In essence it’s an affiliate scheme; a blogger places the button at the end of each of his posts, and if someone clicks on it, they get a unique Pay Per Post opportunity created for them. If they accept the opportunity and promptly sign up for PPP (new users only, I think), they will get $7.50 once the review is complete. Of course it wouldn’t be an affiliate scheme if you (the blogger, in this case me) weren’t getting paid, so when the review is posted, you get $7.50 as well. It might not seem like much, but if you have a large enough readership, it could prove a nice little earner.

Another benefit, is back links. Each review will link back to your blog, so as well as the financial benefits, you could end up with a substantial SERP + traffic boost.

All in all, it seemed a win-win deal. Of course, time will tell.

So Why Pay Per Post?

I actually signed up out of curiosity. There had been renewed buzz about PPP recently, so I wanted to see for myself what it was about. The “Review My Post” feature caught my eye, after I realised The Get Rich Project probably wouldn’t qualify for the Pay Per Post Marketplace (I have had a break of more than 90 days between posts recently). I’d like to try out the Marketplace, eventually, to see if it’s a better performer than ReviewMe (so if anyone from PPP wants to approve this blog, despite the break, I’ll happily write up a good word or two!).

So what do you think? Good idea, or waste of time? Would you try out “Rate My Post”?

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Both these guys released eBooks this week, but from totally opposite monetization angles. Yaro is looking for the upsell to his coaching program, which is exactly the type of thing John wants to avoid. John’s tactic is to drive traffic to his blog, creating more opportunity for high paying affiliate sales and referrals.

I wonder who will have made more money in 6 months time?

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Affiliate marketing is trickier than using PPC sites — you have to convince someone to buy something. Not everyone is a natural salesperson, which leads many to abandon affiliate marketing due to low (or lack of) sales.

This can be changed. I will outline 5 ways you can boost your affiliate sales.

1. Keep it Short.

People are busy. They don’t have time to wade through screen after screen of waffle about the product. Unfortunately this seems to go against common consensus amongst “Internet Marketers”. 99% of affiliate product sales pages are far too long. I’ve certainly never read a full one. I scan for two key things: what is the product, and how much it costs. The rest is usually irrelevant.

This scanning behavior is the other reason to keep things short; on the Internet, people don’t read. They scan webpages instead.

2. Soft Sell.

The Internet was built as a means to share and spread knowledge and information. It may be a more commercial entity today, but it is still seen as an informational tool.

Make customers feel relaxed by pandering to this preconception. Promote your product with language suggesting you are sharing, rather than selling, the benefits or information it provides.

3. Sell with Permission.

Seth Godin invented the term permission marketing to describe the practice of not marketing anything to a person unless they ask you to. On a simplistic level, this could be just keeping your sales material on a clearly marked page, separate from the landing page of your site (be it a blog page or whatever).

More advanced is collecting potential customer details and routinely sending targeted sales material (remember to soft sell!) to your “List”, gently reminding them to buy.

Always remind the customer they gave you permission to receive marketing material, and always remind them they can choose to stop receiving your materials.

4. Use Multimedia.

The Internet affords marketers the opportunity to use sound and video to make their point. If a picture paints a thousand words, a good video can be the seller’s equivalent of War & Peace. The trick is to be focussed and to never overdo it. Going overboard it will have two negative effects:

1. The videos or sound-clips will lose their effectiveness
2. You’ll slow down the loading time of your page. Make it too slow and your customer will click away.

And finally, the absolute, number one tip for making more sales is (drum roll please)…

5. Get Better Sales Copy.

Strip back all of the fancy graphics, videos, and other assorted doodads on a webpage, and what have you got? Text. Pure, simple, beautiful words on a screen.

It might seem rather trite to say, but the best thing you can do to make more sales, is make the text you use to sell your product better! You’ve probably noted points 1 and 2 above are directly related to this; they are small, subtle ways to improve your copy. Or you can rewrite the whole lot to be better from the get-go.

If you want (or have) to write your sales copy yourself, you will want to learn how to write better. There are numerous resources, both online and offline for this:

• Copyblogger is a fantastic blog to read. Delve through the archives and you will find a treasure trove of tips to make your writing better.
• The Online Copywriter’s Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Write Electronic Copy That Sells (Robert W. Bly) is a good book focusing on writing for the web. Many of the ideas on this list were inspired by it.
• Even a quick Google search will turn up many, many more resources where you can learn the ‘tricks of the trade’

Alternatively, you might want to hire someone more qualified to write your sales material for you. Sites like E-Lance and Guru.com can put you in touch with thousands of freelance copywriters the world over. Forums such as Earners Forum are also good places to find freelancers looking for work, particularly those who are focussed on writing for the web.

A few adjustments to your affiliate marketing, such as the points above, could be all you need to go from a handful of sales to the point where there is a significant effect on your income. Give these tips a try. If you’re making no sales already, what have you got to lose?

Of course, I’d love to hear any more tips and advice GRP readers have on this topic. If you’ve got an invaluable affiliate marketing tip then share it!

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Article Underground is, in their own words, an “exclusive members-only content and traffic network”. What this means is they provide their members with all sorts of tools to build, promote and profit from monetised websites (i.e. the type with adverts on them). I guess AU are mainly targeting the Adsense crowd, but there’s plenty for everyone.

The Articles

The main attraction to Article Underground is the 400 new keyword-targeted articles available to members each month. That’s right - four hundred a month! I don’t know who the writers are, but I hope they have plenty of spare keyboards! These articles are touted as highly SEO-optimised and claimed to be “ban proof”. What they mean by “ban proof” is this isn’t scraped content from other sites - it is real, human-written text that won’t be seen as spam by search engine robots.

The Link Network

The other half of AU’s system, are the 22 or so high pagerank blogs members can use to link to individual articles published on their sites providing backlinks and “Google Juice”. These blogs are heavily moderated to keep them from descending into a mess of spam. I’ve not made a lot of use of these blogs myself, but I can definitely see their worth, so long as they stay spam-free. By linking from the correct announcement blog(s) you can generate relevant, high pagerank backlinks quickly and easily.

You could create your own network of “funnel” websites, but that would be far too much effort!

The Extras.

Article Underground don’t scrimp on the extras. On top of the monthly articles, are the frequently updated videos demonstrating how to get the best from their system. There are also a stack of free ebooks to read (with resell rights on some), and programs (all Windows based, unfortunately) to help optimise your sites and your own articles. The quality varies a bit and some of the ebooks aren’t particularly great, but it’s all free and will no doubt be useful to somebody.

Without a doubt, the best “freebie” with Article Underground is the community. The forums are crammed with useful info, tips from other members. A wide range of topics are covered - far more than I could possibly list here. If you have a question about any part of Article Underground, or Article/Internet Marketing in general, it will usually be answered within a few hours on the AU forums.

Other Bits and Bobs

Article Underground only offer limited places (350 per membership round) - at the time of writing there are only 88 84 places left in the second round of admissions. This is ostensibly to prevent massive the articles being duplicated thousands of times over. If there are only a relatively small number of users then the chances of duplicate content penalties drops considerably.

Final Verdict

Article Underground offer a comprehensive system for those interested in creating niche, keyword-targeted websites for advertising revenue. Their system is better than most article marketing sites because of the more flexible copyrights to the articles you get. The traffic-building tools are invaluable, particularly for those just starting out in this field. AU has been quite a good investment for me, with my fledgling empire. It has allowed me to build a number of highly-focussed websites which are already bringing in Adsense revenue despite being only a few weeks old! Overall, I’d have to say Article Underground is one of my recommended tools for web entrepreneurs.

Visit Article Underground

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