, to JV competitions and prizes, to offers of “reciprocal mailouts”… all on top of high commissions.

Unfortunately, for a newbie marketer, it can be difficult finding those affiliates and JV partners.

One of the best shortcuts to take is to advertise your product launch a few months in advance on a JV broker site.

[Note, people use "affiliate" and "joint venture partner" interchangeably online. The only difference is that a JV partner is more likely, on average, to be able to generate sales than an affiliate]

One of the best, longest-running JV-broker sites is run by my friend, Mike Merz who I’ve known since about the dawn of the Internet!

You can join his “JV Notify Pro” website for free, but there’s also a “Partner Upgrade” offer which is discounted if you join in the next few days…

Why should you upgrade?

1: to get your launch mentioned in JVNP mailouts
2: to get complimentary review access to products you’re interested in promoting
3: to access VIP areas of the forums

So, grab the free account, or a “partner upgrade” and start networking! Then, when you’re ready to do a product launch, people will know you from the forums and be willing to be an affiliate or JV partner for you!

I would guess that most successful Internet marketers have used Mike’s JV Notify Pro service to help get them started.

Google Killing Keyword Tracking

If you’ve ever done “keyword research” for your websites, you know it’s a minefield. Unless you have a Ph.D. in keywordology, you’ll quickly be bamboozled by comparing ”visitor volume”, “seasonal trends”, “exact versus phrase match” and all the other related variables that go into finding “good” keywords to target and write articles for.

One of the easiest ways to shortcut the entire process is to search your webserver logs for the keywords that people actually USE when searching Google (or other search engines) before visiting your site. I even created a product called “Niche Treasure Hunter” around this keyword research topic. All you have to do is trawl your weblogs for these “Bonus” keywords. You can do it manually, or use software to do it automatically. I do a bit of both, with Google Analytics doing the automation for me.

When you discover a keyword that someone used to find and visit your site, it’s a great feeling. If it’s a keyword you wrote an article around, it’s proof that your SEO is working. If it’s a keyword you DIDN’T write an article around, that’s even better because it shows that Google trusts your site enough to send you traffic for a Golden keyword you didn’t actually optimise for… and now you can write an article around it to get more visits!

For example, say your main keyword is “toy electric train”, but, one day, you notice someone visited your site for the keyword, “electric model train”. When you check at Google, you’re only on page two for that keyword. How hard would it be to get more visitors for “electric model train”, when you know that, without trying, you’ve generated traffic for it from page two of Google? Pretty easy, right? That’s why I call them bonus keywords!

But now Google is starting to hide the data containing the keywords from webmasters. When people do a Google search while logged in to their Google account, the search is done at a secure page, an https request. The results of the secure search are show to the Google user as normal, and the click on the chosen search result takes them to the website they want to visit… BUT the search keyword is NOT passed to the destination web-server.

It’s estimated that about 10-12% of searches done at Google are secure ones, which doesn’t seem like a problem, until you consider what would happen if Google switched ALL searches to the secure system. All referral keyword information would be hidden resulting in webmasters losing “Bonus” keyword data, third party analytics software being unable to track “keywords to sales” and advertising platforms that display ads based on the incoming keyword searches would stop working.

So why would Google make the switch to secure searches? Well, it would be an obvious way to let everyone know (including lawmakers and regulators) that Google cares about “user privacy”. Not only cares, but is actively switching people to secure searches. Who could argue that making the switch would be a good thing? Of course, the fact that it kills “bonus keywords” and “keyword to sale tracking” for webmasters as well as certain advertising methods would be just coincidental. Interesting, Adwords ads still reveals the search query to the advertisers! I guess Google is assuming that, 1: people can tell the ads from the organic results and, 2: are happy to give up a measure of their privacy to advertisers that they’re not happy to give up to the websites appearing in the organic results. That’s quite a big assumption…

Of course, Google says that webmasters need not fear! If you use Google’s Webmaster Tools (GWT) you can, “receive an aggregated list of the top 1,000 search queries that drove traffic to their site for each of the past 30 days”. Woohoo. I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t like GWT at all. I’d much rather do my own digging through my weblogs or via Analytics than trust the “aggregate list” from GWT.

What do you think? Is this a deliberate ploy by Google to move webmasters to Adwords, or just a privacy -related action ahead of a regulatory requirement? Will it affect keyword tracking? Will it affect you as a user of Google, or as a webmaster?

[comments are now closed. When the "spam to genuine" ratio exceeds 50:1 it's time to close the comments!]

