MAKING YOUR LIFE EASIER
Before you start, I want to share with you links to two WordPress plugins and an Amazon affiliate WordPress theme – all of which I personally had developed for myself. They will help streamline your site building process and have sites up and running in no time flat!
Azon Insta Review – This is one of the coolest
plugins around. It pulls product listings from Amazon and allows you to choose product features, specifications, and descriptions from multiple listings to create a unique Amazon review.
Rapid Response Theme – The slickest looking Amazon affiliate WordPress theme you‟ve ever seen. It boasts a sleek design and powerful options to help you get the most out of your site and start earning commissions in no time.
PowerPress Plugin – Another great plugin that puts all of your WordPress settings on one page and allows you to create pages, posts, categories, and even installs plugins from ONE WordPress page. You can create an entire site in under 10 minutes with this beast.
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INTRODUCTION
Let‟s start with a question…
…Did you know that Amazon is one of the largest marketplaces in the world? Did you also know that it‟s the best way to make money online?
OK… So it was actually two questions.
Amazon is a HUGE, multi-billion dollar company. They offer a couple of different options to make money (as an affiliate or by Amazon fulfillment). We are going to focus on making money as an Amazon Affiliate.
Now, if you are thinking “I hope I didn‟t buy another stupid Amazon guide” then you are in luck! This simple 5 step strategy is going to allow you to leverage tons of cheap traffic without worrying about Google. Organic traffic from Google is just an added bonus with this blueprint.
This 5 step process has never been released, so feel lucky that you are one of the first people to read it. Make sure you take action and go make some money while these strategies are fresh.
If you want an overview about Amazon‟s affiliate program and why it‟s the best, check out the video here:
Click Here
Also, make sure you sign up for Amazon‟s affiliate program before we start at this URL: Click Here
Support:
here
Here’s what we are going to cover in this SIMPLE 5 step process:
Step 1 - Choosing a good niche
Step 2 - Finding products to promote
Step 3 - Creating an Amazon Affiliate Site
Step 4 - Creating a Facebook page
Step 5 - Driving traffic
I am sure many people are dying to know why in the heck we are creating an Amazon affiliate site AND a Facebook page. After all, couldn‟t we just promote Amazon affiliate offers directly to our Facebook page?
Yep, you sure can! I‟ve seen it done before and it can be successful. However, the method I am teaching you leverages the power of Facebook with the potential to gain traffic from Google.
It‟s a win-win situation. The biggest complaint I get from people about building Amazon affiliate sites is how long it takes to start making money. That‟s why most us of are here right?
What you are about to learn will give you loads of traffic in the short-term (and long-term) with Facebook and will also prepare you for long-term success by leveraging the power of Google.
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STEP 1 - PICK A NICHE
This is the easiest step there is, but I am aware that sometimes people can have a hard time with it.
The top priority you want to keep in the back of your mind when doing niche research is that you want to choose an evergreen niche.
An evergreen niche is a niche that has staying power and won‟t likely be going away or having any major shifts in the foreseeable future.
Let‟s take a look at an example of what is NOT an evergreen niche:
What if I built an entire Facebook fan base and Amazon Affiliate site around the product Madden 2013? We may actually do pretty well from around September 2013 to early February 2014. What about after that?
It‟s going to take a hard hit in interest, traffic and sales. They are going to plummet faster than hawk diving for a fish.
Now, let’s take a look at an evergreen niche:
The baby niche is a great evergreen niche. For lack of better explanation, people are going to continue to have children. In fact, we‟ve recently seen some of the highest birth rates in the US since the baby boomers from 1946-1964.
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Let‟s go through a quick checklist to see if this niche has good potential:
Is this an evergreen niche or at least a niche that will make us a lot of money?*
Will this niche have products that I can promote to my visitors/fans?
Does the niche have a large enough target audience?
Is it viable to build a Facebook Page and Amazon review site in this niche?
*If I have the opportunity to make a lot of money on a non-evergreen niche, I‟ll typically take it. If you have the chance to make a lot of money in a short period of time then it‟s often times worth the risk.
You should be able to answer yes to all four of these questions before you proceed and choose your niche. Let‟s take a look in more detail why these questions are important. We already covered evergreen niches so we‟ll skip that one.
Will this niche have products that I can promote to my visitors/fans?
This is an extremely important criterion to meet. We‟ll go over product research in more detail in step 2.
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No matter how many visitors you get to your review site or likes you get on your Facebook page, if there aren‟t products you can promote then you can‟t make much money.
If I was targeting the baby niche, I would look at what types of products I can promote. There are thousands, so we‟ll just stick with the popular ones:
Car seats
Strollers
Baby swings
Bouncers
Diapers
I could go on for hours picking products to promote in the baby niche because there are TONS. You should be able to do the same thing with the niche you choose.
Does the niche have a large enough target audience?
Having a large enough target audience is just as important as having products to promote. Having a small target audience can literally stop you in your tracks. This means little visitors and, consequently, little to no revenue.
Before you choose a niche, you should sit down and plan out who your target audience is. Let‟s continue with the baby niche.
Who are likely to be my target audience? These are the broad criteria:
Women
Married
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Ages 22-35
I plugged these into the Facebook ads manager and I have a broad target audience of 12.8 million Facebook users – granted this is just demographics based on FB users but that‟s fine.
We‟ll get into more detail and getting more precise about demographics in Step 5 – Driving Traffic.
Is it viable to build a Facebook Page and Amazon review site in this niche?
This is the last question we are going to ask ourselves and this is really the question that affects your profitability potential the most.
My buddy Don Wilson answered this question best when he gave an example of the acne niche. It is:
An evergreen niche
A niche with a huge target audience
A niche with tons of products to promote
So, what‟s the big problem then? It is not a social niche. People don‟t want to go on Facebook and talk about their skin issues. They may very well visit an Amazon Affiliate site, but our goal here is to drive traffic from Facebook, so we need people talking about it to make it work.
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If you answered yes to these 4 questions, then great job! We can continue to the next section. If not, don‟t worry. Sometimes it takes a little bit to come up with a niche. Go to the next one and try again.
Trending topics and niches
I recommend both evergreen niches and trending topics. Sometimes they can overlap and you can actually have a trending topic that‟s inside of an evergreen niche. Even better!
What exactly are trending topics you ask?
These are topics that are hot in the Google searches, the news, on Facebook, etc. It‟s essentially what people are talking about.
You can find current trends at Google Trends. My only issue is that they only show one trend per day, so it‟s a little difficult sometimes to find good trending topics to build an Amazon affiliate site and Facebook page around.
Here are a few more good sites for trending topics:
TrendingTopics.org
Fox News
Trends Map
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Why should I choose trending topics?
Great question! There are actually quite a few benefits of choosing trending topics, and I‟ll cover the most important ones:
1. People are talking about it so you know there is traffic to be taken.
2. There is likely less competition in Google for trending topics and products that can be sold to the visitors in trending niches.
3. Paid advertising on Facebook is generally less expensive for trending topics compared to most other “mainstream” topics or niches (i.e. dating).
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STEP 2 – FIND PRODUCTS TO PROMOTE
In this step, we are going to go over product research. The benefit of this is twofold: First, it is going to help us if we want to directly promote Amazon products on our Facebook page. Secondly, it‟s going to help us add relevant pages to our Amazon Affiliate site. Yep, we just killed two birds with one stone.
