Where am I?

[WayOutWisdoms]

What's shaking people,

My experience is limited to understanding the pyschology of selling, business demographics, and having more ideas than I know what to do with. I love writing, and would like to spend time writing ads, creating links to capture pages or "landing pages", promoting quality products, and avoiding viral emailing, spamming, and ultimately abusing those who have no interest in the products I intend to market.

My strengths are determination to succeed, honesty, and I am willing to endure the frustration(s) associated to the learning curve.

Unfortunately, my weakness is I keep telling myself if I simply find a hot product and a couple decent affiliate programs offering a pre-scripted landing page, tracking software, and a check out window...Then I could simply post thousands of ads, links, etc...and see a return.

The irony is, I am hopeless in understanding why everyone is teaching people how to create "landing pages" and though it sounds like a good starting point, is that a necessity?

I am clueless to the whole code, and computer language. In truth, I really don't want to be a web-designer, but rather focus on connecting A.) The consumer with.... C.) The merchant and.... B.) The person who interceded the transaction, and caught a % of the sale.

I mean it sounds simple, and yet I don't know where to find C.) A merchant who provides the landing page/advertisements/check-out etc...

Is it even possible, I can succeed without having to learn how to become a web designer?

I need directions something fierce!

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanx,
Art

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Art,

What you are asking in simple terms is a question we are asked often...
Can you do affiliate marketing without your own website?

Yes. Maybe for awhile. But eventually you will want your own site once you understand how the game is played. You'll want your own site for a WIDE variety of reasons.

For one, there aren't that many places you can run around and just drop links but lets say you do put a lot of links out there to one merchant. Then the merchant stops their affiliate program or switches links. Now you have a bunch of dead links all over. If instead the links you took all that time to place went to your own site where you control everything, you could just switch the link on your site to a different merchant and not lose time or money.

I'll give you a another scenario. You have 3 great products to promote. One that's higher end and more full featured one mid range and one low end. You can't know which one will be more attractive to which user. You can only drop one link. Instead of picking one of the 3 to link to and maybe picking the wrong one - If that one link went to your own site you could feature all 3 options, explain all the differences, give people a choice and have a better chance of making a sale. Then again if one merchant didn't convert you could just switch it out for another.

But the biggest reason IMHO is driving traffic is hard and a lot of work! I want to work to drive traffic to my own site, build up my own brand and control everything. The other thing is if you send to your own site 1st you can track how many visitors click to you, vs how many click to merchant and measure the success of your efforts.

I could go on and on...

One way to dip your toe in the water is to start off with a free template based site like blogger. So at least you can send traffic to your own site, write your own content and pre-sell. It's all templates and almost as easy as word. But that's like renting. You don't own the site, but you do have some control.

The BEST solution is get your own domain and have someone build you a site or a wordpress blog. It won't cost much. You bypass learning to build a site. Once you start writing content for WP it's as easy as writing a doc in Word.

Hope this helps and best of luck!

 

[WayOutWisdoms]

You're Awesome...

Thank-you, that definitely changed my perspective. I have recently started a personal blog for my writing, but have not yet designed one centered at converting sales, marketing, with product distribution, PPC or of any monetizing value.

I'm stuck as to how to monitor traffic on my blog.

What tracking tool(s) do you recommend I use to know who's visiting my blogger account?

With the right resource to track, I am confident I can better deterrmine my audience, and maximize on a product line accordingly?

Better still, are there "free" tracking tools that will work as well as a purchased one?

Clearly, I respect your insight and your response. In fact, I believe today will be a time to build a new blog site centered more around inspiring and encouraging others to better appreciate the educational value marketing has given me, and start by writing a blog that compliments people like yourself who in any account are not only great mentors, but philanthropists sharing wisdom.

I know of no greater fellowship then people helping others. A community I am slowly finding, and drawn to continue exploring.

I imagine if arming the public with tools to combat ignorance were a sport, I'd be training for the olympics right now, in confidence knowing the "training" is how the gold is earned.

Time will tell if my efforts are sincere, I guess.

Thank-you again,
Art

 

[Linda Buquet]

You're Awesome...

Thank-you, that definitely changed my perspective.

Better still, are there "free" tracking tools that will work as well as a purchased one?

You are very welcome.

There ARE free tracking tools that work with blogger but I don't know the name. Have just heard people mention them but can't remember. You can add html and other code to your blogger blog so I think any free tracker would probably work. Maybe someone else here can recommend something for you so you don't have to hunt and figure out what's best.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Just remembered one that a friend is using on blogger.
StatCounter Free invisible Web tracker, Hit counter and Web stats

I THINK that's the one and it's about the most popular too.

 

[WayOutWisdoms]

Time to go to work

TY

 

[RayTamayo]

Write a 90 day plan of what you want to say. You can pick up some great ad copy ideas from a book called "How To Get Rich In Mail Order" by Melvin Powers.... If I met the guy I would buy him a snapple... Helped me make great profits....

 

[Clintoc]

Free blogs are great for testing any niche. It is not nearly as difficult as it really sounds. As a bit of added info... learn to build your niche tests on squidoo. Google loves squidoo, you just need to know how to let google know your squidoo lens is there. Once you do you gain the power of thousands of backlinks to the domain (which is often enough to propel most new lenses up high in the SERPS).

I would honestly have to say, the hardest part about building a landing page is learning the HTML coding of tables (I still keep a cheat sheet). I will admit that things come pretty easily to me on the technical side, the marketing side is what is giving me the fits.

This isn't to say that my websites/blogs are beautiful or perfect, but every new attempt it gets better. I buy a domain and slap a wordpress blog up for every test niche/site that I do just for that practice.. that and it is a whole lot easier to monitor your traffic on a site you own (Hostgator traffic logs are wonderful).

In my short time in affiliate marketing my experiences have taught me that if you are willing to throw yourself at any problems that arise, you will win the game. Just keep at it and you will be ok.

 

[RayTamayo]

Learning Ad Copy

You're Awesome...

Thank-you, that definitely changed my perspective. I have recently started a personal blog for my writing, but have not yet designed one centered at converting sales, marketing, with product distribution, PPC or of any monetizing value.

I'm stuck as to how to monitor traffic on my blog.

What tracking tool(s) do you recommend I use to know who's visiting my blogger account?

With the right resource to track, I am confident I can better deterrmine my audience, and maximize on a product line accordingly?

Better still, are there "free" tracking tools that will work as well as a purchased one?

Clearly, I respect your insight and your response. In fact, I believe today will be a time to build a new blog site centered more around inspiring and encouraging others to better appreciate the educational value marketing has given me, and start by writing a blog that compliments people like yourself who in any account are not only great mentors, but philanthropists sharing wisdom.

I know of no greater fellowship then people helping others. A community I am slowly finding, and drawn to continue exploring.

I imagine if arming the public with tools to combat ignorance were a sport, I'd be training for the olympics right now, in confidence knowing the "training" is how the gold is earned.

Time will tell if my efforts are sincere, I guess.

Thank-you again,
Art

Art,

Learning Ad Copy is easier than you think... There are many teachers out there... but the one who I sat with and trained under is my biased opinion... I have some free e-stuff if you want to shoot me a message... would love to share the wisdom...