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Make Easy Money With Articles, Videos and Affiliate Re-Directs (Fast, Fun & Almost Free)
One of the common, recurring questions that comes up a lot on here (especially in the comments section) is making money with affiliate re-directs. Or more specifically, using article marketing to automatically forward to a vendors URL, with your affiliate link, for fast and easy commissions.
In my view – using straight re-directs is NOT the best way to build a viable, valuable long term business.
Why?
As a rule, your conversions will be a bit lower, and the only thing you’re really building, long term, is the business of the vendor or company that you are sending traffic to.
You can, however…make A LOT of easy money from straight re-directs, and in many ways that are pretty simple and straightforward, may be the BEST way for you to start making money online if you haven’t been able to do it thus far.
Linking DIRECTLY to the vendor is a mercenary business.
You don’t care about a list.
You don’t care about blog building, being friendly all day and having to make sure your wrinkles don’t show in your about me page.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is strictly about picking kick ass offers, and driving boatloads of backsides at each one you promote.
The truth is, most of what I learned about making money online, I learned from using straight redirects.
Why?
Because while my natural skill set is probably BEST suited to building blogs and relationships with people who are entertained by my stuff, when I first got started I simply had a hard time getting people to buy anything.
My site building skills weren’t good - and blogs weren’t as easy to modify and creatively experiment with as they are today.
In combination with the fact that I’m obsessive compulsive about testing designs, layouts and other stuff, I was spending SO much time tweaking my pages for conversions, that I was wasting all my time, energy and income on trying to build valuable sites that I THOUGHT would convert well and have real value…..only to find that the sales were so sporadic I feared having going back to a life of bulk isle supermarket crime to support myself.
What saved me were straight redirects.
One day – I just decided enough with business building.
Enough with ruminating over the perfect blog posts to sell more stuff.
Enough with worrying about how many people were un subscribing from my lists when I got hyper aggressive with email.
I just wanted to start making some money……and to stop THINKING all the time about strategy, technique and all the silly stuff that keeps us up late when you’re paying the bills on the broad shoulders of a brain that’s just said…..ENOUGH..:-)
And truly…….I can still remember the shift – that *light bulb moment* in my consciousness where I realized – this is going to work.
My ability to support myself GOING FOWARD is ONLY limited to my willingness to work harder and smarter than some other dude who wants to "own" the same "eyeballs" I do.
I can be a mercenary – in the background….quietly working on my own terms, at my own pace, on my own schedule.
My only responsibilities? Pick LOTS of good offers. Experiment often.
And be willing to attack them aggressively when they work.
And that worked really, really well….and still does for many, many people on a day in and day out basis.
I still MUCH prefer building lists.
I enjoy building blogs and adding value….and I’ve grown much better at it.
I do far less direct linking or re-direction today than I did a few years ago.
I recommend that you list build to.
But if your brain is saying…."ENOUGH", I have outlined some of the "step by step" stuff for you below.
Use it if it meets your needs and serves your goals!
(some of these are *notes* that I wrote for myself – and am reprinting here – and I have elaborated in other areas on why today, I often NOW find direct linking FAR preferable in many markets over building review style sites or blogs, especially in the ever popular, and hyper profitable "FREE TRIAL" sorts of markets, in which, if you also work – you’ll recognize some of the below as true!
Benefits to Direct Linking
- Cheap! (You can get lots of 99 Cent Domains to Test Markets)
- You CAN MIGRATE FROM MARKET TO MARKET SUPER FAST (one a day)
- In 30 days you build a REAL business and focus JUST on the markets that are converting (create your own product – or – specialize in one specific area of the market – i.e. – life coaching versus business consulting)
- It’s analogous to the super popular (and hyper profitable) adwords arbitrage approach ( direct linking) that is pretty much no longer allowed….but you can do it all day long for FREE with organic and directory traffic
- Ezine Articles allows it – has to be a root level redirect
- You can alternate affiliate programs using scripts (I use GoTryThis – which was the best available program when I bought it – there may be better stuff now – but it works great)
- You can set up the re-direct on the server side – hands free and code free
- In good markets you can control HUGE amounts of traffic that will pay you for weeks, months or even years to come
- You are protecting the ROOT – so you can always swap in an opt in form, or a site map – or anything else you want on a page that is getting a ton of traffic when you’re ready
- Google "forgives" root level redirection pretty fast in my experience
Markets that it works really well in
High converting free trial offers (diet/weight loss/feel better/live longer/look younger/etc)
CPA style offers – zip submits, etc ( Although I don’t do these – )
Quick Action Plan:
Go to the CPA networks – and search these style offers – then - do a PPC search for these specific and/or style products - any of them that you see are doing direct linking….you KNOW are good candidates for these offers.