This step is best done if you put yourself in your visitors‟ shoes… If you were visiting your Facebook fan page or Amazon affiliate site, what types of products would you be interested in?
Let‟s use an example of the niche of twins. I just had twins 8 weeks ago, so this is pretty relevant in my mind right now. What types of products would parents (or expecting parents) of twins be interested in?
1. Car seats
2. Strollers
3. High chairs
4. Bouncers
5. Swings
6. Etc.
I could literally go on for hours listing off the products that are in this niche.
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After you have a nice sized list of products that would sell well to your visitors, it‟s time to go find the products on Amazon.
Here are my typical criteria for choosing a product to promote:
Price is at least $100
Rating is at least 3 stars
At least 10 reviews or 5 really good reviews
This is going to really depend on your niche though. For some niches, you can find thousands of products that meet these criteria (like the baby niche). However, there are some niches that don‟t have a lot to choose from. That‟s okay though because you can still make money if the item isn‟t $100 or more.
I do recommend sticking with the rating of at least 3 stars and 10 reviews or 5 really good reviews. You need to read through the reviews to be able to tell if they are really good or not.
Check out this video on product research: Click Here
Keyword Research
The next step is to do keyword research for our products. Keyword research has changed dramatically from when people used to build micro niche sites with just a few articles and product reviews.
In this case, we want to ensure that the products we chose in the previous section will get enough traffic from Google in the long run. Remember how I
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told you that Facebook traffic will get us short and long term traffic and Google will get us long term traffic?
If you‟re questioning this, let me pose the following question…
What if you have two potential employers…
The first says “We are going to give you $42.83 per hour”
The second says “We are going to give you $42.83 per hour and after 2 months we will give you 20% more”.
Which will you choose?
After you‟ve done all the work of niche and product research, it‟s simple to apply this to both a Facebook page and an Amazon Affiliate site.
Finding Buyer’s Keywords
First, we are going to transform our products into buyer‟s keywords. We need to figure what people would be searching for if they were looking to BUY our products (not just browse our site). This is going to help our Amazon affiliate site and boost our conversions.
The more detailed the keyword the better. For example, if someone types “Car Seats” into Google, they likely are looking to browse car seats and not buy.
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However, if someone types in “Graco Nautilus 3-in-1 car seat”, they likely know exactly what they are looking for.
These buyers keywords are going to be plugged into our meta title and meta description for that particular review page on our Amazon site we create in the next step.
Now go through all your products and turn them into buyer‟s keywords. A good way to help with this is to jump in the Google Keyword Tool and type in your product name. Sometimes it will give you a more specific keyword with a good amount of monthly searches.
Criteria for a good keyword
When we type our buyer‟s keyword into the Google keyword tool (or whatever keyword research software you use), we want to make sure that the exact local monthly searches are 1,000 or greater. We can be a little more lax with this since we are generating traffic from Facebook as well. So, don‟t worry if it‟s a little lower.
The next thing you need to do is install SEO Quake (it‟s free) from SEOQuake.com. This will put a bar under each website in the Google search that shows page rank, backlinks, etc.
You are now going to head to Google.com and type in your search term. With this as well, we don‟t need to be as strict with our
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guidelines because this isn‟t our only traffic method. So find the range that you are comfortable with.
These are the tentative criteria:
Average page rank under 3
Backlinks under 100 (or more and not relevant backlinks)
At least half of the sites not optimized with the keyword in the meta title, meta description, or meta keywords.
Check out the videos where I go into detail about keyword research:
Video 1: Click Here
Video 2: Click Here
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STEP 3 – CREATE AN AMAZON AFFILIATE SITE
Now it‟s time to set up your Amazon affiliate site. Many people already know this process and you can skim through this section if you consider yourself an expert.
I do recommend that you go through this section if you‟ve never read any of my courses on Amazon because these are up to date strategies that work well in 2013.
This section we will cover in videos because it‟s often times easier to follow that way. Here‟s what we will cover and the video links for each section:
Choosing a domain name: Click Here
Choosing a host: Click Here
Setting up WordPress: Click Here
Installing themes and plugins:
o Video 1
o Video 2
Adding content:
o Video 1
o Video 2
o Video 3
o Video 4
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Optimizing your site for Google: Click Here
* If you want my ENTIRE course on building an Amazon affiliate site, you can read it for free here.
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STEP 4 – CREATE A FACEBOOK PAGE
We‟re getting close to banking a ton of money now and we are at the fun part – creating a Facebook page.
The first thing you need to decide is if you want to use your regular Facebook account (if you have one) to create the page. Otherwise you can easily create an entire new Facebook account.
The first thing you need to do is log into the Facebook page you want to create the ad in. All the way at the bottom, you should see “Create a page”.
Next, you‟ll need to decide what type of page you want to create. The choices are:
Local business or place
Company, organization, or institution
Brand or product
Artist, band, or public figure
Entertainment
Cause or community
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I typically choose cause or community because I am building a community.
The next thing you need to do is to enter your Cause or Community name, which will be the name of your Facebook page.
Then you just need to accept the Facebook terms of service and you are ready to rock and roll!
At this point, your Facebook page is technically set up but you just need to add a profile picture and cover. If you don‟t want to do this right away, you can skip these steps. You are going to need to add these before you start getting traffic though, so no time is better than now!
Simply upload from your computer and click save photo
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Next, you need to add a little information about your community. I typically do some sort of call to action like “Click „like‟ if you love Rottweilers” or whatever type of community you are building. This will show up right under your cover and profile picture.
Next, enter your Amazon Affiliate site URL into the bottom box and then click “Save Info”.
If you skipped the profile picture and/or cover image section, now is a great time to add these. Under no circumstances do you want to start getting traffic when your Facebook page isn‟t completely set up.
Post, Post, and Post Some More
The first thing I do when setting up a new Facebook page is to change my start date to the previous year or prior. This makes it look a little more legitimate than saying you just started a few days ago. You should be able to find this as one of the few items on your timeline. Call to Action Your Amazon Affiliate Site URL Goes Here
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Also, when you add your cover photo, it can look a little bit different from the way it shows up at the top of Facebook to how it looks when you post the image.
For this reason, after I upload my cover photo, I typically hide it from the timeline. This just helps you to look a bit more professional.
Next, it‟s time to post some status updates and images. Depending on the niche of your Facebook page, you can post either “cute” pictures, viral images, or a combination of both.
For example, if your niche is Rottweilers, you will likely want to post pictures of cute puppies and good looking Rottweilers.
If your site is about the Samsung Galaxy S4, you may want to post funny memes about iPhone users or why the S4 is so much better than the iPhone.
Here‟s an example of a funny one:
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The funnier, more viral images you post will get shared hundreds or thousands of times depending on your fan base. Just make sure you put yourself in your customers‟ shoes and target the right audience.
The next thing you want to keep in mind is that you don‟t want to post all your images/status updates at once. Facebook has a cool feature (although buggy at times) that will post on the date specified.
Next, just select the year, month, date, and time of when you want the post to be active. If you want to change any of this after you save it, you can visit your admin panel and change the date, time, or delete it altogether.
