Category: Cost Saving
Quick Cash Tip #1 – Paying Attention Can Pay Off!
Posted by Kathy Jackson in Affiliate Marketing, Cost Saving, Keyword Generation Friday, 18 April 2008 09:43 3 Comments
If you are too poor to pay anything much more than attention, you can still make money in Internet marketing 
!
Most people think that the very best keywords are the most expensive keywords, but that isn’t necessarily true all the time. It IS true that some keywords are always good, and those keywords will be more competitive and therefore more expensive. But then there are those keywords that suddenly become — hot!
When a new product is launched, for example, a brand new keyword can be born that has absolutely no demand and is therefore cheap…really cheap. Which means that if you’re keeping your eyes open and stay ahead of the trends, you can be the first to bid on those keywords at bargain prices.
How can a keyword suddenly become hot?
When a celebrity does something that the keyword is associated with. Example: A recent Oprah interview sent the keyphrase “pregnant man” into #165 in the worldwide keyword searches. Six months ago that keyphrase wasn’t even on the radar.
When a new toy, gadget, game, or fashion item hits the market but hasn’t gotten “hot” yet. Example: “Webkinz” wasn’t always in the top 20 search terms, but now it is – and will probably stay there for quite some time.
When a major event hits the news – such as when the airlines canceling hundreds of flights for plane maintenance. “Flight departures” became the #10 searched term overnight.
So pay attention to what is happening in the world around you – you may just discover keywords that can be had for pennies, yet will make you a lot of dollars quickly.
Travel Back in Time for a Money-Making eBook
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Marketing, Best Business Practices, Content Creation, Cost Saving Monday, 9 October 2006 17:05 No Comments
Time Travel. It’s an interesting idea and something that I bet we all wish we could do. It’s a classic case of “If I knew then what I know now. . .” What if you knew that a book was going to be a best-seller, I bet you would just go back in time and write it yourself!
Someone pinch me, I must be dreaming, or am I?
You can find good books to market by finding those in the Public Domain. Then just do some research at the library to help you write ads for those books. (As a first step, try to find the original ad for the book.) Here’s how the process might play out.
Go to Project Gutenberg.
There you will find electronic versions of hard copy books that are in the public domain. You are free to sell those eBooks in the public domain and keep all the profit. (Be sure to check the copyright status first, to ensure they really are in the public domain.)
If you don’t want to re-type an eBook that you find, and you don’t have a text version or a way to covert PDFs, you can have someone scan in the pages. Then just convert it into a PDF-type eBook.
After you get your book together, set up a simple website and write the sales letter. (If you think you have a big winner, consider having a professional copywriter compose the letter.)
You can also poll Affiliate Classroom members to see if you might have a winning subject. If you don’t want to post your subject, just ask for advice on the general concept. There are a lot of gurus that hang out at the forums, so take advantage of them.
I’ve seen this done with very old books on dreaming and self-help. The gurus spend a few days with the processing and develop a $19 eBook. They send a mailer out to their list and then watch the orders come pouring in.
Other than the official site at Project Gutenberg, you should keep your eyes open in other places. You never know when you might find your million-dollar best seller in a pile of old magazines or books at an antique store. You might even find original sales letters that you can use to develop your own.
Just make sure they are indeed public domain items, and then develop your book, send a mailer to your list, and watch the orders come in!
Pay Per Click – But Don’t Pay Too Much
Posted by AC Editorial Team in Affiliate Marketing, Cost Saving, Tracking Thursday, 28 September 2006 11:19 2 Comments
Pay Per Click advertising has been touted as the fastest way to get visitors to your site. And it is fast, but it can also be expensive if you do it wrong.
The first thing you need to do after you open a Google or Yahoo! Search Marketing account is to set up your tracking codes. These codes will help you determine how much of the traffic coming to your site is actually buying. You can usually find these scripts in the Account Set-Up areas – they’re all ready to copy/paste into your transaction completion page.
The second thing I do is to see which keywords are performing the best. If there are some that are not performing, I do some keyword research.
Now, I know that there are programs like HitsLink and Indextools that will do this research for a small fee. But, I also know that in the control panel of my web site there is a place that lists the keywords that were used to find my site.
Don’t be afraid to go into your web site’s control panel! You need to get familiar with it because it is an easy way to track who is coming and going – and how they are finding you.
Anyway, I go into my stats section of the control panel and use the AWStats reports and find the “Search Keywords” section. Then I take a look at what words people used to get to my site. I almost always find keywords that I am not bidding on, and some I never thought of before.
Now, here’s the most important part. Because I never thought about those words before, I don’t know what other words might be related to them will bring traffic to my site. And, here’s where Wordtracker comes in handy.
Have you heard the saying “the money’s in the tail?” It means that these little words have more words behind them that are just as important (and maybe more profitable), but will not cost me an arm and a leg to bid on.
I’ll go into Wordtracker, look up my newly found keywords, and find more words that are related to them (I have found that Wordtracker will give me more results than any other program). Then I go back to Yahoo! or Google Search, and add minimum bids on words that no one else is bidding on yet.
Even if you don’t want to examine your web stats, Wordtracker is a helpful tool to find words related to those that you are already bidding on too.
So, that’s how I get more traffic, for less cost – and you can too!
Lower Your PPC Costs
Posted by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine in Affiliate Classroom Magazine, Affiliate Marketing, Cost Saving, PPC Tuesday, 2 May 2006 12:58 1 Comment
PPC ain’t cheap… but it doesn’t have to be ruinous either.
Google and Yahoo! provide about 90% of the search queries, but 10% of several billion per month is still a very large number. There are other engines out there.
Let’s run a sample calculation. Say MSN gets 10% of the traffic and suppose the click rate is 10%, both conservative estimates. Finally, suppose the total number of clicks from all sources is only 1 billion. (It’s actually around five times that.) 10% of 10% of 1 billion is 10 million ad clicks.
Spread those 10 million ad clicks over the top three dozen ads (90% of users will search through no more than three pages of results before trying a new query). That’s still a large number of clicks on your ad. (How big depends on which ads get what percentage of the total.)
How much money you make from that traffic depends on factors we can’t know at this point. We don’t know how often you convert a click to a sale � those numbers vary all over the place. We don’t know how much commission you make on each sale. Those numbers, too, vary quite a bit.
But to calculate your ROI (Return on Investment), you can fill in the numbers and finish the example… after you know one more thing. What does it cost you for a click?
That’s something you have a lot more control over than you may realize. True, most affiliates won’t be bidding against Bizrate or Shopping.com for ‘Plasma TV’ on Yahoo! or Google. The price of admission into that arena is high and, like gasoline prices, there’s little you can do.
Unlike gasoline prices, you have alternatives. Marketers are consumers too and, like many people, they sometimes focus too much on the offers from the famous. (See, advertising does work.) Coke may be the most famous cola in the world, but there are several alternatives besides Pepsi.
MSN or Ask are just two of the most obvious ones. But there are dozens of (admittedly smaller) engines out there. And they often get a healthy amount of traffic and good conversion rates by focusing on narrower niches.
Miva, for example, is used by between 11% and 22% of marketers and their cost-per-click tends to be much lower than the majors.
So, before you decide PPC advertising isn’t profitable, check out the ‘cost’ part of the ROI equation. Use our links compilation to find some of those lesser knowns out there that can offer you a good deal.
If the quality of traffic is high enough to keep your mileage up, you may find some stations are cheaper.
Even with a 10% conversion rate, PPC can still be very profitable if you remember every COO’s golden rule: Keep your operating overhead low.
