Posted by Brett McEllhiney on September 24, 2009
OK, OK, I know it’s been about a month since I posted anything here and I do apologize.
I have been off on one of my tangents, which unfortunately still happens way too often.
Actually, I have finally finished putting together something I have been working on for several months and everything is finally in place and beginning to pay off.
Anyway, that is not what this blog is about, so lets get back to business here.
While I have not been promoting as heavily as I should be, I have not been entirely unsuccessful.
As you can see from the screenshot below, I am starting to get a few sales. Nothing major, but definitely more than covering my costs at this point, which was my initial goal.
Just an FYI:
Most of the sales for the week of 2009-09-09 were actually from another membership site that runs using the same membership software that Clickbank Pirate does.
This membership site is called Daily Niche Idea and is a free membership site. Over time I have referred several people to this site. Again, it works the same as Clickbank Pirate does in that emails that go out to the people that you have signed up contain your affiliate details. As such, any sales that are made to your referrals get credited to you.
All the rest of the sales made were directly from Clickbank Pirate!
One of the things that was promised when first signing up for Clickbank Pirate was that they would be improving squeeze pages, follow up emails, and various other items over time.
As you can see from the two new products that were added to my account this month, they have definitely improved the squeeze pages!
eBay Fortune
Clickbank Bonus Domination 2
The reason that I was given two additional products instead of just one as originally promised, is that Soren and Cindy made a decision to provide each person who stuck around for the first month an additional bonus product to promote.
Another change that has been made is that due to the fact that Google Adwords does not allow you to have auto playing video on your squeeze pages, you now have two squeeze page options to choose from. One version auto-starts the video and the other does not.
That about wraps it up for today!
If you have any questions or comments (or would like to see anything specific tested) please feel free to post them below in the comments section!
Posted by Brett McEllhiney on September 2, 2009
*** NOTE: This post was originally published on http://brettmcellhiney.com on August 27, 2009
OK, so after having the week from hell, I haven’t gotten hardly anything done with building my traffic this week. Nor have I been able to get my new blog online.
I did manage to make a sale, but again, not off the product I am promoting.
The sale was through one of my other initial Clickbank Pirate products – Secret Affiliate Weapon. Unfortunately this product only sells for less than $10, so not much in commissions there.
This brings up a good point though, and one that I honestly did not take into consideration before beginning my promotions. (big mistake on my part)
You should know how much the product sells for and what percentage you get in commissions (preferably before you start promoting).
So let’s take a look:
Clickbank Pirate – $67 signup plus $47/month residual – 50% commission
Easy Offline Cash – $49 or $18 depending on option purchased – 50% commission
Privacy Control – Free front end – 75% commission on multiple back end products
Secret Affiliate Weapon – $9.97 – 60% commission
Commission Blueprint – $97 – 60% commission
Automated Cash Formula – $37 – 75% commission
So, it looks like I actually did pick out a good product to promote.
Clickbank Pirate looks like a good one as well, but it was promoted heavily during the launch, so I will most likely just use some thank-you and download page ads and some mentions in emails and blogs for now. Once it has become old news then I will pick up the pace on it somewhat. (now that I think about it though, this would be a good time to get some articles, videos, and podcasts online for this as well and get them indexed).
Automated Cash Formula looks promising as well, though while it is not a residual product, has a good price point and good commission percentage.
The Privacy Control would be interesting to try out as well as it is simple to give away free items on the front end, while backing it up with paid products. I am using this exact same model on my own Build A Niche Marketing Business ebook.
Another suggestion that can help immensely, in not only being familiar with the product, but knowing that it is a good product, is to purchase the product before promoting. Now I know this can be difficult when first starting out if you are working on a shoestring budget.
Some marketers (myself included) make this process easier in that we will allow you to purchase the product through your own affiliate link. That way you get your commission back during the next commission payout (this varies by marketer).
This has always seemed like a good idea to me, because it helps both the affiliate and the marketer by allowing you to become familiar with the product at a reduced price. If you are familiar with a product you can do a much better job of promoting it, thus making more sales for you and the marketer (a definite win-win situation for everybody)
BTW: I have been promoting the other products in small bites, like adding them onto the end of some of my mailings to my list, but that is basically it.