Here‟s what I recommend – find one day per week that you devote an hour or so to just setting up scheduled posts. Go find all your images, think of your status updates, and set them for the following seven days.
I typically post 2-3 times per day and you‟ll have to find your comfort zone. If you start to see an increase in people un-liking your page or not sharing your images as often, you can alter this accordingly.
Set Date/Time of Post
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STEP 5 – DRIVE TRAFFIC PART I - FACEBOOK
The fifth and final step is to drive traffic to our Facebook page and our Amazon Affiliate site. This is going to do a few things:
Give us an initial boost of traffic and sales via Facebook
Provide us with backlinks from Facebook to our Amazon Affiliate site that‟ll be used by thousands of visitors
Provide us with long-term growth potential via an Amazon Affiliate site.
What‟s the best part of this? Before too long, you will be getting organic (and FREE) traffic from Google along with massive traffic from Facebook. Since we have to do product research anyways, we may as well use the same research for an affiliate site and a Facebook page.
This traffic is going to be easily converted to sales because of your laser targeted niche that we covered in step 1 and your killer product research from step 2. Right?
Before we start driving traffic, you need to make sure your Facebook page is ready to go with quite a few images posted and status updates (or a combination of the two). You also want to make sure your Amazon affiliate site is set up and ready to rock.
Short-term Traffic Boost Via Facebook
It‟s time to get a massive traffic infusion via the biggest social network there is – Facebook. The first thing we are going to do is build our
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fan base up by generating TONS of likes on our pages. This is done by two main factors:
1. Purchasing Facebook Ads – Don‟t worry. I get Facebook “likes” for a penny or less per like. That means that 500 likes will cost you around 5 bucks. You can‟t even get close to that in genuine likes on Fiverr!
2. Posting Viral Images – Viral images are an absolutely awesome, easy, and FREE way to build the likes on your Facebook page.
We‟re going to do things in this specific order too. First, we are going to build a nice fan base. I wish I could look into my magical 8 ball and give you the number of fans that you‟ll need to start growing at a great pace. However, this is going to depend on your niche AND how much you are willing to spend.
When you look at the fact that in some niches you can get 1 cent or less likes, it‟s pretty easy to spend 20 bucks and get 2,000 likes. If you only want to spent $5 or $10, it‟ll take more time to grow but it‟s still definitely doable.
Facebook Ads
The first thing you are going to do is sign up for the Facebook ads account. You can do this in your settings area after you log in to Facebook. You‟ll have to enter some of your information and a valid credit card number or you can pay out of PayPal.
The next thing you are going to do is to create your first ad. Are you excited? Let’s go!
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First thing you need to do after you get your account approved (should be automatic) is to click on the ad manager. If you don‟t see it on the left side of Facebook, you can click in the settings button in the far top right corner of your screen.
Next, click “Create an Ad”.
Under Pages and Places, you should see your newly created page
Our goal is to get more likes for our Facebook page because we are going to offer products to our visitors. If you were advertising a website, we could enter a URL, and we could also link to a certain page, app, event, etc.
Next, select “Get More Page likes”.
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Next, you‟ll need to enter a headline, text, landing page, and an image for the ad.
Headline
You want your headline to be catchy and entice people to click the like button. If you have a good name for your Facebook page, you can use that a lot of times. You are also only allowed 25 characters so you need to be concise.
If your Facebook page is “I love Dobermans” then you very well could have a headline of “I love Dobermans”. We‟ll get to split testing soon and talk about different headlines.
If your headline isn‟t catchy, people aren‟t going to click Like – simple as that.
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Text
In the text area, you are allowed 90 characters. You need to be concise and, once again, persuasive. You could say something like “Like us if you love Dobermans too!”
Let me take a moment to say I don‟t specifically endorse creating a page about Dobermans. Your target audience may be too low since people who like Dobermans are likely a small group of people.
Landing View
This is the page or app that people will end up on when they click on your ad. For example, they can land on your timeline or a specific photo.
I typically set this to my timeline. Once again, you can split test this to see which one works better for your particular niche.
Image
Image is the small image that will show on your ad. It must be 100px wide x 72px long. There are tons of programs out there that you can use to create these images: Paint (if you have Windows), Jing, Photoshop etc.
For a simple task like this, you really don‟t need a complicated program like Photoshop - although it comes in handy if you end up creating images for your posts later on.
I recommend outlining the image in a red stroke. This makes it stand out from the rest of the ads that are shown above and below yours.
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Check out these Rottweiler images and you‟ll understand what I mean.
vs.
Which one stands out more to you?
Put on your thinking cap!
Now we get to the point that will make or break the success of your ads – the demographics you choose.
The demographics are who you are targeting and there are thousands of different combinations you can choose.
I suggest putting yourself in the shoes of the “typical person” that you expect to visit your Facebook page. Let‟s assume we are targeting people who like Rottweilers. What type of people will we target?
Location
I would start with the United States until I get more data that suggests that different countries should be targeted. For example, Germany is one of the more popular places for Rottweilers because they originated there. However, you don‟t want your ad to target people in Germany and have it written in English.
If you are going to select difference countries, make sure to target English speaking countries (if you are from the US or Canada). For example, you could target Canada since it is an English speaking country, for the most part.
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Age
Ages range from 13 to 64, but you can select “no max” if you want to target all people above your minimum age.
We are going to assume that 13-18 year olds probably don‟t have a lot of money to spend on products we will promote, so I would exclude them. Most people, unless they grow up with them, would get a Rottweiler after they settled down and purchased a house.
I am going to assume that 26 is a good minimum age to target, and I won‟t have a max age so I can target anyone 26 and older.
You‟ll need to figure these out for yourself depending on the niche you choose because they are going to be different for each one.
Gender
Nearly all the people interested in Rottweilers, on Facebook at least, are women. It‟s worth split testing men and women in one ad and just women in another ad to tell for sure though.
There are niches that are predominately man as well – like the niche of handguns. Once again, put yourself in your visitors‟ shoes.
Precise Interests
This is where we get specific. We can target people who are a part of a specific Facebook group that is in our niche. Let‟s use the Rottweiler example again. I can target people with the interest of “Rottweiler” which has an audience of 270,000 (if I select age 26 and older).
Precise interests are based off interests listed in peoples‟ profile, groups they‟ve liked, apps they use, etc.
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Unfortunately not all groups that people have liked will be in this list. So you‟ll need to get creative when thinking of interests. For one of my ads for my Rottweiler page, I targeted people who have an interest in Cesar Milan – the dog whisperer. I split tested this, and it actually was one of my top ads.
Broad categories
These are taken from people‟s timelines and will help you target specific groups of people. For example, you can click Interests>Pets (Dogs) and it will target people with those interests.
Please note that broad categories is an “AND” criterion – meaning that if you target the Precise Interests of Rottweiler and the broad category of Pets (dogs), your target audience will be people who have BOTH interests.
If this limits the demographics you want to target, you can always create more ads and split test, which you should be doing either way.
Connections
99% of the time, you will want to choose to target people who aren‟t connected to your Facebook page. Otherwise, your ads will show for people who already like your page, and this will just end up costing you more money in the long run without much benefit.
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Advanced Targeting Options
Sometimes it‟s helpful to use the advanced targeting options. For example, if you created a page on dating, you would want to only target single people. Simply click “See Advanced Targeting Options” and you can see all of these.
