Newbies’ Guide to Niche Marketing

Once you have a name and an address, it’s time to create a landing page that results in sales. Keep it simple. Many marketers state that a simple two column page is all you need. For a header at the top of your page, consider downloading a banner from the affiliate program.

If our example site qualitytattoo.com provided free banners for affiliates, getting one would be a simple matter of going to the page where affiliate tools and links are provided.

Page one should be where the customer arrives when clicking on the pay per click ad. The second page is the About page. That’s it. Two pages. Google expects to find a home page, an about page and contact information.
Three key features of a good landing page:

The landing page should match the ad – it should contain the same keywords. Write a short review or article about the product you are promoting. Put text links inside the article to the merchant page.

Example promo written for domain name of myangeltattoo.com:

The Ebony Angel Tattoo by renowned tattoo artist Cherise is truly a work of art. The ethereal glow of the angel wings gives the tattoo the look of a living, breathing creature. Crimson etching shadowing the wings lend an aura of dangerous power… more

The hyperlink for the word ‘more’ leads to the merchant page. The phrase ‘Angel Tattoo’ and other keywords, (tattoo, design, etc) should be bold and can also be hyperlinked to the sales page. This text can be a two to three paragraph article or a short introduction.

Your landing page must hook and hold viewers attention in just a few seconds. Product image(s) should be placed to the left side of the page.

Other Landing Page Contents

A free newsletter sign up form should be included on the page. This is often in the upper right or left corners of the page. Many web hosting services that feature website builder software also provide easy to use forms to include on pages. Some web hosts also include a free autoresponder to handle the signups.
Contact information should reflect the email address you set up with your hosting provider or a free email address that you will check frequently.

Opinions vary on how many products to feature on a page. Since the angel tattoo, fairy tattoo and dragon tattoo are all tattoos; all three could be featured on the same landing page. In this case, an article or product review would be done for each tattoo.

You can keep the landing page fresh and continually updated by grabbing an article feed and having articles about tattoo related topics showing on the page. These should be positioned below your tattoo promo material.

Adwords’ rules and regulations can and do change. Google provides a free guide to help you get started, along with information online and the Adwords Blog. When it comes to landing pages, Google Adwords expects a link that works. (Seems like a no-brainer but they obviously had to put it in writing.)

Once a viewer clicks on your ad, the promoted product should not be more than 3 clicks away. The landing page cannot contain pop-ups or pop-unders. Clicking on the back arrow at any time must return the user to Google.
The landing page is a vital part of pay-per-click marketing. If you send viewers directly to the Clickbank merchant’s page, you’re required to show yourself as an affiliate. Google allows two affiliate links per merchant per page. Two. If you aren’t one of the top two producing pay per click affiliate marketers for the product, don’t bother writing ads.

URL’s featuring affiliate links or long URLs do not look professional and this can reduce clickability. Example: Promoting the tattoo site with the Clickbank link would look something like this – http://tattoo.hop.clickbank.com/7634. Some merchant affiliate links are quite lengthy. Example: http://greattattoo.com/angel/user/bebop/site2/3658720-90.

These are fictional examples but they illustrate the problem. One solution to affiliate links? Go to www.tinyurl.com and shorten the link. This is a popular solution. So popular that the words tiny URL look almost generic. Tinyurl.com also offers what they call the preview version, meant to instill more customer confidence. This version just adds the world ‘preview’ to the newly created URL.

You can also download profit protector and use it to create redirects. Since this does require FTP experience, you might prefer to use URL freeze. It’s free and doesn’t involve any uploading of files. You’ll find it at www.URLfreeze.com.

The best solution to the URL issue is to get your own domain name. Use your keywords. Example: We’ll pretend that qualitytattoo.com is available and use it for the exercises we’re doing.
You cannot set up an actual Google Adwords campaign until you have a URL to direct ads to. When you type your ad into the Google Adwords ad setup, you’ll be required to provide the URL. Google will follow the URL, making sure it works and that your landing page contains the same keywords.

