Alex Goad is at it again. Just 2 months after releasing Players with Money, which I was moderately enthousiastic about, tomorrow June 10 his latest Clickbank Hit will be released. It is called the Four Tier Annihilation Method, in which “there are 4 tiers of profit in 4 TAM, and tier X could mean paying off your mortgage, car payment and gas for a whole year with just one shot” as Alex puts it nicely. I was able to get a review copy of the product in my hands and this time I must say: this really looks very, very promising!

Four Tier Annihilation Method Video
Here is a short video as kind of an introductory to this release:

4TAM is not about Google AdSense, SEO, Adwords, or even having your own website. I can not disclose the exact details, but it will teach you new ways of making BIG BIG money, with real blueprint examples on how to set it all up. This is stuff The Rich jerk has also been talking about, but in a whole new dimension and with LOADS of information. You will get 100 pages of fully illustrated ebook, plus 10 over the shoulder videos.

Well written and documented
I was really amazed about the quality and quantity of the content. If you are looking for a well written and documented Ebook about a new and powerful method for making money online, the Four Tier Annihilation Method may well be the investment you were waiting for. You will be given full proof of students of this method making 5 to 6 figures a month. It will mean some study and work, but once you get things going, it will only take you several hours a week.

My recommendation: get the Four Tier Annihilation Method Ebook and go for it!

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Today I was doing some research on classified ads and found an interesting new way of getting noticed in the search engine listings. Of course you first have to get in the top 20 or preferably in the top 10. But once there here is a screenshot of someone who really figured out how to get most of the clicks out of his free listing:

As you can guess the search query was ‘free classified ads‘ and the top 3 paid ads have exactly this heading. But take a look at the non-paid search results. Inetgiant has counted the exact number of characters and written a meta description that fits exactly with the 2 lines in the SE listing. The first line repeats some of the main keywords in a real sentence. The second line uses special characters, with a centered layout, to attract the eye of the user. Personally I haven’t seen such a remarkable way of using the SERP listing before. Although Mr. G will probably catch on soon with this new ‘trick’. Or will they?

Using caps
Another ‘trick’ that can be seen often lately is the use of CAPITALS in Google ads. According to the TOS this is forbidden, and usually the ad isn’t accepted. Paul Bourque (our Uberaffiliate)  wrote a post about a guy who did this in combination with total Google ad domination (this advertiser ‘owned’ all ten side spots). But there are many more examples and apparently Jonathan Volk has found a way of how you can have all caps in your ads. My guess is that it works with dynamic keyword insertion in combination with the use of symbol characters. Below is another example of using caps:

I have been following this search query (’free ringtones’) for some time now. And the above ad has been around for weeks (and probably months). So Google either has problems in identifying the use of this trick or they do not care so much. I haven’t seen it in Yahoo ads until now. And when you try to write all caps in your ad it will automatically be corrected by the Yahoo ad system.

Anyway, I wouldn’t call the use of capitals in ads ‘blackhat’. It is against the TOS, but some of these ads are online since months’ in a row. It is a fact that it gets harder and harder to get noticed. Lets just say that there are very creative people out there. What dou you think?

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If you read my post about the Black Ink Project, a free affiliate coaching course provided by Jeremy Palmer, you may have decided to try to get one of the 2000 extra seats that became available. If not here is a short update about the first week of this course and a link to the results.

My motto is: ‘never too clever’. Although I have extensive experience in creating websites, my programming skills are not so ‘experienced’ and my affiliate trick hat can never be full enough, so when someone with such a rep as Jeremy Palmer throws up a course for grabs, detailing the whole process of niche selection, to web creation, to keyword tracking and even affilaite tax advice, I will jump in.

The first week has already been loaded with information. The great thing here are the live calls via Webex, where you can ask any question you want, and the forums where all the participants meet and discuss. First weeks’ program covered the following items:

• Session 1 - Finding Your Niche
• Session 2 - Getting Your Business in Order
• Session 3 - Develop a Rock Solid Business Plan
• Session 4 - Getting to Know Your Audience
• Session 5 - Setting Up Shop

Every session has its own  Recorded Webinar, PowerPoint Presentation, Action Guide and Support Forum. You can check out the results of the first weeks program of the Black Ink project on the BIP blog.

