Can I Use Another Affiliate Network Besides Amazon...

I’ve been getting this question quite a bit since Amazon decided to not allow affiliates from certain states due to stuff I don’t anything about. What I do know is if you don’t have Amazon as an option… all is NOT lost!

There are many other affiliate networks available for you to use. Some of them house some of the biggest names in “real life” shopping, like Target, Walmart as well as many very very niche stores that are perfect for finding specific products to promote.

Two of my favorites, and the ones I find easiest to navigate and use are

Linkshare

ShareaSale

I like these because they don’t seem quite as complicated to get around and find what you’re looking for as say CommissionJunction ~ which is another affiliate network you can use… and I still find it confusing to get around and find what I’m looking for.

You will have to apply to both of these programs. You’ll need a website ~ so if you don’t have a blogger blog yet, now’s a good time to get one.

They will ask you some questions, just answer them honestly. I think one of the questions will be about how you’re going to drive traffic… just write in SEO or search engine traffic ~ something like that, because that’s how we get our traffic.

You do not need to tell them you’re going to use your code on your lenses ~ the application pertains to the site you’re using on your application.

Once you’ve been accepted to the network you’ll have to apply individually to each merchant (store) to be an affiliate for them.

This is where having a general “gift” or “deals” blog comes in handy. If your blogger blog, the one you used on your application, is about teeth whitening, and you find a great keyword on a high chair and decide you want to apply to Baby Universe over at LinkShare you may not be accepted because your site about teeth whitening is not really relevant/related to baby stuff.

That’s why I love to do holiday gift sites, or get the best deal sites, because no matter what niche physical products of any type can be given as a gift or you can get a great deal on them. A general site like this gives you better reach for a wider variety of merchants, and products to be able to promote.

Some merchants in these networks will be automatic approval… some won’t. It may take some time to get approved by some of the merchants. Some are more lenient than others and will approve just about everyone. Other merchants will check your site stats and if you don’t have the traffic level they’re looking for in their affiliates they won’t approve you.

Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get approved by a merchant. It’s no big deal. There are probably 5 or 6 other merchants that can give you the same or similar product, so just find another merchant and apply with them.

Once you’ve been approved by a merchant there is a possibility that depending on your sales level they will dismiss you as an affiliate. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen so I just want you to be aware.  If you are dismissed by a merchant it is not the end of the world, just find another merchant that carries similar/the same products.

There are many options when it comes to where you can find products to promote. While I teach Amazon mostly ~ because it’s the easiest, and they have EVERYTHING, they are not the only show in town. So if for some reason Amazon is no longer allowing you to be an affiliate don’t worry. You have options.

Squidoo Christmas Cash Video Series
Step by step video tutorials walking you through the entire process of creating a Squidoo Christmas Cash lens
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Starting the Research Process; Finding a Product

The last time I did a “finding killer keywords” post the idea came  from daydreaming and staring out my window.  Although I’m sure there are plenty of ideas outside your window too, I thought I’d be a little more proactive about the product finding process, to show you how that works.

It’s still very easy… don’t complicate the process. It’s the one thing I find beginners do, make things really complicated in their minds, when it’s really as simple as finding something cool you might want to buy online.

Let’s take a look at shopping.com ~ one of my favorite starting places.

This is where I start… you’ll find out in the video it’s not always where I end up. The key to successfully scouting for new products is to be open minded. Don’t get stuck on one product, or one keyword or even one topic.

I go to shopping.com to get an IDEA… then go to the keyword tool (in this video I used google free tool). Once at the keyword tool I may get another idea, a different idea, a more specific idea ~ and that’s OK ~ in fact, that’s good.

So if you’re asking where do I start, how do I pick ~ just jump in and start clicking on products ~ look for something with price point over $100 and then check it out further. It really is trial and error, and as you do more of it you’ll get a feel for it and it will go quicker ~ and you’ll have an idea of what keywords are going to work, and which ones won’t.

Here’s the process I went through in print:

1. Go to shopping.com

2. Click the “see all” link in the top right hand corner

3. Pick a category (I pick something I have some interest in)

4. Look for a price point over $100

5. Take the product name and go to your favorite keyword tool.

6. Check for search volume, keeping your eyes open for better keywords along the way.

7. If you find a possible new keyword take it to Amazon and see how much it costs and if there are reviews.

Then you will have to go and check out the competition levels for the product ~ but that wasn’t part of this video. Today we are just getting started, finding products and possible keywords.

