Warcraft Affiliates

August 5, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, Modules by MatthewDC

In our last module, we learned how you can use article marketing to garner some serious traffic. Now we are going to focus on a method that I believe should always go hand in hand with your article marketing efforts. That method is Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking revolves around sites like Digg, Reddit, De.lici.ous, and other various sites that allow you to post virtual bookmarks to your website. I am going to try to explain how they work, why they work, and then offer some advice on what you should be doing with them.

How Does Social Bookmarking Work?

We will use Digg as an example since I think they are one of the most often used Social Bookmarking sites. Everyone reading this probably has bookmarks in their firefox or internet explorer that they have saved from all over the internet. These are your favorite sites and ones that you want to go back to constantly for updates and whatever else they might offer. Social Bookmarking sites allow you to do the exact same thing, only the bookmarks are stored on the web where millions of others can find them through a searchable database. Basically what you are doing is adding your website to another search engine that gets TONS of traffic every day. Not only that, but if you are the first one to submit your site, you get to fill out the description box that everyone will see when they visit. Sound nice? Yeah, it is.

Why Do Social Bookmarking Sites Work?

The answer to that is a fairly simple one. They work because the sites are popular with Google. Digg bookmarks get listed in Google very fast and also get ranked fairly high for low competition search terms. The problem is, the listing won’t last long. That is ok however, because the real goal is to use these social bookmarking sites to get your site noticed and indexed in Google faster. Sites like Digg are so successfully not only because they get Google love, but also because of their millions of visitors each day. They are basically offering their own search engine when you get down to it. Your site gets indexed in their system and if someone searches for your key terms, your site might come up. They also have top lists for new sites, popular sites, etc.

So How Should I Use Social Bookmarking with My Sites?

Social Bookmarking is going to become an integral part of your campaigns. Basically every site, every blog, every squidoo lens, and every article you post anywhere on the internet, needs to get bookmarked. It sounds like a lot of work, but once you get the hang of it the time consumption will go down drastically. You can also find services on the internet that will submit your site for you, or you could outsource and hire someone to do it for you. The key thing to remember is that it is free exposure, free traffic, and a great boost to getting indexed in Google and improving your SEO.

So right now, our steps should look something like this when creating a new site :

1. Make a Squidoo Lens.
2. Social Bookmark the Squidoo Lens.
3. Write 1 Article per day and submit to the top Article Directories with a link to your Squidoo Lens.
4. Once the article gets published, Social Bookmark the Article.

If you are following these steps, you may already be getting some traffic to your lens. The more traffic your lens gets, the higher it will get listed within it’s category in Squidoo. If you can make the top 20 or so, your lens is going to get much more natural exposure from searches within Squidoo and their featured listings. So the goal right now is to drive traffic to your lens with your affiliate link on it, get it bookmarked for a little extra traffic and exposure, then hammer the articles like theres no tomorrow.

Recommended Reading :

• PotPieGirl’s FREE 52 Page Step by Step Squidoo Guide
• Use Bookmarking Demon to automate Social Bookmarking

August 4, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, Modules, PPC by MatthewDC

If you’ve read all of the modules up to this point, congratulations. You are already on your way to starting your own affiliate marketing business. You understand the basics of affiliate marketing, you should have a clickbank account, and you even set up your first squidoo lens. The only problem now is, noone is looking at it. But don’t worry, we are going to cover all of the basic traffic methods I use, right here in module 7 and it’s sub-modules!

Traffic generation is a funny business. Much like all areas of affiliate marketing, everyone has their own take on what you should and should not be doing to build traffic. The methods I am going to share with you are all methods I have personally used and found to work for me. If you do them aggressively, you WILL get traffic to your site as well as increase your Google Pagerank and backlinks at the same time. All of these things will help you get to your ultimate goal, whether it be $1000 a month or $500 a day.

Due to the importance of this topic and the number of methods you can use, I am going to break this module down into sub-modules as follows:

• 7.1 : Traffic Generation with Article Marketing
• 7.2 : Social Bookmarking
• 7.3 : Forum Participation
• 7.4 : Pay Per Click (PPC)
• 7.5 : Outsourcing Everything

All of these methods go hand in hand to create a complete traffic building system. One method alone probably won’t be enough to get you serious visitors to your site. That being said, combining article marketing with social bookmarking is a very powerful traffic building system. If you have the right keywords, you can make some serious sales after about a month. So go check  out the sub-modules, learn everything you can, and then get to work writing your articles. Your almost ready to start cashing those checks!

Our next module is Module 8 : Scaling Your Campaigns

August 1, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, Modules, Squidoo, World of Warcraft by MatthewDC

In the last module, we covered the importance of of having a site and the difference between Landing Pages and what I am calling “Mini-sites”. In this module, we will discuss the process of getting your first website published to the web. We are going to start with a simple landing page using Squidoo to set it up.

Squidoo is a very popular site in the internet marketing world. They allow you to create one page websites, post any content you would like (for the most part), and they also allow you to put whatever links you would like. They also allow you to do it all for FREE. Sounds good right? This module is going to walk you through setting up your first Squidoo site (what they call a “Lens”). We like Squidoo because it allows you to get your affiliate link on the web for free so that you can start building traffic and we also like Squidoo because Google likes Squidoo.

I originally had a whole article written about how to set up a squidoo lens. It was very basic and only covered a few simple steps and really didn’t go in depth into squidoo. I wasn’t happy with the level of training that it offered so I went on a hunt to find a better, more developed squidoo training guide.

That is when I found PotPieGirls FREE 52 Page Squidoo Training Guide. This thing is awesome. It’s step by step with full color screenshots for every single step. I don’t have permission to give it to you but if you head over to her site and sign up for her mailing list, she will email you the PDF. I cannot stress enough how much you need to read this guide. So get it, read it, and then move on to the next module.

