How To Earn Extra Cash From Home

I hope you know the definition of affiliate marketing. If you don't know it yet, it's basically selling or market other people's product. When you make a sale or lead, you will earn commission.

Here's the plan:

• Choosing Your Lens Topic.


• Finding Profitable Affiliate Products.


• Create Your Landing Page On Squidoo.


• Drive Traffic To Your Landing Page.

It's sounds old, isn't it? But once again, it's work!

I just want to give you some advice. Stop searching another business opportunity after another business opportunity. Focus to one first, examine the result, and improve your work. If the results doesn't make you any good, then move on. Don't just read an Internet Marketing lesson and lay it off without doing anything.

Internet is a great place to get distracted. In fact, the information are too overloaded. You NEED to focus!

You need to find a profitable topic for your lens. It's good to choose a topic that you like most but if it's not profitable, then you need to skip it.

What I mean a profitable topic is actually a profitable niche market. Here's how you can find it...

Method #1: Google Trends
The best way to find a hot topic for your lens is too visit Google Trends to find popular topics and choose a product-related topic so you can easily monetize your lens.

Method #2: Clickbank Marketplace
Go to Clickbank and choose "Marketplace" from the top menu. Choose any category you like or use the search function.

Let's assume that you'd want to promote a Weight Loss product on your lens. Just search for "weight loss" or "diet" on Clickbank. If you can find more than two products about weight loss, that's mean a good signal.

Look at the gravity of each product. If average gravity for weight loss products is above 100, mean there's a lot of people already bought a weight loss product.

Method #2: Ebay Pulse
Just go to Ebay Pulse and look at the popular searches. That's what people are really buying on the internet. You just need to create lenses around those products and monetize your lens.

Method #3: Google Ads
Go to Google and type your desire topic in the search box. Look how many ads are there (on the right side). Only choose a topic/market that have at least five ads.

I know you already heard about Clickbank a thousand times before but yes, it is still profitable to promote Clickbank products. I will also cover about some information about Squidoo revenue sharing.

First, get yourself an account and register at Clickbank.

Here are the steps to find a good offer on Clickbank:

Step #1
You need to get yourself familiar with Clickbank first. Just go to Clickbank and read the F.A.Q which is located in the "Customer Service" section.

Step #2
Go to the Marketplace and choose any category you would like to promote. Maybe it's the one you like.

Step #3
As you can see, there's a lot of products in the Marketplace. Choose the one that will give you at least $10 commission. The highest payout at Clickbank Marketplace is 75% of the total price.

Step #4
Look at the product Gravity (grav). The gravity indicates the popularity of each product. A product with gravity above 100 means that product is sold well and there's a lot of affiliates promoting it. It also tell us that there's certainly a market for that product.

Well, a product with at least gravity of 60 mean that there are people who will buy that kind of product. So make sure you choose a product that have at least gravity of 60 and don't pick a product with high gravity (above 300) to avoid too many competition unless you already have a huge list of eager subscribers.

Step #5
Another indicator you need to look is the %refd attribute. If you see a product with %refd:85% that's mean 85% sales of this product are generated by affiliates. Which mean there's a lot of affiliates who earn money by promoting this product. It also tell us that this product is profitable enough to promote.

Step #6
Avoid product with high refund rate. This is very important. A buyer can easily send email to Clickbank asking for a refund. This mean you will also lose your commission. To do this, you have to check at the product price and look at the commission percentage then look at the earning per sale.

If a product sell for $97 and the affiliate commission is 50%, then the $/sale should be $48.50. But if you see the $/sale is only $15-$20, this mean there's a lot of buyers for this product who asking for a refund. You should avoid to promote this product.

To be honest, there will always be someone who ask for a refund. What you need is to choose a product with minimum refund rate. If we look at the example above, then the $/sale should be at least $30.

Step #7:
Last thing to do when choosing an affiliate offer is to visit the sales/pitch page. Look at the product landing page. How is the site's design? Does it look clean and professional.

The important part is the sales copy. You need to make sure that the sales copy is persuasive enough.

Here's a quick guide to examining the sales copy:

• Read the headline. Does it an attention-grabbing headline? Does it makes you want to read the rest of the sales copy?


• Read the entire sales copy. Does it makes you want to buy the product? Does it offer benefits? Is there a guarantee?

Use the steps above when finding a profitable product to promote. If you just choose an offer without doing a proper research, then you have to depend on luck and hope someone would buy it.

Note: If you choose to find offers on CJ instead of Clickbank, choose an offer that has "Network Earnings" of 4 or 5. Also look at the 3 months EPC trend. If it increasing, then great.

Another Affiliate Network To Consider?
- Commission Junction
- Share-A-Sale
- Link Share
- Pepper Jam Network

Thanks Janet21 for your suggestions.

And oh -- When you decide not to use Clickbank, then you need to choose an offer that will pay you the best commission (e.g 5$ - 10$ per sale) and also look at the merchant's landing page. It has to be clean, professional, and converting (ask your affiliate manager for the conversion rate of each offer).

Anyway, you can always to place the Amazon or Ebay or Cafepress modules to your lens and set the payment option to "I Want Cash." 50% of this affiliate revenues will go straight to your Paypal account.

Why you need to create a landing page? Why not just sending visitors directly to the merchant's site? A traditional affiliate promotion is to sending as many people as you can directly to the merchant's page using your affiliate link.

Well, the game has now change as too many affiliates competing to promote the same product. So you need to be unique and stand out from other affiliates. Another reason to drive traffic to your landing page, which is a product review page, is to prepare your visitors and put them into the RIGHT mood before buying the product.

We're going to use Squidoo as our landing pages. The Squidoo lens will act as a product review page. To do write a review, you know about the product. You can ask the merchant for a review copy, or buy the product first to get to know about the product. But sometime I just read the entire sales copy and made a conclusion from it. One rule when writing a product review is DO NOT hard sell the visitors.

I won't write a guide about writing a product review, which is also called as presell page, here. But there's a good guide about writing affiliate presell step-by-step. You can click here to learn it. Use that guide to write your own presell page (or lens) and also visit this lens as your case study.

You can also visit Copyblogger.com to learn about how to become a good writer. It's actually necessary because you need write a compelling review to attract your visitors to visit the merchant's site.

Note: Do NOT overused your affiliate link. Use it only when necessary.

Driving traffic is the most important part of this money making activity. This is the part when you find a buyer for your offer. Since we're use Squidoo, then we're going to start driving traffic from inside Squidoo. The purpose of these techniques is build your presence in Squidoo and get some extra traffic. Here we are:

Step #1: Lensrolling
This step will NOT make your "money" lens flood by visitors BUT it's a good way to notify another lensmasters about your new lens. Go search another lenses that are related to your lens.

Step #2: Lens Commenting
Now we're going to steal traffic from other lenses that are already have a good traffic. Just go to the 'Top 100 lens' in your category and leave good comments. But do NOT spamming and leave a useful comment. Don't just say 'Hey, nice lens'. If you're going to say that, also leave a reason about why you like that lens. Find as many related lenses as you can to comment for. You can either use search function, visit the top 100, or visit your tags pages.

Step #3: The Squidoo Groups
You can join as many squidoo groups as you can. Find groups that are related to your lens. If you try to offer a weight loss product then you might want to join group about weight loss or muscle. You can leave a nice comment on the group HQ (if there's any). Also, why don't you build your own group to get more exposure.

Step #4: Build Your Own Lens Empire
Don't just create one lens. Create another lens that is related with your main lens as many as you can. These helper lenses are not about product review. It could be a how to or anything but it has to be related with your main topics. Make a small section about affiliate product that you're promote on each helper lens. Make a link that is pointing directly to merchant's page and another link pointing to your main lens. Repeat the three process above to drive traffic to each helper lens.

Now we're going to promote our "money" lens in another places on the internet. There will be a lot of hard work when doing this. But I will explain about how to get yourself organize later. Here are the steps:

Step #1: Search Engine Traffic
To drive traffic from search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN, you need to do keyword research and optimized your lens for SEO. After that, you need some backlinks for your lens and it has to be quality one-way links. Which mean you are not create a link back to the site that is linking to your lens. And oh -- The site who give you a backlink, it has to be relevant and also have a good PR. Now, that's what I called a quality one-way links.

I admit that there's no SEO guide in this lens, but you can register for free at this site to learn about Keyword Research, SEO, and your 30 Day Challenge to make money online.

And here's some great resources about SEO and Backlinks:
- Five Steps To Effective Keyword Research
- How to Optimize Squidoo Lens For SEO
- Squidoo SEO Article
- Increase Your Backlinks with DoFollow Sites
- How to Get Deep Links With RSS

Step #2: Bookmark Your Lens
I will assume that you already learn how to do keyword research and have your own keywords. Submit all your lenses to a lot social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious, Furl, etc. To save your time, you can use SocialMarker.com or SocialPoster.com when submitting your lens. Use your keywords on the title of your bookmark and must grab readers attention. Also use your keyword and phrases in the post description but don't just do keyword stuffing. You also need to write a good description.

