Work at Home Internet Business
I’ve been trying to find the words to explain how LinkTrackr works and why every affiliate marketer should get an account, but I’ve come up with an even better way – to simple draw it out.
Look at the diagram below, and I’m sure you’ll pretty much understand the main purpose of LinkTrackr. While we’re only launching next week, you can subscribe now to get some free affiliate marketing tips.
Do you want to make money from affiliate marketing, without a website, list, money or even Google?
Then I strongly recommend that you head on to LinkTrackr.com and register for my pre-launch list. In July 2010, I will launch a brand new, crazy affiliate marketing software that will change the world forever.
As you may have guessed from it’s name, it’s an affiliate link tracking and link cloaking software. But it does much, much more than just help you manage your affiliate link – it actually helps you make more money from affiliate programs with little or no effort on your part.
Here’s a teaser screenshot:
I have to warn you that only 2,000 active accounts will be available at any time for this software. If you’re late, you’re going to lose out big time.
I’ve blogged about my Aweber commission check and some of the strategies I used to generate it, but I forgot to mention that it works on a “first affiliate cookie” basis.
That simply means that the first affiliate to get a click on his link will embed the cookie to the potential customer’s computer, and get commissions for an eventual sale. If the same person later clicks on your affiliate link and signs up, you get nothing because you were not the first affiliate.
I hate this concept, and here’s why:
Imagine if you’re a real estate agent for a while. You find the potential buyer, show him around the house, convince him that it’s the dream home he’s been looking for. He decides to buy it – though your efforts – but the actual commission goes to the guy who put in a spam flyer about that house into the buyer’s mailbox.
The argument is simple: The guy who “closed” the sale should get the reward. Not the guys who blasted his affiliate link to every corner of the Internet.
Even if you write a great review about the product (Aweber for example), continuously recommend it on your site etc, you’re not getting all the commissions that you should. Some of your visitors clicked on an Aweber affiliate link somewhere else before out of curiosity, but they were not interested. It was you who showed them why they should get an Aweber account, you sold it to them.
For example: On my Aweber review page I offer a bonus to whoever signs up from my affiliate link on that site. Almost 40% of the people who email me to claim the bonus swear that they clicked on my link and signed up – yet it doesn’t show in my affiliate earnings.
I have to ask them to contact Aweber and manually adjust the commission back to me, which most are willing to do. Without this sort of manual intervention, 40% of sales from that page, based on my effort and content, goes to someone else. Someone who “got the click first” but never actually “sold” the product.
The lesson: Check if the product you’re promoting works on a first-cookie or “last-cookie” basis. If it works on a first-cookie-gets-the-sale basis, you need to offer a bonus so that people who bought from your affiliate link will get back to you, and you can manually reverse the commissions into your account. It’s a little bit more effort, but it pays.
I got my biggest check ever from Aweber, for $1,158.71. The truth – it’s my one year total earnings 
My affiliate commissions were so low, that I decided to set a higher payout limit because I didn’t want to receive checks for amounts lower than $500.
I didn’t really promote Aweber aggressively until mid-2009 as you can see from the earnings below.
Promoting services like Aweber is a lot more difficult that promoting a typical ClickBank “make money” e-book, for a few reasons:
However, the BIG advantage of promoting recurring products like Aweber is that when you have a satisfied buyer, you can literally earn from that one referral for years. I can’t remember if I clicked on someone’s affiliate link when I signed up for Aweber, but hey I’ve been using them for more than two years now.
If you’re thinking or promoting recurring products like Aweber etc, here’s my advice:
So what did I do to increase my Aweber commissions since July 2009?
It’s easy – I created a product called RSS To Email and sold it with Master Resell Rights. The product itself explains how to use Aweber to build a big subscriber list from your blog, instead of services like FeedBurner etc.
It worked really well. I made money upfront (more than $6k), resellers made money, and Aweber made money. Win-win-win
You can also get Private Label Rights to that product from PLR WordPress Videos and take it to the next level.
ClickBank has been making tons of changes recently, including a new design which seems more “modern” than their old look. However some of the important changes were more than just cosmetic.
For example, as I was trying to get an affiliate link for Simply PLR today, I expected to see the usual hoplink format which is your affiliate ID followed by the publisher id and the rest of clickbank.net URL.
What I found however is the new encoded hoplink format, which solves the age old problem of affiliate commission theft from ClickBank products. There has been tons of third-part applications for encoding or masking affiliate links, but it’s good to see that ClickBank has FINALLY made it part of the default features.
Of course affiliate theft can still happen, but it’s much more difficult now.
Earlier this year I decided to launch a few products related to the Malaysia market, something I have not really done since the days of Chapter-M. The first of these projects is Rahsia ClickBank, a fast system to making money from ClickBank designed and developed specifically for Malaysians.