Easy Money

Ahh. /sniffle 

It was a very lucrative niche within Internet marketing… selling cheesy “get rich quick” ebooks or software (step one, download… step two, install… step three, RICHES!) using scumbag marketing tricks such as false scarcity (only 300 ever!), fake screenshots ($4,312 per day!), fake testimonials (“it was super easy to make money” Joe, Dallas) and pretty much spewing a stream of lies to make sales.

Sadly, because human nature is what it is, pushing all the emotional buttons worked, and the junk products sold like hot cakes to desperate and lazy people. Many cheesy “marketers” made small fortunes and then, naturally enough, sold their “expertise” in the form of “coaching programs” where they explained how the scam worked, giving rise to yet more junk products and deceptive sales letters.

Clickbank

Of course, the marketers needed a way to take payment, and they primarily used Clickbank, who not only processed the credit card orders, but also provided a pool of potential affiliates to help promote the junk products and then cuts the checks to pay everyone. For some reason Clickbank approved the “pitch pages” where all the unethical and deceptive marketing tricks were being used. Perhaps the fact that they creamed off money from each sale prevented them from wondering why the products with “only 300 copies available” actually sold tens of thousands of copies… or why the refund rates were so high. Perhaps they just didn’t care.

So, if the marketers, affiliates and Clickbank made money, and the customers could get refunded easily if they so wished, where was the problem? Quite simply, the whole of the digital marketplace suffered from the unethical marketing tactics being used to sell the junk products. Once a customer had bought one of the junk products, I’d guess they’d be very unlikely to ever purchase anything from Clickbank again. When that situation is repeated over many, many merchants and customers, you can see why the whole Internet marketing niche started to suffer. As it became harder to make sales, marketers with questionable ethics start employing the same deceptive tactics and pretty soon the IM niche was drowning in a sea of deceptive marketing! Almost a year ago I wrote about the problems this lack of trust was causing, so did many other marketers such as Gauher.

FTC

Well, finally, the marketers have been disowned by Clickbank… because “certain regulatory agencies and credit card processors have been taking a very close look at sales and promotional messaging in the e-commerce space” [email sent to Clickbank vendors]. To my mind that sounds like Clickbank have only acted under pressure from “regulatory agencies”, presumably the FTC and others.

So, what have Clickbank decided to do?

Here are some of the additions Clickbank have added to their terms and conditions for vendors to abide by. They are effective, for all products, from today, September 1st 2011…

No False Scarcity

Yay! No more, “only 300 copies available”, unless it’s actually true! Clickbank will ask on the product submission form if quantities are to be limited and will stop sales when that number is reached. They say that the offer can be “reopened” after 7 days. Why that is acceptable I don’t know. Surely if it’s only 300 copies, then selling more after 7 days is still unacceptable? This “scarcity” rule also applies to the length of time a product is available… so no more, “ends in 24 hours” unless it actually will end in 24 hours!

Clearly Display The Price

The product price must be displayed in size 12 font, which is probably pretty close to the normal font size on this blog post. It’s not clear if Clickbank mean 12-pixel or 12-points, either way they’re fairly similar, and roughly equivalent to a “normal” font size for body copy online. For a visual guide, see this page.

No False Discounts

A product can’t be sold as “$37, was $97″, unless is was previously sold at $97.

No “Required” Upsells/Downsells

Upsells, Downsells and One-Time-Offers must be “enhancements” to the initial product and must not be required. The “no thanks” links must be clearly displayed in at least 12 font.

Limits to Upsells

No more than 3 upsells (one time offers) and two exit offers for each sales flow. Does that mean there won’t be umpteen popups screaming, “wait, don’t go, here’s the same thing for $10 less, for the next three people only!!”?

No Cheesy Marketing Phrases

… such as “one push button to make money” or “three simple words will provide you income”.

No Fake Testimonials

Everything said about a product in a testimonial (video or written) must be “capable of substantiation” which means you must be able to prove it. You must be able to provide the testimonial from the person giving it as a signed document if requested. The FTC also requires you to be able to give contact details for each person giving a testimonial if requested.

And for affiliates…

No Fake Review Sites

Clickbank say, “affiliates cannot pose as neutral third parties evaluating two products so they make a commission on selling one of them.”

Conclusions

While it’s good that Clickbank have finally decided to stop merchants using unethical and deceptive marketing tactics, it’s a real shame that they took so long and appear to have only instigated these changes in response to pressure from “regulatory agencies”.

Hopefully, they vigorously enforce the new Terms and Conditions and try to claw back some credibility for their slogan, “The Web’s Most Trusted Digital Marketplace”.

What do you think about Clickbank, the ethics of sales-letters and the state of the Internet marketing niche? Leave a comment below…

Google Bowling

This is an update to the widely-read post, “Google Breaks Its Own Golden Rule” which you may want to read first to get up to speed.

