Work at home on the Internet: internet marketing and affiliate program help.
Back issues here Issue 247 | Nov 24th 2002

Letter from Phil

Here's what's inside:

Making piles of money

More on Optin Mavrick popup tool

Something disturbing has surfaced

Reminder about products covered over the past few weeks

Autoresponders

Want to win a copy of my book and tons of other prizes

Another good template site

1. Making Piles of Money...

hemorrhoids aren't a very savory subject. In fact they're something
that most of us tend not to talk about in public.

( though I believe a controversial hemorrhoid artwork once hit the
spot in the UK's prestigious Turner Prize for contemporary art.)

But tasty or not, some savvy webmasters are making piles
of money from hemorrhoids and other ailments with around
5000 people searching for a cure last month.

Among the webmasters is Garfield Hodgson from northern
England, who has followed all the techniques detailed in my
book, Mini Site Profits and built a 2 page mini site on the touchy subject.

Here's Garfield's site http://www.new-hemorrhoids-cure.com/

As you can see it's a simple 2 page text based site, designed
to rank well in search engines, though for better ranking I've
suggested Garfield splits the site over more pages. I've not got
any figures, or proof of this, but I believe that a site of 8 pages
with 250 words to a page will rank higher than a site of 2 page
with 1000 words a page.

At the moment Garfield is doubling his money on the pay
per click search engines. In other words for every $100 he
spends he makes $100 profit.

I think that one reason he's doing well is the domain name
which suggests a "new" cure. People might have tried all
sorts of treatments and the promise of something new
attracts their attention and gets the click.

Here's what Garfield had to say about his site when we
talked a few days ago:

"All I've done is read and re-read your book and Ken Evoys
course. I've followed them to the letter the best I could.

I've got a few niche markets that I am going to explore. The
reason I did a hemorrhoids site is because a friend has them
really bad, external ones. It gave me an idea! So I thought I'd
run a check on the viability of a site dealing with hemorrhoids.
It was a bit out of the blue really!

I looked on the Overture Search Suggestion Tool - quite a lot of
searches done - and then looked at the search results and there
wasn't a lot of competition bidding. I looked at Alta Vista to see
how many competing sites there was there - not many really - and
loads of other spadework i.e ixquick and so forth.

I built the site SE friendly as well. I looked at the meta tags of the
top ranked sites at AV, ixquick and Google for relevant keywords
and built my site around them.

Then I just put some money into my Overture account.

Although I've bid for the term "hemorrhoids" in 16th place, I've
also bid for other search terms like "hemorrhoids treatment",
"internal hemorrhoids" so it is very tightly marketed. Nobody
is going to click to my site who doesn't have hemorrhoids
therefore NO wasted money.

My title and description are benefit driven, also tried to use magic
words like "guaranteed." I've just used the main benefit upfront
-"Guaranteed Relief From Painful Hemorrhoids." Says it all really.

I've just followed your blueprint from Mini Site Profits really."

Garfield only has one worry with his site, and no, I'm not about to
make a joke here.

He's getting very few people to sign up for his newsletter, which
he's started so he can do follow-up marketing to visitors who
don't buy first time.

Personally I think the reason is that few people will want to read
it. They're visiting the site looking for info on how to get relief or
a cure. Garfield offers hem that solution. End of story.

I doubt he'll get many return visitors. If they're happy with the
treatment, next time they buy they'll go straight to the merchant
site - and hopefully Garfield will receive ongoing commissions
from this.

Probably a better way of capturing email addresses is to come
up with some kind of free report, or bonus offer linked to an
autoresponder series which would give him the opportunity to
contact the people who do not buy immediately.

So it might be best to turn his ezine into a "free report"
autoresponder series and make it attention grabbing without
distracting people from clicking through to the affiliate
merchant site.

I've also suggested he adds additional keyword bidding on
the pay-per-clicks, concentrating on phrazes like "cure for
hemorrhoids" and "hemorrhoid relief" rather than just the
general hemorrhoids. And he should add additional pages
to his site for different niches: hemorrhoid during pregnancy
for instance.

This is just one example of a tightly focused niche mini
site - you could build one around bad breath, snoring,
athletes foot, acne treatment, or hundreds of other subjects.

Mini Site Profits reader Jim Barnes, for example, is doing
very well with a small site he built about concrete stamping.
IIt comes up number 1 in Yahoo, Google, and AOL, and way
up there in some others.

Like Garfield said, it's just a matter of following the blueprint
in Mini Site Profits

2. More on Optin Mavrick.

Last issue I wrote about a new piece of software called Optin
Mavrick and expressed my concerns at the potential for its misuse.

