EzSEO Newsletter # 126
#######################################################
EzSEO Newsletter # 126
Andy Williams
“Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”
#######################################################
This week:
1. Choosing Clickbank Programs to promote
2. Great F.ree Tool for Researching Niches
3. Other Stuff
Hi again.
Firstly, welcome to the new subscribers this week. Have you downloaded “Creating Fat Affiliate Sites” yet? If you haven’t, look for the link to the subscriber bonus page at the end of this newsletter. To those who are new, that eBook was actually written over a period of several months, with each chapter being published in this newsletter as it was written. The same goes for the other fr.ee reports you have access to.
In this week’s newsletter, I’ll explore a fr.ee tool and show you how you can use it to develop keyword lists for virtually any niche, plus a look at Clickbank’s “gravity”.
—————————————————
1. Choosing Clickbank Programs to promote
—————————————————
If you have ever promoted Clickbank products on your site, you may have seen the data that Clickbank provide for each of the products.
Let’s have a look at it.
Go to Clickbank.com, and click on Promote Products.
Click the Business to Business link.
Results may vary according to when you check, but the first product here is (I have deleted the name of the merchant for privacy reasons):
“xxxx xxxxy xxx-xxxx 75% New Site Design! [ earn 75.0 % ]”
Old Payout was $22.60/Current Payout now $33.93 Per Sale! 2x less refunds. Affiliates Profit More than Ever Before! Try it & See.
PAYOUT STATS: $earned/sale: $ 29.49 , %earned/sale: 75.0 %, %referred: 79.0 %, gravity: 387.1
The Payout stats is what I want to pay attention to:
$earned/sale: $ 29.49
%earned/sale: 75.0 %
%referred: 79.0 %
gravity: 387.1
The first two items in the list are fairly self-explanatory.
What I am interested in is the last two.
%referred: 79.0 %
gravity: 387.1
%referred is obviously the percentage of sales that are referred by “affiliates”, but what is gravity?
Well, if you search, you’ll find that gravity is:
“Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added.”
So, gravity is basically a number that represents how many affiliates are making money selling this book.
So, do you look for a high gravity or a low gravity when choosing affiliate programs to promote?
Think about it for a moment before reading further…
OK, what do you think?
Here is what I think. At Clickbank, it is very easy for someone you refer to a merchant, to steal your commission by creating their own affiliate link, and buying the product through their own link, effectively stealing your commission and getting themselves a discount.
If a merchant makes it easy for visitors to sign up and buy through their own link, would that merchant have a high or a low gravity?
Exactly, gravity would increase. The higher the gravity, the more likely commission theft is rife.
This type of commission theft is most common in the categories where potential customers know about Clickbank e.g. Business to Business, Computing and Internet and Marketing and Ads. That is because those potential customers know how Clickbank affiliate links work.
Click the link to the merchant we just discussed.
Right at the top of the page, you can see a link that says “AFFILIATES MAKE MONEY 75% Commission”. You’ll see the same link at the bottom of the page. Click the link. Its a page that goes into detail on how to sign up and how to create your own affiliate link.
Would I promote this merchant? Not likely. I don’t like sending my valuable traffic to people who treat me as a source of fre.e. traff.ic. Merchants should treat their affiliates as partners!
So, the answer to the question is actually not what some of you would expect. I would choose programs to promote that have lower gravity scores (Popular program with 15 or less gravity is my baseline). However, one factor you do need to look at is how popular a program is at Clickbank. The higher up the list in any particular category, the more successful it is. Those higher up WILL tend to have higher gravities. Just check out the merchant site for any affiliate sign up links, and beware of very high gravity scores.
Clickbank is a great place to find affiliate programs that pay well, but if possible, stay away from the categories related to online business, as your referrals are just too clever for YOUR own good.
—————————————————
2. Great F.ree Tool for Researching Niches
—————————————————
If you have ever had problems coming up with ideas for a new site, this tool may just be able to help. I find it very helpful in both coming up with ideas, and creating a list of words I can later type into Wordtracker when I start my keyword research.
If you want to follow along with this example, you can. Go to the tool here:
I want to come up with a site idea, so the first step is to think of a general niche. My goal is to find a niche that has potential Adsense opportunities (you can choose to research a niche that has affiliate potential as well, or instead if you like, but we don’t have time for that here).
Being a Biologist by training, I am very interested in the workings of the human body. Since a lot of people search for information about various diseases, why not start there.
In the search box at KWBrowser, type in disease.