Also, I did get my mailing out to my list for Commission Blueprint (which is the aweber tracking code). As you can see I did add an additional 132 people to the Commission Blueprint list from this mailing.
You’ll also notice that I got my first conversion from my videos. May have to break this down a little more and track each individual video so I know which ones are working the best.
So that is almost all I have today.
I do have one other thing that I would like to get peoples comments on.
In the image below you will see that I have gotten several hits to the order pages. Just curious as to how many of these you think backed out of the process and how many may have changed to their clickbank affiliate link and then purchased the product?
Seems to me Clickbank still makes it much too easy to steal commissions. I know that you can hide it up until they hit the order page, but there doesn’t seem to be any options at that point, to my knowledge.
Again, thanks for reading and please do let me know what you think!
Posted by Brett McEllhiney on
*** NOTE: This post was originally published on http://brettmcellhiney.com on August 19, 2009
So, as you can tell, I haven’t got the other blog up and running just yet.
I am going to be purchasing the domain today, and it will be ready for next weeks update.
As my Clickbank stats show, I have had no sales this week as you can see below.
I’m not worried though as I am still implementing my traffic strategies and have a long way to go yet.
Also, I hope that by showing you the actual stats you will realize that I am being honest and am not trying to show you some inflated stats that are just not real. I don’t know about you, but I just can’t seem to believe all the stats that I see on a lot of salespages any more. Even if they are true I feel like I’m not quite getting the full story.
OK, Sorry about the rant.
-Steps down off soapbox with head held low-
So, here are some of the tools and processes I will be following in my quest for Clickbank Domination!
I am using the Top Traffic Tips Call that Doug Champigny and Willie Crawford put on. This call lasted for over 3 hours and between Doug and Willie they covered 15 solid ways to drive traffic to your website. I will be taking the topics covered in the Top Traffic Tips Call and using each one individually and tracking my progress.
I am going to be creating some articles this week and submitting them to the article directories.
I will be using Article Marketer to get my articles distributed to a large amount of directories at one time. Article Marketer is one of the best offers I have found to date for getting your articles distributed.
I will also be testing out Cyndi Parker and Willie Crawford’s Easy Push Button Traffic. Easy Push Button Traffic will allow me to send out articles, videos, and podcasts to multiple locations by just uploading them one time to the Easy Push Button Traffic site. They take care of the distribution. For files like video and audio, which can sometimes be quite large, this is a great time saver.
You may have noticed that I mentioned tracking above. This is a very important key to your success. As you can see in the image below, this has been included as part of Clickbank Pirate. All you have to do is add your tracking code onto the end of your Clickbank Pirate link, whether it be for Clickbank Pirate or any of your other affiliate products and voila, instant tracking.
Using Commission Blueprint as an example
The original link would look like this:
http://cbpirate.com/s/blueprint/mcellhiney
While the link with the tracking code would look like this:
http://cbpirate.com/s/blueprint/mcellhiney/cpcsblog
Using this you would see an entry below with a Tracking Id of brettsblog. If you are curious, just follow the link and you will see it in the report next week.
As you can tell I have not had much luck with my videos, but that is to be expected. I only have two videos uploaded to YouTube only at this point, so was not expecting anything yet.
I have been using Twitter very, very lightly and have already had a couple of conversions there. BTW, not all of the hits you see coming from Twitter are real people. There are several bots that follow these links as well. If you would like to differentiate, you can create a free account at TR.IM and use their URL shortening service. You can track your hits to your links and also find out how many are real humans.
I have also been using Elite Safelist, which is an email safelist. I am able to send out 6 mailings each day, although I have been rationing myself so as not to use all my credits in the first few days. You can see that i have added 2 subscribers to my list by using this process. Elite Safelist also allows for banner ads, which is the one hit from elitebanner that you see above.
The email tracking code you see above is from a P.S. in a couple of emails I have sent out about other things, so you can see that this is also somewhat effective.
And just so you know, the one that says No Tracking Id is from a download page that I have added the following image with link to the free report.
As you can see this has outperformed all other methods up until this point. I say this because I am going to be sending out my first mailing for this to my list tomorrow.
