And in conjunction with this web hosting service, we have been experimenting with a few ways to get traffic and conversions, including Google Adwords, Facebook adverts, as well as contacting various group buying websites, such as Groupon Malaysia, mydeal.com.my and also MilkADeal.com.

I’ll go into more specifics about what I did to get featured and the way the deals work (for businesses and customers) in a later post about the overall group buying experience, but today I invite any of my readers to check out the deal at: http://www.milkadeal.com/deals/inside-the-box.

It’s a bigger discount than I normally would give to even my readers, but because of the revenue sharing model (will explain that later), I’ve had to give a 70% discount on 2 of my hosting packages.

The deal will only last another 6 days (at time of writing), so grab it while you can!

I haven’t had the time to revisit my materials and update them to cover additional topics, but off the top of my head I’m thinking of giving workshops that cover the following set of topics:

• Blogging as a business
• Blogging for your business
• How SEO works and how to improve your website/ blog’s SEO
• How to setup, monitor and tweak a Google Adwords campaign
• How to setup, monitor and tweak a Facebook Advertising campaign
• Traffic generation techniques

Specifically which topics depends on the group of attendees that come for my seminar/ workshop.

Although my office has space for 20 – 30 people at any one time, I am thinking of keeping my initial group small at first, as I would like to spend as much time with my students as possible – a more hands on approach.

So for the first group, I’m going to try and keep it to less than 10 people.

Pricing

Pricing wise, I’m going to keep it as affordable as possible, with the following set of price points:

• Workshop Only – RM280
• Workshop + Premium Blog Theme – RM480
• Workshop + Premium Website Theme – RM980

More details will be made available later on, but essentially the second and third prices above will include installation of a WordPress blog or WordPress website from a set of premium WordPress themes I have access to.

They can even be partially modified to suit your needs.

Duration

To cover as much as possible, I am considering having my course over a 2 day period, on the Saturday and Sunday of a weekend to be announced, from 10am – 6pm.

Lunch will be included of course

Who’s Interested?

Last but not least, I need to take a count on who would be interested in sitting through a 2 day workshop with me, so please fill in the form below if you would be interested in attending an Internet marketing workshop as described above:

Did I mention lunch was provided?

I’m not sure if that’s because you’re not meant to ‘retweet’ your own posts and that’s why it’s not increasing, or if I’ve set it up wrong.

Could someone do me a favour and just Tweet or Re-tweet this post so that I can troubleshoot?

If the number increases, great, if not, will have to consider using an alternative method of allowing my readers to re-tweet.

Your help would be greatly appreciated,

Cheers,

-William

Basically what Twitter does is that they impose a limit to how many people you can follow (2000 people) and they will not lift that limit until your total number of followers equals 2000 as well.

I’m currently a couple hundred short, so till I get those followers, I apologise for not following you back!

Thanks,

-William Lee

I’ve been doing localized Google searches (web pages from Malaysia) and realized that not many websites have the term above in their URL. Also, this term in general is searched quite regularly according to Google’s keyword tool, so by assumption, there should be quite a lot of localized searches for it too.

Although the mighty Google bot can search through text and find out a lot of information, I doubt they will be able to read my intentions if I actually DO write an article about affiliate marketing on the Internet.

Well here goes:

What is Affiliate Marketing Anyway?

From Wikipedia:

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s marketing efforts.

From the point of view of the average Internet marketer, it is being paid comission by selling somebody elses products on behalf of them. For every sale that is made, you will typically get between 50% – 75% of the total sale price of the product.

From the point of view of the advanced Internet marketer, affiliate marketing is the process of building a strong affiliate marketing network, providing them with all the materials they need in order to make the most sales as possible.

For every sale that they make, you only take a small % of the total sale price, but you will most of the time require little to no advertising on your behalf, your affiliates are you arms and legs to the niche or market you are targeting.

Which Method Makes More Money Online?

Typically the product creator with a huge affiliate network working under him would make the most money, even though he or she may only be receiving 25% or less of the product price.

But put it this way, which is easier? You selling 5 items at 100% profit? OR a 1000 strong army of affiliates selling 1 item each at only 25% profit? You do the maths.

That being said, there are some super affiliates who make a KILLING with affiliate commissions. But I still think the product creator has a much bigger advantage than the affiliate.

Which Is Easier To Start?

Starting as an affiliate selling on behalf of the product creator is the easiest way to start. You get all the marketing materials provided for, you don’t have to create the product, basically you just drive traffic to them.

Clickbank.com and CJ.com are great places to start looking for products to push to your website’s viewers…

But in the long run, product creation is the best way to go, building your affiliate marketing base and get other Internet marketers to drive traffic for you rather than paying for it yourself.

Good luck,

-William Lee

I mean, some of the strategies you use to get people to pick up your products can sometimes be questionable right?

Have you ever used a pseudonym on a ‘niche’ site, where you are trying to promote an affiliate product using the social proof method?

That’s basically where you pretend to be someone else and the entire contents of the web page or blog are telling your story of how you went from (fat/poor) to (thin/rich) and how you did it because of product X.

How many of these sites do you think are out there? Not many I hear you say… think again.

Have you ever come across any of those blogs aptly named ‘Jenny’s weight loss blog’ or something similar? And when you open it up to read the contents, it shows a wonderful before (fat) and after (thin) picture of ‘Jenny’ and how she managed to accomplish it all with the use of the magical Acai berry.

And what’s more, OPRAH SAYS IT WORKS TOO!

Did you know you can buy before and after pictures from the Internet? I’ve seen people asking for it at many a forum.

So ‘Jenny’ might not actually be ‘Jenny’…

Does this offend your sense of what’s right or wrong?

