Earlier this year, when I joined Affiliate Cash Secrets By Derrick Van Dyke, one of the main focus of setting up a successful affiliate campaign is actually to create a squeeze or optin page. It’s a type of landing page which you can see an example of one of my affiliate offer early on at freePPCads.biz The purpose of a squeeze page is mainly captured your visitor name and email address before they head on to the merchant site. When I was taught it is extremely important if you are paying for traffic such as Adwords, Yahoo sponsored search, or various form of paid advertising.

Why a Squeeze Page?

The reason for a squeeze page because can either buy the offer or leave the offer totally and buy getting the leads, you can following them up throughout an autoresponder squeeze, and hopefully they will buy. At the end of the day if they don’t you will still have a chance to show them other offers later on which I am currently doing with my private label rights products as well as some affiliate offers as well. So it leaves to how actually you can create a squeeze page for an affiliate offer.

Cookie Pre-loading

After reading the ebook affiliate rescue, they taught a quite “sneaky” method which some merchant may have problem with you…i.e. copy the merchant site entirely and stick your affiliate link in the web copy with a 1 by 1 pixel transparent image. The actual HTML looks like:

[quickcode] <img src=”YourAffiliateLinkHere” height=”1″ width=”1″>[/quickcode]

Indeed I’m doing that today with all my affiliate offer, as examples, you can go to blogtradesecrets.biz and biggestfiresale bonus page but I am necessary copy the merchant but create a simple squeeze or landing page for each offer. The purpose of sticking your affiliate link is with a transparent is important (it’s also known as cookie pre-loading or cookie dropping) because your visitor doesn’t have to go the merchant site before your affiliate is recognized. Well you don’t know what your visitor will do, some may fill up their name and primary email address for your squeeze page form and some may close that page and don’t bother to enter their information! Therefore by pre-loading your cookie with your squeeze or landing page, you increase your chance of getting commission.

Next time I will talk about how to set up a sales funnel so that you know what price range of products that you can market to your list so stay tuned!

In my last post of affiliate marketing that easy, I mentioned affiliate marketing is not as easy as you think. Today I am continue to post my opinion here especially if you are promoting products in internet marketing, or make money online niche.

In September 2008, Alvin Phang, the atomic blogging guy, now is my friend and mentor as well, launched his first online coaching program named “BlogTradesecrets” where he showed step by step videos on how he created a 6 figures online blogging business and revealed his money making niches.
Well at that time I was involving in his affiliate promoting where the commission was $500 per successful referrals! The announcement of products launched was in August. So I quickly registered a domain called blogtradesecrets.biz, copy whatever Alvin got on his .com website on my .biz website plus creating an autoresponder series that similar to what Alvin offered in his site. So far so good.

Then I promoted my website using ViralURL, ListJoe, credit based safe list, giveaway sites, forums etc to encourage my newsletter sign up and of course I dropped my affiliate cookie in the emails newsletter so that I increased my chance of being credited when my subscribers buy the products.
What I thought this was perfect and in fact I did made a successful sale which my account credited about $500! Well I was happy on that day….

The story so far was good. However, about 3 days later, I found my commission was gone! From $500 to $0! What happened? I quickly emailed to Alvin and ask him why? He answered something like that,

“I noticed you had an commission fro blogtradesecrets but I did verified with the customer that said was by you But the customer contacted me that the referral was someone else. so I have moved the commission As he is claiming a rebate from the other affiliate”

The key point is actually “he is claiming a rebate from some one else“! That’s why I lost my sales! In brief affiliate marketing seems easy but in fact you have to face there are many competitions. You can recommend that products so does others! Especially in “make money online” niche! The competition is so fierce and you have to offer something different from the crowd in order to succeed! That’s why I am actually prefer selling private or resale rights products and keep all the money myself.

Later on I will show you how you can make a profit by selling resale rights products so stay tuned!

When a newcomer tries to make money online, they often are told affiliate marketing is easy, you do not need to have your own website nor creating a product to sell online! Well to me, it is half true. Yes 10 years ago, perhaps affiliate marketer doesn’t need a website to promote the merchants product, but today, if you are planning to use pay per click or PPC advertising and promote your affiliate programs, I can tell you definitely will get a hard time. Why?

1.) According to Google Adword policies, there only can be one keyword bids per website. E,g your merchant site is xyz.com and they are selling a weight loss program for instance. If they have placed their bids using the keyword weight loss program, then you can’t bid it using the name of their websites.

2.) Some may argue to use a free affiliate cloaker such as TinyURL, ViralURL to “change” the name of the websites and advertise the programs using PPC but by doing that, you are not building your own prospects database. So is a website really needed to successfully promote any affiliate products?

There are short and long answer, in short, I would say a “yes’ , ‘no”. A “no” is because building a website definitely increases your chance of success when promoting affiliate program, but we do NOT for sure, if it worths our time and energy on promoting until we test it with marketing data. Once we confirmed this program generate a descent sales and commissions, then we can start to concentrate in building a website.

Why a ‘yes’ then? It depends on the program “buzz”. If many people start talking about it before the official product launch, it is more likely that we can generate lots of sales on the market, so by building a website, it helps to separate yourself to other marketers which hence gives your more benefits around it.

So back to my question “is affiliate marketing really that easy?” Well when it compares to creating your own products or services, it definitely a yes but if you compare it to a person that have little computer knowledge and funds and tries to make some money using the Internet, then I would say it NOT that easy after all. However, there are some good programs on the Internet that provides easy step by step guide and help you to set up the your first affiliate promotion pretty easily without you to know the in depth technical know how which doesn’t stop a total newbie to earn their first buck off the Internet. Such a program does exists but you have to do your research and find which ones suits your need.

Later in this affiliate marketing series post, I will talk about how to choose a profitable click bank products, so stay tuned!