Another example would be if you are targeting people for graduate programs in college. You could target only people who are in college currently and haven‟t graduated.
Campaign Pricing and Schedule
Here is where you can either create a new campaign or use an existing campaign, and you can select which one you are doing at the top right of this box.
Next, select a campaign name or choose an existing one. After that, select your campaign budget per day. This will be your budget for your entire campaign, not individual ads.
Thus, when you create your next ad when you are split testing, you‟ll want to select an existing campaign.
For optimization, since you are trying to get more “likes”, select “Your bid will be optimized to increase engagement with your post”. Then you can review your ad and place your order!
It typically takes 24 hours for your ad to get approved. I‟ve seen them be approved in as little as 12 hours and as long as 48 hours.
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Split Testing
Split testing is extremely important when you purchase any type of ads, and this definitely holds true with Facebook ads. Split testing is when you test different variables to try to obtain the best results.
I find it easiest to write down what I want to split test before I actually do it. Here are some examples of what you want to split test:
Images on your ad
Stroke around your image
Title of your ad
Text of your ad
Demographics
Essentially what you do is create different versions of your ad that links to the same page. You create them all in the same campaign and this way you can see which one converts the best.
How many ads do I create?
This is entirely up to you. The more ads you create the better chance you have of finding a big winner. However, if you create too many, then you‟ll have to increase your budget or wait longer to find out which ad performs the best.
This is because if you have a budget of $10 per day and you create 10 ads, you likely won‟t get enough impressions to be able to tell for sure which ad is best. In other words, make sure you only create so many ads that your budget can handle.
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After you find the best performing ad, you can pause the rest of the ads and devote your budget to that ad.
GOING VIRAL
Going viral takes calculated measures for the most part unless you are posting a video of your Rottweilers ballroom dancing with each other or something crazy like that.
Viral images are images that get shared over and over again and gain you FREE fans. These are the best types of fans for your Facebook page because they obviously don‟t cost a dime.
Here‟s a popular layout for a viral image:
Interesting things and cool pieces of art can also quickly become viral like this balloon tank:
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Even irony can be viral!
Viral images should be well planned though. Controversial images can be HUGE when going viral because the more people that share it the better.
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When I say controversial, I mean that your fans or visitors will be on your side even though it‟s a controversial topic. Examples of these can be: the current president, gun laws, pit bulls, etc.
Think about a controversial topic that has to do with your niche and then think about what type of image would have a good chance of going viral.
Not every image is going to get shared, but one image that goes viral can get you thousands of new likes to your Facebook page.
It‟s good to do some testing and figure out what types of images are being shared the most. Make sure you are testing at the same time of the day so you are comparing apples to apples.
Nothing will skew the data more than if you post an image at 2:00 AM in the morning on a Sunday and try to compare it to 6:00 PM on a Wednesday.
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MONETIZING YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE
Monetizing your Facebook page consists of posting links to Amazon products using an affiliate link generated by Amazon. You‟ll need to visit your Amazon Associates account and on the home page you can search for products to promote.
Once you find one, simply click the arrow next to Get Link and select . Lastly, you can add this to your Facebook post.
You obviously don‟t want to just add the affiliate link to your post. I would recommend something like this if you had a Facebook page about Rottweilers:
Add a photo to your post and stroke it with red around the edges:
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Add text to your post:
“Love your Rottweiler?
Then show it with the favorite Rottweiler treats!
Click here ==> http://amzn.to/16G4T4X”
This is pretty simple to do and can be very effective. I recommend stroking the image in red to make it stand out – especially when the background is white but it‟s effective almost all the time.
Your text for your post should be directly related to your niche, your target audience, and your product. Make sure and be persuasive because you only have a small window go grab people‟s attention.
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DRIVE TRAFFIC PART II – BUILD BACKLINKS
The second part of driving traffic is for your Amazon Affiliate site. We are going to start building backlinks to the site while we begin earning sales from promoting products on Facebook.
I use a seven step process to get backlinks to my site and start building organic (most importantly FREE) traffic. Let‟s go over an overview of this process and then we‟ll go into more detail.
1. Get Site Indexed
2. Submit RSS Feed
3. Get Social Bookmarks
4. Build Link Wheel
5. Submit Press Release
6. Build Backlinks to Press Release
7. Video Marketing Campaign
These are the 7 crucial steps to get organic traffic to your site. Sure, without these steps you may be able to get some visitors. The problem is it will be more like a small traffic wave instead of a TRAFFIC TSUNAMI!
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Step 1 – Get Site Indexed
The first step in this whole process is pretty damn simple: Get your site indexed. This will help Google crawl your website and index it so it will show up in the search results.
Prerequisites
Here are some prerequisites and a final checklist to make sure your site is ready to be indexed by Google.
First of all, make sure that your website is set and ready to go. This means that you need to have your unique content posted, no broken links, etc.
You should have an xml sitemap created for your site as well so it is well organized and easy for Google to index.
Your site should also be well-optimized using the techniques I explained in the on-page optimization section. You want the title, description, keywords, etc. all optimized for your selected keyword.
Ready to Go!
Alright, so you have all the little details covered and you are ready to get your site indexed. Here are the final steps:
Log in to your Google Webmasters account or create a new (FREE) account if you don‟t have one.
Click “Add a Site”
Type your full website URL into the Google Sitemap Page and click OK.
Click Add Sitemap
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Type in your full sitemap URL (can be found in the plugin if you are using Google XML Sitemap plugin).
Click “Submit Sitemap” and you are done!
Within a couple days, your site should be indexed in Google. To test this, you can type your URL directly into Google and see if it appears in the search results.
Step 2 – Submit RSS Feed
So, your site is indexed and you are looking to make some big bucks, right? I thought so! Now it‟s time to submit our RSS feed to a few different sites to get our site and its updates out on the web. Submitting your RSS feed is a great second step to do just that.
How the heck do I find my RSS feed?
Simple. Just visit http://www.yoursite.com/feed (Replace yoursite with whatever your URL is).
Here are some of my favorite sites to submit my RSS feed to:
RSS Submitter
BULK PING RSS SUBMIT
950 RSS Submit
Now what?
All three of these sites are free to use. All you have to do is sign up for free accounts at each site and paste your feed URL (noted above) where it asks for it.
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This is a step you won‟t have to repeat unless you want to submit your feed to different sites.
Step 3 – Get Social Bookmarks
There are two methods I prefer for getting social bookmarks and social media backlinks. One is optional and the other is highly recommended. I consider Social Monkee as optional because they recently moved from a free structure to paid. At the time of writing this, they charge $7 for a lifetime membership. It‟s well worth it.
Steps:
1. Sign up for an account at Social Monkee
2. Submit the sites URL to 25 social media sites using this tool
3. Repeat for each new article that is posted on your site
Outsourcing: Buy a gig at fiverr.com and have them submit your site to 100 social media sites. Give them at least 5 URLs and 5 keywords. You do not want to submit one URL to all 100 sites.
FREE ME!
You asked for it! Here is the free method I use to get social media backlinks.
