Ian Fernando » Monetizing

Monetizing a Heavily Traffic Blog Post with CPA Offers

Ian — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:39:00 +0000

Yesterday, Luke from PeerFly called me out on Twitter. Just plain shouted me out stating that I was promoting affiliate offers on my blog. Not just any traditional affiliate products but more so a CPA offer. He got me and it’s cool. He didn’t expect it and plus the post was probably not intended for him or our demographic, affiliates. I forgive you Luke. Stop spying on me.

As you know this blog reflects about affiliate marketing, online marketing, and me as a person. I post about travels and helpful hints that maybe related to business in general. These post may not be towards affiliates, but I like to share my experience as I think it helps with you understanding who I am as a person. This means that some posts are probably ranked higher than most pages and get a lot of traction from the search engines.

With a particular post (the one Luke called me out on), I tried to monetize it with information products (Clickbank). The post itself was an informative “how to” post as well. So I figured an ebook would help. I added internal links to the ebook, switch it out for footer links, then banner links – no go. For months it did not work. I then decided to add a CPA offers and almost immediately it performed better. The best part is I was able to put the offer right in front of their face.

So how was I able to turn a blog post with a lot of traffic into an income stream? Simple, I use an exit pop up plugin. The other day I mentioned a WordPress plugin which can help increase your blog optins with a Facebook Connect button. I use the same plugin to help with exit traffic but with a CPA offer instead of a lead gen, allowing me to take advantage of potential prospects leaving my blog.

With WpSubscribers you are able to create multiple optin forms. One great tool they added was custom popup option, which you can create a popup to your own imagination. I personally just create a big image and link the image to an affiliate offer. This way I don’t have to deal with any CSS issues with the popup.

This one click exit pop up lander has helped with high CTR’s because the ad or “pop up lp” is in their face. I also do it on exit for a purpose because I want them to be in tune with the topic they are reading, then influence them with an ad. When I get traffic from the search engines, I always think of that traffic as ‘informative traffic’, meaning they are looking for information, a solution to a problem. Most do not buy right away but they get an experience and that is what I want to do. The best part is there is no backlinks that I personally made, but I rank #1 for several high search keywords.

Anyways…

This particular blog post gets most of its traffic from the SERPs. So I simple searched for an affiliate offer which is relevant to the blog post and create an in your face popup lander. The next step was setting the popup to only show on that particular post. For example the popup you will on this post, my Affiliate Guide, will be shown all over the blog. If I want to show one particular popup, especially a custom one I just pick it from an option within WpSubscrubers within the post I want the pop up to only appear.

This allows me to control what popup or optin form to show on a particular post. I have control and this is what about this plugin. This powerful exit popup script allowed me to start creating an income stream from a blog post which I was not able to before. With these options I can control what popup pops up.

There are times where a blogger has a lot of traffic to an irrelevant blog topic and you need to take advantage of that traffic. Leverage the traffic by gaining the users trust and then influencing them with an affiliate offer more particularly a CPA offer. My reason is they do not have to take a credit card, just fill out a lead gen form. Readers are more interested to participate in something than actually buying, especially if they are coming to your blog for just information.

Plus, you see these types of ad block all the time except they load before you reach the content. Online magazine articles are popular to show you a content gateway with a timer before showing you the actual content. I simply took this idea and show an exit popup right before they leave.

Facebook Privacy Issues Benefits Facebook Marketers

Ian — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:08:58 +0000

Finding trends is pretty important to me because it helps me find niches and audiences that no one will take advantage of. I have been using a specific site to find trends in the social space, more specifically Facebook. I watch twitter and I also look at Google trends. These are very helpful when trying to find a trend to take advantage of.

I do not know why but I like utilizing Facebook a lot, it is a portal of just pure traffic. I have been using a specific site to find trends base on a keyword I type in. Today, I have decided to share this site with you. The website is called YourOpenBook.org.

This specific website looks at your search term and then searches Facebook statuses. You can see what people are talking about and if they mention something important. This is similar to twitter search and twitter trends, but it uses Facebook statuses. I am uncertain how often it updates but it does provide some value to research.

I first found this website when the craze of Facebook privacy was a HUGE issue. Also this website arise when Facebook was posting FourSquare locations – showing people their friends are not home and the opportunity to rob them. OpenBook wanted to show to Facebook users their privacy wasn’t really private. It was a campaign to show everyone Facebook lacks and has privacy flaws.