And because of that, a lot of stuff needed to be translated to Bahasa Melayu, including me
So today I tried to create a promotional video purely in Bahasa and that’s what I ended up with. Not bad right, but you have no idea how many takes and super-edits I had to do to get just that. It seems I have not really spoken BM in a long time, although I remember it used to be quite good.
Also, it’s pretty difficult to talk about Internet marketing in BM because of all the jargon. I need Dewan Bahasa and Pustaka to attend my internet marketing seminars
In the previous article I showed you how to redirect affiliate links using simple HTML. Now lets look at the second option – creating “redirects” in your Cpanel administration area.
To do this, please make sure that you have a web hosting with cPanel installed. Then login to your cPanel account and click on “Redirects”. The process is quite similar to creating a www redirect but this time you’ll be using your affiliate links.
So make sure you have the correct affiliate link.
In this example I will be using this affiliate link: http://winniche.gobala.hop.clickbank.net which leads to my own product on ClickBank. I would enter something like this in the configuration section.
You can basically enter any file name you want. You can put a /go/ or /recommends/ followed by the product name. Then just enter the actual affiliate link, select “redirect with or without www” and click on “Add”. Your redirect link should now be functioning.
NOTE: This method will not work properly if you are using WordPress or other CMS that uses a .htaccess file to manage access permissions.
If you are using WordPress, then these are your options:
Any questions or comments?
Affiliate marketing can be one of the simplest forms of making money online – just get traffic to your links and when a sale is made, you make money.
But if you want to get serious about it, there are other things you may want to do. For example, all serious affiliates mask or cloak their affiliate links. This not only allows them to appear more professional, but also prevents “commission hijacking”.
The easiest way to mask affiliate links is by using HTML “refresh” in the meta section of your HTML document.
So for example, let’s say I want to promote WordPress Adsense System by Gobala Krishnan. Here is my naked ClickBank affiliate link:
>> http://winniche.gobala.hop.clickbank.net <<
Let’s say I want to change it, so when I give out a link it will look something like this:
>> http://www.gobalakrishnan.com/recommends/wordpressadsense.html <<
What I needs to do is create a folder in my web server and name it “recommends”. Within this folder you save all your HTML files, each file represents one product that you are promoting. In this case, I will create a new HTML file and save it as “wordpressadsense.html”
Now, using DreamWeaver I can just click on the Insert > HTML > Head Tags > Refresh and I’ll see a window like this:
Select “0” seconds to make the page redirect immediately, and enter the actual affiliate link as the “Go to URL”. Your HTML codes will look something like this:
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” content=”0;URL=http://winniche.gobala.hop.clickbank.net” />
</head>
Now you can link directly to that page when promoting, for example www.yoursite.com/recommends/wordpressadsense.html and it will automatically redirect to your affiliate link. Simple, but it works.
If you have a Clickbank account, chances are you’re getting paid by check every pay period (2 weeks). If your payments are consistent, ie you have received at least 3 consecutive payments, then you qualify to apply for Clickbank’s direct deposit feature.
ClickBank is pleased to offer International Direct Deposit (XACH) for direct deposit of your ClickBank account payments into certain international bank accounts, at no extra charge.
This will help me save loads of time waiting for checks to appear in my mailbox, and trying to cash in the checks in time to pay other expenses and bills. If you live outside any of the countries where Direct Deposit is allowed (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States), then you can get a non-resident US bank account as an intermediary bank.
If you’re from Malaysia, do also check out Rahsia ClickBank for the best system to make money from ClickBank.
For any Malaysian with a Clickbank account, listen up as there is some great news. Now as a Malaysian you can use the “Direct Deposit” method to get your Clickbank money faster than before.
Previously, most Malaysians were not able to open up a Clickbank account but since April this year Clickbank has opened up to Malaysians again. So I assume most Malaysians using Clickbank would be relatively new and would be requesting to get paid via check, the only payment option available previously.
However, with Clickbank’s new direct deposit feature you can use any US bank account you have (for example with E-Trade bank) to transfer all cash automatically. No more waiting two weeks for the checks to arrive, and another few weeks for it to clear. Once the funds are in your US bank, you can transfer it to your Malaysian bank in less than one working day (E-trade) with a fee charged by the bank.
There is one catch though:
To be eligible an account must have first received three paper paychecks within any 90-day period.
This means if you do not qualify for a Clickbank check every payperiod (2 weeks), you will not see this option when you login. I realized this when I tried to change one of my smaller Clickbank accounts and was unable to do so. Minimum payout is $100.
Clearly if you’re making only a few hundreds in Clickbank, you may want to wait for the check as the fees involved will eat up your affiliate commissions, but if you’re making more than 1000 / month this option is viable.
If you’re from Malaysia, do also check out Rahsia ClickBank for the best system to make money from ClickBank.
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