Ethical Internet Marketer – Make More Money Online… Ethically!

First of all, I guess, the expression “datafeed” is not known to everyone and therefore, I will try to give you a short explanation:

Usually, a datafeed is the whole inventory of a merchant store all written into one .txt file. It has URL’s, product images, categories, prices and descriptions included and the different sections are separated from each other. The links will have a generic affiliate
expression included like aid=XXXXX. And your job as an affiliate is to replace that XXXXX with your affiliate ID.

Some datafeeds are generated with your affiliate ID already included, though. This is dependent on the merchant or the network you’re using.

What datafeed formats are there?

The most common formats are pipe delimited (|), .csv (comma separated values) and tab delimited ( – a big space in between the different areas). In order to make changes to such a file, the best thing would be to open it in MS Excel. Because Excel will be able to use the separators and actually display the content in a neat way, in lines and rows so it will make sense when you’re looking at it.

What software do you need?

There are several tools available on the market which can bring your datafeed to life. In combination with a WordPress blog, you can automate the posting to your website. Of course, you’ll need to use a datafeed which has enough products in it in order to have content for a few days or weeks.

One of these tools is called Affiliate Feed Generator by Michelle Timothy and it’s the one I’m personally using whenever I am putting that kind of sites online. This software will take the raw text file and convert it into a file which you can use in combination with RSS2Blog (having the “break” tags included already). But that’s not all: It will also produce a RSS file for you with an .XML ending.

Meaning, you can upload this XML file to your server, fire up any tool which can post entries from RSS feeds to a blog and you’re set. You’ve just automated a huge part of the content creation and posting process. You still have to add articles and reviews and that kind of content, too, in order not to be seen as a “thin affiliate” (Someone who doesn’t bring any additional value to their product promotions e.g. by just copying and pasting the ads the merchant provides. These ads can then be found on hundreds of websites…).

Why should you care about datafeeds?

Well, it’s one of the easiest way of posting content to your site on a regular basis. Especially if you’re using blogs, the whole process can be automated. If you combine datafeeds with posting regular articles, you will have your income on autopilot.

That’s because every product that gets posted there has the potential to make you money as your affiliate link is always included. Moreover, by posting it in between your real content, it acts as additional content (most of the times, the product descriptions are long enough to count as real content) – thus making your content more “unique” in the eyes of the search engines.

Your content will be seen as unique as soon as you have added at least 25% of different content to your HTML page. In other words, as soon as you’re adding additional material like pictures, videos and additional text and you’re not just posting the same article like everyone else, you will have an advantage in the search engines.

So if you’re using a combination of Article Builder to make e.g. your private label articles unique AND you’re also adding datafeeds to the mix, you can bet that you will have no problems with your content being seen as duplicate content even if you’re using the same articles as everyone else!

Where can you get datafeeds?

You can either get them directly from the merchant you want to affiliate with (you probably have to ask them) or you join an affiliate network like Commission Junction (CJ.com) and Shareasale (Shareasale.com). The difference between these 2 networks is that Commission Junction wants you to pay a fee (around $200) to use their datafeeds while datafeeds on Shareasale are free.

Personally, I love the Shareasale network (as it is very easy to navigate and they are listing all the merchants which are offering datafeeds). So if you want to find merchants with datafeeds, you just go to the section “Find/Join merchants” in your Shareasale admin area. Next, you click on the link “View those with datafeeds”. And last but not least, you click on “Join program” to the right of the merchant’s listing.

Conclusion:

If you want to promote more than just Clickbank products, using datafeeds is a good alternative. Of course, you’ll have to choose merchants which have a high payout on physical goods (a minimum of 5% on high priced goods) so it really is worth your time. Just compare some of the merchants which are in the same categories and you will get a feel for this.

And the additional content perspective should not be neglected, either. In times of everyone screaming “duplicate content”, it can be a good idea to differentiate yourself from others by adding something useful to your pages. Even if these are just product descriptions – but you will gain keyword density and probably get ranked for keywords that you never knew would bring you visitors. Just check your web stats and you
will see what I mean…

After a long weekend hanging over the script settings for the butterfly marketing script, I finally got everything set up ;-). There were problems with Paypal on Friday – that’s why I delayed the launch to today.

To your success,

Detlev

P.S.: Affiliates can make up to 50% in recurring commissions depending on their membership level.

Hi there,

unfortunately, I’ll have to delay the launch for my new Adsense membership website. It’s impossible to launch it today… There were problems with Paypal all day so I couldn’t properly test the functionality of the script and the payment functions.  Moreover, some of the bonus files (videos) I am offering were so large that the upload got interrupted several times. I’ll send out an email message as soon as you can sign up.