(note – some of the free trial stuff, direct linking- converts, on PPC – at 5% or better….which is very, VERY tough to do with click bank style products)
The BIG advantage to straight redirects for CPA style offers, especially FREE Trial – in MY experience is this:
Flexibility. (and hassle free if you don’t have time to tweak and change lots of different sites on a regular basis….which many us don’t if we want to have a life)
For example, you can build a review site – put in tons and tons of work – get FIRST page rankings, organically on a whole bunch of product specific stuff - send your traffic DIRECTLY to the product page the proper way….and then find out, serendipitously - that the product has been pulled – or the offer is down….or some other nefarious nonsense that kills your conversions.
What do you have to do?
Go back and re-edit all of those links on you page – take them down – change it up – etc.
It’s a major league PAIN IN THE ASS….and it happens more often than you would think.
(i.e. – anyone who was reviewing or selling acai berry products can tell you that half of those offers went off the market in one fell swoop a while back…simply because of the widespread and embarrassing level of manipulative marketing and mental midgetry that lots of affiliates resorted to – and the general dishonestly of the companies themselves – Oprah’s FAVORITE Acai Wow! Dr Oz LOVES Rez Ultra, etc -)
Even if you are doing honest sites for general health and wellness products and had some of those offers and were getting good traffic to them – you’ll find lots of dead links and a major league pain in the ass when they go offline and you’ve got to either fix them fast……or simply leave them (and money) on the table instead.
Re-direction gives you flexibility.
An offer goes down?
You simply go into your re-direction script and swap in a new link. One step – smooth simple and seamless.
Find an offer that you don’t find yourself comfortable selling anymore? You just pull it out and change it up to something you do.
Diet programs also are really good for redirects - find HIGH EPC offers on Commission Junction like Medifast, for example – and then write GENERAL articles on weight loss - and redirect to Medifast.
When I promoted medifast – they had a 200 + EPC – which means that mas o menos – for every 100 visitors you send them, you will make 200 bucks if your traffic is average quality.
Pretty damn good.
To be perfectly honest with you – I had BETTER luck using a straight redirect – then I did to a "review" style site.
Why?
Because if people are already typing in "Medifast" – and read a good article on medifast - they are already "ready" to buy.
They don’t need a "secondary" or tertiary source to read - they’re already chubby – and probably just had a big lunch anyway.
All you need to do is build the bridge that they walk across to make the transaction.
But -
Writing general articles on weight loss -which alot of you are doing I presume- is a better strategy now.
Why?
Because EZA seems NOT to like product specific articles - going to product specific redirects anymore. ( i.e. – they seem to want a medifast article – to go to a intermediary site and NOT Medifast through a redirect in this example)
General weight loss and BIG evergreen markets are great- which I’ve been preaching on here for a while as one potential strategy – you can control MASSIVE amounts of traffic – redirect it all to the parent site – and make close to that EPC figure pretty easily. (in this case – 150 – 200 – or whatever it is….even if you do HALF as well, it’s still pretty damn good compared to Clickbank offers)
You can always switch it up – or stick a root level opt in, etc if it doesn’t work – remember, flexibility is key – and this is flexibility personified.
Okay – now here is a very easy, very specific way to start making REAL money, right now, with redirects – OTHER than the obvious above.
It involves two simple tools – one is perpetually free, and one has a free 14 day trial, and I promised in a previous email I would write more about this. (becuase it’s super cool and WILL make you money)
Go to wordtracker questions.
Ask a question for your market. ( just type in a word - lets say resveratrol)
It will spit out all of the questions that people are typing in to the serps for answers AS they’re asked.
