When CPA is used, sometimes it is referring to pay per lead programs. No taking out the credit card. Not even getting a free trial that is billed monthly in 30 days, although some can be. Just get the lead and get paid.

When you sign up for a CPA program, you are signing up for half the job you do as an affiliate marketer. You don’t have to close the sale. You only have to lead customers to the people that will. And you get paid for that lead. I’d say that’s a deal.

Some combinations of info your visitors may have to fill out for you to get credited with a lead:

• Just an email address.
• Name and address and phone #
• Name, address, phone # and email
• All info plus a credit card

And on the whole, the more info requested, the more you get paid. You could be looking at $30 or more to get someone’s credit card for a 30 day free trial of Acai Berry

But, of course, where the money is easier, it’s not really easier. There is competition. There is a lot of competition for easy money. But it is possible to make money this way. I have used both Adwords advertising and banners on my own sites to generate paid leads and it has worked. And since you are dealing with $1, $5 and $10 increments, you can track your results quickly. You will know if a campaign is working early. Whereas you might let a product with a $75 commission ride a bit before you cut it and have the potential of losing a lot more money if you are not used to using PPC.

Some Pay Per Lead Affiliate Programs

• Maxbounty
• ShareASale
• FineClicks
• ClixGalore
• LeadPile

You can find a lot more just by searching Google for “pay per lead” programs. But these have been around for a while and I have made money from the programs listed above.

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Data. What is data? Anything on the internet for the most part. As soon as you post an article to your blog, it becomes data. I know. I know. You wrote it. It’s the result of your work. But once it hits the internet, it becomes data. What else is data? The Clickbank marketplace XML. Affiliate datafeeds. Your bookmarks. The list goes on.

I am a blogger. I am an affiliate marketer. I do use PPC. But data is what got me as far as I have. It is a big piece of the puzzle. I write software also. But the software’s purpose: to manipulate, present and transfer data.

There was a time when I was looking for the killer app or trying to come up with the code to create it. This app would handle everything I do online to make money, from brainstorming a post to submitting it to various sites. Great idea and still on backburner.

But the data behind such a tool is basically the same data I have now. What if I took out the killer app and worked with just the data? That would give me more options. I could use the tool suited to each specific job and then move the data between them.

So that’s where I have been. On a software hunt. It takes me away from my normal schedule, but in the end, it is worth it. I always find something new and useful that speeds up one process or another. Well here is what I found this time:

Screen Scrapers

Not necessarily black hat. Sometimes you just need information, whether it be from Wikipedia or elsewhere. Or maybe just to check your rank in various search engines.

• screen scraper – The basic version is free and will give you a CSV file. This is the one I settled on.
• php screen scraping class with caching – For doing things on the fly without a database
• OutWit – A firefox plugin that does some data scraping
• Iopus Internet Macros – Another free Firefox plugin that you can automate browsing and scrape sites with.
• phpquery – A php class for scraping. Uses DOM.
• Web-Harvest
• IRobot
• SIMILE – A whole slew of screen scrapers from MIT.

Affiliate Datafeeds

Datafeeds help you to move the data for your affiliate program fast. About 90% of the money I have made through affiliate marketing has come through affiliate programs that supply datafeeds.

• Clickbank
• PayDotCom
• ShareASale – from Cubrowski.com
  
• Regnow

And what the hell, here is more from Cubrowski.

Tools for Moving and Transforming Data

These are relatively new. Take any data source format at any location, local, remote or secure and move and transform it into any other data source.

• Jitterbit – The one I am using and it is working out very well. This one will move data fast.
• XAware
• Talend
• Apatar
• SnapLogic

Working with MySql

Here are some tools that make working with MySql easier. There are many more out there. Or you can use PHPmyadmin.

• SqlYog
• SQL Excel

Importing Csv Files Into WordPress

For the longest time, there were only paid versions of plugins that would do this. I am sure I will be modifying one of these so that it can import pages and not just posts.

• Import CSV – There is a pay version of this plugin that does more like integrate with All-In-One SEO.
• Convert CSV Datafeeds to WordPress Posts – Not actually a plugin, in that you have to navigate to the tool manually in WordPress, but it will also do the job.

Now this may be the boring part of the job, working with data. But eventually, you may learn it’s power. If you could divide the internet into three parts, those parts would be people, data and algorithms. There is a motherload of tools in this post. Some I wish I had earlier. Some I never thought existed. So if you don’t need them now, if you stay in this business for any length of time, you might want to bookmark this post for later. Or just wait. I may give an example of their usage here. Forget paying for a bans system. You can do it better with these tools for free.

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The problem is with the options. There are just too many. If you look at the post I wrote just the other day, you will see why. I listed over a hundred ways to promote your blog. Do they all work? Yes. To some extent. But when you are faced with a list like that, at least when I am, I freeze. Too many options gives you no clear place to start. And I promise, that list is only a start. I have used some of the methods and know what has worked for me. And some of the methods are based on your blog as a whole while others focus on posts. And some methods are good to use when you start a blog and others will only work after your blog has at least a little bit of a presence online.

But that is just promotion methods. Have you chosen a niche yet? How about an affiliate program or products to promote? Add these two variables to the mix and you have even a bigger mess. How do you solve this?

First you need to know what you want to write about. Can you write about it? Are you an expert? Do you have enough material for the niche? Now you don’t have to be an expert. I happen to think that one of the best times to start a blog is when you are learning something new.

If you are learning SEO, keep a blog about what you have learned each day. Try some SEO software. Write about it too. Not one post. Try to find out everything it can do and start listing things. If each item on your list can be it’s own article, then write an article about each topic. Take screenshots and use them in your post (and upload the photos you use to flickr instead of your own server. It can only help spread your network further). Take screencasts of you using the software for one post and then post your video wherever you can. Even simple niches can contain lot’s of material for posts.

That didn’t help much either. I just made every option a little more tempting. If any niche is worthy of creating a blog about, there is no narrowing down with that last paragraph. I am no help. You see, I look wide and far for options, techniques and methods. The problem with that: eventually you have to chart your course and actually do the work.

Just do it. Okay, I lifted that from Nike. But it applies to so many things including affiliate marketing. You know what you can write about whether you admit it to yourself or not. Don’t worry about products to promote. They are out there. Just choose your topic.

And I will let you in on a little secret about the methods you use to promote your niche blog. Gurus and experts play favorites. They also have comfort zones. They also are prejudiced. I have lurked and traveled in a lot of marketing niches online. For the most part, the email newsletter expert knows nothing about Adwords, the pay-per-click expert knows nothing about SEO and the article marketing expert knows nothing about social media marketing. And when someone doesn’t know how to do something, they tend to devalue it’s worth. Now I am not talking about all the experts or any specific experts. I am speaking generally. But just take everything you hear and read with a grain of salt, including this post.

But I am signed up for a lot of affiliate programs and not using AffSpy as often as I should may not have been a good choice for one reason.

I am setting up Profit-ware to be a niche Ebay blog. My initial search for products was through Clickbank. I found a few, but that limits to me to one network. A search for Ebay on affspy brings up 20 more products I may want to promote and tells me my payout right on the search results.

So AffSpy is just another option when you are trying to find an affiliate product to monetize your website or blog. Whether or not you can find more by just doing a Google search with "affiliate program" in quotes remains to be seen.

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There are plenty of systems out there. The problem with systems is that they tend to get you in a rut. I have talked a lot about promoting Clickbank products with Adwords. There are many ebooks available on the subject. The problem is that most of them take one technique and expand it to the point it is a system with no regards to any other possible technique that may have a synergistic effect.

Use only exact match keywords. Content bids are worthless. Content bids are a gold mine. Building landing pages is a waste of time. Not using landing pages means you’re missing out. I have heard them all. The key is to take each suggestion with a grain of salt and test for yourself. If someone thinks that the method they use is the next best thing since money fell out of the sky and filled your driveway, then they probably have something worth learning, but not to the exclusion of other methods. Because the guy using the other method is saying the same thing about his techniques.

I say listen to them all. Instead of following in a guru’s footsteps, spend enough time learning the method, take from it what you need and move on to another. It beats getting stuck in a system that may change due to changes at Google, too many competitors or many other factors. I guess my point is that a system is a tool and you want as many tools as you can fit in your toolbox.

Google Adwords Quality Score

There are many factors that contribute to how much you will end up paying for a specific click. Clickthrough rate is one of them and we will get to that in other posts. But there is one big one that will effect your cost per click before you even start getting clicks and that is the Adwords Quality Score. Now, I am not going to go into detail on this one. Instead I will refer you to a few other blogs:

• The Adwords Quality Score - Startup hustle goes through a few of the broad factors that effect the quality rating that Google Adwords will give your compaigns. The one I am mainly concerned with in this post in the landing page.
• Page Loading Speed Does Adwords Quality Score – It’s new factor, but it counts. If your page loads slow, you pay more.
• How to Change Your Landing Page for Better Quality Scores – Now we’re getting somewhere. On to the blogs section.

A Niche Blogging Plan

This is a blog. Obviously, I must know a little bit about blogging. And lately I have been working up a blueprint for launching a new one. Then I will be writing posts here explaining each step. This is a work in progress, so I may make good moves, I may make bad ones, but you will know them all. I currently do make money online, albeit a little haphazardly. By that I mean, I have daily plans of action but everything is not organized as well as I would want it. I jumped into a indepth study of blogging while publishing two site that actually could be called "blogs". I have other WordPress sites, but they are static for the most part, mini-sites.

What I want to do this time is use other niche blog plans as a starting point and then max them out with knowledge I have with a special added twist at the end. First a few blueprints:

• DoshDosh’s Niche Blog MasterPlan - This is one of the first I ran into and my starting point. Read up. DoshDosh has a heavily trafficked blog.
• An Introduction to Keyword Sniping – I will be using aspects of this one, but we won’t be going for ad clicks. We will be after commissions of up to 75%.
• The 90 Day Challenge – Just found this one. Haven’t had time to read the 400 page book, but I did take a look at the spreadsheet. You will have 12 blogs by day 66. The goal: $100/month. Our goal is bigger, but the process may be slower. I believe in squeezing all I can out of a site. I am shooting for $100/day from one site. It’s very possible. The only thing I am completely unsure of is the timeline. We will know that at the end, this being the first time I set myself up to do this.
• My Brainstorming on a Niche Blog Network – This is where is started. And this is the mindmap I have been working on.

I could go on, but those basically cover it. We will not be looking at the social aspects of blogging until later. That is the icing on the cake. It will bring in more sales. We are going to try to cover all the bases and see what this does to the profit from one single domain.

Niche Blog + PPC

Now were talking. You’ve built a blog that gets traffic from search engines and has subscribers. Why not through a little bit of advertising in the mix? I have yet to try this exact combo, to tell you the truth, but it’s what any ecommerce site that wants to make more sales does. I run one for a day job. I can pick from thousands of profitable keywords because of tracking. If I am on page 2 of the natural results, I can make myself page 1 with Adwords with proven words.

You may rank in the search engines for certain keywords. There will be many long tail keywords among the mix that keyword tools just do not pick up. These can be harvested for use in PPC campaigns. In the same way, using broad matches in Adwords will enable you to capture long tail keywords with your statistics software. These can be used in SEO to increase ranking for lesser known keywords.

With the right type of tracking in place, you can take your ROI calculations down to specific keywords. This will allow you to remove words that just don’t produce.

If you build a blog with natural ranking, your Quality Score with have to reflect this. You will get a lower cost per click because your site will have some natural ranking. This is much better than having a fly by night landing page. I has also heard that having separate domains in the display and destination url can lower your Quality Score. So sending hits directly to the vendor through an affiliate link or even through a tracking service may also raise your cost per click.

So those two benefit wrap up in a pretty nice package that I will be fully exploring, evolving, and testing.

On The Road Map

This is a rough draft of how I plan to pull this off. There will be updates in this plan as I go and when I am done, I hope to have a pretty nice outline down.

• The Blog: Profit-ware.com
• The Topic: Making Money from Ebay. It is not exactly a niche. There are many, many ways to make money from Ebay from being a seller to being an affiliate. I should have a better domain name, but I think I can make that up with the history of the site. It used to be a site about making money on Ebay back in the day and has a PageRank of 4. The PageRank gives me a huge running start. Don’t get me wrong. But I am here to make money too. So I figured I might as well use my assets.
• Find some products to promote related to Ebay. At first I will do a search in Clickbank. I will find a few products and write some reviews of them. I am not sure now whether I will make these pages or posts. I am not sure pages can send pings and I want the extra links that can give. I think I will start with ten and build from there. These reviews will be a menu on the sidebar. Later, as I do more research, I will pick up other products to promote from other companies and I will drop unprofitable links once sales start coming in.
• With each of the products above, I will build a set of terms for the Alinks plugin so that the product pages get plenty of varied anchor text.
• I will set a schedule for submitting the site as a whole to different and various sites, documenting each campaign here.
• After I write each post, I will tweak everything from the headline to the slug and use the new and improved Google Adwords keyword tool to get an overview of terms I will be trying to target. Not much time spent here. Just enough. Then I will seek links to each and every post whenever I can. I like to call this embedding a site in the internet. Each page will have links from multiple domains.
• I will be using a set outline to write articles so that I can write them faster. I will be lenient with the article blueprint.

So that’s the plan for now. Each step will have a post. When I see missing parts of the outline, I will add them, do them, and then write about them here. I guess I could have written an ebook and sold it for $49.95, but I needed material for this blog. Damn the luck.

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