To register a domain name, go to a domain name registrar by typing domain name into the search engine search bar. There are several popular ones. GoDaddy, and Hostgator are two of them. Since you’re going to need a 2 page website, it will be easier to get both name and web address at the same place. While it is possible to point domain names to any location, it takes time.

Blog advertising has become the latest trend of online promotion and marketing. Judging from the numbers of growing blog advertising companies, this trend is going to stay for long time to come. Blogs are powerful and it is a traffic magnet. Blogs are used to drive traffic as well as link building for higher ranking. The links from blogs seems natural to the search engines and many companies experience higher ranking at the search engines by sourcing the service of blog advertising programs, such as PayU2blog. PayU2Blog is relatively a newcomer but they are growing by leaps and bounds and has steadily gain popularity among many of the online advertisers.

*This post is sponsored by PayU2Blog

Keyword Budget is an important part of pay per click marketing. Bid too much and you’ll go broke, possibly even without sales to show for it. Bid too low and you’ll never get clicks which mean you won’t get visitors. No visitors mean no sales.

The best way to set a keyword budget is to take sales figures and costs and do some calculations. However, if you’ve never sold anything before, there are no sales figures to plug into the formulas.
For the rest of the keyword and ad exercises, we’re going to use a Clickbank tattoo provider who pays $23.32 per sale and states that the product has a conversion rate of 100. This means that it takes 100 visitors to sell one item.

Let’s find out what a visitor is worth.

Visitor Value

Here’s what we know:
The Clickbank Merchant we signed with pays $23.32 per sale.
It takes 100 visitors to get one sale.
Visitor Value = commission amount divided by the number of visitors.
$23.32 ÷ 100 = $.23

So each visitor is worth 23 cents.

This is important to know because you don’t want to pay more for a click than that click (visitor) is worth.
Our click cost limit is 23 cents, preferably less.

Many people lose money on pay per click affiliate marketing because they do not keep up with how much they’re spending on ad campaigns and because they fail to check the return on investment for ads.
In our case, we know that spending more than 23 cents per visitor will mean losing money instead of making money. It’s very important, especially for the first few days of a new ad campaign, to pay close attention to the clicks and results.

Many marketers agree that after an ad has received 200 page views, you have enough information to do something. If there have been no sales, either the ad isn’t focused and well written or there just isn’t any market for the product. If you aren’t monitoring the ad information regularly, you won’t know when you’ve reached 200 views.

What is pay per click affiliate marketing? It is the use of pay per click ads to sell products and/or services. When website owners and affiliate marketers use pay per click marketing, they write keyword based ads.
Once the ads are written, placement is decided by bid amount. There is no charge for ad placement until someone clicks on the ad. The key to success in pay per click is creating an eye-catching ad containing specific, focused keywords and monitoring ad cost.

When someone surfs the net and clicks on the ad, the cost is equal to the bid amount that has been set. For instance, if the bid is .$05 on the keyword hypnotherapist, a nickel will be deducted from the pay per click account every time someone clicks on the ad featuring the word hypnotherapist.
Keywords

Success in any type of affiliate marketing advertising revolves around keywords. Keywords are especially important in pay per click. The cost of the ad is determined by the bid. Keywords are the words that people type into the search bar when they’re looking for something online. Example: People looking for a Norah Jones
CD will either type “Norah Jones CD” or the title of the CD into the search bar. The key to selling a Norah Jones CD would be in using the keywords “Norah Jones CD” and not the generic terms “music” or “CD.” Keywords must be as specific and focused as possible.

In order to compile a good keyword list, you’ll need to make use of a keyword research tool. Here are a few of the three popular ones:

Good Keywords a free downloadable software
Google Adwords Keyword Tool free online tool
SEOBook Keyword Tool free online tool
Wordtracker subscription but offers a free trial.
123Promotion free online tool featuring Overture & Wordtracker

When you type one of the words from your list into the search box on a keyword tool, the tool will tell you how many people searched that word or phrase recently. You’ll also see all the ways they searched for it.