Well I decided to take this website to my own marketing efforts and use it for good use. Market research.

Though this website will not search every Facebook’s user status, there is still a lot of information you can pull from the search terms you put in. A lot of users has protected their profile, but a good majority still have not adjusted their profile privacy. With so many users joining Facebook on a daily basis, they will not even know what their default privacy is. So this still benefits online marketers who want to use this service as a research tool.

For example this website is great to find problematic issues and create an info product or promote a specific offer. It is about putting in the right keywords to find what you are looking for. Even finding trends and then taking advantage of that specific trend with an affiliate offer.

One other aspect I like is you can filter this website by male or female, helping you create a Facebook campaign geared towards that specific gender. With each gender you can find the right vertical to promote to that specific group of users. Gender targeting is definitely a strategy when it comes to online promotions. In any case this specific website helps you find the niche or trend which you can immediately take advantage of.

If you see a trend in twitter, do a search at OpenBook to see if users are also posting to their facebook wall. Then look at the profiles and see their interests. Now you have a targeted campaign. It is repetitive and boring to go look at every profile, but it can help with your current Facebook campaigns when trying to target specific users. Outsource this!

The website is used to show the lack of privacy, but it still provides data such as – profile interests, genders, trends, new niches, etc. Again it is how you use the website and how you look at the data. Data and information is important in any business and in life, it is how you utilize the information.

Rob Hustle Introduces ShoeMoney’s LinkControl

Ian — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 19:52:12 +0000

Affiliate Summit is real entertaining. Especially the one in Las Vegas, just because you have girls that you want to touch. Shoemoney had a session introducing his new product, LinkControl. It is a private invite only currently and it basically helps you control your links. Shoemoney gave out over 800 invites, that means there were over 800 attendees to his session to see what he got cooking up.

Before Jeremy even spoke, he had Rob Hustle rap an intro with some Las Vegas girls! It was a really good performance and lyric wise as well. If you have not seen the introduction video here it is below. If you do not know who Rob Hustle is then you are just a lost person in this space we call affiliate marketing. Check him out below and the girls behind him.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After the intro, Shoemoney goes into further detail about his tool. I can say it is pretty impressive, knowing I got something minimal and custom for my own links. The one aspect I really like are some of the great features such as referrer and Genetic Algorithim Shoemoney has implemented. I think this is something that is truly amazing.

The referrer control is always something amazing and in the past Jeremy always talks about. I have heard him speak about it in the past and referrer traffic as each source caters to a specific audience. So it is important to cater to that audience to leverage from. The genetic algorithim is something really unique and I think it will definitely help increase the user experience and make affiliates more money.

I believe it looks at conversions and then adjust rotation values to promote the right offer to the right demographics or audience. I am still uncertain how specifically it works but it sounded real amazing. According to the Jeremy it is a 17% increase when it came to his own campaigns.

Another aspect is the advisory board that was mentioned. Some well known affiliates in the space are part of his advisory board and will help LinkControl get to where it needs to be. For example, Missy Ward is part of the advisory board, Jonathan Volk, and Ad Huslter – you know he will speak his mind. There are other great name on the board, but these 3 I think will have the bigger influence especially in the industry we ar in.

If you miss the Shoemoney session introducing his new tool, check out his video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Clickbooth CPC Program, an Adsense Replacement?

Ian — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:11:24 +0000

There are many ways to monetize a site. One and this is how I started is adding Google Adsense blocks to your website. It was one of the first ways I actually started making money online, along with ebay. The problem with Google Adsense it took me several months to get my first $100 check.

I would never ever monetize a site with adsense, just because of the complexity it can be. You really need a high volume site to utilize adsense. Well 2 years ago I came out with a platform that does just that, called CPA Shuffle – which I have stop. Now the end of 2010, a new platform rises, Clickbooth CPC.

Similar to adsense and my past idea CPA Shuffle, it takes offers puts them in an IAB display style box and displays offers. The difference is you get paid on a per click basis, similar to Google Adsense. So if someone clicks on an offer, they convert you are just paid on a CPC level not lead level.

I do not know how they calculate the click earnings but I think it is definitely way more than adsense. Here is my stats with only 2 clicks which earned me $.40! Baaalllin! Anyways, there was a bit of confusion on the reporting.

