Warcraft Affiliates

July 26, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, World of Warcraft by MatthewDC

Welcome to the Raiding edition of “Everything You Need to Know About WoW”.

Raiding is a term used for advanced dungeons in World of Warcraft. These Dungeons are instances that are tailor made for groups ranging from 6 all the way up to 40 players. Typical Raids consist of 10-man, 25-man, and 40-man parties. The 10-man raids are used as stepping stones for guilds to get the proper gear as well as to test their strategies and become accustomed to working together before they take on the 25 man raids.

When raiding, there are several things that are important. The first thing is that you need the proper group makeup. You are going to need experienced and well geared healers, tanks, and DPS. You also want to incorporate crowd control for trash mobs prior to the bosses. A typical raid can have anywhere from 1 to 5 bosses on average. These bosses are super mobs that require great skill and tactics to defeat. Each boss has a specific method that can be used to defeat them.

Many players search the Internet for Guides in order to locate strategies as well as videos on how to defeat a particular Raid boss. This is one area you might want to focus on when creating free content to generate traffic. If you can create proper guides on how to defeat bosses, or even have someone make you videos of a raid defeating a boss with a particular strategy, you would more than likely garner significant traffic. Keywords you might want to use would revolve around the name of the instance or bosses.

For more information about the specific raids, head to WoWWiki’s Raids page.

WoWWiki contains a separate page for each Raid. Within each Raid there is a section for each Boss. It would not be too hard to study the raids bosses, strategies, and loot, and create a guide for your site. I think this is one particular area that most affiliates forget to focus on and is one of the most consistently sought after pieces of information.

You can also find videos of most boss fights on youtube which can be freely used on your pages.

July 25, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Guides, PPC by MatthewDC

Pay Per Click advertising is a very popular method used by many experienced affiliate marketers. While it can be a very successful technique, it can also be overly expensive when not done properly. Today I will try to explain to you the basics of Pay Per Click, but I would highly suggest you try to get more in depth on the topic prior to beginning your first campaign.

What is Pay Per Click?

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has been made famous by search companies like Google or Yahoo. It allows you to place your ads on various participating sites, and pay a fee based on the number of times your particular ad is clicked. Google Adwords is the most well known and trusted of the PPC engines in use today. Website owners allow the ads to be placed on their site in exchange for a portion of the fee collected by Google when someone clicks the ad. Google handles all of the processing and money exchanges and you get to place your ad on highly visited sites without having to broker a deal yourself.

What Are Keywords?

Pay Per Click engines like Google Adwords work in several different ways, but the most common is by what we call Keywords. A keyword is a term that is associated with your site, that you would like to use to trigger your ad. For example; you run a World of Warcraft Leveling Guide site, and you know that people will be searching on Google for the phrase “WoW Leveling”. “WoW Leveling” would be considered your keyword. Keywords are the foundation of a PPC campaign and will determine when and where your advertisements will surface. To find out what keywords your competitors are using and lighten your workload, you can use sites like Keyword Spy (my favorite).

Setting Up a Campaign

When creating a PPC advertising campaign, there are several parts to the campaign that you must design. Each step is an intricate process and requires research in order to keep your costs down. The first step is to research keywords and find the terms that you would like to use to trigger your ad. Once you have your terms selected, you can most on to creating the actual advertisement. Google and Yahoo allow for text ads, video ads, and banner ads. The most common type is the simple text ad. You have probably seen these types of ads down the right side of Google when you do a search.

Text Ads require three lines of text and are your chance to sell the product. You need to make the ad enticing and with very limited space. There are entire ebooks on the subject of creating PPC ads and how to write the best copy, we will not go in depth as this is a basic introduction to PPC. However just keep in mind that even professionals are constantly testing multiple ads and everyone at some point or another will write a dud.

Once you have your keywords and ads fleshed out, you simply need to make a bid on the keyword. The bid will determine how you rank within the results for any specific keyword. If 100 people are bidding on the keyword “WoW Leveling”, and you bid less than they do, your ad will not show. The actual algorithm is somewhat more complicated than that, but bid price plays a large factor in how you place on Google.

The Google Quality Score

The other major factor that goes into how your ads rank on Google is the Google Quality Score. Google assigns a score to your landing page based on an unknown series of criteria. The quality of your ad (having the keyword in the title) and the content of your landing page seem to be the most important. The higher your quality score, the less you will pay per click to advertise on Google. Again, whole books have been written on optimizing Google quality score, so we won’t delve any deeper onto the subject.

What to take away

PPC Advertising can be a great way to gain traffic to your sites. However, it is not wise for a new affiliate marketer to rush in head first. If you use the wrong keywords, create horrible ads, or bid too much for your advertising, you can spend a lot of money in a very short period of time. Read up on the subject, look into how to select your keywords and write proper ads, as well as how to increase your Google quality score before you get started. If you do the research, you will be able to use Google Adwords to bolster your affiliate marketing business and make a substantial income doing it. To get more in depth training on Google Adwords, check out Perry Marshall’s Google Adwords Course.

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.

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

Have you ever wanted to learn how to make money on the Internet? Maybe you have been scammed by various get rich quick schemes, or paid survey sites. The truth is, there are only two viable money making business models that the average Joe can use to make money on the Internet. One is to create your own product to sell and the other is Affiliate Marketing. Today, I am going to explain to you what affiliate marketing is, how it works, and why it works.

in Affiliate Marketing, Guides, World of Warcraft by MatthewDC

As the market expands and new guides are released, this list will continue to grow. Check back often more the most up to date listing.

Leveling Guides

• Zygor Guides – Top Seller! Also my personal favorite..
• Brian Kopp
• Dugi’s Ultimate – Also Rocks
• Team iDemise

July 19, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing by MatthewDC

Article marketing is one of the most popular ways to build pagerank and get exposure for your site. I have compiled a list of the top article submission sites to be used when submitting your articles. This list will be built over time and added to every time I find a new site that I like.

in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Free Training by MatthewDC

You’ve probably encountered the word AdWords at least once or twice. You know it has something to do with Google. But if you were asked what AdWords is really about, would you be able to answer the question? If your answer is no, reading on will help you do just that.

If you’ve conducted at least one search via Google’s website, then you have already seen these Adwords. These are the text advertisements that appear on the results page of your Google search.

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.