So go on now, get over to shopping.com and test it out for yourself. It’s really not hard, you just have to jump in and do it. Remember, you really can’t get it wrong. Some keywords are certainly better than others, but even if you pick a dud keywords and take action on it ~ you’ve taken action and learned from that action. You’ve practiced which leads to quicker product selection and lens building. So even if you end up with a lens that doesn’t make you money you’ve still won.  (and it becomes another place you can use to link to OTHER lenses from… but that’s another story all together)

Let me know how it goes! I can’t wait to hear.

How to Choose the Perfect Product for Your Lens

At the very beginning of the process of creating a Christmas Cash lens (or any product based lens for that matter) is the product.

I generally choose my product first, and then go and find a “good keyword” to target for the product. I find this makes it easier to match my keyword and product perfectly.

So how do I choose products to promote?

1. Price Point.

I like to promote products over $100. The first year I did this I promoted a lot of toys and kids stuff, all probably under $50. I made money but quickly realized I could have made a LOT more money had I chosen products with a higher price point.

An easy way to find products of a higher price point is to use the “search by price” feature in the sidebar at Amazon. It will let you look at products in a specific price range ~ I usually pick over $100.

2. Number of Reviews

I generally try to choose products with at least 10 reviews ~ really the more the better. Reviews are a fantastic source of INFORMATION. These reviews will tell you what people LOVE about the product (perfect for your benefits/features module). They give you information about what might be “not quite right” with the product ~ which you can also mention in your lens to give a more balanced review of the product.

The more positive product reviews you have the better. I like to go to the last page of reviews to pull the ones I show on my lens, that way when people go to the reviews page they see totally different reviews than the ones they saw on my lens. (Most people aren’t going to scroll through a few pages of reviews)

3. Savings or Free shipping

I like to choose products where I can tell people they are saving a LOT  ~ whether it’s a percentage or a dollar amount. People saving money makes a huge difference in them actually buying (and clicking through to the page).

That’s what I look for when choosing the product. Of course, once I’ve chosen a product I have to be able to find a good keyword to target for the product. I may find there are tons of people searching for it, I may find there are none. If there isn’t enough search volume then I just start the process over again.

Where do I start looking for products?

I generally sell from Amazon ~ but it’s not always where I start the search.  There are quite a few places you can go to get ideas for products to promote.

1. Shopping.com

This is one of my very favorite places. If you click the “see all” link in the top right hand corner you will be provided with an amazing list of options to dig into. I ALWAYS find something I hadn’t thought of when I jump into shopping.com

2. Ebay Keywords

Ebay is one of the biggest shopping destinations online. You can use their shoppers to your advantage. You can find out what the most searched keywords on ebay are… Just go to the ebay keyword page and click a letter and start looking around.

3. My Local Walmart

Please… let’s not have a discussion about how much Walmart Sucks. I know… I don’t have any other shopping options within an hours drive.  It doesn’t have to be Walmart ~ Target ~ Macy’s whatever you’ve got around you.

Check the end caps. This is PRIME selling real estate ~ they are not going to use the end caps for things that don’t sell. Always take a pad of paper with you to Walmart. Look around, see what you see ~ let shopping spark ideas for you. You can come home and research them later.

A trip to Walmart (while my husband was looking at something I was completely uninterested in) got me on the idea of a very profitable series of lenses I did a couple years back.

The world is your niche idea treasure chest ~ keep your eyes open. Any store you walk in, watch what people are looking at, watch what they are buying. Anything bought in a store can be sold online. Write it down and do a little research when you get home.

There you have it, my simple process for choosing products and finding product ideas. I’d love to hear what you are doing to find products to promote, tell me in the comments.

Keyword Research: Finding a Keyword

In my last survey Keyword Research was one of the two biggest problems people are having in their internet marketing career. (Building links/getting traffic being the other).

I love keyword research so I thought I’d start a regular keyword finding mission here. I think the more you see the process in action the easier it gets.  So here’s today’s first keyword finding mission.

Some basic tips for keyword research:

1. Get an idea.

Doesn’t matter where you get the idea. At the store, looking out the window, browsing a shopping site online, looking around your house. Ideas are everywhere. Just grab one and get started.

2. Don’t be too attached to the idea.

So many times I see people get an idea and then go to the search tool and hold on to that idea so tightly ~ whether it’s going to work or not, that they completely miss 5 or 6 great keywords that are right in front of them because they aren’t exactly the idea they went in with.