You can read about it in last weeks issue here.


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. So you could use it to send people to any site
and make it appear that site is endorsing the product you're
promoting.

The program's developer Jim Reynold's has responded:

"My response is yes Phil I agree Optin Mavrick gives some
unsavory characters the ability to do just as you said
“promote something you do not necessarily endorse”.

I don’t teach this in the members area - I teach build your list,
which I believe is vital to all marketers.

But, I do find it interesting as an affiliate marketer myself that
I've sent people to a site to try and make an affiliate sale to
find out they offer some program I either do not endorse
or worse yet.. lol.. do not make a commission on.

So in a way Optin Mavrick has turn the tables a bit and leveled
the playing field for Affiliate Marketers and Internet Marketers
in general. And that is what I had in mind when I created the
product.

Optin Mavrick is best used to build one’s list thru free reports
or valued ebook giveaways… to encourage newsletter or update
subscriptions.

I too only wish it to be used for ethical purposes only …..so
the end we agree. Wishing you continued success."
Jim Reynolds

Incidentally Jim has just added an interesting $37 software
collection package with master resale rights as a bonus.

If you use Optin Mavrick ethically I believe it can be a very
useful tool.

3. Something disturbing has surfaced....

Three times this week popups have appeared on my screen
when I've been online but not surfing. At first I thought they were
delayed popups which appear some minutes after you leave
a site. Then I thought that maybe I'd been infected by spyware
but a quick scan with Ad-Aware revealed that wasn't the problem.

So what's causing them?

It's something new called IP2IP technology, and utilizes
Windows Messenger technology.

It's software that sends popups to your IP address. Using it
you can select IP addresses thru a ISP range, and with a fast
connection send popups and popunders to millions of IP's a day.

This could quickly become as big a problem as email spam.

You can read about it at these 2 sites: http://www.121ads.com/
and http://www.broadcastadvertiser.com/index.htm

But PLEASE don't be tempted to buy and use it.

4. Reminder about products covered over the past few weeks...

In case you missed them, here's what I've been recommending:

Neil Shearing's Super Affiliate Secrets Exposed (audio plus transcript)

James Martell's Affiliate Marketer's Handbook - 2002 (ebook)

The New Search Engine Secrets Exposed, by John Lim (ebook)

Jimmy D Brown's Email Strategies Exposed (audio)

Chuck McCullough's Website Traffic System (member site)

Peter Twist's Internet Marketing Lounge Radio Show (audio)

Joe e. 'the wizard' Clayton Jr's Free Software Forever
(software collection)

These products are all good, all useful.

5.Autoresponders...

Now that all the fuss has died down about Lead Lightning it feels
safe to mention autoresponders again.

When Kate was setting up her PKU Living site we looked around for something cost effective and picked on My Lead Center.

The services offered are much like Lead Lightnings, but without
the matrix style affiliate program and hype. And also it's at a much
lower cost at $14.97 a month for 25 autoresponder accounts,
25 mailing list accounts and unlimited ad tracking links.

The 25 autoresponder accounts each have a 52 message follow-up
capability, and the 25 broadcast accounts allow you to operate
25 different ezines with unlimited subscribers. Not that you'd ever
want to run 25 different ezines :) but eventually you might well
have 25 separate mailing lists.

A bonus with My Lead Center is unlimited ad tracking for
specialized linking, but we haven't used that side of it preferring
to use Adminder which after a year of using has proven totally reliable and very useful.

6. Want to win a copy of my book and tons of other prizes...

Then head on over to http://www.christmas-competition.com
and while you're there sign up for his great little newsletter
Kickstart Daily...which is, you've guessed it, a daily ezine.

First prize in the Christmas comp is worth over $840, and
there are two runners-up prizes each worth more than $450.

It's free to enter.

7. Another good template site....

last week I mentioned speeding up your web site building by
using a template. I'm a member of Basic Templates which is around $79 a year for 445 templates and growing. It was only $60 when
I signed up but they've introduced an affiliate program paying
$20 so I guess that accounts for the price rise.

Anyway, to get to the point, Chris Swyer from Amazing
Talking Websites wrote about a template site he joined last week.

"On the subject of "fast website building", I thought you and
your readers would like to know about a similar "template"
service that I joined this week.

You don't get access to as many templates as you do with
"BasicTemplates.com", but you still get loads for a small
yearly fee of $29.95.

There's nothing in this for me, by the way!! :)

I just thought that some people might be put off the other
service by the price and might like to know about this one.

The site is called "A+ Templates" and it's at:
http://www.aplustemplates.com

Regards, Chris