Our next module is Module 7 : How to Build Traffic to Your Website

Recommended Reading :

• Get a FREE 52 page illustrated, step by step squidoo guide from potpiegirl. did I mention it’s FREE?
• If you are looking for more in depth lens making tactics and tips, Squidoo has a lens for that.

July 25, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Free Training, Guides, Modules by MatthewDC

Making sales is what it is all about. Without sales, theres no money, and without money, what’s the point? So let’s talk about how we can go about making affiliate sales and start making some money. There are several business models you can use in this industry. Some of which are free and some of which will cost you money. How much money depends on how much you are willing to spend. There are a LOT of options so we will start with one of the cheapest.

July 19, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Modules by MatthewDC

What should you sell?

Sometimes, one of the hardest parts of affiliate marketing is finding a niche and then finding products within that niche that convert well. Let me explain a little bit about what I mean.

A niche is the specific industry you are working in. In our case, that part is simple to figure out. We are going to be using the World of Warcraft niche. There are hundreds of other niches out there that you can sell products for using the skills you are going to learn here. However, I want you to focus on only the one niche for now. It makes things easier.

July 18, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Modules by MatthewDC

So now that you understand the basics, let’s talk about clickbank. Clickbank has what we call the clickbank marketplace. This is where we go to research product’s that we might want to sell. If we go to the clickbank website, we will see a link at the top named marketplace.

When you click the marketplace link, it will take you to a search box. We can use this search box to look for products that are currently registered with clickbank. All of these products will be affiliate products and will offer us a percentage of the profits from any sale we refer. I am going to search for “World of Warcraft” in the marketplace search. It is important that we search WITH the quotes on our search term, so that we get only results that have the exact phrase, World of Warcraft.

in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Modules by MatthewDC

Introduction to Clickbank

In the first module we discussed the method we are going to use to make money off of World of Warcraft. We are going to promote WoW Guides, written by other authors, and get paid 50% profits for sending them traffic that buys their guide. Some of you may have been wondering after reading the first module, “What if the guide seller doesn’t pay me?”. Well to legitimize the affiliate sales (that is what we call it when you make a sale), we use a website called Clickbank.

in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Modules by MatthewDC

What is Affiliate Marketing and Why do I Care?

You came to this site so that you could learn to make real money, using your knowledge and experience playing World of Warcraft (WoW). But how is it we will take experience playing a video game and turn it into cash money? We do it by using something we call “Affiliate Marketing”. It is called that because you are affiliating yourself with another person or company in order to make money. In the World of Warcraft niche, we affiliate with Gold and Leveling guide authors specifically.

You may have seen the various WoW guides plastered all over the Internet. The banners and text advertisements are on just about every WoW related site you can find. Zygor’s Leveling Guide, Joana’s Leveling Guide, and Warcraft Millionaire are just a few. These guides sell for upwards of $50 each currently. The reason you see these guides all over the Internet is simple; the authors of these guides will pay you 50% of their earnings for every guide you help them sell. So let’s break this down into something that can make your mouth water :

Zygor’s Leveling Guide sells for $50 (That’s $50 each Alliance or Horde)

For every person you send to his website that BUYS a guide (you get nothing if they don’t buy), you get 50% so $25 (roughly after fees, the actual amount is more like $22.62 but I am not good with math and $25 is much easier to work with).
On average, I sell 3-5 of this specific guide every day. Let’s do the math.

3 guides x $25 = $75 per day.

$75 x 7 days in a week = $525 / Week.

$525 x 4 Weeks in a Month = $2100 / Month!!

As you can see, by sending traffic to Zygor’s website, using a special link, you can earn $2100 a month and that is only looking at 1 guide. There are approximately 15-20 WoW guides currently on the market! What I have just described, sending traffic to someone’s website in exchange for a percentage if they buy the product, is what we call affiliate marketing. You are marketing for Zygor and by affiliating with him, you get paid. It is as simple as that. So why would he want to give away 50% of his profits? Because that way he doesn’t ever have to worry about advertising his product and he can spend all of his time making sure it is the best on the market. Makes sense right?

So now you are getting anxious to get started and you are wondering how exactly you can get traffic over to his site and start making money. LISTEN CAREFULLY! Do NOT jump into paying a bunch of money on various traffic methods all over the Internet before you go through these training modules. I am going to explain as best I can, all of the different methods I like to use, and I am going to recommend which ones to use, and which ones to stay away from. I will also show you how to go about doing it completely free, it just takes longer that way but it is doable. I will also show you some methods you can use that cost a little money, but greatly speed up the process.

What I want you to take away from this first module is this. Affiliate Marketing is making money by sending traffic to someone else’s site, in order to help them make sales, in exchange for a percentage of the profit. It is a feasible business model and there are marketers currently making millions on the Internet using this very method. Are we going to turn you into an Internet millionaire by using what I teach? Nope. I am not even close to that point. That being said, I do make a nice chunk of change and it pays my car bill, my rent, and most of my expenses. I still have a regular job too so if you are thinking you won’t have the time to dedicate to this new mission, consider this. I am a SSgt in the USAF and I work 12 hour days regularly. I also take 2 classes per semester of College and I still have enough time to use these methods to make thousands a month selling WoW Guides.
It’s possible. It’s easy. It’s staring you right in the face.

Read the modules, implement the techniques, and you WILL make sales. You may only make 2 sales in your first month, but guess what, that is $50 you did not have before you started, and thats 2 sales closer to quitting your job and working for yourself. Thanks for reading and see you next module!


Our next module is Module 2 : Introduction to Clickbank.