Sites Used:
https://seesmic.com/
http://www.linksalpha.com/
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Steps:
1. Create multiple social media accounts and link them together using any of the three sites listed above.
2. Create a short 400 word articles with a link to your site
3. Post to all social media accounts with a push of a button
4. Use a spinning program to create unique versions so you can submit articles to multiple pages of your sites fairly quickly.
5. Repeat this 1-2 times per week
Notes:
Don‟t include links in every single article and also make sure you post articles with links to articles from authority sites. This helps to make it look a bit more natural to our maker (Google).
Outsourcing:
It may be a pain to create all these accounts but you can find people on FIVERR.com that will do this for just 5 bucks. Give them a general idea of your niche and some keywords so they name the properties in a relevant manner and they will also add all those accounts under a new account and verify everything for you, for just 5 bucks! Isn‟t that awesome?
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Step 4 – The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round
Another great strategy we use to create powerful backlinks to our Amazon affiliate sites is creating a link wheel that links to our site and then sends hundreds of links to each element of the link wheel so they gain more value and help get the site rank higher. A link wheel for us is a set of 12 or more web 2.0 properties that link to your website while also linking to each other creating a simple pattern. The image above shows graphically what a link wheel looks like. The Wheels on the Bus are Broken? A broken link wheel is where the pattern is random and not all web 2.0 properties link to each other but all of them DO link to your site. We use a number of web 2.0 properties to create the link wheel including Squidoo, Hubpages, Wordpress.com, tumblr.com, blogger.com, scribd.com, slideshare.com, livejournal.com, Vox etc. along with some video sites like Metacafe, Daily Motion, Youtube.com and maybe a handful of good article sites that we mentioned earlier. Here‟s what a broken or also known as OPEN link wheel looks like…
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The key here is to not make the link wheel too obvious to Google, so don‟t follow the same exact linking pattern shown in this image, get creative and ensure you don‟t have any patterns to your link wheels.
You don‟t necessarily need original content for all of them, but instead you can spin your original content to ensure all content is original. If you use a “spinning” program, make sure you use your best judgment and read each article to make sure it flows nicely and is free of any grammatical errors.
Next, for each web property, get some social links and after that we like to use a program like Article Marketing Robot to submit these articles to thousands of article sites. This is software that will streamline your article marketing procedures for you and you‟ll be able to drip feed these articles slowly over time to all these sites – we recommend not doing more than 30 links per day to any site.
We recommend 30 because not all the sites will accept your articles and hence there will be an acceptance rate of about 50% which is fine. Keep in mind also that you don‟t want to link directly to your main site from these mass submitted articles – all the link value is passed to the web properties which become stronger and pass more value to the main site.
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All the links built this way have the ability to last a long time and you can continue creating more every few months to maintain your killer rankings.
Step 5 – Submit Press Release
Press releases are a fantastic way to gain massive amounts of authority in the eyes of Google, along with other search engines, and also to receive backlinks from high PR sites. I highly recommend that you take a look at this article before you even think about writing and submitting a press release. Read this article.
Press releases aren‟t like any typical article that you‟ve written. Without the knowledge on how you need to write them, your press release will likely either get rejected or not benefit you at all.
The other option is to hire someone for $5 on fiverr.com or a similar site to write a press release for you. Many times, the same person or other people will also submit it for you to 10-20 press release sites. However, if you don‟t have the money to spend on this, here‟s a list of the top 10 free press release distribution sites that can get you hundreds of backlinks.
Sites used:
http://www.free-press-release.com/
http://www.newswiretoday.com/
http://www.1888pressrelease.com/
http://www.i-newswire.com/
http://www.sbwire.com/
http://free-press-release-center.info/
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http://www.prlog.org/
http://www.widepr.com/
http://pressreleasepoint.com/
http://openpr.com/
Steps:
1. Sign up for any of the sites above that you choose. You can sign up for a few and see if there is one that you like better than the others.
2. Write a press release (view article above if you need help writing it) around 500 words or more.
3. Submit it through the site(s) you choose.
4. Repeat monthly
Outsourcing:
As mentioned, you can find a gig on Fiverr.com from someone that will write and submit your press release to any of the sites listed above. This is a fast and easy way to get a press release out.
Step 5 – Press Releases – Part Deux
Yep, that‟s right – I did it… I added a second part to press releases because I believe this is an extremely important part of submitting a press release – building backlinks to your press release. Most people don‟t do this and they definitely pay for it.
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Remember step 4 where we talked about building link wheels? We want to use this same exact strategy except for our press release URL instead of our site URL.
Press releases typically don‟t stay in Google rankings for very long. For this reason, it‟s beneficial to build backlinks to the press release to get it to stay in Google longer. The longer it stays in Google, the better it is for our site that the press release is linking to.
Essentially what you need to do is return to step 4 and build a link wheel for your press release URL after it‟s submitted and active. Link wheels and broken link wheels are both a great avenue to explore. The more backlinks you build to your press release the more authority it gains.
When your press release gains more authority, it also causes the backlinks that lead directly to your site to gain authority as well. The more authority and credibility that the backlinking sites have, the better off your main site will be.
Let‟s look at this in a formula:
Quality Backlinks + Quality Content = LOADS of visitors!
Step 6 - Video Marketing Campaign
We‟ve mentioned this earlier, but it warrants being mentioned again because it is one of our top sources of ranking high in Google and driving loads of free traffic to our sites. It is, of course, Video Marketing!
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Getting backlinks from video sites is a killer way to get good backlinks and gain authority in the eyes of Google. All you have to do is use a free screen capture software like JING or just use the web based tool SCREENR.COM and just create a simple video walkthrough of your website, talking about the topic of your site, what it covers and what all other related topics are covered and how the site has complete information about that niche etc. Make sure the video is between 2-3mins long and then upload it to the top 10 video and some social media sites using this free tool called TUBE MOGUL - http://www.tubemogul.com/signup/.
Sites to Submit to:
http://youtube.com/
http://vimeo.com/
http://flickr.com/http://video.google.com/
http://video.yahoo.com/http://www.photobucket.com/
http://www.dailymotion.com/http://www.metacafe.com/
http://www.viddler.com/http://facebook.com/
Steps:
1. Use either JING or just use the web based tool SCREENR.COM to create a 2-3 minute video on your niche.
2. Sign up for accounts at the video sites listed above
3. Post your video to the video sites listed above and be sure to add a short description to each video and include a link back to your site.
4. Repeat every 3-4 weeks
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Alternate Video Ideas:
If you don‟t want to speak, use call out boxes instead to display the text you want.
If you don‟t want a video of yourself, grab a FREE copy of Open Office at http://www.openoffice.org and use the presentation software similar to PowerPoint.
Outsourcing:
Like many of the other methods, you can grab a gig on Fiverr to create videos and submit them to video sites.
Recap:
Using these methods, we‟re sure you‟ll get some great rankings for your sites. Just keep repeating these methods every few weeks and your site will definitely rank on Page 1. We recommend you keep repeating them even if your site is already ranking well so that it maintains the rank!
Method 7 – Guest Blogging
While other people are running away scared from anything having to do with guest blogging, you can dive in and reap the profits. Finding a site to guest blog on is probably one of the best ways to build good backlinks to your site. The best part is, you can still outsource the content if you choose and post it yourself.