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Promoting products on Clickbank as an affiliate isn’t as easy as 123. I recently started to research the Clickbank marketplace and it’s products and have found some interesting tools / sites that can be useful in selecting products. At the end I will show a method to promote Clickbank products on Adwords and a ’secret’ tip that can be useful in reducing the cost of aquiring a Clickbank info-product.

What is Clickbank?
If you don’t know what Clickbank is: it is the main portal for selling and buying information products, mainly ebooks, in a wide variety of categories. You can promote these digital products as an affiliate and earn a percentage of the sale, somewhere between 25% and 75% of the selling price, which in most cases varies between 10 and 100 dollars. If done right, this can be very profitable for both seller and affiliate. To quote Cilckbank:

ClickBank has quickly become a global leader in the sale of digital goods online with more than 10,000 product publishers and over 100,000 registered affiliates. Each day, ClickBank completes nearly 20,000 orders from more than 200 countries around the world. ClikcBank.com is consistently ranked as one of the most highly trafficked sites on the internet.

Choosing Clickbank products to promote
There are so many products available on Clickbank that choosing the right one to promote is a not-so-easy task. There are several websites that can help you in this process. Firstly there is CBengine, which stands for … ClickBank engine. Wow It is much easier to navigate than the Clickbank site itself and has a lot more options to check for products, authors and statistics. When you signup as a member, there are even more options available to get inside information. A page I regularly check here is the Clickbank movers and shakers page.

Analysing Clickbank products
Another useful website that I recently discovered is the Clickbank Analytics website. Its business model doesn’t rely on membership fees but on Google AdSense, so all the content is free for the grabs. And content they have! Loads of graphs depicting everything (well almost) you’d like to know about current or new products on the Clickbank Marketplace. On the bottom of the right column of the homepage is an interesting list of top-gravity-gainers. If you are just starting as a (Clickbank) affiliate it may be a good idea to focus on new products (less competition!) which pick up gravity fast, meaning they probably are very interesting to promote.

One method to promote Clickbank products
The following method was developed (or published) by Chris McNeeney, author of some of the best selling Clickbank ebooks about affilaite marketing methods, among them Affiliate Project X, the famous DayJobKiller and lastly Google Assassin. The following article can be found on Allan Gardynes great website Associate Programs. I will quote it here:

The hottest products to promote are invariably the new ones - that is true for physical products (PlayStation 3 anyone?), but it is also true for ebooks, which brings me to the biggest affiliate network for digital products, ClickBank.com.

ClickBank lists its latest products in a separate category, titled “New products”. Here is a simple technique that fits in the above guidelines - each week, 50 to 100 new products are added to the ClickBank marketplace.

In our experience, do you know what factor precedes a product about to blow? The number of brand searches for that product. If five people search for [affiliate project x] today and 50 tomorrow, it’s about to blow, BUT you wouldn’t be able to see this by glancing at the ClickBank marketplace until it’s too late…

So, that’s the background; here’s how we are going to do market research on new products AND only promote on super targeted keywords. First, each time a new product is launched on ClickBank, set up a single AdWords ad for that product targeted the [product name] keyword. Chances are, at this early stage there will be no other affiliates there (and often not even the merchant).

We simply throw up a direct affiliate link (going straight through our hoplink). Ideally, cloak the link and upload it to your website (so you get around Google’s “double serving” rule). We insert a bid price of $0.50 - and let it run. For 90% of the products there, you will get very few searches (but quite a few clicks). However, every so often, the product will suddenly start go gather steam - which is the opportune time to go to the next step and write a full pre-sell for the product, or start promoting it on broader keywords (as now it has been proven to convert). You can see which products are getting popular by looking at the impressions for each product - if any product suddenly starts to get lots of impressions, you should take a closer look.

This method allows you to use AdWords impressions to track market research, and also to pay cents for super targeted clicks that no one else is bidding on. It’s a time consuming technique, but it works.

So, what works for Chris will work for you too? Give it a try and let me know if you succeed.