So I asked Clickbooth to call me up to discuss these numbers. Parts of the reporting is really confusing, so when they explained it to me, it became clear on what the numbers meant. For example:

Impressions if the Ad Unit itself
Ad Unit Impressions means each ad (offer) that was within the Ad Unit.
CTR is the the Ad Unit CTR as a whole
Ad Unit CTR is the individual ad (offer) CTR

So if I have a 300 x 250 ad unit, the Impressions would be (let’s say) 100 and the Ad impression would be 33 – because there are 3 ad displays within the ad unit itself. Interesting numbers. Now I did collab with Clickbooth a bit to better improve their system and give some great ideas on how to better their reporting and even monetize it as a whole.

Currently I am rotating this on another blog with banners and even adsense. I want to see if the banners (affiliate offers) or Google Adsense itself will pay better than Clickbooths CPC platform. I am simply just rotating the code, with OIO Publisher.

So the way that the CPC system works is advertisers pay to be within these ad blocks, no offers are being pulled from the network ad being displayed on the CPC Platform. When I created CPA Shuffle, I pulled offers from the network and displayed them on ad blocks. My thinking was I can always get new/updated offers and display them in specific niches and get a higher payouts if they convert.

I am even thinking about re-opening CPA Shuffle because my technology is already surpassed Clickbooth’s CPC Platform. I think anyways. Plus it was a 2 years ago that I came up with this idea. The industry is just catching on. The only difference is Clickbooth CPC platform displays images and text, similar to a facebook ad. While CPA Shuffle just did traditional adsense style format, text.

Here is an example of an ad in the health category on a health blog I have. So you can see it only has 1 ad related to health. The other 2 can be categorized elsewhere.

This is the other problem I have with the ad platform, no relation to the niche or category I chose. The reason is because advertisers optionally put themselves into the CPC platform. Offers are not pulled from the network. So it fills empty space with other advertisers.

Now, what would have been awesome, since they are tracking each offer unit, the ability to see what offer received the click. This way if I have this ad on my health blog and the EDU offer is getting the most click I can change my ad unit category to education on a health blog. Better monetizing the site.

But they are working on the platform still as this is still in beta. So more advertisers will be added and hopefully have a more targeted offers for the sites or niches everyone have. It seems only the popular diet, health, edus are populating within these ad units.

The reporting definitely can be more user friendly and the creation of units as well. I actually didn’t like the way ads were created, so I took the time to decipher the JS code bit. It works the same way the old adsense style box worked. By simply reorganizing the JS commands a bit you can pull any category and adjust the ad unit size. But then it does throw your tracking and reporting off for traffic sites a bit, then again the ad unit captures the referring site. So the reporting should be able to see this in the reporting somewhere, but isn’t – I know they are capturing it because the referring site is being passed through on a per click basis.

You create ad units by traffic source, so this way you can easily track which site is producing the most clicks. Since it was a bit of a hassle, I just dissected the JS a bit to make it easier for me.

Reporting is the most important part, the more data I have the better I can optimize these ad units. I am still playing with these ad units, rotating it with banners and adsense. So I will give an update on what I find. Maybe restart CPA Shuffle?

Start a Facebook Campaign for Less than $30

Ian — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 17:41:41 +0000

Facebook is such a great place for traffic, I am always trying to figure out a way to monetize it for my benefits. Early November I wrote about how you can create a viral ad campaign by utilizing Facebook Fan pages. The type of offer used is a download offer and will most likely be disapproved by the Facebook Ad committee.

So the question becomes is how do you start a campaign that can’t get any traffic? Simple use Fiverr.com!

Fiverr.com is a site where users literally do anything for $5. They literally have a ton of users who will either prank someone or do actual work for $5 bucks. In this case we want to buy traffic for $5, specifically gathering fans.

You can see a list of people who are willing to receive $5 to spam…. ergh tell their loyal fans to visit your fan page. The only time consuming part is communicating with some of these users and asking their insight information or demographic of their user base. Some will be annoyed your even asking for that information and some are happy to give it to you.

You also have to make sure and certain they are either inviting their users or if they are just posting on their wall, which will show up on their friends wall. I personally found a personal invite from the end user to their friends is far more productive than a post on their wall. The invite actually gets sent to the end user instead of just a visibility factor on their dashboard.