It will also give you COUNTS, on how often those queries are made. (I ignore the actual count total as I don’t trust it…but, it will give you a good idea as to the ‘weight" or conversational quotient of your market)
Sign up for Article Video Robot (they still have a free trial as of this writing…and it’s killer easy to use)
Make short videos of your articles (each video can be 90 seconds or less and literally takes less than 10 minutes to do)
They will DISTRIBUTE those articles for you to 17 + very popular video sharing sites like youtube, daily motion, viddler, et al (note – only 9 or 10 of these are really necessary, or even relevant, if you are trying to sell products that aren’t your own – i.e. – affiliate marketing)
They will even ROTATE the titles for you automatically if you choose that option……(giving you different title text for search engine uniqueness – a BIG ass benefit for "spinning" the video titles which is truly cool)
Plug your redirection URL into both the WATERMARK – and the end of the video credits too. (giving your users the ability to "click out" at any point in show and go right to your URL – (note: the watermarked URL requires a manual type in by the user – I happen to abuse drugs unfortunately, and I may have hallucinated this. Carry on below )a big benefit if you are using .info domains rather than .com’s for pricing purposes – as people typically will append a .com if they need to type it in directly after the video is done)
Your videos – if they get similar results from the ones I’ve seen (and many other people who use video marketing) will get indexed, and RANKED, in the search engines in hours. (often minutes)
And everyone knows that videos get lots of love when it comes to ranking well…and ranking fast.
(I had a test video done for me last week at like 9pm – in a very competitive market – using a reasonably competitive keyword – the girl who did it learned the whole process in 30 minutes – did it – published it – and within like 9 minutes or something……we were on the FIRST page of Google for the targeted keyword – visa vi it being picked up first on DailyMotion – and that’s with no promotion – no social book marking – no other work – and quite honestly – NOT a really good video either..:-)
That’s really it.
Get a list of ALL the questions your market is asking from Wordtracker questions.
It’s a super cool way of REALLY getting in the head of the niche you’re targeting – and if you’re like me, it will give you a whole host of tangential ideas to target as well.
Turn those EXACT questions, into answers, in the form of articles. (using the questions in the titles, obviously)
Then – take those articles – and turn them into an autopilot publishing machine by turning them into VIDEOS, using article video robot.
Submit the text directories and re purpose otherwise as usual.
(hint…if you REALLY want to be successful with this, use book marking tools to "buzz" the videos on the multimedia sites, and "buzz" the articles on the directories and satellite sites. All of this of course, promoting a URL which auto magically forwards to your affiliate program of choice as a straight redirect for easy commissions)
(one EXTRA hint: Use different social networking profiles for EVERY niche if you scale this out. Doing a straight redirect for a psychic powers ebook on Monday? Have a social networking profile for "Paranormal Pete" and buzz not only YOUR stuff, but lots of other cool things in the paranormal market that other people will enjoy.
Promoting an skin care ebook on Clickbank on Wednesday? Have a social networking profile for "Acne Amy" and buzz a whole bunch of good stuff in skin care...and of course, mix in your own stuff as well)
Lots of fun – very easy…..and one of the best ways to generate a terrific torrent of traffic – often overnight!
Great for list building, great for blog building but ALSO great for dead simple re-directs that go video"viral" in a hurry.……very cool and dead simple to use.
22 Comments to "Make Easy Money With Articles, Videos and Affiliate Re-Directs (Fast, Fun & Almost Free)
Great stuff I especially appreciate the heads up on the video robot I wiull be giving it a try real soon.
Gee Ian,
You’re hard to keep up with with this neophyte mind of mine. I got on to you thru PotPieGirl and you have taught me a lot. Thanks.
Not sure what a “straight direct” is. Could you straight direct me to a site or blog you’ve done with AVR that shows me what “re-directs that go video”viral in a hurry” looks like.
Thanks again for what you give.
paul a.
Thanks Dennis!
@Paul – Thanks! And if it wasn’t for PotPieGirl’s nice comments about this blog – I think the only ones reading it would be my Mom and I (and if my Mom’s Clickbank balance is any indication – she’s not really reading it much either..:-)
The straight re-direct simply means forwarding DIRECTLY to the merchant, rather than using an intermediary landing page. So a real blog or website wouldn’t really qualify, by defintion, as something you would want to re-direct (unless there was “black hat”stuff and such involved which is not what i’m talking about here..:-)
Of course – using this approach to promote your blog – or – opt in page is EQUALLY as powerful – it’s just not the point of this particular post – which is making money with direct linking.
Remember though……
AVR – is NOT going to re-direct anything. It’s just a way to leverage cool technology to convert your articles (or actually….ANYBODY’S articles) into video – that can be promoted on youtube, dailymotion, viddler, howcast, et al.
The URL you include in your movie – either through a watermark or in the resource box credits at the end-(or both) is the URL that per the above – you forward to the merchant with your affiliate link visa vi setting it up on your server – or via the control panel where you host your site.
AVR is the technology for CONVERTING the text content to video articles, they will then distribute it for you too, (although there are services like TubeMogul that will do this for you for free as well) and then it’s up to you to promote the video for “viral” distribution……OR, just create really entertaining, engaging videos that people love to promote for you!
Hopefully that made sense!
@ Paul – if for some reason you can’t wrap your brain around the re-direct thing – just let me know and I’ll send you a URL that we used to re-direct to Medifast per the above. (it’s simple stuff – but I know this can be confusing if you’re not familiar with it..:-)
Hi,
I’ve asking you in another post where do you do the redirection? It is from the host, and if yes how do you do it,or from the name registrar? I ask this because you have implied once that doing it from registrar you may lose comissions. I have a hostgator account and the only way I managed to do a redirect is with a php code. I am going to try do re-directs to cpa as for Clickbak don’t work as well.
Hi RR –
I’m not 100% sure what you are asking..:-)
It has nothing to do with the registrar – you simply put the appropriate code in the header of the page if you are doing it that way (just google “re-direct code” and you’ll get several different options) or you can simply do it through the Control Panel of your hosting company if they offer that option. (most do)
Clickbank – or CPA – or CNN.com – or wherever the destination is – is sort of immaterial..:-) All work equally as well – you are just sending the visitor where-ever it is that you want using code/script or server commands. I happen to use a server based php script which is installed on a separate domain for tracking, etc – but even a basic meta refresh works fine for this to get your feet wet – just Google the code for this – and you’ll have it in 3 seconds. (and just put your hoplink/affiliate code/etc as the destination URL as you should be good to go)
Ian,
I think I got it (about the “directs”. And I do appreciate the way you make your knowledge available and entertaining.
Ian,
Great post – also loved your free e-book. Could you maybe do a quick screencast to visually show how you do a straight re-direct say from an Ezine article?
Thanks and keep up the great content.
Thanks, Alan!
I’ll look into covering some topics like this one in more detail with multi-media if lots of people want it – but in the meantime – all you need to do is:
1)register 1 domain name
2)sign up for affiliate program of choice
3)put forwarding code in head of page/or use Cpanel to handle it for you (just “google” this and you’ll get the code and where to place it if you use the html page option)
4)write articles and promote by sending traffic to this URL, which will “forward” to your affiliate program visa vi the above.
It’s super, super simple stuff once you do it once – it sounds sort of complex – but believe me, it’s really easy.
Not sure this is related to the topic of this post, but I don’t know where else to ask you this question: What’s wrong with duplicate content?
If I posted the same article, word for word on my multiple sites, how would that not have the same effect as say a dozen sites of other people picking up the same article off EZA and posting it on their sites?
Only a certain amount of occurences of the same article tend to show up. I’m not a big believer in a duplicate content “penalty” per se – but I’ve also rarely seen 1 article, reprinted vertbatim on numerous sites, have any real lasting benefit.
I.E – the services like Article Marketer, that massively republish one article around the web for you – have a little bit of benefit for diversity of incoming links to a new site, but I’m not sure the article being syndicated, will “show up” more than once or twice on the higher end directories long term.
(they don’t for me)
You are probably better off using a good spinning program, or just writing a new article – (or even just changing the headline with the benefit of a good thesaurus can be adequate to be a big help)
Got it. Thanks Ian.
paul a.
Paul – if you had 10 sites, all publishing the same article *pointing* to your primary site as an authoritative source on marriage and family counseling – or – addiction recovery, etc – the bump your primary site gets is well worth the effort. (as you don’t really care so much about the individual articles showing up high – you care about the resultant “authority bump” all of those incoming links offer your primary domain as a good source of info in your chosen field of expertise)
The trick is – of course – having more unique content on those 10 sites than the same set of articles each time – AND – preferably – an linking system set up that looks natural, AND doesn’t look like you are manufacturing “authority” through your own network of stuff)
The duplicate content penalty – in my experience (others disagree) is enforced moreso for trying to “game” the authenticity of authority – using your own sphere of influence – than it is for re-purposing the same content all over the web.
I like your site by the way – looks great!
Hello Ian
Stupendous post, so much great information and advice. Thank you. I have a question about this suggestion: “Plug your redirection URL into both the WATERMARK – and the end of the video credits too. (giving your users the ability to “click out” at any point in show and go right to your URL”. Is it possible to place a clickable or live link within a video? That would be fantastic but I have not seen one in a video.
