One of the big problem with choosing clickbank products to promote is working out what the refund rate is. This is no longer a problem , on checking CBengine today it was showing the refund rate for all the products sold on clickbank in the pro edition. 

Unfortunatly it can’t display it for sites that have recurring billing so several major prodcut that have been launched recently, escape my derission for their 30% + refund rates. 

CB engine offer a free trial account and also a free account with limited information alternativly you can get a full account for $39 a year.  Compared to using the Clickbank marketplace it’s an absolute pleasure to use , this is what the marketplace should be like. 

If you are serious about affiliate marketing then check out CBengine now.

I thought I’d talk about scaling your business today, for those of you who don’t know scaling is the process by which you take a successful venture and grow it so that the profit increases exponentially. So for example if you had a successful AdWords campaign that earned you $30 per day you would want to scale it up so that it earns you $300 per day.

Unfortunately scaling is not always as easy as some people make it sound. Each niche or product has a natural level of sales. How many people actually want to buy purple spotted baseball bats? No matter how hard you try to scale up those sales you will struggle… unless of course the Chicago cubs start using them!

However putting that aside the theory is sound, I always regard my first sale on a site as a proof of concept. If I can make that first sale then I can can make more. I frequently buy a domain and place some content from ezinearticles on there and add AdSense even if i am intending it to be an affiliate site. I’ll then submit another article on the topic to ezinearticles and see what happens. It’s quick and cheap.. and can save you money in the long term.

If I get the traffic and a few clicks on the ads then I know there is a market as Adsense ads are generally aimed at attracting buyers so people clicking on the ads means that there are buyers, they are reading your article and you can make money.  It’s then all a case of scaling it up,  there is nothing stopping you having several sites on each niche, adding additional keywords , trying an AdWords campaign.

Who wants a challenge this weekend?? 

Do the following and I guarantee that you’ll earn money before next weekend . Then all you need to do is to scale it up.

1. Go to ezinearticles and find an article that has had 100 views or more in 3 days. The more views the better. (views and date posted are listed at the bottom of every article.)

2 Buy a Domain related to the same niche or if you have no money set up a subdomain using the name of the niche on an existing site.

3. Grab some related content from article directories (we aren’t interested in seo on this site) If it has list of tips so much the better. (see 6)

4.  Add Adsense , don’t blend it in or be subtle..make it stand out

5. Spend 1 hour writing articles for submission to ezinearticles (this should be enough for 2 or 3 articles) they only need to be 300-500 words.

6. Add a resource box which will get click throughs , says some thing like  ” For more FREE Tips and advice Visit ……  ” or “Find out how to cure xxx forever , visit…….”  or “Now you know the problem find out how you can get rid of xxxxx visit….”   Don’t use any resources boxes that say things like “john smith is an expert in…..”

Thats it….  Now go an prove that you are not like 95% of other people out there and take action. When you make money from this post a comment below and I’ll come up with a gift for the best comment.

 Have a nice weekend!

Whoops, it’s been 7 days since I last posted I can’t believe how time flies when you are engrossed in the olympics. Here in spain most of the action happens between 2 am and 5 Pm so as a sports fan my body clock has been thrown into chaos.

I’ve been enthralled by the performances of Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt and the British Cycling Team although I have to say calling Phelps the Greatest Olympian of all time is a bit premature, yes without a doubt he is the greatest swimmer of all time but people like Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis who won medals in multiple events or Olympians like Sir Steve redgrave who won 5 gold medals over 5 different Olympics probably have a greater claim to the title of greatest olympian.

I bet you are wondering how I can link the Olympic greats to Internet marketing..easy! It’s all about variety.The greatest olympians are the ones who take part in a variety of events. Just like that the most sucessful marketers are constantly trying new things. It’s very easy to get caught in the trap of creating the same types of sites all the time. I’ve spent months building the same type of affiliate blogs and before that the same types of adsense sites. They work so why change them? Well by changing you find more efficient methods of working and more profitable types of sites.