3. Identify basic information during your research.

• search volume (I like over 1000/month, but sometimes over 500 will work as well)
• competition (SOC under 30 in Micro Niche Finder ~ average Page Rank for first page of results under 30)
• commercial intent (if you have MNF you can click the OCI button. If you don’t, think about the word, and if you were doing the searching would you be buying or searching for information?)
• LASTLY exact phrase count. (this one just gives me a little more confidence in the kw. Sometimes things look good on paper but then you see it has an exact match of over a million. Even if it looks good otherwise I wouldn’t go for it. I try to keep it under 50k or 30k exact match pages ~ but that’s flexible. Remember I like to keep things really easy to rank for and there’s plenty of keywords in the sea.)

Ok so let’s see how I do it.

Today I was looking out my window thinking about starting a worm compost bin, when it dawned on me to check and see if it might be worth doing a lens on. (yes, starting keyword research CAN be that easy!)

I checked to see what worm bins cost. (I checked at Gardener’s Supply ~ only because that’s where I buy most of my gardening stuff  ~ but they have the same worm bins on Amazon.)

Opened micro niche finder and did a search of the broad words “worm bins” to see what all would come up. I found a few options and a couple that I would go ahead and build lenses out of.

Here’s the video:

So take it easy, have a little fun, don’t be too attached, and if you have any questions about how I did this, or how YOU can do it too, please ask in the comments section.

Using Micro Niche Finder For Squidoo Christmas Cas...

You can find everything you need with free tools. You can find keyword search volume with the Google keyword tool. You can find the competition for your keyword using the SEO for Firefox plugin. You can get ideas for keywords and products by going through all the categories of Amazon.

However… If you want to do this all quicker, easier and all in one place you need Micro Niche Finder.  I bought MNF a few years ago. I didn’t really “get” it. I used it once or twice and then “put it away”. I saw a video somewhere talking about the things MNF could do and it dawned on me that it would be PERFECT for finding products for lenses. So I tried it out and I was right!

Here’s some reasons I love MNF for Squidoo:

1. You can put in a broad topic and it will bring up keywords that don’t have all the words you searched for in it. This gives you tons of ideas that you might never have thought of.

2. It tells me all the things I need to know on one screen. No more searching and jumping from window to window looking for the info I need.

3. It tells me the commercial intent of a keyword. In other words, how likely is someone to buy when they search on that keyword.

4. You can save keywords you find in a folder. You can have a bunch of folders for different topics. You NEVER run out of ideas.

5. It’s regularly updated every time they get a cooler idea or Google makes a change.

Let’s take a look at how Micro Niche Finder works and how it can work for you.

First of all, once you purchase MNF you will download it to your computer. It stays on your hard drive.

When you want to use it you just click the icon on your desk top and it will open.

At the top of the page you’ll see a search box. Let’s say we’ve gone to Amazon and we want to find some keywords for cycling computers. You’ve seen that the VDO brand is pretty expensive, and if you’ve had any experience with serious cyclists you know they will SPEND on their equipment.

So let’s see what MNF finds for us.

The results will come in alphabetical order so you will see some great things that might catch your eye before you even get to what you’re searching for.

This is the left hand side of the screen. It shows you the keyword, local, global search volume and the trend for the keyword.

This is the right side of the screen where you’ll see you can get the exact phrase count for the keyword (putting it in google with quotes around it) You can see the adsense cost for the keyword. You can see the OCI which is the commercial intent ~ how likely people are to buy when searching with that keyword. The MOB which is measure of backlinks ~ in other words how much backlinking you’re going to need to do to rank. The last is the SOC strength of competition ~ which tells you how hard it’s going to be to rank in Google for that keyword.

To find out each of those things you simply click in that column for your keyword.

When working with Squidoo lenses I generally use the exact phrase count  the soc number, and the OCI ~ as well as the search volume number.  This is everything I need to know if a keyword has a good chance of doing well.

As I’m looking down the list I come across the keyword Cateye Astrale 8 ~ Cateye is a really popular brand of bike computer.

1900 search volume a month ~ that’s good. So I checked the SOC (that’s the second piece of info I like to check)

Zero! That’s excellent. That tells me it will be quite easy to rank for that keyword. Now I’m going to check and see how much this Cateye costs. I’m going to go back to the left side of the screen and click on the keyword. That will give me a BUNCH of options.

As you can see there’s a LOT of information you can find related to this keyword. You can find out if there are articles at Ezinearticles.com about this phrase, you can do a whole new search starting with this phrase. You can see if there are clickbank products related to this product.  You can check the Google trends. It might seem a bit overwhelming. All those options are there… so as your business grows they are there to use.

However… today we’re going to check amazon and see what the price is for this product and if there are any reviews. (Because those are the things we look for when creating Christmas cash lenses)

I clicked the Amazon search button only to find the product is 30 bucks. Nope that’s no good. Let’s keep looking down the list of keywords.