Example: Go to the SEOBook Keyword Tool and type in the word music.

The results show that millions of searches have been done for the word music. Music is much too broad a keyword. It must be narrowed down. How do you know how many searches make a good place to start?
Some successful affiliate marketers say that 15,000 searches are enough. Many affiliate marketing professionals recommend using keywords that have somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 searches per month.
If you look on down the returned music search list, you’ll see the number of searches for each phrase. You can choose one search term that has 30,000 to 50,000 searches or you can combine several keywords and add the total searches for each until the total adds up to 30,000 to 50,000 searches.

Now, let’s try typing the word music into the Google Adword Tool. We can choose to run an exact match, a broad match or a phrase match. Google will give us an idea of how often a phrase is being searched and how much competition there is for that keyword.

Type your product keywords into one of the keyword search tools. If you are an experienced spreadsheet user, copy and paste the results into a spreadsheet. Use more than one of the keyword tools. Keep adding to your list of potential keywords. Note the keyword or phrase (you can search phrases as well as individual words) that gets the most results for each product.

The fact that a report is free does take some of the constraints off of marketing it. You aren’t selling anything…you are giving something away for free. If you are into marketing at all, you are more than likely already posting to blogs and forums that pertain to the products and services that you sell. These sites usually have strict rules that forbid posters from advertising their wares. But… if you are giving something away for free, those advertising rules will not apply. You can post a link to a download of your free report and not be accused of posting advertising on most blogs and forum sites. The people who populate these sites are your very best prospective customers…and giving them a free report can’t hurt.

Another way to advertise your free report that would not be allowed for a product that was being sold is to post links to it on such sites as My Space or Yahoo Answers. Since the free report is not a product that is being sold, you are within your rights to post links to it on those sites. It goes without saying that you should post a link to your free report on your own website of course, but it would also be worth your time to contact other website owners in your particular niche and offer to let them post links to the free report on their websites. You may be pleasantly surprised at how many take you up on the offer.

Reports themselves are usually too long to be placed on article bank sites. There is most often a limit of about 750 words and a report by nature will be longer than that. You can, however, take excerpts from the report, make articles out of them and submit them to article banks with a link to the full report. When you do this, don’t give the main points away, just use them as a tease to encourage people to click on the link and download the full report.

Reports can be submitted to E-Book banks as they are. Content is still king and website owners and E-zine publishers regularly use material that they download from E-Book banks and repositories to fill all of that beautiful empty space on websites and in E-zines.

You can contact marketers who have nice long lists and offer your free report to them directly. List owners always love to be able to offer something of value to their list members that is not only valuable but free as well. Contacting these list owners can’t prove to be a very effective way of distributing your free report to those who you most want to have it.

Do banner exchanges with websites that sell products and services that are related but not identical to the products and services that you sell. Your banner should be a link to your free report and the banner should say “FREE REPORT” and the name of the report.

Place advertisements for your free report in E-zines that have topics related to the subject of your report and the products and services that you sell. Readers might ignore an advertisement for a specific product or service but they very rarely ignore an offer for something for nothing. Advertising in E-zines is one of the most effective and cost effective methods of advertising available. Make use of it.

Now is one free report is good, just think how great a series of free reports could be! Once you have written articles and submitted them, the second and third parts of your report won’t require that effort or your time. You will have already laid the groundwork for subsequent parts of a report. The same thing is true for link exchanges. Those E-zine publishers and those related website owners will be almost required to use subsequent parts of your free report.

Dividing a very long report down to make three shorter reports will give you more bang for your buck as well as for your time. That is precisely what Rich Schefren did with his “Internet Business Manifesto” free report and it worked like a charm!

All of the above methods of distributing your free report are doable. They will all require some time, effort and energy from you but it will be time, effort and energy that has been well spent. Now, if you are fortunate enough to have been born rich, there is one more way that you can distribute your free report.