Here is the trick: Get to know the person. Take a look at the wrong way and the right way to send an email to the person with the site you wish to guest blog on:
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Wrong way:
Hi Denise,
I was taking a look at your site and I would really enjoy writing for you on a regular basis. All I ask is that I have a backlink that links back to my site. I am an accomplished writer and will bring great content to your site.
Thank you,
Jack
Recap:
This may be written in an OK manner as far as grammar and spelling go, but it is the worst possible way you could go about this. Why? Because Denise here probably gets tons of emails just like this every day. She most likely won‟t even respond to you. Let‟s take a look now at the right way to do this.
Right Way:
Hi Denise,
I saw you live in Florida and write about the gentle nature of alligators. That is awesome. I visited there a couple years ago and, man, was it humid! It is tough coming from Oregon where there is no humidity.
I‟d love to connect to you and talk about our fascinations with alligators. Here is my Skype information if you want to chat some time: alligatorlover2930.
Talk soon,
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Jack
Recap:
What is the main difference between the right way and wrong way? We got personal. We learned a fact about Denise and we used it to try to get her attention. Rather than her getting another email about guest blogging, she just got an email that proves that we did a little bit of research to find out where she lives and what she is interested in.
We also made a connection with her because we said that we love alligators as well. Also, the weather is never a bad thing to bring up! I‟ve connected with many people by bringing up something as simple as the weather.
So now we have the opportunity to connect with Denise on Skype. And, NO, we will not get her on Skype and immediately ask her if we can guest blog. It is a good idea to spend 5-10 minutes trying to get to know her and then easing it into the conversation. We promise you this will work wonders.
After you get the green light to start guest blogging, make sure it is OK to add a link to your website in the article or in the author information section. You of course want to make sure that you are guest blogging on a topic that is related to your website.
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You can view the 8 videos on building backlinks and getting massive traffic to your Amazon Affiliate site:
Getting Traffic Video 1
Getting Traffic Video 2
Getting Traffic Video 3
Link Wheels Video 1
Link Wheels Video 2
Link Wheels Video 3
Link Wheels Video 4
Link Wheels Video 5
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MASSIVE MONEY BOOST #1 – LIST BUILDING
List building is one of the most simple ways to double, or even triple, your revenue AND profits. People are much more responsive when they receive emails than they are when they visit a Facebook page.
Many people are scared of list building. They think that it takes a ton of work or it‟s difficult. List building at most times is a “set it and forget it” type of system where you can automate nearly everything. We‟ll cover this in detail in a moment.
Let‟s start with learning about auto responders, what they are, how they are used, and which ones I recommend.
Auto Responders
Auto responders are a crucial step in building your list. In fact, they are a necessity. A good auto responder can be the difference between your subscribers getting your emails or not getting your emails. The options they provide heavily vary between auto responders as well, so pay close attention!
What in the heck is an auto responder, Ryan?
An auto responder is a service that will send out massive amounts of emails for you in a safe and timely manner. It will also automatically send out emails based on the options you choose.
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For example, if someone signs up to your list, you can already have an automatic email set up that will be sent to them at the interval(s) you choose. So, you hypothetically could have 52 emails set up that will be sent out at 1 per week for a year. Pretty cool, right?
Once again, the psychic in me knows you are asking yourself right now, “why the heck do I need an auto responder?”
Well, it‟s pretty simple. Without an auto responder, you would be left with the option of sending the emails out yourself. Not only would this be tedious, but your email account would be flagged and emails would go to the spam folder of the recipient. Spam is no bueno!
There are many benefits to using an auto responder. To name a few:
Extremely high rate of emails that make it to the recipient‟s inbox and not spam folder
Easy to set follow-up emails that are automatically sent at intervals you define
Easy backup, segmenting, and combining of your many lists
Web forms that integrate easily with your website
Reports that show you tons of different statistics for your mailings
As you can see, auto responders are pretty cool. There are a lot of crappy ones out there, so I want to make sure that you don‟t fall into
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any traps. I‟ve used a ton of the auto responders out there, but I recommend only TWO auto responders.
GetResponse is currently my favorite auto responder. I have never had any issues with delivery rates or any other problems that I can think of. They are also willing to let you import lists without the subscriber having to confirm. This is only true if the import passes GetResponse‟s test using a high-tech algorithm after you import. Not to mention that the reporting with Get Response is simply awesome.
Aweber is a close second in the race of my favorite two auto responders. Aweber is the leader in auto responder services and provides some of the best rates for deliverability.
One of the reasons that I rank Aweber in second place after GetResponse is because they have recently been having issues with how long it takes to deliver the emails to the subscribers. They are a great company, so I am sure they are working on it as we speak.
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NEWSLETTERS, BROADCASTS, FOLLOW-UPS
Newsletters
Newsletters are a cool way to send emails (usually in regular intervals, i.e. weekly) to your customers. If you are providing good information, your customers will be chomping at the bit to read your next newsletter. Nearly every auto responder will have different newsletter templates you can use or you can even have your own newsletter designed using a freelance website like Odesk.com.
It is a good idea to pick a template that you really like and that looks nice and stick with it. This will give a uniform look to all of the newsletters you send out over time. This way, people will recognize the newsletters and associate them with you.
Here are some of the newsletter designs in GetResponse:
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As you can tell, GetResponse has probably forked out quite a bit of money to have some killer newsletters designed for you. Don‟t think that everyone will have the same newsletter look because you can customize it to look pretty unique.
Besides, if you want something that you know will be 100% unique with no questions asked, you can have a newsletter designed for you using any freelance website.
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Broadcasts
Broadcasts are pretty similar to newsletters except that they are not usually sent at regular intervals. Sometimes, I will sometimes send out a broadcast promoting a product and send out another one two days later or even two weeks later – it just depends.
Broadcasts are awesome for those last minute emails or promotions you want to send out. The cool thing is you can choose to either send it automatically or schedule for a date in the future. Most auto responders allow you to schedule a broadcast around 90 days before it is actually send out.
For broadcasts, I don‟t use any kind of template because it is usually just a few paragraphs of information about an upcoming product that I or someone else is launching. This is up to you though.
Follow-Ups
Follow-ups are an awesome way to send emails to your subscribers at any interval you choose after they sign up. It may sound a bit confusing, so I‟ll use an example to demonstrate how powerful follow-ups can be. Not only
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that, but they can be a huge time saver, and who doesn‟t like saving time?
Say that you have some pretty standard emails that you want to be sent out to your subscribers after they sign up. If you were to do this manually, it would be simple if you were getting a few subscribers per day. But when you are looking at hundreds or thousands of new subscribers, it would be impossible to send out follow-ups manually.
Here are the following emails that are sent out to your customers (example):
Day 1: Welcome email introducing the subscriber to you and your business
Day 2: Acknowledging a common problem in the niche you‟ve chosen and promoting a product to solve it.
Day 3: A reminder of the problem and the product
Day 4: Final follow-up for this sequence
This is just a simple example of what you can do with follow-ups. The possibilities are endless and you can tweak your follow-up sequence to suit your niche and the products you are promoting.
This couldn‟t be much more easy peasy lemon squeezy than using follow-ups! All you have to do in any good auto responders (i.e. GetResponse or Aweber) is to create a follow-
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up. The actual email itself is identical to creating a broadcast except for one feature.