Until then.

Yours in success,

Detlev

I think, Joel had done a pretty good job with his “Instant Adsense Templates” Firesales and he sold a lot of copies. I promoted these packages myself as I considered them to offer great value for the price he was selling them for. But they were massive already. I don’t remember the exact numbers but it must have been something like 200-300 Website Templates per package. And now he wants to release at least 100 new templates per month.

Let me ask you a question: Who can build that many websites in a month?

Not me. That’s for sure. In my opinion, this is not manageable and that’s why I am not recommending it. Usually, I am building around 10-15 niche sites a month. And that is keeping me busy enough already. And if you have previously bought his two Instant Adsense Templates packages already, you’re probably set for at least a year or two. Creating those sites is the easy part. The more difficult, more time intensive part is the promotion of your sites. You can never be successful if you’re not doing e.g. any linking strategies for them.

And that identifies probably the problem that most people are suffering from: Lack of traffic coming to their sites and thus no income from Adsense or affiliate programs. It’s easy to make thousands of dollars a month from Adsense or affiliate programs once you own websites which are getting a lot of traffic. Monetizing this traffic should be your last concern. It’s more difficult to generate this kind of traffic.

No traffic, no money. It’s as simple as that.

The approach for my own Adsense membership site will be different. I want to provide you with a number of complete websites per month that you can actually manage. Because the highest number of sites you will get from me is 13. That’s about 4 websites per week that you can bring online. Not hundred, not two hundred.

I will open my new Adsense Websites and PLR membership site this week. I had some problems with the setup but I am quite confident that I can get the site finished until Friday.

Here’s what you’ll get from me on a monthly basis:

Up to:

* 12 Complete Adsense Websites

* 300 PLR Articles

* 3 PLR Ebooks

* 3 PLR Audio Ebooks

* 24 Niche Header Graphics

* 12 Keyword Lists with Adwords’ CPC prices

There will be 4 different membership levels:

Free:
1 Adsense Website, 2 Graphic Headers and 25 Articles

Silver:
4 Adsense Websites, 8 Graphic Headers and 100 Articles
+ 1 PLR Ebook & 1 Audio Ebook & 4 Keyword Lists

Gold:
8 Adsense Websites, 16 Graphic Headers and 200 Articles
+ 2 PLR Ebooks & 2 Audio Ebooks & 8 Keyword Lists

Platinum:
12 Adsense websites, 24 Graphic Headers
+ 3 PLR Ebooks & 3 Audio Ebooks & 12 Keyword Lists

As soon as my site is ready, I’ll send you the link where you can join either for free or for a minimal fee. It will be really affordable.

If you as a webmaster want to monetize your websites, a great way to do it is through Adsense. Unfortunately, many webmasters are struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the “geniuses” among them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the low earning ones is that they are different and are thinking outside the box.

The ones who have “been there and done that” have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and they are still effective.

Here are 4 proven tips on how best to improve your Adsense earnings:

1. Concentrate on one format for your Adsense ads. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format has the tendency to result in higher CTR, or click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because your ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense ads but as long as there are clicks, it will all be to your advantage.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. Do not use visible borders! This will scream “ad” to the visitor. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense ads look like they are part of your website. Again, this will result in more clicks from people visiting your site as people in general do not like to click on ads.

3. Remove Adsense ads from the bottom of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense ads. Put them “above the fold” where people can see them quickly. This means, they should be placed in the first third of the layout so they can be seen by your visitors without them having to scroll down. You will be amazed at the difference in income when you change your Adsense locations.

4. Get your traffic from a variety of sources. Just relying on the search engines can be a very instable way of getting visitors to your site. This means that your income will fluctuate a lot as your search engine positions generally will not stay stable. Get traffic from newsletter ads, try banner ads, article submissions, social bookmarking, linking strategies etc. etc. – do everything you can to get visitors to your sites.

If you have a lot of high paying Adsense ads on your site and nothing else works try doing Arbitrage. In other words, you buy cheap PPC traffic and lead it to your high paying money pages. The key in doing this is to find related keywords (lateral keywords) which will bring you interested visitors without paying the same top prices on the high paying keyword that you want to make money on.

Last but not least a more general tip from me:

Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side includes) . Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This can also be done by just using PHP with includes.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for a lot of webmasters who are getting big Adsense checks from their websites. It is important to know that Adsense works so well because they are targeted and fit the interests of the people viewing them. So focusing on specific, high paying topics should be your primary purpose.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying out these tips for yourself.