I’ve just started using Google’s Website Optimizer tool and I’m wondering why I never used it sooner. I guess I thought it was just too difficult to set up but it ended up being so easy. You just add a few pieces of code to each of your landing pages and your conversion page and Google takes care of the rest!

A/B testing is just so important for an affiliate marketer. I must admit, I sometimes run my business based on my gut feel of what the market wants and that is absolutely WRONG.

With Google Optimizer, I now let the market tell me what they like. For example, I’ve set up two landing pages to see which one has better conversion for sales for my PPC campaigns.
I just leave the test to run until the data tells me that one of the landing pages is significantly beating the other. (see screenshot below)

After that, I would toss out the loser and then create a new landing page and run a test again to try and “beat the control” as they say.

You can even test multiple items on your page at once such as the headline, images and call to action. If you are not using A/B testing on your sites yet, give Google Website Optimizer a try.

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Crazy Egg is amazing! Especially for marketers since its free version is awesome for analyzing single page sales letters or opt in forms?

What is it? Well its a simple analytics tool that gives you 4 different types of graphical analytics tools to analyze your site.

There’s “Overlay” which gives you color coded icons on all your links and displays the number of clicks numerically.

There’s “List” which pops up a straight forward table with all your links and clicks.

There’s “Heatmap” (my personal favorite) that shows you a the “hottest” spots on your page. It reminds me a little of the “temperature sensitive vision mode” from the movie “Predator”!

And finally there’s “Confetti” mode which as the name suggests displays the more popular spots on your page with more…confetti!
Yup! Aside from the fun of it all, there’ literally no installation required. Just plug in your site and it tracks it for the duration you specify. Either by number of visitors of by duration (e.g. 1 month).

Its extremely useful to let you know if your landing pages are doing what they should be doing. If you’re not using Crazy Egg, you gotta be crazy! ;)

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In the year ended 2007, Barnes and Noble, Borders and Amazon had collectively sold $13.59 billion worth of books and other information products such as music and DVDs. And this is in North America alone. That’s a lot of dollars.

But what exactly happens when someone buys a book or a CD? Are they buying the paper that the words are printed on? The plastic that the CD comes in? No. They are actually buying the “ideas” behind the book. And these ideas are of GREAT value to the people who buy them.

For example, the “ideas” behind a book can solve problems, entertain and even help the reader to make money and improve their lives. It’s all about delivering the right ideas to the right people when they need it most.

So if the value of the book (a $13.59 billion industry) is not in the book itself but rather the “ideas”, then the Internet offers the ULTIMATE VEHICLE to get the right ideas to the right people.

Why? With the Internet, you can tell EXACTLY what “ideas” consumers are looking for, you can promote and sell the ideas on a web store front, you can collect money for those “ideas” via a payment service like PayPal and you can deliver your “ideas” instantly to your customers!

As an information marketer, I’m very clear about this. Whether its an eBook, MP3 audio download or Camtasia videos or even software, I am actually solving problems and adding value to my customers with ideas through the process above.

I love this because there’s no “hard sell”. A good marketer delivers the right product to the right person just when they need them - that is, when they are searching for the solution online.

There’s so much potential in the online information marketing industry that I can’t even begin to explain. For example, you can tell what “ideas” are hot in the marketplace by researching the number of searches for particular keywords.

For example, I can tell you that there are 81,100 searches per month around the word “Hypnosis” and that there are 324,906 searches per month around the word “foreclosure”. By digging deeper into these keywords you will be able to formulate a clear idea about what the searcher is looking for and even determine if they are willing to pay for this information!

Then its just a matter of matching the searches with the information product. With information products, you could create your own or find products that offer an affiliate program on ClickBank for example. This entire process of analyzing what consumers are searching for is called “Keyword Research”.

One of the best tools I have found so far for doing keyword research is Keyword Elite by Brad Callen. I like this tool because its simple to use and very effective. I use it almost everyday. But I’ll be digressing from this post if I go too much into it. I’ll probably do a post about how I use in on another day but if you visit the site, Brad has already created 5 videos to show how you can profit from effective keyword research.