How to pay less for Clickbank products
If you have found a promosing looking Clickbank infoproduct you may ask the seller for a review copy. But if you’re a newbie affiliateer chances are that you do not get one. Then you may want to buy the product to assess if it really IS interesting. So here is a not so widely known ‘trick’ with you for buying Clickbank products and paying the lowest price. Do this at your own risk, and after having read this post about how you may even get it for zero dollars. Here is how it works:
Often a seller develops several versions of a product or several pricing strategies over time. Sometimes these differently priced products are available even if they are not currently promoted on the sellers’ website. To find out, just click on the ‘order’ button or link. It will take you to a Clickbank page with payment information. Now look at the url and search for the following string in this url: ‘&item=x’ . Now try out another number (the number being in the place of ‘x’) and see what happens …

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One of my favorite Affiliate Gurus, Jeremy Palmer of QuitYourDayJob, has started a new project, called The Black Ink Project. The main feature of this project is free affiliate support and coaching by Jeremy himself. If you do not know Jeremy Palmer: he is the guy who made $100K in his first year as an affiliate and $1M in his second year. He primarily works with Commission Junction offers. A few of his affiliate websites are:

• www.audiobookhub.com
• www.trysuperpass.com
• www.gamestoyourdoor.com

So what is the Black Ink Project really about? What better than to quote Jeremy himself:

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the Black Ink Project is an affiliate success course designed to help new affiliates bridge the gap between my e-book and making a profit. Some find that the book and forum support is all they need to succeed, but others need a little more hands-on training to connect all the dots.

The project focuses on four key areas:

1. Setting realistic goals, based on your time and budget. You’ll discover how much time and money you need to invest to achieve your goals.
2. Researching prospective opportunities. You’ll learn out how to avoid potential pitfalls and find the right niche and the best advertisers.
3. Learning the software, scripts, and tools to help you create your site. You’ll not only leave the course with a complete tool belt, you’ll learn how to use your tools alone and together to create beautiful high-converting sites.
4. Develop and launch a campaign from start to finish. At the end of the course, you’ll have a complete action plan and checklist you can use for future sites.

Right now the first 1000 ’seats’ are booked, but Jeremy wrote that there might be some more available in the near future. So check out the site and join him on Twitter or Facebook and subscribe to his blog feed, so you will be in-the-know as soon as new registrations are possbile.

To learn more about Jeremy, here is a link to an interview with Jeremy Palmer by Andrew Wee, where he talks about his stairway to succes and gives free affiliate advice and examples.

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One of the most visited posts on this blog is a post on tools to spy on competitors websites. As this apparently is a hot topic, I will share three more free tools that I visit frequently online, either to:

1. check on backlinks of my or other peoples’ websites
2. see quickly which Google ads are being displayed for a certain (set of) keywords, per country
3. ’study’ the ads and keywords that other affilates are using, per domain, or per keyword !

Number three returns only ten results in the free version, but is still very interesting to do a quick research on new projects you are considering. Take the displayed numbers more as a direction than as an exact result though …

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So april 1st has come and a lot of Adwords advertisers are being confronted with the new display url policy change. From now on Google will be enforcing that the display URL will be the same as the destination URL. So does this mean there is no room to play anymore?

In previous months publishers were getting more and more creative in using the display URL to their advantage. For example when www.domain.com is already taken by an ad, they would use www.domain.co/m or www.domain.com.uk as the display URL so as to avoid the double serving rule. So now Google is finally taking action.

When looking at some examples in the Adwords Help Center posting about this topic, it seems they are being very strict:

For example, the following would be acceptable:

• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.google.com

However, this example would be unacceptable:

• Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
• Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
• Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com

Quite straightforward, isn’t it? But the second example already shows more space for creativity:

For example, the display URLs below would be acceptable for the landing page URL of http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous, as the top-level domains match:

• sub.google.com
• google.com/extratext
• www.google.com/extratext

So the main thing seems to be that display URL ‘domain.com’ should go to destination URL ‘domain.com’. But everything before (a subdomain) or after ‘domain.com’ can be different between display and destination URL. For example you are promoting a product and the destination url is www.domain.com/strangedescription.htm then the display URL could still be product.domain.com. Or www.domain.com/product. Or domain.com/anything-product-related … as long as domain.com goes to domain.com!