Again, you have to figure out your offer and then find out the demographics of the fans the fiverr user is inviting. When I did my Halloween campaign, I was looking for young adults, college students, younger kids, etc. I wanted to make sure they participated with the Fan page to start the snowball effect of a viral campaign.

Some stats I found is about 7% – 10% of personal invites actually like the page. Enough likes means it will get displayed on the walls of their friends and that is the goal. If a fan page just gets 1 likes, it is most likely will not be noticed. If a page is liked enough, Facebook will push it up on the dashboard of users for visibility. Not sure the exact algorithm but enough likes gets visibility.

The only thing you have to cater too is your Fan Page landing page, does it have strong call to action?

Step 1 Like the Page
Step 2 Share this Page
Step 3 Download Game, or whatever offer you may have.

It can be just a 2 step action, like and receive the offer. To be more viral I tell the end user to share it with their friends. Personal recommendations is a powerful source of traffic, especially if the audience is young. So it really depends on your fan page, and your audience you buy from Fiverr.com.

You will have to buy a couple $5 personal Facebook invites via Fiverr to get the snowball effect going. If you have a good blast invite from one then maybe you will not need to buy others. I found it personally to buy several to get the ball rolling. Once you have enough solid users sharing and liking, the campaign is self sustaining. It may die base on the trend, example the Halloween offer died about 3 days after Halloween itself – there isn’t any interest in it anymore.

The important factors are your Fan Page CTA and the type of users that are being invited. Remember to ask the person on Fiverr about their audience, this is important. Ask for age, how often they interact, past invites response, etc. If you do not ask then you will not get the results you want.

Make sure to read my Fan Page Viral post here, if you have not read it already.

Creating Niche Mini Sites for the Holidays

Ian — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 17:50:08 +0000

The holidays are coming up and I hope everyone is ready to get fat for the Thanksgiving feast this week. Then get even fatter for the holidays that is coming up, money fat that is. The other day I talked about 2 niche building scripts and how they easily create sites for you with almost a click of a button. Lately I have been enjoying Keywords to Website plugin because it is a WordPress plugin and it is pretty straight forward.

There are 3 sets of tools I use to get my mini sites created in under 30 minutes. These set of tools help with the ease of creating the sites I need and getting them to where I want them to be. In this post I will talk about the 3 set of tools that is being used to help create and automate my mini affiliate niche sites.

First you need a theme and the only theme I recommend because of its versatility is the Socrates Theme. This theme alone help create the perfect site for any niche. I use it with my membership sites as well as mini landing pages. It gives you the versatility to create almost any type of style page with a clean look.

The Socrates theme allows you to customize a lot of the features and allows you to make it personal. The best part about this theme it works with the Keywords to Website plugin perfectly. With the Socrates theme I create either a 2 column or a 3 column website and then customize it to fit either banner ads and or content. The ease of Socrates is very simple that a site can be made literally in 10 minutes.

Socrates also has the versatility to not only be a mini site but a blog style site, a sales page, and even optin squeeze page. Again I love this theme just because it has the versatility to do a site in many ways I want to.

Next, you will need to create the affiliate merchant offers on your mini site and I use Keywords to Website. I have been talking to the owner of this plugin for sometime and we have been good friends in the past. Using this plugin is actually very powerful because it literally does everything.

Here are some features Keywords to Website can do:

Get Products listing from Amazon
Get Merchant Products from Shopzilla
Get Merchant Products from Linkshare
Get eBay listings from eBay Partner Network
Get Merchant Products from CJ.com
Get Content from Yahoo Answers
Insert Images from Bing
Integrated Content Spinner
Integrated Typomaker
… plus many more features.

Watch this video below:

In the past I had to do some of these things manually and when I first started, I was on the eBay Partner Network heavy. Now that there are so many merchants now in the affiliate space, there is room to expand and create niche sites. Use this coupon and get $20 off Keywords to Website! [coupon code="Coupon Code: ian" /]

The next thing I use is a content system that post to the site automatically. The service I use is by a good friend of mine it literally writes the content for you, it is called SEO Linkvine. Now there are 2 parts to this service, one is receiving content and the other is providing content. I use it to receive content. The purpose of this service is to get content and the best part is it auto posts to your site automatically, must be a WordPress driven site.

The best part about this service is it is free to use and get content. So this mean you can get pretty unique content to your site fairly quickly. You just chose your topics and then you approve or deny topic posts. It even gives you a preview of the content as well to make sure it is the content you are looking for.

Even though keywords to website has a content spinner, SEO Linkvine can still help with providing your niche site with content.

You literally chose a topic and you can approve and deny post if you think they are not relevant to your niche. It is real easy to use and very simple, this way you can start getting content to your site almost immediately.

All 3 of these tools are for WordPress driven sites. WordPress is such a versatile CMS platform it is being used by so many users because of it’s simplicity. But take a look at all 3 tools I mentioned and this week I am going to show you an even powerful plugin that will help you rank fairly quickly in the SERPs.

Seven Steps for Reaching International Markets Online

Ian — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 23:48:32 +0000

European executives are already well acquainted with the benefits of an online presence, particularly the potential for direct contact with clients and 24/7 availability, as well as lower promotion costs when compared with traditional media.

A recent survey revealed that executives have a tendency to pay close attention to their companies’ online development strategies, with 64% of executives working at European level having voiced their intention of increasing their online marketing and SEO budgets.

The current economic instability demands that companies, particularly Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), become more mobile, with the aim of attracting new clients and taking up positions in markets outside of their home country.

However, some entrepreneurs remain unreceptive to the idea of targeting foreign markets. After weighing up the costs of such a venture, if the budget seems formidable and there is sufficient business in their local market to survive, many companies prefer to stick with what they know.

Companies also often make the mistake of not establishing themselves online in foreign languages simply because they have the impression that English is the official language of the internet. What they don’t realise, though, is that by disregarding a foreign language web presence, they are losing out significantly in terms of new clients. Here’s why:

75% of the world’s population speaks little or no English;
40% of internet users are Asian;
There are 30% fewer internet users in North America than in China;
Four out of five internet users prefer to buy online from sites written in their own native language;
Almost 100% of Internet users search local websites.

These statistics present a strong argument for setting to work and formulating a multilingual web-development strategy. But whatever the size or scope of the approach, the following seven steps are crucial:

Step 1 – Identify your target market

First and foremost, it’s essential to analyse the socio-economic environment of the target market to establish whether it offers the necessary conditions in which to take up a position: demand, competition, buying power, potential clients’ living conditions, and attitudes towards foreign businesses. Whether the conditions are favorable or not will depend upon the type of products or services the business offers. As an example, a favorable condition for a translation company is a target country that has a high rate of exports. In Europe, Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium are all major exporters, and therefore prime target markets for translation services.

Step 2 – Keyword searches

For a new site to achieve high search engine rankings in foreign language searches, keywords are vital. It’s advisable not to directly translate the key terms which produce good results in your home country, as you risk ending up with terms that are not suited to the specific culture of the target country or the search habits of local internet users. In order to be certain of choosing the right terms, use keyword search tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool, WordTracker, Keyword Discovery or SEM Rush. Bear in mind that search trends change regularly in all professional fields, so it’s important to follow these trends using keyword search tools, and subsequently adapt your site content.

Step 3 – Site construction

In terms of site location, you’ll need a domain hosted on a server in the target country for the purpose of credibility – this will also contribute towards boosting the ranking of your site in local search engines.

Colours: blue or green backgrounds combined with black/white text have been found to be the colours most universally liked by internet users, while pink and purple are unpopular in traditional cultures.
Typeface: use a standard typeface such as Times New Roman, Arial or Verdana so that text displays correctly on all screens.
Product names: many consumers, particularly those in Europe, prefer products with technical-sounding names containing numbers, while consumers in the US prefer catchy, buzz-word names; for example, Canon calls one of its cameras the “EOS 400D” in Europe, while in the US it’s called the “Digital Rebel Xti”.

Step 4 – Build links with local sites

To guarantee that your company appears in local search results, look for sites that relate to your industry and try to obtain links on these sites. Local online media can provide you with valuable links if you offer interesting information based on your expertise, and follow their editorial policy.

Step 5 – Use PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns

Avoid squandering your company’s marketing budget by starting PPC campaigns with local websites, using your most popular search terms. PPC campaigns offer you complete control of your budget, allowing you to more effectively measure the return on investment. It’s also been found that a substantial amount of visits resulting from PPC campaigns convert into sales – however natural traffic should not be overlooked.

Step 6 – Obtain genuine local search results

For improved localisation, and to boost your genuine search results in local search engines based on regional key terms (e.g. “my product/service Stockholm”), buy a virtual office in the target country.

Step 7 – Constantly develop site content

As well as outlining your products and services, presenting the company and providing contact details, the content of your site needs to be constantly updated, offering your users the latest news from your professional field as well as case studies. Think also about launching discussion topics; a good tool for this is a corporate blog.

Following these steps to expand into new foreign markets is a foolproof method of winning new clients, and also building up your professional reputation around the world.

Article by international translation agency Lingo24, founded in the UK. Lingo24 has used e-marketing strategies as part of its global development, and today Lingo24 works with clients from over 60 different countries.

[Series] Creating a Niche Blog for Affiliate Income

Ian — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 13:25:41 +0000

This is going to be a series since I want to kinda watch my growth. I have been heavily expanding my affiliate income via other methods. One of them is to move to the CPS side slowly and see if I can potentially make it profitable. My first month (March) I didn’t reach my goal. But it is a learning experience for me

So the I created a blog on a specific niche and I just pump it with affiliate links from Clickbank, ShareaSale, Linkshare, and Amazon. But it is an actual blog whith real unique content. In the next coming days or even weeks, I am going to log what I have been doing with it such as blog plugins, traffic, etc

My first month of creating this niche blog was to just bang out content and it was easy for me to bang out the content since I enjoy what I was doing. I needed to bang some unique content to start ranking within the search engines, Google specifically. Surprisingly I was ranked within 2 days for just 2 days worth of posts.

I use WordPress as my CMS platform which is probably the main reason I got ranked fairly quick. I use wordpress for everything from sales page, blogs, squeeze pages, etc. I do not use standard static HTML or any other cms platform. WordPress is just so verse and simple there is no need for me to use any other platform.

The next thing I needed to get was a theme and I wanted a nice simple blog formatted theme. I searched for a free theme and I found a really good one a particular site. So I threw it up and just customized it a bit. I kept all the colors, I didn’t want to spend too much time on colors and adjusting columns, etc. I wanted to find the right theme right away.

I also got a nice logo and image done for the blog as well. It didn’t cost much at all and it definitely brought an official feel to the site. I wanted to start giving it a presence online, which will be a post as well.

The next thing I needed to do was to start finding offers, which I will talk about in the next day or so. I also started downloading and researching plugins that I will need to get me ranked higher. A plugin post will come in the next coming days as well.

But this is just the introduction of what I will be talking in the next couple days. I have bought social traffic and contextual, which will be posted in the next couple days as well.

So make sure you are subscribe to the RSS or Twitter to stay up to date to my posts in the next coming days.

How to Track Your eMail Optins with Prosper202

Ian — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:26:26 +0000

As you know I have been expanding my online portfolio… and it seems everyone else is doing the same. Lately I have built a new CPS site and I have been aggressive building a list for that niche. The problem is I couldn’t look at my spending and see if my spending for traffic was worth the conversions for my email optins.

I was trying to think of a way to track my email conversions. Aweber has their own internal system but doesn’t give me a dollar amount for my email leads I captured. So I had to think of a way to try to utilize or even find something that was out there that can do this.

..duh.. Prosper202!

I showed you how to track your info products or digital products with Prosper202, so today I’ll show you how to track email conversions with P202. The concept is very easy to see because prosper is a click analytic tool. It has grown to be such a powerful PPC analytic tool that no one really thinks to use it in a different way.

Let’s get started… Personally I use Aweber as my email autoresponder… so this tutorial will be using aweber, but the concept will be similar to any email auto responder you use.

Here are the steps…

Create your eMail Squeeze Page
Place P202 Pixel in the welcome email

Simple and done!

Obviously it is important to create a squeeze page template to capture your leads. It can be something very simple from utilizing the aweber custom interface to create your own. You can use templates that are on the internet, I suggests Squeeze Theme which is a WordPress plugin which automatically turns WordPress into a squeeze page.

Now with your Squeeze page done, you need to turn it into a prosper202 redirect. Since this instance is capturing a lead, we will use the squeeze page you just made as the offer. So create the offer as you would via Prosper202, (#3 Affiliate Campaign). Enter your details in the options that are given.

To append a subid without messing up your url, just append a ? at the end of your URL. So it will look like http://DOMAIN.com/?subid

Once that is done all you need now is your link, just skip over to #7 and grab your tracking link. This is basically your redirect or tracking link. It will track how many clicks you have sent to your squeeze page with whatever traffic source you are throwing at it.

Now the next part is tracking the conversions. In aweber once you go through the long process of creating a damn email form campaign, you need to create your welcome message. In the HTML SOURCE of the welcome email simply copy your pixel code from Prosper202 (#8 Get Postback/Pixel).

Simply just copy the pixel (secured or unsecured) and paste it at the bottom of your HTML message.

The reason why I do the welcome message instead of the first optin is because they are finally a lead of mine. So it makes sense to track the actual leads that are part of your email campaign and not just people who sign up and never complete the 2nd optin. So that is how you track your leads, the only question left is how can I relate my spending to my own email conversions.

Another way to track and I think which is more accurate is to place the pixel on the confirmation page. Within Aweber, you provide a confirmation link when the USER clicks on the confirmation link. Once the user confirms their subscription, they are then redirected to your ‘thanks you page’ or ‘welcome page’.

Within this page is where you would place your pixel. This should be more accurate because the user does not even have to open their welcome email. Once the user confirms their optin and is redirected to the thank you page, your pixel will fire and should be tracked via Prosper202.

While most network email submits range from 1.10 to 2.45 (my experience) you can give a default value to start off. Once you start converting your own leads, you will want to take your actual spend and divide it by the amount of leads you captured, which should give you a value per click.

Some things to note…

The value per click will vary from traffic source to traffic source, unless you want to do overall.
The pixel will fire only if the email will be opened.
If the users use Thunderbird or any email client which stops images from loading then it will not fire the pixel and the conversions will be off.
If you are tracking via a ‘thank you page’ make sure the page is unique. If it is easily found, the pixel can fire by mistake without the user actually registering.

This should help you with your list building campaign and see if you are spending the right amount of money in the right places.

Membership Script Battle: Round 2 – aMember

Ian — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:11:51 +0000

To continue with the Member script battle, we are going to talk about aMember. The other day I talked about Wishlist Member… so today is round 2 with aMember.

I was thinking about aMember in the beginning when I wanted to start a small membership site. But I heard there were issues with getting use to it and having things work properly with it. But again it is also one of the most recommended membership scripts out there.

It was not till some of my marketing friends started making membership sites and they were using aMember. I ask them what they thought and they gave me their inputs.

After a good week of asking around I decided to purchase a license and install it and test it. At first it was time consuming trying to get use to the interface and its settings but after that it was fairly easy. Then came the plugins and versatility that I needed for my site…

The installation of aMember was very simple and very straight forward. I didnt have any issues installing it at all. Once in then you get to play around with the interface and settings. I have messed up a couple things in the beginning but I finally got use to the interface and use to what it can do.

At first it was working great and I enjoyed it, but then when certain things came up like how would I integrate it with my affiliate program, how does it handle with aweber, how does it remove canceled users etc. So these things I spent several good days researching Google and the aMember forum.

Good thing about their community and their staff is they are all helpful and I get a response usually within a couple of hours. It did take some several customization with my programmer to get some things working the way I wanted.

One good thing it gives me is the access logs and who have logged in and what pages they went to etc. Which I think is really good to help troubleshoot if any issues arise. The main dashboard is very informative and gives you a lot of information right away.

Another good thing about amember is the fact they have a ton of plugins free and paid. I have bought several plugins to seamlessly integrate a forum, some reporting, and soon I will be purchasing some other plugins to help with the selling of my membership site.

One thing I did not like was the fact that if you add someone for free it calculates it as an income, which I think it shouldn’t. The only way to avoid this I think is to personally create the same product BUT without a price. This way it does not get calculated with the income reports.

…speaking of reports. Amember has a very basic reporting system and I think can be improved. They have very basic reports but one report stick outs, demographics. This can easily show you who your demographics are overall. Helping you who to target online.

I know some users have requested a more versatile reporting and more options than protection. But there are a lot of plugins for amember but sometimes you may have to create your own to get what you want.

.. Check out aMember and let me know what you think. In a couple days a total wrap up will be discussed. Maybe a video?