Check out the video below to see the recording of the launch webinar, where I explain all the details:

Webinar Recording:

Click here to sign up to the affiliate program!

A page with a written overview of the affiliate system and a short video explaining the highlights will follow shortly.

For now, get in there and start earning! ;)

Any questions and comments are welcome, as always!

Cheers,

It had all the signs of being one among many, doubtless making someone a couple 100K and doubtless being a more or less useless product, under close scrutiny.

But something about Traffic Siphon is different…

Anger Siphon

Something about it seems to be pissing people off to a larger degree than I’ve ever seen before. I don’t spend that much time in forums or reading blogs, but even I came across thread after thread and post after post complaining about Traffic Siphon. And I’ve been getting e-mails. Not spammy “buy-this-now” e-mails (I have a separate address for those, that I rarely check), but e-mails from my readers and subscribers. All of them telling me what a piece of crap this product is and how rage-inducing the sales-page is.

Traffic Siphon is either especially annoying and scammy or it’s the staw that broke the camel’s back and an increasingly large number of people just can’t stand this type of thing anymore.

"Dark, Unheard-Of Corners of the Web" a.k.a. Google.

Hype, Lies and Fluff

If you look at the sales-page for Traffic Siphon, you’ll simply see all of the usual elements for hypey products: Huge earnings claims, lots of “proof” in the form of ClickBank earnings screenshots, promises of how incredible the technique is but never a single detail about what the technique actually is etc. etc. Basically, everything I talked about in my video on how to avoid newbie traps.

If you’ve been in IM for more than a week, you’ve probably seen a dozen sales-letters like this.

So, what’s the problem?

For one thing, I suspect the “us vs. the Gurus” approach has been grossly overdone, lately. Every hypey sales-letter I’ve looked at in recent memory had the premise that “those dastardly gurus” are all out to screw you over and that this one product is the big exception. It’s always “I’m the only honest guy in the industry”. And ironically, it’s exactly the guys doing this who are screwing you over (and they know it). That, I imagine, is another anger-inducing factor. It’s one thing to make claims that aren’t true, but to accuse other’s of things that you are actually guilty of yourself and to be so blatantly hypocritical is something else altogether.

Another factor is the clearly fake scarcity. They claim that they are only going to sell 250 copies, but they’re obviously trying to flog as many copies as they possibly can. You only have to look at the price and then look at the fact that they are recruiting affiliates for the product to know it’s not limited in any way.

Step 1: List everything other than your technique. Step 2: Claim none of it works. Step 3: Blame "Gurus".

In this specific case, the “secret” technique that’s revealed in the product itself is, apparently, SEO. Yeah, totally mind-blowing. The disconnect between the promise of something new and revolutionary and the actual product being pretty much the first thing most online marketers learn about might be a bit too harsh. As for the methods themselves? I haven’t bought this product, but from the mails I’ve been getting, it’s basically a collection of the oldest tricks in the book when it comes to SEO and traffic generation (build links, yahoo answers, article marketing…). In other words, the gap between what the sales-page talks about and what’s inside the product is just too large. The two have practically nothing to do with each other.

And that’s no coincidence.

100% Marketer, 0% Teacher

What I mentioned above is making people angry (along with a dozen exit-popups and endless upsells, bad customer support,…). And that’s understandable, because the consumers of the product are obviously looking at Traffic Siphon from a consumer perspective.

The product creators behind all this are not looking at it from that perspective and never intended to.

You see, a product like this is not made for the customers. A product like this is primarily made for affiliates.

Affiliates, especially those with the skills to drive lots of traffic and those with huge mailing lists, are quite difficult to get on board for promotions. They are usually booked solid with launches they’re going to promote, they owe each other favours (“I promoted for you, so now you have to promote for me.”) and they are, more often than not, looking to make the maximum amount of profit for every promotion they do.

Sad but true, many affiliates will pick the second offer in this scenario, simply because it will put more money in their pockets. That’s their number one concern: The bottom line. The actual product quality is a distant second, if that. Many affiliates and “marketers” are even proud of the fact that they put money first and everything else second. “It’s business” is the common justification for this (apparently business and ethics are mutually exclusive – I didn’t get that memo, though).

Because of this, many product creators tailor their product entirely to affiliates: Making them appear as attractive as possible in terms of earnings potential. In fact, these product creators aren’t really product creators at all. They are 100% marketers and what they do is simply a “trick” to exctract a lot of money from the Internet. The product itself, the thing you actually get once you’ve waded through the swamp of upsells, is only there as an after-thought. It’s basically fluff, there to fill out the bit of empty space that’s left after the marketing strategy is set up.

Why do you think that everyone released mobile marketing products in the past few months? Is it really the new big thing? Have all these guys suddenly turned into mobile marketing experts?

No. They looked at the marketplace, saw that this was a trend, off of which money could be made, created a marketing plan to exploit it and then tacked an excuse of a product to the end of all that.

A Storm is Coming (Probably Not)

Some suggest that there’s a shift happening in the IM market. That people are starting to get wise to these marketing tricks and the typical hypey sales pitch will no longer work.

It would be nice, wouldn’t it? As far as I can tell, though, the ClickBank boys have been using these tactics for a long time and aren’t showing any signs of stopping. In fact, they’ve created something of a niche for themselves. Since they are all producing crap that leaves people frustrated, they are basically setting their customers up for each other’s products (remember: all of the sales-pitches are made for frustrated newbies who’ve been burnt by so-called “gurus”).

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think things will change or do you dobt the ClickBank boys will ever run out of a fresh supply of quick-riches seeking newbies?