Step #3: Bum Marketing
Bum marketing is actually article marketing. This is when quantity beat the quality. Basically, you need to write a lot of articles and submit them to a lot article directories. You don't need to write a great article but you need to make sure it is valuable enough for the readers. And please, no sales pitch but you can use the author resource box to write about who you are and your work and then create a linking to your "money" lens.

You don't actually need to write the articles yourself. You can hire someone from Elance.com or Need-An-Article.com to write articles for you. But if you choose to write it by yourself, here's a quick guide:

• Visit articles directory like EzineArticles.com or doing a search on Google to find related articles about your niche market.



• Just take the idea and then write a new article based on that idea.



• Use your keyword in the article's title and in the article's body.



• Spend some time to write your author resource box. Position yourself as an expert here and add a clear a call to action so that readers will visit your lens. Also consider to use PLR material as it allow you to claim the articles as your own.



• When using PLR articles, you also need to rewrite it because there might be a lot of people using the same article as yours. You can spin an old article into a brand new article using free article spinner like JetSpinner.com.



• Submit your article to EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, IdeaMarketers.com, and SearchWarp.com.

Article marketing is one of the powerful traffic generation. By doing this alone, you can generates a good amount of visitors to your lens (if you know how). Well, I have found a great guide to maximize the power of article marketing. Click here to find out.

Step #4: Forum Marketing
Find some forums related to your niche on google. Register on the forums and become an active member. Well, forum is a place to discuss something and not to advertise your product or offer. But you can always put an anchor link to your lens as your signature. Some forums doesn't use the 'nofollow' attribute so it will be consider by the search engine as a backlink. And the best part is that some search engin bot will ignore the 'nofollow' attribute. If you're doing forum marketing properly, it can gives you a lot of traffic to your lens.

Step #5: Video Marketing
Why don't you create a product review or educational video using screen capture software like Camtasia, CamStudio, or Jing and submit it to video sharing sites. Put your lens URL at the beggining and at the end of the video. Use your keyword in the video's title and write a keyword rich video's description. Also put your lens URL in the description and use a good tags.

Here's a list of video sharing sites:
- Youtube.com
- Revver.com
- LiveVideo.com
- DailyMotion.com
- Metacafe.com

To submit your video, you can use free video submission service like TubeMogul.

This activity will involve hard work and consume a lot of your time. To avoid being a computer slave, you need to get yourself organize by creating a schedule for your marketing activity. Here's an example:

Monday:
- Find affiliate offer
- Create a product review lens

Sunday:
- Submit your lens to Social Bookmarking
- Lensrolling
- Lens Commenting

Tuesday:
- Write article and submit it to articles directory.

And so on... and so on... and so on

The hardest part of making money online is about getting traffic. There will be a change after you doing all the hard work but there's only a few people who visits your lens. This is what makes a lot of beginner marketers quit before they can make their first $1. The traffic generation thing can drive you nuts!

If you can take the pain about driving traffic, then you will make some serious cash...

You need to know the key to get high-quality visitors to your lens (or blog, hub, website, etc). Well, the key is to always learn about traffic generation techniques and actually use it to find the right techniques for you. Don't give up too soon!

The 2nd problem would be the conversion rate. You need to learn about copywriting for this. You don't have to use copywriting skill only when you're writing sales letter. But you can also use it when writing you lens to lead the visitors to click your affiliate link. And you can always learn about copywriting for free at CopyBlogger.com.

"High-Quality Traffic + Conversion Rate = $$$"

It's a great idea to invest some of your money for a great course about traffic generation techniques. If you're really serious about making money with Squidoo and affiliate marketing, then I recommend you to own the Super Affiliate Traffic.

I didn't ask you to buy this product but Super Affiliate Traffic will show you the exact system that is use by Howie Schwartz to generates over 50,000 and make $56,000 using web 2.0 properties like Squidoo. And he did it in ONLY 28 days with NO list, NO JV partners, and NO Website!

Here's a screen shot of his earnings:

Right now the Super Affiliate Traffic is on the pre-launch phase and it's going to live at Dec 10th, 2008. I have watched the preview videos of Super Affiliate Traffic and I'm also one of Howie Schwartz's students.

You can also watch the video about Howie revealing his techniques by clicking here.

I have to say that his traffic system is always work for me. I just use it when promoting Google Conquest using Squidoo and earn me a $997 in a short 2 days. Here's a screenshot of my earnings:

So, if you want to give yourself a proven system to making REAL money online, then you need to watch Howie Schwartz's video to learn more about traffic generation techniques.

Click here to visit Super Affiliate Traffic website.

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