I’ve tested this myself with new sites… when I built them using only unique, quality content and linked to them in ways recommended by some Internet Marketing “gurus”… BAM.. the sites get dropped by Google. Sites that were built the same way without the links retained their rankings, so it’s not the Google Honeymoon effect in action, but a real negative effect from getting links Google considered “spammy”.

So much for the Google Golden Rule that links from external websites couldn’t hurt your rankings. Perhaps that was true in the past, but it’s not true now. When I wrote about my suspicions back in May I thought that Google would only penalise sites for bad links if they were new sites. I expected the penalty to be lifted as the site aged… perhaps gradually so as to avoid a new Internet Marketing craze such as “Buy Websites Over 18 Months Old To Avoid The New-Site Penalty”. You can almost see the “guru” emails promoting the new ebook, right?

Well, in Dr Andy’s latest EzSEO Newsletter (which is excellent and you should subscribe to it) he released details of a test he performed on an old website which also lost ranking positions in Google when he built some “spammy” backlinks. In his test, the website was five years old, PageRank 2 with 80+ phrases in the top 100 at Google and within a month of building “spammy links”, all the rankings were lost. Dr Andy controlled the source of the spammy links and deleted them as a further test. Within three months 68 of the 80+ phrases are back in the top 100. For those who are interested, in the comments section of the blog post describing the test, Dr Andy says the “spammy links” were, “mass links on WordPress MU networks that I built. I had 25+ links to the site PER MU site”.

So, what conclusions can we draw?

Well, it now seems certain that the sudden appearance of spammy links can hurt sites, so Google has most definitely thrown out its “Golden Rule” in favour of tighter controls on backlink profiles to identify potential spam websites.

Furthermore, the profiles of sites at risk reaches well beyond the parameters I expected meaning many more, if not all, sites are susceptible. With both PageRank and aging, I would’ve expected Dr Andy’s site to be safe from any kind of link-profile penalty, but it wasn’t. So you can’t throw spammy links at aged sites with PageRank and expect them to be at best helpful or at worst ignored. It’s not clear if there are levels of PageRank or years of aging (or a combination of both) where sites do become immune to spammy links in their profiles.

It’s more important than ever to be a good guardian of the link-profile of any sites you own. It’s best to assume that building spammy links to any websites can actually wipe your site from Google’s search engine results… and if you don’t OWN the sites you put the links on, (which could be because you use services providing anonymous links), you won’t be able to remove them like Dr Andy did… so your site will almost certainly suffer a long period of ranking at the back of Google.

Winning Ware

I’ve been meaning to write this review for a while, but unlike most cheeseball marketers who just use “canned copy” provided by the product owner and try to pass it off as a “review” in the name of making a few bucks affiliate commission, I needed to find the time to actually do a detailed review of what is a very comprehensive and powerful product.

So what is Sales CSI?

Sales CSI

Well, the product creator, Rick Braddy, has taken the “CSI” detective theme and applied it to e-commerce. You become a “sales detective” during the course. In his product, CSI stands for “Conversion Success Investigation”. Basically, the course is for people who are making sales and want to identify ways to improve their conversion rate by reverse engineering the source of the sales (both the referring website or search engine keyword and the content they views on your site) and using that knowledge to generate more sales.  While these are advanced Internet marketing strategies, they are worth learning and applying as soon as you start making sales because it’s a lot easier to improve your conversion rate by a percentage point or two than it is to double or treble your traffic. Let me illustrate with an example…

If you get 1,000 visits per month at a 1% conversion rate, you make 10 sales. If you improve the conversion rate to 2%, you’ll double your sales to 20 per month. If you went in search of more traffic INSTEAD of improving your conversion rate, you’d have to double that… which means getting 2,000 visits per month instead of 1,000. Ouch!

In order to improve your conversion rates you need to install tracking tools to let you measure what’s happening at your site. “You can’t improve what you don’t measure” is an old marketing axiom.

The course is delivered as a series of online videos, along with the MP4 video files to download if you wish. It would’ve been nice to have PDF transcripts and perhaps the slideshow slides, but as a video course, it works just fine.

Sales Detective

Module One consists of five videos and explains the “nuts and bolts” of tracking, including how to install both Analytics and Adwords to track signups, leads, conversions and sales. From what I understand, you can use Analytics or Adwords, you don’t have to use both. Further tracking tools such as Open Tracker and Affiliate Prophet are covered to go “way beyond” Google Analytics and track real-time visitor actions on your website including the path they take through your site and their site interaction metrics. I like how Rick takes you through actual data from his main websites… there aren’t many Internet marketers willing to do that. A good example is the attention and conversion stats from his Affiliate Prophet account, which illustrates what you can do with the tool.