So I came across another kw that looked good Mavick Wintech ~ with 2400 searches a month. Here’s what it said for SOC though:

Big red X means no go.Keep looking.

As I scroll down toward my original search term I see this keyword:

Checked Amazon and it’s over 100 dollars. There’s 12 reviews and they are good.

Let’s check the rest of the info:

woo hoo! It has an SOC of 0 ~ which means easy to get ranked. The exact phrase count is 0 which means it will be SUPER easy to rank. The commercial intent is 99%, which means people are really just looking for a place to BUY this computer.

So yes, this is a keyword I’d definitely build a lens around.

As you can see it’s really easy and fast to find great keywords, check all the measures to identify if it’s a “good” keyword all in one place. Very easy.

Of all the things I’ve bought online Micro Niche Finder has definitely been my best purchase. I use it at least a few times a week if not every day ~ depending on what I’m working on. I definitely recommend it if you want to speed up the process of finding keywords.

To think I left it sitting on my computer doing nothing for such a long time.

If you have any other questions about Micro Niche Finder please feel free to ask in the comment section.

Where Do Your Keywords Fit in the Buying Cycle?

I have talked quite a bit about choosing keywords and why I think it is so important to make sure you’ve chosen “good” keywords. I’ve mostly focused on making sure you have high search volume and low competition. However, there is one element I haven’t talked much about. The buying cycle. The very nature of the Christmas Cash blueprint helps you overcome this problem, but I recognize people may venture away from product specific lenses/sites. So where your keywords fit in the buying cycle will be crucial to your success.

Keywords and Buying Cycle

When people come online they are generally coming in search of information. They have an interest in something and want to know more about it. This is the interest phase. They will not be purchasing during this phase.

The second step of the buying cycle is the research phase. This part of the phase they are looking for more detailed information and are really interested in this topic and want to know more.They will not be buying in this phase either.

The last phase is the purchasing phase. This is where they have made a decision and are looking to purchase what they were only interested in and researching previously.

Let’s take a look at an example. Seeing as Thanksgiving was yesterday and I have a great personal example of choosing the “wrong” keywords ~ we’ll use the example of deep frying a turkey.

Someone in the interest phase may google “frying a turkey”. They are looking to find out if this is something they even want to do.

Second stage research ~ they may have decided they’d like to try to fry a turkey and want to know how. They may google something like “deep fry turkey instructions”.

Third phase ~ they may google “deep fry turkey cooker” (or something similar).

A year or two ago I did a lens on how to fry a turkey/deep fry turkey instructions.

Here’s my stats for the last week.

That’s a lot of traffic. A LOT of traffic. I’m getting traffic from a lot of different keywords too.

I must be making a killing … right?

Wow ~ pretty cool huh? Well guess how many sales I’ve made from all this traffic?

0 ~ yep. 0. Not one sale.

In fact, of all this traffic I have only received 74 click throughs in the last 7 days, and only 34 of them were actually to amazon. (the rest were email, favorited, and facebook postings).

So … I hope this is hitting home. It’s NOT all about traffic, it’s all about targeted traffic. It’s all about hooking up with your reader when they are ready to BUY, not when they are ready to get information.

Do you think if I had researched and built a lens on a keyword like this I might have done better?

Do you think the people searching for the bayou classic fryer are looking for information or are they looking to buy a cooker so they can fry the turkey?

I think they’re looking to buy.

While it was exhilarating to see those kind of numbers on my lens, it was quite disappointing when I saw such a low clickthrough rate ~ but I know what the mistake was. I hope you see the mistake as well, and avoid it yourself in the future. I obviously did a good enough job choosing the keyword ~ it had tons of search volume, and had low enough competition I was able to get it to the top of Google search listings. What I MISSED was the keywords were NOT in the buying stage.

How can I fix this?

I can’t change the lens as it is ~ it is what it is. But I can add some lenses to the campaign, some lenses that target more buying keywords. I can then link the new lenses to this one via the featured lens module and lensrolling. At the bottom I might ask a question (in the featured lens module) asking them if they are ready to get started and link to the lens where they can buy the stuff.

Between that and optimizing the new lens for more targeted buying keywords I could get enough traffic to make some money from this campaign ~ next year. well… Christmas is coming. I could probably get that working by then.

Here are a couple good posts I’ve found that talk more about the buying cycle. This is crucial, (as you can see from my mistake) so take a little time and read them.

Understanding the Buying Cycle

Search and the buying cycle