When creating a follow-up, you can set the interval that you want it to be sent out. This interval is how many days after the person signs up that you want the email to be sent out. So, for example:
Interval 0 – Right when the subscriber signs up
Interval 1 – One day after the subscriber signs up
Interval 2 – Two days after the subscriber signs up
Etc.
This feature will single-handedly save you HOURS of time, I promise. Not only that, but it will likely increase your open rates and even your sales if you are promoting any products.
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CREATING A KICK ASS SQUEEZE PAGE
You want to create a squeeze page to entice people to sign up to your list. It‟s difficult any other way to build and grow your list without doing this. Don‟t worry because we‟ll go through it step-by-step!
The type of squeeze page you build is dependent on what type of niche you are in. The standard squeeze page model (shown below) is good for most niches.
A good squeeze page design will:
Keep people from closing the page right away
Make the visitors more likely to opt-in
Give a more professional and authoritative feel
What does a squeeze page look like?
It can be a simple design like this that goes over the benefits of your report and convinces the reader to opt-in.
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WordPress Themes for Kickass Squeeze Pages
Sure, you can create squeeze pages using basic HTML… but how much fun is that? Creating HTML squeeze pages takes two things: time and HTML skills. I don‟t have either of these, so I lean more towards using WordPress themes to help me build my squeeze pages.
OptimizePress is quite possibly the best WordPress theme ever developed for building squeeze pages and membership sites. It boasts an extremely robust set of features that will leave you drooling.
I use it for all my squeeze pages and membership sites because of its ease of use, slick design, and all the options it has to customize the sites. Not only that, but it also has pre-designed squeeze pages where all you have to do is add a little bit of content and add the code from your auto responder form you create.
Click here to take a look at OptimizePress
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FlexSqueeze is my second favorite behind OptimizePress for themes that create squeeze pages. It is as close to one-click site creation as you can get while also providing some pretty cool other features.
The one area that FlexSqueeze does better than OptimizePress in is easily the option to quickly change the look and feel of the site. Don‟t get me wrong – I love OptimizePress, but most of the OP sites you will see have more of a generic look to them than FlexSqueeze sites. You can customize nearly every facet of OptimizePress, but FlexSqueeze just makes it easier.
You have to carefully weigh the options that you are looking for when picking a WordPress theme – especially if you are spending money on it. Luckily, most theme providers offer some sort of trial or money-back guarantee, so you can test it out for 30 days and see how you like it.
Keep in mind these theme providers coded the WordPress themes so if you do request a refund, they will deactivate your license and you will no longer be able to use them.
OptimizePress and FlexSqueeze do, however, cost money. If you are on a very tight budget, check out the options below.
Click here to check out FlexSqueeze
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ThemeForest.net is an awesome website for finding less-expensive WordPress themes. The themes are sold by individual vendors under the Theme Forest name, so it is all 100 % secure.
You can visit http://www.themeforest.net and find some killer squeeze pages themes for around $10. Just visit the link above and type “Squeeze” in the search bar and you will find quite a few results for squeeze page creation themes.
You can also search Google for squeeze page themes, and you may find something that is a great fit for you. If you want plenty of options and also ease of use in your theme, you‟re likely going to have to pay a bit more for it.
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Creating the Squeeze Page
The creation of the squeeze page heavily depends on the theme you are using. Because it varies so much based on theme, I am going to give you a generic idea of what it should look like rather than how to create it in each theme.
Each theme should have specific instructions on how to set up a squeeze page – I know OptimizePress has TONS of video tutorials and FlexSqueeze has some as well.
I prefer to create squeeze pages that have some sort of content on the left side (whether it be video or text) and the opt-in form on the right side. However, you are free to create this however you like.
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Above is a great example of a squeeze page. It has a compelling title that draws the reader in. Next, it has a video on the left side that explains what the product is about. Lastly, it has an opt-in form on the right.
Take a look at this heat map of a website. This is where people‟s eyes focus on a website first.
Tests have consistently shown that reader‟s eyes are drawn towards the top left first. Next their eyes move down and from left to right. Also, 99% of readers‟ eyes look first in the triangular area that is orange and red.
The orange and red section is where you want your content because it is more likely that the visitor will read it. If you had your opt-in form here, they would likely make a quick decision to leave. You are in essence using your content to help keep the visitor on your site and then to convince them to opt-in. Hence the reason why we want to create killer content!
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Learn how I made $43,281.78 using this One SIMPLE Method
A good title will compel the reader to opt-in. You also want to intrigue the visitor by leaving the key ingredient out. For example, which sounds better?
“Learn how I made $43,281.78 using this One SIMPLE Method”
Or
“Learn how I made $43,281.78 using this Method Where I Create Videos on YouTube to get Visitors to a Clickbank Product”
I hope you said the first one!
It goes along with the old saying, KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid. You do not want to give too much away but you also don‟t want to leave too much out. There is a perfect balance in between where you give a little bit of information (like the dollar amount) but also leave some to the reader‟s imagination.
Because your goal is to entice the reader to opt-in, you want to leave them intrigued on what you are going to tell them.
You‟ll need to obviously tailor your headline towards the niche that you are targeting. Your headline for promoting a product and your headline for your love of Rottweilers will be completely different.
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Make Sure you are in good Form
The design of your form is pretty important. If you have some crappy form that doesn‟t flow with your website, it could deter visitors from opting in without you even knowing.
Forget that! Aweber and GetResponse both have spent tons of money on developing slick looking opt-in forms for one reason – conversions! Make use of their hard work and money spent so you don‟t have to do any hard work or spend any money!
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CHECK YOUR RATES
In our actual auto responder, we are concerned with five different percentages. Pretty much all the relevant information we need to gather can be found by looking at statistics of these five rates. Are you dying to know what they are? They are:
Open Rate – When you send out any type of email through your auto responder (whether it be a broadcast or a follow-up), a certain percentage of your list will open the email. This is exactly what the open rate is – the percentage of people that open your email.
You want to pay close attention to your open rates because it is a good idea to get a baseline of your open percentages. Your open rate is really based off three things: the time you sent the email, how responsive your list is, and the subject of the email.
You want the subject of your email to not give away too much information but still be enticing enough for the recipient to open it.
Click Rate – This is the rate that people click on a link inside your email. This number will be 0% if you don‟t have any links inside your email. This metric is based on how much your email entices the reader to click on a link in the email.
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This is an important measure to focus on and compare to your open rate. Ask yourself the following questions when looking at your click percentages:
o Is the click % in this email high or low compared to normal?
o If it‟s low, what was different from some of the higher emails?
o If it‟s high, what was different from some of the lower emails?
o How many links did I add to this email?
o Was the content of the email in line with the subject or were they completely different?
It‟s important to always look at the factors of why things are changing. If they are changing for the better, great, but you need to know how to replicate it.
Bounce Rate – The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that did not make it to the recipient. This can be one of a few reasons:
o Non-Existent emails don't exist or were cancelled. The address may have a typo or the person with that address might have left the company.
o Undeliverable bounces happen when the receiving server was temporarily unavailable, overloaded, or could not be found.
o Mailbox Full means that the recipient's mailbox was full. You won't be able to deliver the email until the contact makes space in their inbox. In some cases, the email address may be abandoned.