You can do what Mike Filsaime did with his free report called “Death of Internet Marketing”. He simply paid other marketers for distributing it for him. It has been reported that he paid out over $100,000 dollars in commissions. You can bet your bottom dollar that Mike made that money back in short order and a whole lot more to go with it!

Another way that you can make your free report even more valuable to you is to sell advertising space in it to other Internet marketers.

Paid advertising needs to look like paid advertising, however. It should not be disguised to look as though it is a product that you are specifically recommending in your free report. It really isn’t surprising that people expect to see advertisements. It’s true. You really expect to see advertising, don’t you? Others expect to see it as well and it will not aggravate those who download a free report if the advertisements look exactly like what they are…advertisements.

The amount you can charge for advertising space in a free report varies with the report and the size of the circulation it will achieve. A long report can generate a larger advertising charge than a short report. A report that will be downloaded thousands of times can bear a larger advertising charge than one that will only be downloaded a few hundred times.

Advertisements can be shown as sponsorships. Example: “This free report is sponsored by” just above the advertiser’s logo. This kind of advertising is less annoying to a reader and puts the advertiser in a better light than just an advertisement.

Remember, however, to hold your advertisements down to a very reasonable number… even if you list them as sponsorships. Too many advertisements make a free report appear to be nothing more than a cheesy way to slip advertising in disguised as something other than what it is…and people really hate that.

There is even one more way in which you can profit from a free report. You can provide a capture method so that you can collect the names and email addresses of those who have not yet downloaded your free report.

You can give your free report a viral quality.

For example: You can use a quiz in your free report and have the answers posted on your website. Quizzes are by nature viral and those who download your free report will be more likely to pass them along to their friends if there is a quiz included.

Each visitor to your website is a potential customer or, at the very least, a potential member of your opt-in list. Another way to give your free report a viral quality is to include coupons that provide dollars off on a product or service that would be of great value to those who download the report as well as to their friends, family and coworkers. People love coupons!

Each of these techniques to add to your opt-in list or increase your potential for profit from a free report by selling advertising space or strategically placing links to products and services that you profit from or by giving your free report a viral quality is worth your time and effort to investigate and put into action. Free reports are only free to those who download them…they are supposed to make money for you.

Free reports are hot items today among Internet marketers. Most of the very savvy ones have discovered just how valuable a free report can be and how it can serve to help build those all-important opt-in lists. Free reports do help to build opt-in lists, that’s true, but they can serve other purposes as well.

A good free report is something that your average, garden-variety Internet surfer actually seeks out all by himself. You never have to beg people into taking free stuff. When a surfer is looking for information on any given topic, the first thing they usually look for are free reports on the subject. People do pay for information but only after they have gotten the free information first and are looking for more specific and detailed information. One thing that you can absolutely count on, though, is that people will download and read free reports if they are interested in the topic of the report. That’s a given.

So, the next question is how do you get the most mileage out of a free report? After all, that ‘free’ report is only free to the people who download it. It sure isn’t free for you, the marketer. You have spent time, effort and energy writing it yourself or you have paid a ghostwriter to write it for you so you need to get something back, right? Yes, you do need to get something back and that’s what we are going to talk about.

The first, and maybe the most important thing you get, is the name and email address of the person who downloads your free report. That is usually the main object of producing a free report, after all, but you benefits don’t have to stop there. There are other ways to profit.

In a free report, you can strategically place advertisements for your affiliate products or even for your own products. Now… the free report cannot be a blatant advertisement… hat is just not acceptable but that doesn’t mean that you can’t place links to products or services that you will make a profit on, does it?

You do need to use good judgment and possibly some restraint in placing links to products and services that you can profit from. Remember that the people who have downloaded your free report didn’t expect nor want to get yet another advertisement. They intended to get information and information should stay the main focus in your free report.

You can add links to products and services that you make a profit on but only within the context of the information being supplied to the reader. For example: if within your report you are discussing the importance of providing a dog house for a dog, you can include a link to a dog house product that you will make a profit on. What you can’t do is expound on the virtues of the dog house that you will make a profit on. In other words…you can’t advertise it.