How about those Internet marketing specific products which teach you how to make money online?

Where they claim ‘I Made $100,000 In 30 Days!’ and ‘You Can Do It Too!’ for a price of $78 $68 $38! Hurry! Only 2 days left!

Have you bought one of these before to find that the product is a super general e-book on Internet marketing in general and that there’s no real meat behind their promises?

But deep inside you know that this kind of product is what sells best and that you provide at 30 day money back guarantee! So if they are not happy with the product, they should return it for their money. It’s their own fault if they don’t.

But even deeper inside you know that statistics show that alot of people who buy e-books tend to forget about them until it’s too late to ask for your money back.

How about this? Does this disturb your morality meter a bit?

Or is this what needs to be done to make money online…

Well that’s up for you to decide. I didn’t title this article ‘Internet Marketing IS immoral’ or ‘Internet Marketing ISN’T immoral’.

I asked you, ‘Is Internet Marketing Immoral?’

Always questioning,

-William Lee

p.s. Make 100,000 In 30 Days! Click Here To Find Out The ‘Secret’ To Making Money Online!

However, affiliate marketing does suffer from two major drawbacks, a) people sometimes don’t like clicking a link which says: http://lwliang1.maverick66.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=10 because more and more people know what an affiliate link looks like now a days.

b) and even if they DO click, they can easily remove the ‘lwliang1’ in the above example, continue with the purchase of the product and rob you of your commission!

So what is a struggling Internet marketer going to do?

Well the simplest way is to mask your affiliate link and use that to send people to the affiliate site.

Masking With Tiny URL

This is by far the simplest way of masking your domain. Go to http://tinyurl.com or http://pinurl.com.

Type in your long URL that shows your affiliate ID and click ‘Make TinyURL’. It will result in something like this: http://tinyurl.com/bhtq54.

That looks alot better right? It increases the chance that people will click through on the link because they’re not sure if it’s an affiliate link or not.

However, there is still one drawback. When you click on the link, it will still show your affiliate ID in the address bar of your browser. People can still remove your ID, continue with their purchase and take your commission away from you!

So what’s the best way of masking and redirecting your visitors to an affiliate website and protect your affiliate ID?

I thought you’d never ask.

Domain Name Masking and Domain Name Redirects

With Cpanel

Some webhosts have this built in to their cpanel account for their users.

1) For those people with this lucky privilage, just create an empty folder on your server under the root directory and name it something suitable for the product you are selling.

E.g. http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/googleshadow (create a folder called ‘googleshadow’.

2) Login to cpanel on your webhost, select ‘redirects’ under domains, tell them to redirect ‘http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/googleshadow’ to your affiliate site by using the TinyURL address as described above.

3) Select the ‘masking’ tab (if there is one) and put the address of the website you’d like to display in the URL of the browser when being viewed on the affiliate website.

Without Cpanel – Coding

For those who don’t have the advantage of having domain masking in cpanel, it’s not that much harder.

1) Follow step 1 above, create a suitably named folder

2) Create a new file in the folder labelled index.php

3) Copy and paste the following code into that new file and change the details listed with your details.

<HTML>

<HEAD>

<base href=http://address_of_domain_you_want_to_display.com />

<meta name=”DESCRIPTION” content=”">

<TITLE></TITLE>

</HEAD>

<FRAMESET ROWS=”100%, *” frameborder=”no” framespacing=0 border=0>

<FRAME SRC=http://insert_your_affiliate_link_here.com NAME=”mainwindow” frameborder=”no” framespacing=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″></FRAME><frame src=”UntitledFrame-2″></FRAMESET>

<NOFRAMES>

<CENTER>

<H2>

Your browser does not support frames.  We recommend upgrading your browser.

</H2>

<br><br>

Click <a href=”http://address_of_domain_you_want_to_display.com“>here</a> to enter the site.

</CENTER>

</NOFRAMES>

</HTML>

4) That’s it! You’re done!

I’ve done it for one of my affiliate links, check it out and see: http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/googleshadow

Thanks,

-William Lee

p.s. your affiliate ID will flash at the bottom of the web browser’s screen while it’s loading, so this doesn’t completely hide it. But it does a good enough job.

1. If you already have an existing customer base, to sell more back end products to them. You’ve already built the trust, so why no build on that as you’ve got the credibility.
2. Upsell to new customers. Make it a habit to offer something a little bit better for a higher price. If they decide to buy the original product, then offer them something else.
3. Use other businesses out there to cross promote products that aren’t your direct competition. This will enable you to reach a larger audience at a lower cost.
4. JV (Joint Venture) with other Internet marketers/ businesses. Same as above, you’ll be able to create a much better profit margin as your costs are less.
5. Offer an affiliate program for you product or service. You may not need to advertise again if you offer an attractive enough product, as your affiliates to the brunt of this cost.
6. Barter/ trade with other businesses if you don’t have the revenue to buy advertising. Trade banner adverts, e-zine ads, links etc.
7. Out source. This can save on employee costs (for most countries), equipments costs, tax, expansion and other miscellaneous costs that come with having a workforce.
8. Give things away free with your offer that have a high perceived value. This can be in the form of books, members only area, e-reports and more.
9. Viral marketing can get your business all over the Internet in a very very fast way. Give free things away in your advert and encourage people to give it away as well.
10. Use an auto responder to follow up with all your prospects. It can be a newsletter, an ezine, an update or even just a reminder list. Don’t let them get away!

Hopefully some of these tips help you in your affiliate marketing tasks. There’s alot of power in Internet marketing for online businesses and I believe everyone should give it a try.

Later,

-William Lee