Module Two consists of four videos (almost another hour of tutorials!) and goes into far greater detail for Analytics (goals and funnels, big picture and segmented views), Affiliate Prophet and Open Tracker for detailed analysis.

Once you’re able to gather all your data and know how to generate the most useful reports, the five videos in Module Three take you through “forensic analysis” of the data you’ve acquired to back-track from the sale or lead to the source of the sale or lead such as how they found your site and which content they viewed, so you can determine your most effective marketing methods. When you’ve identified what piece of content resulted in a “buying decision”, you can focus on that as your primary content creation method and also direct other traffic on your website to the pieces of content that generates buyers. Similarly, you can see which pieces of content don’t result in sales, and down-grade your use of that content.

Module four is just one important video which takes you through the important decisions you can make based on the data and analysis you’ve done so far. As I said above, you can amplify, reduce and another option, fix (for if something is discovered to not work properly on your site).

Module five (three videos) takes you through the fine-tuning of your decisions and re-evaluation of the effectiveness of your decisions. These modules also walk you through using Google’s Website Optimizer to do A/B and multi-variate split testing.

Finally, Module six (two videos) look at the best practices associated with increasing conversions such as modelling the best practices in your industry such as your competitor’s homepages and squeeze pages and the key elements on those pages that most affect the conversion rates.

Overall, this is a very complete course for intermediate and advanced Internet marketers who want to learn how to increase the conversion rates of signups and sales. It’s an easy-to-follow set of videos done by a conversion expert who explains advanced concepts easily. I highly recommend it.

Click here for more information on becoming a Sales Detective with Sales CSI!

.co.cc domain name

I don’t know about you, but recently I noticed a lot of spammy-looking webpages in Google’s search results coming from .co.cc. Well, it seems like Google took the same view and dumped all .co.cc pages from their index.

What I didn’t realise was that .co.cc was NOT a domain extension like .com, .org and .co.uk. In fact, .co.cc is just a regular domain, like neilshearing.com (the actual extension is .cc). When people signed up for a .co.cc “domain”, they actually got a sub-domain, such as pages.co.cc or pages.neilshearing.com which they redirect to places like blogger.com. Why’s that significant? Well, the fact that .co.cc is one domain name allowed Google to clean out 11 MILLION .co.cc sub-domains by simply banning the main domain from its index. 

It’s always risky to build a business relying on an asset someone else owns, especially when that asset is provided to you at no cost. Anyone who relied on free Google traffic to a .co.cc sub-domain was relying on at least TWO free services… Google and whoever owned the .co.cc domain. I started selling my first ebook back in 1997 from free webspace given to me by my Internet Service Provider, but I also knew it was risky and bought my own domain name later that year. So, fourteen years later, the same rule applies… don’t build a business around other people’s assets, especially if you don’t pay for them.

In other words, don’t do this…

SEO 4 U... DOH!

Double Six

The goal of SEO is to get to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for any specific keyword phrase. As Google accounts for the lion’s share of the market (about 65% at the moment), most efforts are expended in trying to rank at the top of Google’s SERPs.

In the past, capturing the number one spot was the only game in town. Since then we saw “indented listings”, which were coverted for a while due the the fact that if you had a top ranking, you could get a second, indented, listing quite easily and more than double your traffic for that keyword. Indented listings fell by the wayside as Google evolved… and now, behold, the power of SITELINKS and BRANDLINKS!

When Google thinks you’re searching for a specific website, it may return “sitelinks” for that particular website. They look like this…

Google Sitelinks

But, Sitelinks aren’t the only games in town… there are also “brandlinks”, used when Google thinks you’re searching for a specific brand, in which case it may return several pages from the chosen website as full listings in the results. Here’s an example for Hitwise…

Google BrandLinks

But… wait for it… websites can get an immensely powerful combination of Sitelinks and Brandlinks. For example… Amazon and Nike…

Google Amazon SERP

Google Nike SERP

OK, I can hear the wailing from here, “but I’m not Amazon or Nike… how does this apply to me”?

Well, you don’t have to be Amazon or Nike to benefit from the sitelinks and brandlinks combo. Check out the results for this search…

Google PHPBB SERP

Through branding itself around “PHPBB Hacks”, that one website has no less than TWELVE links to it before the next website gets a look in!

So, the message here is to become the 500lb gorilla for any niche where you run a website. As you build a brand around the name of the website (note, the domain name exactly matches the search phrase) you’ll increase your chances for both sitelinks, brandlinks and the massive 12-link combo!