Tip: You do not see the URL product.domain.com being used very often, but I have found that it usually converts very well.

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Concerning the free guide contest, of course some of you have been asking what this is all about. And have been questioning the numbers involved. That’s why today some actual earning examples are being posted, to let you see that I am not joking around. And, to reveal a first secret: this income is (no: not from AdSense ads) … from AdSense referrals!

Here are two monthly earnings examples. The first one is from November 2007:

The above screenshot of November was actually the second month of this campaign. I started out with $5 per day ad budget in October with an average daily profit of $40. When I saw this was working, I started raising my ad budget. As you can see, my daily income in November was already an average $100. Then I started to really upscale this, adding other referral products and promoting it in different european countries … and this is what happened:

Actually this was the last month I could promote this campaign, around February 15th I had to stop. You can read in the guide why and how this method is still available to others. But at this time I had already earned around $80.000 … and got paid!

So here it goes: this method is not about AdSense arbitrage, but about earning money with AdSense referrals. For some of you this may be enough to get started on your own (although there are many, many referral products). For others, a little portion of the veil has been lifted, you can see some actual numbers. But you haven’t got the details: which referral products, which keywords, which ads, which countries etc. If you are interested in a chance to win this Affiliate Blueprint Guide, be sure to visit the Contest Page to read how to enter.

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Are you tired of all the problems Google Adwords is giving you? Tired of the Google Slap? Tired of the hard time all your Adwords opponents are giving you on the highly saturated US market? Then maybe it is time to start using a different approach.

As will be revealed in my soon to be released free Affiliate Blueprint Guide one of the biggest secrets of the Super Affiliates of late 2007 and early 2008 is that they use Yahoo Search Marketing more and more for a lot of their affiliate campaigns. Of course Yahoos’ share of the search market is only 10 to 20 % of Googles’ (depending on the country), but there is much less advertiser competition. And click fraud is also considerably less. Other advantages are lower CPC and higher conversion rates. Hey, why are you still using Adwords ?

These are some very good reasons to make a new start with your online advertising campaigns. If you have never used Yahoo Search Marketing before, you can get a $25 free click credit in the US. But it comes even better: a very good choice for trying out a ‘foreign’ market is to advertise in Europe, especially the United Kingdom. It is a big market, with a population of almost 60 Million people, and the main advantage for US advertisers is of course the english language. But take care of the spelling differences!

An even bigger advantage is that you can get a £50 click credit on Yahoo UK, which, at the current all time low dollar rate, comes down to a cool $100 free credit! Doesn’t that sound like an offer you can’t resist? Of course the user interface for setting up campaigns is different from Adwords, but I found it to be very intuitive. And if you need some insight, there are loads of tutorial videos to be found. Next to that, Yahoo is very quick and accurate in their response to your every question, be it by email or by phone.

The UK offer is for a limited period only. Be sure to use the current promo code: GB0283 and get $100 free credit on Yahoo!

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Here is a secret tip that can save you money in the Ebook jungle out there. Some say the following method isn’t fully ethical, but as fas as I am concerned, there are so many unethical ‘gurus’ trying to get you to spend $29-$49-$97 on some bogus Ebook, that I decided to share it with the readers of this blog.

I am not a Google Hack Expert, but I found the following hack somewhere on the internet, and it can be extremely useful in finding that special ebook (or mp3, or anything), as there are many people who upload their digital inventory to a website (server). Or they change the hoplinks in the ebooks they bought or found und upload them to function as a kind of ‘honeypot‘. Hey, that’s a money idea!

This particular Google Hack has the following structure:
-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(pdf) “ebooks” affiliate

In this case it searches for directories with pdf files in combination with the keywords ‘ebook’ and ‘affiliate’. And see what we found here with the above search: the famous Affiliate Project X Ebook, among other ebooks. First time I read that one, somewhat useful, but worth $97?

A word of warning: this is a very powerful hack, use it wisely and sparingly. And know that the really blac.k hat guys out there know that there are people using this hack, so don’t blame me when you ‘find’ something that you weren’t looking for …

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