Yes, that’s right, I haven’t even done that yet. Been busy testing other methods and wanted to get a feel for them before sending the mailing. Guess we’ll see how it goes next week!
So, I think I am going to end this for this week, but before I go, I wanted to re-iterate how important tracking really is. It is built into Clickbank Pirate, but if you are looking for ways to track your own existing products, check out the free report, Tracking Your Way to Profits from my friend Mike Paetzold.
Tracking Your Way to Profits is a great resource for learning how to take your existing traffic methods and adding tracking to this mix. You really can’t know for sure which options are your best traffic or conversion methods until you track what you are doing.
Thanks for reading and have a great day!
Posted by Brett McEllhiney on
*** NOTE: This post was originally published on http://brettmcellhiney.com on August 12, 2009
To start this all off I signed up for Clickbank Pirate a little over 1 week ago.
To be honest with you I was caught up in all the hype surrounding Clickbank Pirate and I had some good friends that I trust a great deal recommending it which goes a long way. And quite frankly, in retrospect, I am very glad I took their advice.
So, as soon as the doors opened I was rushing in to take a look at it. I already knew what it was about and how the basics worked, but was expecting a pretty hefty price tag to go along with that. Well, I was very pleasantly surprised when I scrolled down to the price and found out it was much lower than I expected (and no, I didn’t really read the sales letter – and yes, shame on me!).
Once inside, the site was very easy to navigate using the treasure map that everything is laid out on. I started poking around to find out what all I had gotten and found that I was setup with 6 ready made affiliate systems all ready to go (guess I would have known that already if I had read the sales page!).
Here are the six programs I was provided with:
Easy Offline Cash
Privacy Control
Secret Affiliate Weapon
Commission Blueprint
Automated Cash Formula
and of course Clickbank Pirate!
For the last week I have been adding the bonus boxes to my thank you and download pages in an effort to find out which one to start focusing my efforts on. The reason for this is because I want to be able to focus my efforts on one (and only one) product at a time. The first month is the most difficult because Clickbank Pirate provides you with 6 ready made affiliate programs at one shot. I wanted to narrow this down to the one product that was showing the best conversions on signups.
At this point the definite winner is Commission Blueprint with a visitor to signup conversion rate of almost 70%.
So, now that I know which program I am going to focus on first, let’s get to the reason I am doing this. I want to show you my journey into Clickbank Pirate and to keep you up to date on my progress as I begin to drive traffic to the Clickbank programs that are provided inside my membership.
To start off, I am creating some videos to upload to YouTube and various other video sharing sites. They are nothing fancy, mind you. Just a screen capture of some Powerpoint presentations that I put together using the materials provided through Clickbank Pirate. You get blog posts, emails, and articles within your promotional materials and this is what I am using.
I just uploaded two of these last night and you can see them here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5F9VEJMLTU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Z8X9lsiEo
I will also be taking the audio from these and posting it to iTunes and various other podcast directories.
I will also be creating articles to post to the article directories as well in the next couple of weeks.
Most of these traffic strategies I will be using were covered in a massive call that Doug Champigny and Willie Crawford covered in the Top Traffic Tips Call. This call lasted well over three full hours and between the two of them they covered 15 different ways to drive traffic to your site. I will be using these and more and will cover each in the weeks ahead as I implement them.
Another very, very critical component is keyword research and this needs to be done before you start posting anything to the web, including videos, podcasts, articles, and any other traffic generating pages you put on the Internet.
A excellent resource for this will be the upcoming Keyword Call with Mike Paetzold and Steve Roye. This call is scheduled for the 19th of August at 7:00 PM EDT.
I was all ready to come into this case study saying that I had not made anything yet, but I actually made my first sale two days ago as you can see in the picture below. This was actually a membership to Clickbank Pirate. Not what I expected, but who’s complaining! Also, as you can plainly see, I am not very good when it comes to promoting Clickbank products. I have had my share of sales, but they are few and far between.
So with all this said, I hope you will enjoy this journey and get a lot of good information from this. I will most likely be setting up a completely different blog for this before next week, but at least wanted to get it started here.
I will post a link here to the new blog once I have it up and running.
****NOTE: As I’m sure you have already figured out, this IS the new blog (see top note)
