Today I thought I would give a guide to how I first got started in affiliate marketing with no fancy tools and a very small budget. The concept I used was not new and is still being used today but with a planning and “thinking outside the box” I created a nice weekly income of almost £1500 a week until I moved onto larger projects.
The Concept:
The idea was to have people sign up to my AdSense template program and training course using a newsletter based system. Once signed up they were introduced to the AdSense program and offered 150+ free sites in return for signing up to a hosting account. After some initial tweaks my site was converting up to 80% of my visitors with me receiving £70 for each “free” sign up.
The Method:
I had very little in the way of money or design skills but had a old copy of Photoshop and Dreamweaver and the entire online community to look for inspiration. I soon came across some sales pages and used the “thin” page concept as a model for my project.
I knew that I needed to get people excited by my offer so I asked a guy I met online for a screengrab of his AdSense account which he was happy to give. He also gave me some hints and tips which I could include in my training course to tech my users how to make money online.
After I had my screengrab and some tips I created my text which explained how it was possible to make lots of money with AdSense and that if they signed up for my free package they would learn the tricks of the trade. The catch for the user was that my busy schedule only allowed 5 lucky people a day to take advantage of my offer and if they were lucky enough to get a personal reply then they were eligible to take part in the offer.
As some of you have properly guessed the last bit was actually a sneakily little trick to make users feel they have achieved something if they were accepted but in reality everyone was a winner!
Turning A Subscriber In To A Customer
My landing page was bringing me plenty of subscribers but now I needed to turn these money hungry users into paying customers of a well knowing hosting company. The method I used was to dangle a carrot and wait for a bite, I never used any special tactics apart from withholding the sign up opportunity for the first 24 hours. The first email they received was sent around an hour after they signed up and showed then more examples of massive AdSense profits and an introduction to my free package but NO WAY TO SIGN UP!
About 30% of the users would email me right away for a sign up link but I always used an auto responder to explain that there turn would come and to hold tight. This gave them the mindset that the offer was 100% legit and worth waiting for.
The next day they would get their second email with sign up instructions and step by step guide. On almost every occasion I would get a confirmed affiliate commission email within a couple of hours. The delayed sign up and feeling of winning really helped convert the offer and made me a small fortune.
Questions & Answers
How did you come up with the idea?
I was messing around on eBay when I found a AdSense Template Package with resale rights for $30. I immediacy realised I could use this as a basis of an offer and bought it right away.
How did you manage all the communications?
Managing email is a knight mare but thankfully I found and used Aweber from the very start. For $20 a month it lets you send opt-in emails using time stamping which meant I just needed to set my program up once and it done the rest. The Aweber system also allows you to send personal emails by capturing personal information during sign up so the user thinks you are sending that email just to them. Learn more here..
How did you advertise?
I simply used AdWords and stated bidding on simple search terms relating to AdSense. I was an early adaptor to the long tail search and paid almost nothing for traffic. I also put a footer link in every site built for customers. I used an ad like the one below:
$10,000 A Month With AdSense!
Learn From The King Of Content
Only 4 Spaces Left Today! - GO
www.domain.com
How did you build all these sites?
That was the simple bit! I simply used Dreamweaver search and replace and churned the sites out in a few minutes each. Later on I had someone build a script which done the complete install using just ftp info and AdSense Ids.
How Did The Host React?
At the time I received every payout on time with no questions asked. They know I was using an incentive based model and were happy as long as I never mislead anyone.
Would you do to again?
If I needed some quick cash then I would use the same model again in a second. The key to making cash out of this is find a product which people want (arcade scripts etc) and do the same refreshed for 2008.
How much did you make from this offer?
That would be telling!
Popularity: 35%
May 19th, 2008 at 8:04 am
Very interesting post Lee. I have a few questions if that is alright.
How much work did you put into creating the content you offered the respondents? Did you give away all your own secrets or just copy some stuff from ebooks? I would assume that the quality of the guide should be rather good to have people sign up for web hosting.
Didn’t the hosting company mind that you made the signup a condition for giving them the content?
Thanks in advance,
Mads.
May 19th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
excellent post lee. I thought this was a great read and gave me some good ideas! Thanks!
May 30th, 2008 at 10:28 am
I liked the idea enough to buy Lee’s original site and continue it ;). Eventually I ran into a couple basic problems…one was google started cracking down on adword campaigns that advertised “templates”. It would have been simple to change up the ads and get around it though.
The other issue that came up was that hostgator eventually didn’t like what was essentially an incentivized setup. Well, really they probably wouldn’t have much of a problem but only as long as those signing up stayed longterm customers. They just didn’t want to see new customers with super high expectations who would eventually get disillusioned and cancel their hosting…which, with how much they pay for commissions would be a huge loss in no time. There are a few ways to get around this though and regardless, would make you more in the long run anyway. The most important part is to make sure everyone that signs up is super happy and continues to get cool little freebies and more opportunities. You want them to keep their hosting accounts and so should give them reasons, beyond the free adsense sites of course. These opportunities don’t all have to be freebies…they have the hosting and unlimited domains on that hosting account so you can “upsell” them on all sorts of different site/script packages.
Most people that sign up tend to be noobs to web development so if you create new happy customers by giving them the adsense sites you can basically train yourself a happy little army of customers who need and want your products. Of course the downside is they are so new to the game they need a lot of help with pretty much everything such as promotion, ad campaigns and such. So the ideal setup is to have plenty of good training and info such as good plr and ebooks you can give them over time. The tradeoff of having to deal with the noobs is they are hungry for more and if you can show them how to make even a little money online they will be at your door wanting everything you pitch to them.
Rather than keep the site setup as what was basically considered incentivized, to avoid issues with hostgator complaining about incentized signups, I had planned to make it more of a strong suggestion. Most of the signups needed hosting anyway so rather than making them feel they had to sign up with hostgator I planned to send them to my “hosting suggestions” page that would have mini reviews of a handful of different host…all affiliate links of course. Not only would that get rid of the incentivized feeling it would probably help spread out the leads through a few various host making it a bit safer. Of course it may hurt some of the ones that have bonuses for lead performances (hostgator pays up to $125 PER LEAD after a set number of leads a month!). But you can move around the review page highlighting whichever host you want throughout the month as you meed the minimum leads for the higher payouts.
But I got lazy and distracted with my own bigger and more needy projects and kind of stopped before implementing those changes. I do plan to probably go back and start promoting it again as it was easy money as Less suggested.
BTW, I’d be willing to sell the original site/package and details I bought from Lee if someone else is interested in picking it up ;). I just don’t have the time right now.