So now you know what I do. If you are looking for new opportunities, then I recommend selling ideas on the Internet too. ;)

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For fun on this post, I thought I’d take you on a tour of my home office as it currently stands. As some of you might know, I will be moving to my permanent home/ office towards the end of the year. I am moving to a penthouse apartment on the 45th floor at K-Residence (SWEET!). It’s almost ready. I am currently going through the renovation plans with my interior designer.

In the meantime, this is where I work from (unless I am at Starbucks) or travelling:

1. This is my “Brain Wall”. I always create “mind maps” while I am brainstorming as well as when I am in the process of creating a project. It seems to be the only thing that works well for me.
2. My 17″ MacBook Pro. Awesome machine. I run both Mac and Windows on it. I generate my own graphics, videos and audios. What can I say - its the perfect computer for me.
3. Affiliate Checks. Most of my online income is transfered online but I do get checks from Aweber, the Affiliate Center, Google Adsense and Clickbank.
4. 17″ External Monitor. I use an external monitor rotated to Portrait size mostly to read eBooks and I do read A LOT of eBooks so its much easier this way.
5. Internet Courses. I spend about $5k to $10k per year on books, seminars and courses. Having the latest knowledge is the most important asset in my business.
6. Reading/ Work Desk. Currently reading Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve not used Adwords at all in my online business. I’m still not entirely convinced if it will help me in my online business. Seems to be too much competition for my niche markets on Adwords.

If you work from home too, I’m curious to know what your set up looks like. Post a link as a comment on this post if you care to share.

Technorati Tags: home office, macbook pro

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On this post I want to share one of my personal experiences with Resell Rights products. While there is no doubt that you can make a lot of money online, the question I want to address is - “can someone starting from scratch with no list and no experience do it too?”. And…is it as EASY as many hyped up websites claim it is?

Here’s a summary of my case study:
I started with no list and no product to sell. I decided to try an experiment with a “Resell Rights” product that I found interesting and ended up making over $1,000 with a few forum posts. Hmmm something to think about. Was it luck? You be the judge, this is what I did:

Step 1: Finding a Product to Sell Online
I discovered this product by accident. I saw a blog post with a “Peel-Away-Ad” on the top corner. I decided to buy the product at the offer price of $27. During the checkout process, I was presented with a “one-time-offer” to purchase the Resell Rights for the product. I purchased that too since it came with a ready-made website. Total cost = $27 + $67 = $94

I started seeing good results by applying this product on my own blog (in fact, I still use it today) so I felt comfortable selling this product. So now I have a product to sell!

Step 2: Customize the Sales Page
My preferred way to collect money online is via PayPal. Reason is that I can access these funds immediately and I do not need to wait for a check to arrive in the mail. So I created a PayPal Buy Button for the product and copied the html code for my sales page. I then used a free HTML Editor (NVU) to add my PayPal Buy Button to the ready-made sales page.

The whole process (including creating the PayPal button and testing) took less than 30 minutes.

I then uploaded the entire site to a sub-directory of one of my sites I was using as a squeeze page. Here’s the link:

http://secretseminarsystem.com/recommends/peelawayads/

I generally don’t recommend this as the link is very long and since the root domain refers to another product this may confuse your buyers. I only did this because I just didn’t want to spend too much time on this project and I was in a hurry.

Step 3: Promote the Product
I went to a few affiliate marketing forums. To me, this is just a hobby where I just chat with other marketers online or just help someone out where possible. I decided to post my results with this tool on a forum and added my link the sales page.

The Results?
Between August 8 to December 17 2007, the sales page registered $1,166.38 in NET Sales to my PayPal account. That’s a 1,241% return on my initial investment of only $94. I was quite happy.

Conclusion
So is it easy to make money online? Well the answer honestly is “yes” and “no”.

Yes, because the technical steps to set this up is ridiculously simple. I think anyone can do it.

No, because it is not always this easy to match the right product with the right market. Not every resell product will be easy to sell without actively promoting it.

My conclusion is to keep taking action and testing. The Holy Grail in Internet marketing is to find the right Niche Market to promote a Great Product to. If you like to see Camtasia videos of how to set up a resell rights project and hundreds of other Internet marketing techniques - visit IMVideoBuzz for video tutorials.

Technorati Tags: paypal, peel away ad

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