The graphical results produced are on two axes. One shows phrases that contain your search phrase, while the other shows related phrases. At this stage, I am only interested in the phrases that contain my phrase. Here they are:
crohns disease
heart disease medicine
gum disease
heart disease
disease
alzheimers disease
parkinsons disease
infectious disease
cardiovascular disease
disease management
Now, the next step is to evaluate these niches in terms of Adsense.
Here’s how I do it.
1. Go to Wordtracker (you cant do this on the fr.ee version)
2. Click on Compressed search
3. Type in the first phrase and select to return 500 results.
4. Click proceed
5. Make a note of how many results are returned
6. Go to the competition search and do the analysis for Overture on the first 100 phrases.
7. Make a note of the bid prices for this niche.
Repeat for each of the main phrases you are interested in.
Here are my results for the phrases that interest me:
(Phrase, Number of results, Bid prices):
crohns disease, 163, 60+ phrases between $0.10 - $0.76
gum disease, 226, 60+ phrases between $0.10 - $0.79
heart disease, 500+, 80+ phrases between $0.10 - $5.50
alzheimers disease, 183, 70+ phrases between $0.10 - $2.00
Just a note here. I am using the Overture data even though we are targeting Adsense, not Overture PPC ads. The reason is simply that Wordtracker does not provide Google Adword data, but we can be confident that if Overture has a high CPC for related phrases, so will Adwords.
Looking at my data above, the one outstanding phrase is heart disease, with over 500 related phrases, and a lot of phrases targeted by PPC advertisers, going up to $5.50 per click.
That would be my niche of choice, followed by Alzheimers disease.
Let’s go one step further on this.
Back at KWBrowse, you should still have the original search results shown. Click the phrase “heart disease” in the graph.
A new graph opens up showing the results for heart disease. This graph is useful as it provides me with more phrases I can use when carrying out my keyword research at Wordtracker.
Here are some phrase from the graph that would be very useful. I call these my primary research phrases:
congestive heart disease
ischemic heart disease
congenital heart disease
heart disease medicine
coronary heart disease
heart disease prevention
valvular heart disease
pulmonary heart disease
prevent heart disease
On the right of the screen are even more useful keywords listed alphabetically.
Here are a few that interest me, since they are related to my heart disease niche. I call these my secondary research phrases:
angina
cholesterol & high cholesterol
heart attack
Hopefully you can see the value of this type of research. You have a list of primary research phrases that can be typed into Wordtracker, all related to a niche that you have seen has good potential. These phrases should return 1000s of related phrases if you carry out the research as outlined in my Wordtracker Tutorial (which you should have already).
You also have a secondary keyword list that can be used to:
1. Develop more sites related to the initial niche. Just repeat the procedure outlined above for any word you are interested in.
2. Produce more keywords that you can target on your heart disease site. Some of these could make good main pages (see “Creating Fat Affiliate Sites”).
3. Develop an eBook to sell on your heart disease website.
4. Develop autoresponder courses for your heart disease website.
There are lots of good things that these secondary research phrases can be used for, only limited by your imagination.
KWBrowse is a great tool to start your keyword research.
—————————————————
3. Other Stuff
—————————————————
May Niche Blueprint is almost sold out. This was a special edition blueprint aimed squarely at those wanting to make an Adsense site. Many of the phrases have CPCs over $30, and for such a competitive niche, you’ll be glad to know that more than 10% of the phrases I have researched have 5 or more daily searches at Google, and less than 1000 competing pages. 23 phrases have less than 100 competing pages and 5 or more daily searches a day. 4 phrases have ZERO competing pages and 5 or more daily searches. For more information, visit the niche blueprints homepage and click the link top right to May 2006.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog:
http://ezseonews.com/blog/index.php
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives at:
http://ezseonews.com/archives
Have a great week!
#######################################################
Visit the subscriber Bonus page for free reports and other subscriber-only offers:
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please recommend it to your friends. Also if you have any tips of your own, questions or comments, please send then to me at webmaster[REMOVE]@ezseonews.com. Any tips or questions & answers I print in this newsletter will also be put up on the web version of the newsletter with a link to your site
if you want it. That’s extra free traffic for your site as well as an incoming link to your site.
The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2006 Andrew Williams. If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.
This newsletter disclaims all responsibility for the advertising copy or the product advertised. You cannot rely on the fact that the newsletter has examined the product or recommends or endorses the product, unless it clearly says that it has, when you make your decision whether or not to purchase the product or interact with the advertiser. You are advised to do your own investigation before buying. Additionally, this newsletter may accept articles that we do not write or investigate the accuracy of and for which we may receive direct or indirect benefit or compensation. We specifically disclaim any responsibility for the content of such copy.
#######################################################
