Work at home on the Internet: internet marketing and affiliate program help.
Back issues here Issue 246 | Nov 17th 2002

Letter from Phil

Len Thurmond, editor of the respected Affiliate Review caught my attention today when he endorsed a new tool for affiliates, in his latest ezine issue.

Talking about new software called Optin Mavrick he said:

"This handy little invention will revolutionize the Affiliate industry."

Obviously, being heavily into affiliate marketing, I immediately visited the site. And I was impressed enough with what I saw to buy it and sign up as an affiliate.

While I'm impressed with the potential I've got to say that I'm also concerned.

What worries me is will it revolutionize the affiliate industry in a good or bad way?

While I think it could be a great tool for affiliates if used correctly, I'm worried that Optin Mavrick could be used in a way the programmer never intended.

But first let me explain what it is.

Well essentially Optin Mavrick is a pop up/under tool with a difference...it makes your pop up (apparently) appear on any affiliate site you promote.

It's intended use is to help you build a mailing list of your own. And your own opt-in mailing list is pretty much an essential.

Think about what happens when you promote an affiliate program by:

buying an ad in an ezine

taking part in an discussion forum where you use an affiliate link in the space most forums provide for a signature link.

you use Google Adwords, or another pay-per-click method to send people directly to an affiliate program you're promoting.

or you manage to get an affiliate link in an ezine article that appears in hundreds of ezines.

Using any of these common methods you send people to the affiliate merchant site and you make a few sales now or before the merchant's affiliate tracking expires.

But...and this is the rub...you don't have the names and email addresses of the people who responded to your ads. You don't know who they were.

So you can't follow-up market to them. In other words, when you send people directly to a merchant site, you're not building your own targeted opt-in list.

All the time you hear "the money is in the list." And it's true. Like many others who have been marketing on the web a long time, I believe that it's essential that you build your own opt-in mailing list.

Unless you have your own targeted mailing list you're losing a lot of future business.

Using Optin Mavrick in the way intended, when people click on your link to the merchant site it also opens a pop up that resides on your own site, but could appear to be on the merchants site. Using this pop up to offer a free report, or simply a subscribe box, you attempt to get the people who have responded to your ad to enter their email address.

Jim Reynolds, the developer of the program, say that his aim in creating the software was to "turn the tables on building an optin list in the favor of the marketer generating the traffic to begin with."

Now that's a worthy aim.

But let's look at how it can be misused.

My big concern is that some people will use it in an irresponsible fashion by sending traffic to the sites of well known marketers and make it appear that they're endorsing a certain product.

An unscrupulous person could, for instance, run an ad recommending my free ezine, then when people responding to the ad click through to my site a pop up for an MLM (or whatever) could appear which makes it look like I'm endorsing that product.

I hope this doesn't prove to be the case with this software.

For now though I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and recommend it (to ethical people only).

Fast Web Building

Six weeks ago, in issue 240, I wrote about how my daughter Kate had launched a web site about the genetic disorder she suffers from - Phenylketonuria, or PKU for short.

I said we'd built it together in less than a day, and quite a lot of people have written and asked how we did it so quickly.

Simple - we used a template which we bought on the web from a place called Basic Templates

Cheating? Not at all.

I'm not a fast web builder, and I'm certainly not a graphic artist. Neither is Kate, who works as a journalist. We worked from a template because it's the quickest way to build a decent looking site. We opened the template in Dreamweaver, changed a few bits, added names and links to the nav bar, then saved it as a site template.

Then we simply went through the site page by page adding content. Went to Amazon, etc, and signed Kate up, added products to the pages.

When it was finished, apart from needing a lot more content we uploaded it to the web host - I've got a 200 site account so hosting wasn't a problem. We'd already registered the domain name and pointed it to the webhost some days earlier.

Saying it like this sounds like it shouldn't take 6 hours, but even with a template it's more time consuming than it sounds.

Anyhow, look at using a simple template for your site (s). Most web building programs have quite a few built in, or you can download one from a free template site or get a better one from somewhere like Basic Templates which has 440, and growing, templates.

Alternatively use a site building tool like DTMM Or if you want to go the whole hog consider Site Build It which I'm using for my digital photography sites.

Ok, that's it for this week. Just a short one.

Thanks for reading