Thanks, Patt…:-) And you are RIGHT (oops!) I was wrong about the link out – you CAN watermark the video obviously – and it stays “put” throughout the show – and of course – the URL at the end as well displays in the credits – BUT – the watermarked URL requires a manual type in. ( I truly didn’t recognize this until yesterday – when I was looking at some of the vids we had posted that are ranking really, really well – BUT – when I tried to click on that pesky link “in” the url we watermarked….it wasn’t going anywhere. If I hadn’t had like 5 glasses of wine first – I would have immediately said “oooops..” – but instead, being stubborn I just figured brute force would make it work eventually..:-)
The one thing we’re doing to help that along in terms of CTR – is just plugging in some random calls to action in the middle of the video – i.e. – little breaks just using (go to xyz.com now for special this or that, etc). Overall I’ve been extremely impressed with the service – and other than having “howcast” politely remove most of our videos as “not real how to’s” – it’s really a great way of promoting stuff. (especially REAL stuff – I’ve been doing all affiliate products so far – but it has even greater promise for “real” content and articles, etc)
Thanks again. I wasn’t trying to call you out. I have to confess that I was secretly hoping that you would come back with something like, “Of course, you can put a live link in a video, you silly lady. It’s something that I have been keeping under wraps and now I am going to share it with you, my faithful reader”. But, I will definitely settle for the little tidbit you gave about placing random CTR’s throughout the video. I know I would not have thought of that myself. Cheers.
Hi Ian,I am really very grateful for this great information. This is exactly the info i was looking for…..
Actually, i got bit discouraged from some sorts of “review type” sites, where site-owners were TELLING fake stories(especially in health related CB products ) about the prodocuts while pre-selling….That seems bit unethical to me….
And i think redirection is best solution for me at start.Really very thankful to you…….
IAN i have a question, What possible strategies can we use for Promoting an article? And what sort of autmated and free tools are available for this purpose?…..
And how much effort should we put for promoting a single article….? I know possibilities are endless, just asking about simple viable strategy.
Hope to hear from you very soon,,,,,And really very impressed by your great contribution…….
Bless You!:)
To your Success…..
Neo
Thanks, Neo! And those “fake” review sites are getting a lot of people shut down – and some in some serious trouble…..Google doesn’t like them, the legitimate affiliate networks don’t appreciate them and ultimately, the “genuine” product manufacturers that have viable products to offer are recognizing that those splogs only generate unhappy customers who were “duped” into buying free trial products that they want to return right away. (which leads to a whole new can of problems for everybody) Overall – it’s a bad business model, and the defintion of something worth avoiding! (even though, yes…..I know alot of the CPA “gurus” are promoting packages that are thinly veiled promotions for that sort of site – trust me – they ain’t gonna work for long – plus I’d love to see some of those affiliates go to a Turkish prison and bunk with the guy from the movie Midnight Express who had one eye an an overactive libido.
I have some good stuff on the blog coming ( I think) next week for some article automation tools with a friend of mine who makes some really good ones that I use and are not widely known – so look out for that – and other than using free automated social bookmarketing tools (like onlywire) and doing really good keyword research, the articles sort of “promote” themselves as if you use EZA they will rank well pretty fast. ( you can use the mass article blast services, too – use the article video service I recommend here – etc – the key is simply BUILD-A-LIST with your articles, and everything else will fall into place!)
come again? on redirects? explain how to write an article on Ezine articles and not get it kicked by showing a direct link to affiliate site…
Thanks
Alan – it’s very simple – you simply use a root level redirection – with your affiliate link..:-) It’s totally compliant within their terms of service – it’s done every day by thousands of people – and it’s nothing that’s going to get your article “kicked” at all. (you can’t redirect from the page or post level of a blog or website and remain within TOS – but we have hundreds of root level redirects – and they are never a problem)
Genius stuff Ian, and actually quite simple as well, I’m smacking myself in the head for not doing this because it really is just so SIMPLE especially with article directories that instantly publish, like Articlesbase which I love and ranks well and allows redirects that aren’t top level.
I think, generally, it’s just a great idea to do all CPA offers with direct linking to the offer. Why send them to a review page/flog when theyre already presold from the article?
Also, I’ve been reading your other stuff on copywriting and making huge headlines and it’s damn good. I’ve never been big on article marketing because I could never get the titles and resource boxes good. But now, I know how to do it.
After a quick search in Ezine and looking at what the most viewed articles are like, they’re very similar to your style of titles writing.
As for the resource boxes, most authors I see STILL are doing the big no-no of “Author is a music lover that blah blah blah….” All of those 5,000 views per week going to waste with a crap resource box…
Thanks Ian, I am so glad I found your blog.
Finally, a good site that isn’t in my face trying to constantly sell me something. Thanks, please keep up the good work.