Expanding my Affiliate Empire (Part 2 ) - Choosing the Right Products to Promote

I have been trawling the Clickbank Marketplace looking for products to promote and trying to get to grips with the various figures they give. From researching on other sites and forums the important things to look at are popularity and gravity. Until a couple of days ago, gravity to me was what helped an apple fall to the ground while Isaac Newton was reputedly sitting under a tree. In the Clickbank world however, it is a measure of how many recent sales there have been. But if this figure is high (i.e. 150+) and is highly ranked in terms of popularity, then it is likely this is a seriously saturated market. If a product is popular but has a low gravity score this suggests that a very few affiliates are cornering sales. A less popular product with a low gravity score could mean that there is little competition out there, or it might mean that it is a product that just doesn't sell. So it's all quite confusing to a newbie like me.

My original idea was to target a particular less popular niche as there would be less competition, but now I'm not so sure. I'm a little concerned that this would mean fewer potential sales. So I think what I will do initially is choose a few products across a range of categories with a range of gravity scores. This might give me an idea where to concentrate my efforts.

Expanding My Affiliate Empire (Part 1) - Is It Possible to be Ethical and be a Successful Affiliate?

Making money on paid surveys, paid to click, Squidoo, etc, is all very well, but I have come to the conclusion that in order to make any real money then I need to look at extending my affiliate activities. So far my affiliate "empire" is pretty small scale consisting of banners primarily placed on my website and blogs and income from these has been modest to say the least. It is time I think to step up a gear and look seriously at making money from Clickbank or PayDotCom. As a result I have researching how best to do this. As a relative newbie at making money online this is quite daunting.

What I am considering is choosing a number of Clickbank products and finding a variety of methods of promoting them. One of the aims has to be dominating related keywords relating to the selected products through writing articles. The tricky part is overcoming the fact that article directories such Ezine do not allow affiliate links in articles. I have found a couple of ways of overcoming this. Being as I am still trying to get my head around this, I won't try and describe these here as I run the risk of giving incorrect information. Instead, if you want to read more I suggest you visit the following:

http://www.carlocab.com/bum-marketing-experiment/

http://www.earnersblog.com/400-a-month-with-clickbank-article-marketing/

My first task then is to select some suitable Clickbank products. I have decided to avoid any of the making money online type products as this is a seriously overcrowded area. Beside the fact that many of them appear to be highly dubious! So I have decided to look for something a bit more niche, although there is danger of choosing products for which the potential number of customers is very small. My current thoughts are to choose products that link in somehow with my other projects.

Another criteria I have set myself is that the products I choose should be those that I would consider buying myself (or would if I had any spare cash!). I personally struggle with the idea of promoting products that I don't believe in, which is probably why I am not yet a hugely wealthy affiliate. So my first challenge is to choose products that actually interest me and are actually likely to attract sales. That way I am more likely to write convincing articles. Once I have managed that then I can start my campaign of promotion.

Help Me Achieve a Top 100 Squidoo Lens

Having recently completed a couple more Squidoo lenses, one of them I have since improved after receiving some feedback on the SquidU forum. This lens, about the movie director Ed Wood, has been attracting a reasonable amount of traffic. So I have now decided to make it my mission to see if I can achieve a top 100 place with this lens.

And you (yes...you!), my loyal readers, can help me achieve that goal! All you have to do is pay a visit to my lens. If you are a Squidoo member you might want to rate it and leave a comment. That's all you need to do!

At the time of writing my lens is rated #495 in the Movies category and #9063 overall. So not too far to go to achieve the top 100 in the Movie category, but quite a way to go to achieve a top 100 spot overall.

So, please pay a visit to www.squidoo.com/worstevermoviedirector. It's a painless thing to do, and you may even enjoy reading my lens.

If there is anything (legal) you would me to do in return, then please leave me a comment and will do my best to oblige.

Get Paid to Search The Internet

The easiest ways to make money online are those where you get paid for doing what you do already. Well with Scour you can do exactly that. Scour is a search engine that allows you to get paid for every search that you do. You can also boost your earnings by commenting and voting on website. OK, so you won't earn loads, but you if you can get paid for something that you do most days, probably several times a day, then you might as well.

You can boost your points total further by making referrals and you receive 25% of the points made by the people you refer. So, according to the website, if you do 3 daily searches and you refer 100 people who do the same, you will make $455 per year! OK, so unless you have a PR6 blog and your readers hang on your every word, most of us won't achieve that level of referrals, but you get the idea.

You can join Scour here.

Google Page Creator Sites to be Migrated to Google Sites

My website was created using Google Page Creator. I did this primarily because it is free and easy to use, and includes free web hosting. However, as I became more competent and ambitious I did become frustrated with GPC's limitations.

However, I have just read that Page Creator is going to be migrated over to Google Sites. I'm not sure as yet how my site will be affected. Looking at Google Sites it looks much more flexible and has many more features so the migration may be a good thing. Hopefully this may alleviate some of the frustrations I have had with Page Creator. Google Sites also includes free web hosting which is always a plus - although web hosting is like anything else; you get what you pay for!

I had intended to add more sections to my site and tweak the format, but now I think I will leave any major work until the migration takes place as Google Sites might give me some opportunities to make some positive changes. So I will put all the various changes I had planned on hold for now. There are a few updates I need to put in and one of the pages has a glitch that needs sorting, so I will see to those over the next few days.

You can read more about Google Sites here.

Progress report on Squidoo

I have come the end of my week concentrating on Squidoo and I have made substantial changes to most of my existing lenses and completed two more. I have started a third, but inspiration seems to have deserted me for the moment, so I will come back to it in a few days. One of my new lenses is about the movie director Ed Wood, who is considered to be the worst director of all time. His life and work was immortalized in Tim Burton's movie, "Ed Wood". You can see my lens about Ed Wood at http://www.squidoo.com/worstevermoviedirector.

My other lens is called "Astrology is Rubbish" - my attempt at being controversial! You can find it at http://www.squidoo.com/astrologyisrubbish.

You can find all my lenses at http://www.squidoo.com/lensmasters/Rumpleteazer.

I will come back to Squidoo to add more lenses in a week or so.

Change of Template

I have just downloaded a new template for my blog. I decided on a download rather than to try and make one of my own, but there are a number of things I haven't figured out with this yet, so please bear with me.

Total Earnings for September

I have been reading other people's blogs and looking enviously at what they have managed to earn online. It feels like currently it isn't really happening for me. I guess it's a matter of persevering as I am still quite new at this. In adding up my total I have applied my usual rules of only including what I have actually physically received. So my total additional earnings are as follows:

Ebay - £58
Surveys - £57.33 (Global Test Market - £27.33, Lightspeed - £10.00, Toluna
- £10 Amazon voucher, Ipsos - £10 Argos voucher)
Sale of free range eggs - £6.30

Total = £121.83

Still a long way to go to achieve my target of £300 per month. I perhaps need to investigate some other options as well as optimizing those that I am already using.