Affiliate Marketing Plan

If you wish to succeed at affiliate marketing you need a plan. As the maxim goes,”If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

If you are new to affiliate marketing it is incredibly difficult to know what you need to do to get a plan. There are a million and one schemes, secret codes or ‘recipes for success and the problem for newbies is which one works.

Unfortunately the answer is very few. Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick method of making money online as many of the above make it out to be. It takes work, a fair few failures and lots of frustration but make no mistake you can earn lots of money on the internet.

Trillions of dollars change hands every year online and you only have to get a minute piece of that pie to make serious money.

How many of us have produced affiliate websites only to have them disappear into cyber space not to be seen again?
I have websites that even I have forgotten about let alone any prospective customers.

I have found that by getting a plan into place my earnings have increased significantly and whats more important is that I know what is working for me and what I can forget about. I have a plan!

I now follow two different plans depending on what particular niche I have found. The first is Brian Johnsons Commission Ritual which I use when I have identified a micro-niche. This is a super easy way of affiliate marketing which can produce profits in a fairly short space of time.

As I have a very short concentration time on some subjects it allows me to hop from niche to niche without worrying too much about backlinking, article writing etc. Commission Ritual is perfect for this method. It is based on wordpress which I love and which makes the whole process quick and simple.

The second plan I follow is the N1Way, this method is for larger sites that I build around subjects for which I have a genuine interest. I find it so much easier to put in bucketfuls of time when there is a passion for the niche and the N1Way gives me focus and makes the process much quicker and more straightforward. The N1Way was originally designed for Build A Niche Store owners but it contains methods for wordpress sites (which I use) but the concept is easily adapted for any type of website you may wish to build.

I would recommend either or both of these affiliate marketing plans to anyone and further say that until you have taken them to heart don’t bother with anything else. Get an affiliate marketing plan!

photo credit: Eric Fischer

Bans Cloaking Problem | Fix Your Bans Store

Build A Niche Store owners have become aware of a problem with the cloaked URLS on their sites and it has been found that good old Epn have made changes to the RSS feed without notification to their affiliates (one more reason to go to Amazon!)

Fortunately, king of the BANS store problem solvers, Tao Schenks has managed to produce a fix and here it is.

In index.php, you need to find this block of code:

if(($siteType == “US”) && ($cloak == “1″)){
$front->sid = str_replace(“%2B”, “+”, $front->sid);
$link[$counter] = str_replace(“http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?”, “”.URL_PATH.”/item/”, $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace(“&mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2F”, “”, $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace(“QQcmdZViewItemQQssPageNameZRSS%3AB%3ASRCH%3AUS%3A101″, “”, $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace(“campid=”.CJID.”", “”, $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace(“&customid=”.$front->sid.”", “”, $link[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = str_replace(“&toolid=10005″, “”, $link[$counter]);
}

Replace it with this:

if(($siteType == “US”) && ($cloak == “1″)){
$itempos = strpos($link[$counter],”item=”);
$cloakeditem = substr($link[$counter],$itempos+5,12);
$cloakedtitle = preg_replace(“/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s]/”, “”, $title[$counter]);
$link[$counter] = URL_PATH.’/item/’.str_replace(” “,”-”,$cloakedtitle).”_W0QQitemZ”.$cloakeditem;
}

This change also needs to be done in the FrontControl.php file which you will find in the cont folder.

If you use this free fix then buy the man a coffee by using tao.schencks@btinternet.com at paypal.

Site Building-The Number 1 Way

The N1Way

Building a money making website is not quite as straightforward as the turnkey website sellers would have you believe, it seems as though the search engines have a preference for non commercial sites and slapping affiliate link after affiliate link on a page is a good way to be ignored.

So, how do you make money with a website? The major hurdles are:

What product are you going to sell?

Where will that product come from?

Will people spend cash on it?

You will notice, I hope, that these questions are mixed up, in order to make money as an affiliate the most efficient way of doing it is to find the people first, you can then source the product to match the market.

This is where the N1Way guide to building a website comes in. This guide gives you the exact steps to follow in the right order to build your site in the best possible way. In fact with this method the site almost builds itself.

The N1Way guide was originally created as a side product for BANS sites which, if you have read through my blog you will know I think BANS is pretty much a dead horse, but the guide works for any product driven site. It will give you a frame work upon which you can build a website and be fairly confident it will get picked up by the search engines pretty quickly. The best thing about building websites this way is that they become almost self sufficient, meaning that you are not always having to go in and update it.