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o Vacation/Auto Reply is when your contact is away on a trip or unable to check email, they may show up in the Vacation or Auto Reply bounce category. Unlike with other kinds of bounces, your email was delivered successfully into these contacts' inboxes.
o Blocked email means that the receiving server blocked the inbound email.
Complaint Rate – This is the number that you don‟t want to see a high percentage of. The complaint rate is the percentage of emails that go to the spam box of the recipient. This could be because the email provider marks it as spam or the recipient marks it as spam.
Most decent auto responders (Aweber and GetResponse do) will provide you with a spam score, based on many different metrics, before you send your email out. Most providers will rate your spam score where 5.0 or more is not good.
You can keep this down by:
o Keeping your “From” email address and “to” email the same over the course you are sending emails.
o Use confirmed opt-in where the subscriber has to confirm in their email to sign up for your list.
o Make sure your emails don‟t look like spam.
o Provide an easy way for the user to unsubscribe.
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Unsubscribe Rate – This rate is the percentage of people (in proportion to how many subscribers you sent the email to) that unsubscribe from your list. This is actually better than having the subscriber mark it as spam.
Spring Cleaning
Cleaning up your lists and deleting inactive subscribers is important because it will help:
Show more accurate statistics because the stats will be based off how many active people are on your list.
Cut down on your auto responder bill.
As you probably know, auto responders typically charge based on how many subscribers you have. If you are removing the inactive subscribers, you are more likely to cut down on your bill.
Lower bounce rates over time because if the people are inactive in your list, they are likely inactive in other peoples‟ lists as well. This means if their inbox is full, the email will be bounced more times than a bouncy ball by a 3 year old.
Wax on – Wax off
My criteria for removing someone from my lists are that if they are inactive for 3 months or more (meaning they have not opened any of my emails) then I remove them from my lists. It‟s really a pretty simple thing to do and you can do this every few weeks or every month.
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Response Rates Overt Time
Open rates are going to diminish over time – that‟s a given. The longer someone is on your list, the less likely they are to open your emails.
All of the methods that I‟ve listed to build and manage your list will help negate the dwindling response rates to a certain extent. Nothing you do can entirely stop this process from happening, but I‟ve laid out the methods that will at least help combat it.
Building a List with Facebook
You should understand now that your squeeze page theme should be directly tied to the niche you are targeting. Your goal is to have the highest conversion rate possible… Makes sense right?
Similar to how we monetized our Facebook page, you can also build a list in a similar way. For example, you could post an image and text that reads:
“Love your Rottweiler?
Then show it by joining the Rottweiler fan club!
Click here ==> http://iloverottweilers.com”
Once you start getting people to opt-in, it‟s way easier to get them to purchase products from you. Your conversion rates via email will blow your conversions from promoting directly on Facebook out of the water.
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You don‟t only have to promote Amazon products either. In the next Massive Money Boost, I‟ll show you different monetization methods that can make you quite a bit of money.
Building a List with an Amazon Affiliate Site
This part is extremely simple. Literally all you have to do is create a web form in your autoresponder and add the form to your sidebar on your Amazon Affiliate site. There are also different plugins out there that will create a popup for each visitor where they can fill out the form to subscribe to your list.
You‟ll want to make it enticing for people to subscribe or they‟ll have no reason to do so. You can offer something like a free 10 page eBook on Rottweilers or something that is tailored to your niche.
The more incentives people have, the more likely they will be to subscribe. And the more people that subscribe, the more money you make!
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MASSIVE MONEY BOOST #2 – EXTRA MONETIZATION METHODS
Some people complain that Amazon doesn‟t have enough breadth to simply use Amazon to promote affiliate products.
To a certain extent, these people are correct and I‟ll tell you why!
What if the people in your niche aren‟t interested in physical products? Perhaps they would be more interested in surveys, eBooks not on Amazon, etc.
In this case, CPA networks are the place to go. CPA stands for cost per action and it means you get paid when this action takes place.
For example, if you link from your Facebook page to a CPA offer that is a survey, you can get paid when the person finishes the survey and enters their email. Essentially, this offer pays out on email submit.
As you can imagine, your commission increases depending on what type of offer it is. i.e. You‟ll get paid more if the person you refer purchases a product than if they submit an email.
There are tons of different offers and these can make you quite a bit of money!
Even if Amazon carries products that your niche is interested in, you can still make money promoting other offers.
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Here are some of the most popular CPA Networks:
Peerfly
Neverblue
MaxBounty
CpaWay
Convert2Media
ClickBooth
MediaWhiz
Adscend Media
CPA Lead
W4
What you need to do is sign up to the networks that have products that will interest your target audience. Each CPA network will be slightly different in their application process and offerings.
After joining, you‟ll search for products and get an affiliate link just like you were promoting as an affiliate on Amazon.
There are a few different options of promoting CPA offers:
1. You can promote to your Facebook fans just like you would a normal Amazon product. Of course you need to tailor it a bit more depending on the type of offer.
2. You can have a banner or link on your Amazon affiliate site. This is only useful for certain types of products and may not be as successful for surveys and some other offers.
3. Promote to your email list. This will by far be the most responsive people you‟ll deal with. They already signed up to
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hear what you have to say and they‟ll listen far better than people who visit your Amazon affiliate site or your Facebook page. Use this TO your advantage without TAKING advantage.
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MASSIVE MONEY BOOST #3 – INCREASE YOUR AMAZON COMMISSIONS
Yep, I am calling this the super-secret ninja tactic. Each month, your commissions get reset down to a tiny 4%. Just like that, even if you sold 10,000 items the month before, you are back at 4%.
Say I promote a product at the beginning of the month and it sells 100 units for $100 each. Let‟s take a look at the commissions I‟ll receive based off Amazon‟s commission structure: # of Products Shipped/Downloaded in a Given Month Revenue (Commissions) 1-6 $24
7-30
$144 31-100 $455
TOTAL
$623
Look at that, you just made a total of $623 from one promotion! That‟s definitely not bad for a day‟s work, but you can do much better?
How, you ask? Simple. Promote a very inexpensive item that is still targeted to your list at the beginning of each month. This will dramatically bump your commissions up.
Let‟s say that I promote a $2 item on the first of the month and I sell 320 units. The commission on my next sale is now a whopping 7%.
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Let‟s look at how much I‟ll make now from 100 sales of the $100 product: # of Products Shipped/Downloaded in a Given Month Revenue (Commissions) 321-420 $750
Instead of $623, we just made $750. That‟s an increase of 20.3% by just promoting a lower priced item at the beginning of the month. How easy was that? This is based off Amazon‟s commission structure here: # of Products Shipped/Downloaded in a Given Month Volume-Based Advertising Fee Rates for General Products 1-6 4%
7-30
6% 31-110 6.5%
111-320
7% 321-630 7.5%
631-1570
8% 1571-3130 8.25%
3131+
8.5%
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CLOSING
I really hope you enjoyed this course. I spent a lot of time detailing the tactics I use to make money with Amazon and Facebook and left nothing out.
With that said, the ball is now in your court. It‟s your turn to take your newly learned knowledge and annihilate Amazon commissions. Take massive action and the rewards will come – simple as that.
If you need anything at all, please don‟t hesitate to submit a support ticket at http://ryanmartin.zendesk.com.
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