Money-Making Web Tools: Calling All Affiliates





Andrew Lock

ClickBank


Today we’re going try to make you some money. How’s a billion dollars sound? OK, maybe that’s not what you’re going to earn, but ClickBank says that’s what they paid out to their clients, and it’s your turn now.


ClickBank is a marketplace for affiliates to sell products and for vendors to post products for affiliates to sell. Now the key word here is digital — most all of the products on ClickBank are digital — things like e-books — meaning you’re not going to be selling coffee mugs here or t-shirts; that’s not their game. 


Let’s say you’re an affiliate, and you’re looking for a product to sell. It’s fairly simple. First of all you join ClickBank, and then you browse through the products that they have to sell. They claim to have tens of thousands of products, and you can browse by a particular category.






ClickBank.com
ClickBank.com
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Next you promote the affiliate — what they call a hoplink — and post the hoplink on search engine ads, your blog and wherever else you can to generate some traffic, and then the sales come rolling in. And ClickBank says they’ll pay up to 75 percent of the sale to you — maybe the key phrase there is “up to” 75 percent.


Let’s say you have a product to sell. Well, it’s the same type of deal. You create your digital product — probably an e-book if you’re going to sell it on ClickBank. You join ClickBank, and then you set up the product page. Basically you’re responsible for creating the marketing information for your product. Next you activate the product.


Now there is a $50 activation fee in order to post your product on ClickBank, and as the product sells you get a commission each and every time it sells.


Agents of Value


If you’re out there building a business on the Internet, you’re serious about it, you really want to succeed, and you’re putting a lot into it, this is a fabulous, fabulous resource for you. It’s called Agents of Value.


Now these folks are based in the United States but their staff people are in the Philippines. So let me tell you what these folks do. First of all this is not like a freelance site where you go and give somebody a project, they do it, and then they do another project. This is actually a person you would hire to do a job for you and they’re on board as long as you want them to be there.


For example, you can get a link builder. Now building links is a really, really important piece of search engine optimization. For as little as $625 a month you can get someone full time in the Philippines who will begin building links on your Web site. That will help your search engine optimization dramatically.






AgentsofValue.com
AgentsofValue.com
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You can get a writer for $675, a Web designer for $725, and these people are there all the time for you. This is not just now and then, they are on the job. They work regular hours in two different shifts for five days a week; Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET or 7 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET, which is probably the work day in the Philippines. They also have people who will move their schedule around just to fit the time zones here in the United States.


One thing I always like to check is a site’s Alexa rating — how much traffic are they getting. Agents of Value rates 75,000, a pretty healthy score. That means they are in the top 75,000 Web sites in the world, and there are literally millions and millions of Web sites, so this is a pretty respectable rating.


In addition to the link building, they offer site administration, Web masters, Web designers, they’ll do programming — these folks are the cat’s pajamas. This is quite a program.


Tactic7 (Instant Autoresponder Messages Software)


You’re probably familiar with auto-responder messages, like when you contact a company, their technical support maybe, and you get an e-mail back instantly and you think, “Gee those guys are fast.” No, that’s just an auto-responder message. It usually says something like “here are some possible for your problem — we’ll get back to you later.”


However, another way to use auto-responder messages is for marketing your product. We’re talking about an auto-message generator. Here’s where to go to get your free copy: Instant Autoresponder Messages Software.






Instant Autoresponder Messages Software
Instant Autoresponder Messages Software
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All you have to do is download the software. It works with both PCs and Macs, however they say it works much better on the PC with the FireFox browser and not Internet Explorer.


You also need something called Adobe Air on your computer — don’t worry, that’s a free download. Some people have had problems getting the software to run, and I say that because on the blog there are 528 responses and about a third of them deal with that.


However, the admin does respond promptly to any questions on how to do it, and that’s nice because it’s free software — he really doesn’t have to do that. In fact he created a video on how to install it, and it’s right on the blog page.


The software automatically generates marketing e-mails for you based on your responses to questions that the software asks. Some of the people commenting on the site say this stuff works great, it’s free, and they might have paid hundred or even thousands of dollars for similar software.


Other commenters say that the letters sound a little stilted — nobody types like this and nobody talks like this. These are obviously computer-generated e-mails. Well, either way, why don’t you try it out and see what you think.





You’ll find lots more marketing tips and resources from Andrew Lock in our Small Business Essential series, Lock in Your Marketing Resources.





Andrew Lock is a self-described maverick marketer and the creator and host of Help! My Business Sucks, a free, weekly Web TV show full of practical marketing tips, advice and resources to help small businesses “get more done and have more fun.”





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