Build A Niche Store Alternatives

Further to my previous post regarding the demise of the Build A Niche Store many people who already have the script have been asking “What can I do with it now?”

A major problem for affiliates of EPN, the Ebay affiliate scheme has been the dramatic fall in earnings which coupled with EPNs apparent propensity for ‘expiring’ its affiliates with no warning or proper explanation the answer for most BANS users is to find alternatives.

Fortunately their are some simple ways to do this and I have listed some of the best ones here.

Amazon are possibly rubbing their hands with glee as thousands of Ebay affiliates are now switching their loyalties to them and sending their traffic Amazons way.

Amabans $30

For existing BANS users the simple fix is a script by Tao Schenks called Amabans. This fix or mod slips into the Build A Niche Script and pulls in relevant Amazon listings. It comes with comprehensive instructions and Tao is a great guy if you need a bit of help.
Buy the Amabans script Here

Geo Bans $20

Tao writes;  So when I visit from the UK, I see ebay.co.uk auctions and when my mates from the US visit, they see ebay.com auctions.Since I wrote and have been using GeoBANS on my sites I have seen a 60% increase in sales across all of the eBay Partner Network countries that BANS supports! Many others have seen the benefits too. With the advent of QCP, it is now even more important to send quality visitors and buyers to eBay. With GeoBANS, you can send Spanish people to the Spanish eBay and Americans to eBay.com. What could be better!”

Buy GeoBans Here

CJBans $30
Tao has released this great script to let you pull in items from Commission Junction so fire EPN and start dealing with an affiliate scheme that actually wants you.

A simple way to change or add extra items to your BANS store

This  could be your best investment yet. Buy it here

Mega Pack $60

Want all three for $60? Save $20 and get the ultimate screw you EPN mega pack here

Build A Niche Store – RIP

Build A Niche Store or as it is more commonly known, BANS is dead. This has been said time and time again but I truly believe it is now true.

Build A Niche Store, for the people who haven’t heard of it, is a script which allows you to fill in the blanks and create websites which use the Ebay RSS feed to create content, that is you can pull auction listings onto your web pages and if a visitor buys you get a payment.

The BANS program has been a hugely successful venture for the guys that brought it out and for its time it was revolutionary in allowing the newbie affiliate marketer to get sites up and running with very little experience or know-how.

Build A Niche Store is now dead in the water for several reasons and I know that there will be a flurry of counter arguments that will say “Oh, its another BANS is dead story that is not right”

Okay, lets take the major Unique Selling Point (USP) of BANS. You need no knowledge other than what is contained in the well written and helpful manual and Ebay has the best affiliate program available.

The manual is well thought out and does provide all the information that is required to get a site up, no argument but what most newbies do is follow the instructions, put up a site with little or no unique content and are then surprised and unhappy when it does not make them a fortune.

This used to work but now it will not. Period. Google wants fresh, new content not merely clones of Ebay. The early days were great but Google soon caught on to the fact that most BANS sites were just that.

The Bans script leaves a huge footprint and so it was easy for Google to identify and de-index them leaving the ‘webmaster’ with no rankings, no visitors and no earnings.

You can get round this by ‘hacking’ the script, basically re-writing it, but if you bought it because you do not know how to write code this is not an option for you.

This brings us to point two, Ebay have made changes to their affiliate program over the last few months and where you would earn a percentage of the Ebay charges for each sale you brought them plus a bonus payment for each person you introduced who signed up for an account you now don’t.

Ebay has introduced the Quality Click Price system which is an algorithm which determines how much each visitor is worth, they then determine how much they will pay you for each click. There seems to be very sense in how these values are determined and many affiliates are reporting huge decreases in their earnings.

Furthermore, the Build A Niche Store program is no longer supported by its authors and so there will be no upgrades or revisions in the future and so any problems you will come across will be your problem not theirs.

Build A Niche Store does get you into the private forum and this was a major plus point but I’m sorry but that is no longer true. What was once a vibrant, lively area for debate, help and ideas has basically distilled down to a few enthusiasts who have the necessary skills to keep the dying horse alive for a while longer.

If you have recently bought the BANS script I would advise getting your money back if you are still within the refund period and if you are not, then you can only expect the product to be a learning experience.