NOTE:  The following is a guest post from one of my favorite
internet marketing mentors.

Why I Love Affiliate Marketing - Part 1
By Jimmy D. Brown of “Affiliatenaire”

Do you find yourself “starting” to create your own product
to sell online, but never “finishing” it?

One of the things I love about affiliate marketing is –

** You don’t need to create your own products **

Many people find the idea of creating their own products to
be an overwhelming and even paralyzing task.

* I don’t have any good ideas!
* I’m not a writer!
* There’s too much competition!
* I don’t know how to set everything up!
* I can’t figure out where to start!
* It’s too hard!

These are just a few of the valid reasons many people give
when it comes to not creating their own products to sell.
I’m sure with a few minutes of brainstorming, we could come
up with a list of many more.

With affiliate marketing, you don’t need your own products.
You simply promote someone else’s already proven successful
offer for a commission.

And, truth be told, even if you ARE a writer and you DO have
lots of ideas and you CAN figure it all out…

** Nobody wants to create new products all the time **

As good as you may be, you don’t know everything!  Why try
to create a product on every topic imaginable in your
market when you can earn just as much money by simply
promoting someone else’s really good offer as one of your
profit streams?

That’s why I love affiliate marketing.

You don’t need to create your own products.

…………………….

Jimmy D. Brown is the author of “Affiliatenaire”, teaching
you how to create big-time affiliate commission checks in
only 1-3 hours each week.  Discover how you can get cash in
the bank without a website, experience or even an idea!
Visit http://osterude.com/affiliate-blog.htm

…………………….

I made this video for you yesterday, but I ran out of juice and couldn’t post till today.
In it I tell you all about Clickbank Pirate and how you can get a bonus I made specially for you.

Click here to purchase Clickbank Pirate

Click here to see my special CB Pirate Bonus

I recently launched a PPC campaign in the Hispanic market and decided to do a video squeeze page to see how well it converted. While designing my page I noticed 3 distinct designs that were showing up frequently in Internet Marketing so I decided to split test the 3 versions.

To my surprise the opt in increase from the least to the best converting was 140% and the increase from second place to first place was 25%

To see the three designs I tested and the actual opt in conversion rates CLICK HERE to download the report. It’s pretty simple, no opt in no fancy stuff just a PDF.
Video Squeeze Page Report

BONUS: If I find at least 10 comments under this post I will also share with you how I reduced my cost per opt in from up $1.23 down to $0.40 in average

Personally I “feel” iContact has better deliverability than Aweber. I guess it’s good because they are very strict with spam control and the # of emails ppl can sendout.

Here are some of the controls I’ve found:

1-You can only email out 6 x the “subscriber plan” you have so if you have a 10K subscriber account the max # of emails you can send in a month is 60k. Is this bad? well depends on the size of your list and the frequency you email. so if you have a 3 K list and email them once a day, the 10K plan is too little because you’d be sending out 90K emails a month.

2- If a message has a spam score over 5 it won’t send a broadcast email. This could be because of spam words OR because the domain you are promoting in the email has been blacklisted. Yep  that’s correct, they check the URLs in your message before sending and a blacklisted domain is blacklisted your message get a spam score of 8 if it’s graylisted like Infusionsoft.com you get a spam score of 2. So throw away domains can be very useful in these cases

3- They monitor spam complaints very closely so if there are too many complaints your account will be put on probation and you’ll be notified, if this continues they simply suspend your account. Since iContact is whitelisted by AOL I understand they must have a strict policy so it stays that way.

Something very good in icontact is that it let’s you easily import leads without confirmation, but if you use this irresponsibly you’ll get lots of complaints and get suspended.

What I don’t like is that they don’t count unique emails for the capacity of your account, but they use the sum of all subscribers in all lists even if there are duplicates(that’s the blue SUM in the image). But I guess all services do it this way so it’s ok.

The one thing I DON’T like is the fact that there is no way to automatically  unsubscribe a user from one list when she/he subscribes to another one.

Well it seems I am because I just checked my aweber stats and I was above the .1 % complaint rate they suggest you should stay under.

I understand the message wasn’t selling anything, nor did it have any instant money making tip. It was only my thoughts on Internet Marketing and how the “It’s easy” idea isn’t totally true.

But anyways those warnings are there for a good reason so I invited my non interested subscribers to unsubscribe.

We’ll see what happens.

Probably I’ve been too quiet lately so an email from me can be strange for some people, but that’s going to change. I’m flying solo this year so I plan on being in contact with my list more often.

A nice idea I think I might swipe from Stephanie Mulac is how they add the “subscription date” to the intro of all her emails

<>——–<>——–<>——–<>——–<>
Thank you Richard for being a
valued subscriber since February 20, 2008
<>——–<>——–<>——–<>——–<>

Something really easy to do with Aweber and also it reminds ppl when they subscribed.

There are a lot of email best practices we all should follow and really I don’t know them all. The guy to ask about that is Big Jason Henderson, he’s the email expert out there so if you want more information about email deliverability and etiquete you should check out his blog BigMarketingOnline.com

Please leave your comments good or bad and I’ll be glad to get back to you with any question you have that I can answer. Remember: if I don’t know the answer… I’ll make something up specially for you.

Cheers!

Richard