Last month I decided to try something completly new, I forgot about trying to rank #1 in google, I didn’t add my new sites to social bookmarking sites. In fact I didn’t do any additional promotion at all apart form post articles to ezinearticles. Each site took me about 10 minutes to complete and i don’t think I’ve spent more than 15 minutes on the sites since I made them.

This is what I did…

1. Used my rapid Niche research method to identify a busy niche.
2. Created a simple 1 page site with free tips on it and monetized it
3. Outsourced 10 Articles
4. Posted Articles To EzineArticles

That was it , nothing more, here are my stats from ezinearticles for the pen name I used..

This first site isn’t the most profitable site but at around a month old it has still earned me over $100, which puts it in profit. Not bad for a site that hasn’t yet been optimized and has has less than 30 minutes spent on it.

So go and try something new it might work , and it might not. But if you are like me you’ll learn more from your failures than your sucesses.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on an article marketing report. I intended it to be about 30 or 40 pages and i was going to sell it for $7. Well I’ve now abandoned it!  Anik Singal from Affiliate classroom has released an Article Marketing Report to tie in with his new Affiliate Article Directory going from beta to live. It is packed with info and useful tools and only costs $5.  Yes a 96 page report for $5 . (it’s $10 or $5 if you provide 3 friends email addresses)

But the report is not the only thing you get.. You get a Niche Calculator which will evaluate a niche for you, Article Templates, Checklists and A list of top article niches. As I said in the title of this post it’s a no brainer…

If thats not enough the article directory, is designed with affiliates in mind and also allows you to earn money whilst submitting articles.

I could go on about how good this report is and how you’d be stupid to miss it but I won’t. Even if you never write an article in your life and outsource everything you owe it to yourself to get this report.. there is even a 30 day guarantee . So for $5 what are you waiting for?

So Visit Affsphere and grab your Article Marketing Report

I am going to cover 2 things in this post one really good thing and one thing that really winds me up. Lets look at the good side of things first.

Out of the blue today I got an email from ezinearticles saying that I had been given access to the express articles service that they are shortly to launch. So i thought I’d better test how good it was. I always keep a folder full of articles for submission so I chose 2 and submitted them to ezinearticles.

It can’t have been anymore than 5 or 6 minutes later that I got an email telling me that the articles had been accepted. Now that is an excellent service, I’ll keep testing it at different times over the next few weeks and see if they keep this excellent standard.

This is going to be an excellent service when it comes to launching sites and promoting affiliate products from your blogs. One of the key part of any business is the time it takes to get a product to market. With article marketing this looks like is going to be minutes or hours rather than days now!

Now we’ll get onto something I hate and I hope that Google soon clamps down on. This is the now common practice of creating an Adwords ad that says  “Project X Is a scam”

I just went looking for an example and i came across this,”

“Bloggin To The Bank Sucks

Don’t Be Stupid Like Me
Learn Why Its Just Another Scam!”

Blogging to the bank is actually a rival product to my WordPress Goldmine but none the less , marketers shouldn’t be allowed to make statements like this , It’s not a scam and very few books on clickbank or elsewhere are , If they were they would soon disappear as everyone would get a refund.

I don’t believe that the advert could be placed in a newspaper so why should google allow it?

There is someone advertising WordPress Goldmine using a similar method the ad says

WordPress Goldmine?

W.P Goldmine ™ a Scam?
The Truth Will Shock You!

Well at least they were kind enough to add a question mark, but the really weird thing about this is they redirect directly to my site.. Huh??  Suggest a product might be a scam and then link to the site?  At the very least it should go to a review site where you either tell people it’s not a scam or provide them with an alternative product.

This method used to work when one or 2 people were doing it, now that every man and his dog is trying to make sales by calling a product a scam it’s not going to work as well as it did.

As my grandmother used to say, if you can’t say anything good about a product don’t say anything at all.