Cheers,

P.S.: Here’s a bonus video of me ranting about a different product, in a similar vein:

There are countless ways of making money online and I cannot cover them all in this post. However, in terms of monetizing a website, there are four very common methods: Renting out ad-space, using AdSense or similar contextual advertising, promoting CPA offers and promoting products as an affiliate.

These four methods are arranged neatly along a sliding scale and understanding them makes for a good foundation of knowledge about website monetization in general.

So, let’s go right ahead and examine these four methods.

Qualification vs. Payout

The “sliding scale” mentioned in the title has to do with how much you get paid for each of the monetization methods in relation to how difficult it is to qualify for payment. Here’s an illustration:

On the x-axis you see the four major methods, renting out ad-space, AdSense, CPA offers and affiliate sales. The labels going from “minimal” to “high” along the y-axis have two meanings: On the one hand, they describe the potential payout and on the other hand, they describe how hard it is to make the payout happen.

If that doesn’t immediately make sense, don’t worry, I’ll go into a bit more detail on each method right away:

Renting out Ad-Space

If you visit a lot of blogs, you’ve probably come across several that have small 125×125 pixel boxes in the sidebar, displaying ads. Sometimes, some of the boxes read “Your Ad Here!” or something along those lines. That usually means that the owner of the blog is renting out this space on his site for advertisers. A product owner or company can call them up and arrange to have their ad placed in one of the boxes for a set amount of time and a monthly fee.

Once the ad is set up, the blog owner gets paid no matter how effective the advertisement is. The only pre-requisite for getting paid, is that the blog continues to be visited by many people, but the payment stays the same regardless of whether the blog’s visitors actually click on the ads and/or end up buying something from the advertiser.

In other words, there’s no obstacle that you need to get your visitors across, in order to make money. The downside is that you won’t get paid a lot for renting out ad-space and you need a hell of a lot of visitors to make this kind of monetization lucrative at all.

By the way: Not all banners are rented out ad-space. A banner could also contain an affiliate link to a sales-offer or a CPA offer.

AdSense

I’m sure you’ve seen many, many AdSense ads already. Whether you’ve clicked on any or not is a different story, but there’s no doubt that AdSense is a very popular way of monetizing a website. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s what AdSense ads usually look like:

Don’t bother clicking, by the way, it’s just an image.

AdSense is something you can plug into your site and it will automatically serve up these small text-ads that are relevant to your content. I.e. if you write something about cars, AdSense might display ads for car insurance offers.

Behind every AdSense ad, there’s a person or company paying for clicks. As an example, let’s say a visitor clicks on an insurace-related ad. The advertiser will pay Google a certain amount, for example $0.60 for that click. Google, in turn, will pay half of that to the person who’s site the ad was displayed on when it got the click.

Depending on the subject, these clicks can cost more or less and in turn, the ads on your site will not always net the same amount per click. Usually, you’ll get only a few cents per click, however.

You can easily make a few dollars by using AdSense on your site, even if you don’t get tons of visitors. You can potentially earn more per visitor compared to renting out ad-space, but the visitors need to actually click on the ads, otherwise you don’t get paid. So, the threshold is a bit higher, but you get more in return.

Affiliate Sales

Selling products as an affiliate is a very simple concept: You send visitors to a sales-page with your special affiliate link, and every time one of those visitors makes a purchase, you get a cut of the price. This is basically your reward for sending the visitor to that product-page and making the sale possible.

What’s very attractive about affiliate sales is that the payouts can be very high. You will typically get paid between 50% and 75% of the purchase price (at least for info-products and downloads). If you are promoting an expensive info-product, you can earn up to hundreds of dollars every time someone buys through your affiliate link.

The downside is that you only get paid whenever someone makes a purchase. In other words, the threshold is very high and you’ll never see 100% of the people clicking on your affiliate links ending up buying the product (0.5% to 3% is more realistic).

CPA

CPA stands for Cost Per Action and the reason I saved this one for last is that, in a sense, CPA represents the “sweet spot” between AdSense and affiliate sales.

As the name implies, with CPA, you get paid whenever a visitor performs a certain action. The action required is specified by the advertiser. For example, for many offers you can make a CPA commission, by sending a visitor to a page where they have to enter their e-mail address (in other words, they sign up to a mailing list). Other offers require the visitors to fill out a survey-form.

As you can imagine, it’s easier to get someone to supply an e-mail address than it is to get someone to make a purchase. The payouts for CPA offers are typically quite a bit higher than what you get for AdSense clicks – usually in the range of a few dollars.

To get back to the above graph, with CPA, the threshold isn’t very high – visitors have to do more than just click, but they don’t have to spend actual money – and the potential payout is quite good.

So, Which Is Best?

You can’t really say that any one of these monetization methods is better than the others. That’s also something I wanted to illustrate in that graph: The two factors of potential payout and qualification for payout usually balance each other out fairly well.

Whether you get thousands of clicks for a few cents each or send thousands of visitors to a sales-page and only a small percentage of them buy the product, you’ll end up with similar profits.

You can optimize any of these methods to make you lots of money and I’m sure there are people making a full-time living on each one of them. Ultimately, it’s a question of what suits you best.

What monetization method do you prefer? Which ones have you tried and which ones would you like to try? Let me know down in the comments!

Cheers,

Below, you find two short videos explaining everything you need to know about how to add affiliate banners to your WordPress blog. The first video covers the very basics and the second video goes into a little more detail, showing you how to cloak the banner-links, how to make your own banners (in case none are provided) and how to add a banner to the sidebar.

Part 1

Part 2

I hope you find them useful.

All the best,

P.S.: For good measure, here’s a banner: