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Aberdeen, South Dakota, is a great city to live in.  It is a great city to raise a family in.  Most of all, it’s a GREAT city to do business in.

It is not a great city to live in after it snows.

The city has an abysmal reputation for not doing a quality job keeping up with snow removal, which is unfortunate given the weather here is capable of dropping over 12″ of snow at a time.  The city does such a poor job plowing, sanding, and salting, that the number of car accidents after any substantial snowfall just skyrockets.  Just how many of these accidents can be avoided is anyone’s guess, but you would be hard pressed to effectively dispute that poorly plowed roads play a big impact. The city will spin this in any number of ways, but it comes down to poor road conditions even days after the last snowflake falls.

The facebook fan page took approximately 45 seconds to create and 5 minutes to throw out to my contact list. I let the list grow 100% organic.  Considering my town only has 22,000 people living here, the ‘conversion’ rate wasn’t great, but hey, organic is organic!

The reality is it takes a little bit of mob mentality to get any sort of results with small local governments, and my city of Aberdeen is no exception.  The Facebook fan page was only 3-4 days old when it hit 250 people, the frontpage of the 1/12/2009 newspaper, and got the attention of a local councilwoman.

Join the Aberdeen, South Dakota Snow Removal SUCKS! facebook group here!

UPDATE: 1/13/2010 @ 8am: ~500 fans of this page. Page 5 days old.  Entire population of city is only 21,000.

So we have hosting setup, domains purchased, Wordpress installed, WFReview installed, and our data file ready for import.  (You’ll have to add headers to your Shareasale CSV file.  The files come as pipe-delimited .txt files from Shareasale, you simply need to load the .txt file up into excel, import appropriately by choosing Delimited, then using the “|” symbol in the ‘other delimiter’ field, copy/paste headers from Shareasale, and then save it as a CSV to your PC.  Simple as that!  If you have questions,  out video tutorials on www.reviewpluginforwordpress.com details how CSV files are to be used.

Getting your CSV file perfect is the MOST important step.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Make sure the CSV has the basics:  Line breaks, headers, UTF-8, saved as comma separated (not tab, semi-colon, space, or any other character, it MUST be comma delimited.)

NEXT: Tutorial: Getting started with WFReview Part 4

You’ll need the following to get started:

1. Approved merchant offer from sharasale.com (or another network with datafeeds).   Some of the merchants are instant approval; others never approve applications, and the rest take days or even weeks to approve applications.  Diversify and apply to many merchants who have products related to your niche until you have at least 3 merchants you can get datafeeds from.  (Hint: Make sure you have a shell site built AND registered with ShareaSale BEFORE you apply for a program.  Populate it with generic data, including articles and any content that would show a merchant affiliate manager that you are a serious web site.  Just get something in there so the affiliate manager for the merchant can visualize the type of site their products will appear on.
2. Datafeed for your merchant/offer.  Some merchants do not offer datafeeds, be sure to apply to merchants that DO in fact offer datafeeds.  You can search only those with datafeeds to make it easier to identify datafeed merchants.
3. Domain name.  Now here is something you CAN use GoDaddy or Namecheap.com for.  Any domain will do, but consider that targeted keywords in the URL make a big difference when you’re trying to rank your site.  Namecheap is who I recommend.  Get WHOIS protection AND an SSL certificate with your domain purchase for about $9 when you buy with a coupon, so find this month’s coupon!  SSL and Whois protection is important for a few reasons, so get them both with the coupon.
4. Hosting.  This can be a cheapo account, but I highly recommend not using Godaddy, Hostgator, or other high-volume-per-server shared servers.  WFReview has a hosting service that utilizes a WFReview/Wordpress optimized server farm and it’s a LOT faster/scalable and inexpensive than using one of those other services.  If you’re going to import more than 10,000 products, probably better to use a VPS or dedicated server.  Our hosting packages at WFReview can handle much more data than a shared account on GoDaddy or others, it’s a good idea to use us for at least your first site so you have no issues with traffic or latency on the server.
5. WFReview 3.0 or later
6. A copy of Wordpress 2.8.6 or newer (Wordpress MU works as well, and if you’re experienced with WPMU, WFReview works flawlessly with it, consider using it to scale out in the future.)
7. Any SEO plugins you wish to use. (XML-Sitemaps is essential, the others you can choose on your own!)  Also check out the Related Posts plugin, it absolutely makes a HUGE difference in conversions.
8. Setup a Google Webmaster Tools account.  This allows you to submit sitemaps and view rank data for your pages/keywords.  It’s free and it gets results.  You can submit up to 50K pages in a single Sitemap, and here you can specify multiple sitemaps.  Sitemaps are XML files that tell Google where to look on your site for content. It’s not a guarantee that you’re page/URL will get ranked in Google’s search results, but it does help!
9. Setup a single trial account at www.sheerseo.com .  You will use this to monitor rankings for your top keywords.  The trial account is SUPER limited, but it gets you in the mindset of thinking rank.
10. Get a free account at clicktale.com.  This will allow you to see where visitors are clicking/engaging on your site. This is important early on to gauge where people are first trying to look, allowing you to modify your theme/layout to get a lower bounce rate.

You’ll want to complete the steps above in order, though if you already have datafeeds and hosting, it’s not imperative.  I recommend following the order above.

Before you proceed to Step 4, you want to get all the hosting setup, Wordpress installed, and WFReview installed.  Make sure the site comes up when you go to it in a web browser.  Also make sure you have a local copy of the Shareasale merchant datafeed on your computer.

NEXT: Using WFReview To Make Money With Your First Website PART 4

Because WFReview imports mass quantities of data (From CSV, or comma separated values, files) I want to identify affiliate programs that offer datafeeds. Datafeeds are files that contain the product information I want to use. For example:

Each row is a unique product column is a unique part of that product.  We call the rows “records” and the columns “fields”.

Using this format, we are easily able to use WFReview to import this data.  Since we can use the product name as the title of our posts, the image URL as the photo in the posts, the price as the price field in our posts, and the productAffiliateURL as the LINK (important!) in our posts, 99% of the work is done for us.

This specific feed for Mac Memory has over 38,000 products in it, all relating to memory for Mac (and many other high end) computers.

IMPORTANT:  I look for a few things in my datafeeds, primarily MODEL NUMBERS and specific brand names and model numbers.  Both large images AND thumbnail images, good descriptions with HTML, and current prices are very important too. Shareasale.com does a good job of keeping things in order.

Why is that important?  Because people who search for <brand>  <keyword>  <Model> (example: Mac memory 4L84H) are a LOT more likely to be either comparison shopping for a purchase, or looking to purchase a hard to find item online.  In our case, we have Mac memory, which is good because there are a LOT fewer Mac repair centers/technicians than there are PC techs in the United States.  This makes it easy for us to find highly motivated buyers since users will be looking for deals online vs. a repair center locally.  Better to have 5 motivated buyers find your site with 4 making purchases, than it is to have 20,000 people just browsing your site and none make purchases.  We’re providing a solution to the buyer’s problem by offering the exact thing they want and an immediate way to get it!

NEXT: Tutorial: Getting started with WFReview Part 3

This tutorial is free, if you paid for it, get your money back.

FACT: You will NEVER make a dime buying products that tell you how to make a dime. If you don’t grasp this or embrace it, stop now, you’ll never be successful online.  You have to take some time to think of a niche you want to earn with, then GET OUT and DO IT!   Better to have TRIED and failed 1,000 times than to never have tried all.  Don’t buy e-Books, don’t buy coaching  (unless it’s a hardcore technique that’s gotten rave industry reviews from authority marketers, more on that later) and MOST CERTAINLY don’t think that Internet marketing as a full time job or an 8-5.  If you want a full-time income from IM, you’ll have to grind it out HARD for a few months/quarters until sites start ranking and collectively increase in revenue.  This tutorial is meant to help you get to that point: Where you work for yourself and make a good living doing what you love.

Where the hell do I start? The first step is where most people (myself included at one point) really struggle.  I want to do amazing sites that will rake in the dough, but I have no idea where to start and what I should be doing (and not doing!)

STEP 1: Decide what you want to sell/promote

This is one of the most difficult decisions for a newbie because you have no idea the grand scope of the industry, what networks offer what offers, or what kind of history different offers have.  You need to be able to make money without spending money on traffic, so you need to pick a very SPECIFIC niche that you want to create a site for.  ‘Electronics’ is waaay too vague. ‘Televisions’ is waaay to vague, ‘HDTVs’ is waaay too vague.  You need to find the lowest common denominator in a niche.  For example:

• Television remote controls
• Camcorder batteries
• Wedding night lingerie for tall/short women
• Bamboo ceiling fans
• Keyboards for the disabled
• Computers for Preschoolers
• Etc.

Don’t try to create a ‘one stop shop’ for every aspect of your niche when you’re starting out, you’ll never drive any sort of quality TARGETED traffic.  It’s the targeted traffic that makes you money, not the massive collection of meagerly linked products on your web page.  The people who are your ‘targeted traffic’ are looking for one thing and one thing only, and they usually have their credit cards out ready to buy.  Design your site to accommodate these people, and allow them to easily find exactly what it is they’re looking for.

Before you start crying because the million dollar idea you thought you had was just crushed, don’t think that you can’t do what you originally came here to do.  Start a “project idea” document in Word and keep track of your ideas. Once you gain experience and have some coin, you can try the higher risk ideas out. For now though, you’re a broke little monkey and need to concentrate on providing very specific products that are going to be easily found by people looking for exactly what you are selling.

We’re going to pick on products for Mac users: specifically, replacement memory.  This is what our entire site will be featuring, nothing but memory for Macs.  40,000 pieces of dirty, sexy, memory for Macs.  The site is http://www.macmemorystore.com and they are a merchant on shareasale.com.  At the time of this writing, their 7-day EPC (earnings per click) was $166.00 and the 30 day was $62.69.  This means they’re getting sales and the dollar amounts of those sales are relatively high.  DO NOT ASSUME THAT BECAUSE A HIGH EPC EXISTS, YOU WILL PROFIT.  You need to TEST TEST TEST every single offer yourself.

Why is this a good idea?  First, if you are going to want to earn a commission off of a product you sell online, you NEED to be signed up with an affiliate network.  These networks are the middleman between the merchant (the guy offering the product) and the affiliate (You, the person wanting to sell the product for a commission.) and are fairly easy to get signed up with.  You should apply to the affiliate network and get accepted before going to step 2.  Most people choose to apply to affiliate networks because they find an offer that they want to promote and it happens to be on a specific network.  Look at www.offers202.com for a good list of offers and networks.

The network I am going to use for this site is Shareasale.com.  It has a huge supply of merchants with datafeeds.  (Datafeeds are downloadable files that have most of the product information from the merchant.  The parts of the information such as Product_Name, Description, Image_URL, Price, etc. are all in a delimited format, which allows you to import into WFReview or Excel.)

All I have to do is download the datafeed then import the feed as posts into WFReview. It’s a little more involved than that obviously, with adding headers and filtering out any products you do NOT want in your site, but for the most part, it works very well, is very fast, and gets results.  Plus this Mac Memory Store feed has acceptable descriptions and default product images so my posts end up look really good!

Click here to apply to www.shareasale.com / www.commissionjunction.com / www.linkshare.com / www.EWAnetwork.com

NEXT:  Tutorial: Getting started with WFReview Part 2

Local Online Advertising Series

Simple answer: It’s expensive.  Many people can’t afford to keep things running after they run out of their initial capitol investment.

Now before you get all “No it’s not, I started with nothing and…” with your arguments, let me say (and I hope you’ll agree with me) that this business is about volume, not much else.  The people who make their livelihood slinging berries to Shamwow users are the guys who spend, what most people consider, obscene amounts of money on a daily basis.  Some 9-5 working people make $16,000 in a quarter, some internet marketers spend $20,000 in a day.  Bridging that gap, hell, even conceptualizing that dollar amount, is beyond some people and they just can’t comprehend how it’s done.

So back to the reason for high turnover and how you can avoid becoming one of the losers this industry chews up and leaves on the sidewalk. Simply put, a lot of folks run out of money before they should and have a hard time scaling campaigns.  The simple truth is that there is a massive amount of fraud in this business, and as a result, when it comes to new affiliates, networks don’t like paying out commissions on leads that may be invalidated later on by the advertiser.

Almost every network is going to scrutinize any new affiliate to prevent fraud, but ultimately, they want to see some history from an affiliate before they start sending you frequent wires.  Most networks don’t want to send a wire payment that’s under $1000, and many use NET15 or NET30 terms, which means you get paid 15 days AFTER the end of the month, not 15 days after the date you make the commission.  For example: You earn $300 in commissions on January 1st, the network won’t likely send a check until FEBRUARY 15th.   Let’s assume you started out financing your affiliate marketing campaign with a credit card with a $1000 credit limit and your daily traffic expenses are $150.  (You’re spending $150 to earn $300 in commissions, or rather, you’re making $150 profit (100% ROI) each day)

You start this on Jan 1, and by January 7th, you are out of funds, but have $2000 in commissions earned.  The campaign is still converting at whatever rate and the network and merchant are happy with the lead quality.  Depending on the network, you might have to just sit on a paused campaign until Feb 15th when you get your check.

So what can you do to stretch your resources?  First of all find a network that’s willing to pay you when you’re out of cash.  You need to consider 2 things in this situation: 1) network owners carry the cost of the commissions they pay you for a few weeks or even months after they have sent you a check.  If the merchant doesn’t pay the network for whatever reason, they’re the ones who eat the loss, or they charge it against your current/future commissions.  Second, remember that your lead quality counts.  Send consistent quality leads from quality traffic sources, you’ll be in good shape.

So the million dollar question: How do you ask the network to put your commissions in the mail?

Ask.  Simple as that.   Give them the real picture. Tell them what you’re spending, what your margins are, and where the traffic is coming from. They’ve been there themselves and if you justify it, and plan to keep the traffic flowing to the offer, there is a good chance they’ll help you out.

The KEY is to keep the campaign alive, so if you’re 3 days away from broke, THAT’s the time to request the payment, not when your campaigns are paused and you’re not making any money.

Now go getmoneygetpaid!

I have documentation and skype recordings that verify 100% of what is claimed here. I’ve tried to be as fact-based and objective as I can possibly be.

Long story short, I had a very simple situation turn into a big stinking mess because of the misinformation provided to me by one of the AMs at AKMG, Eleah.  Now this girl, Eleah, is extremely nice, but she’s a grunt at the company and has no real voice.  That’s where the problem for me lies. She tells me one thing, I act on that information and incur expenses, then her boss tells me another thing, and asks me to abandon the previous design work and do something new. (Update: In fairness, they did offer to have their in house people edit the sites, but this was only offered after we had gone round after round with me telling them I was done with the offer.)

I initially agreed to run this Oriel wine offer. It’s a weak offer with a low payout, but it’s wide open, barely any competition, so I said I’ll give it a shot.  I spend 30+ hours doing some hardcore research so when I do launch the offer, I have a decent chance of at least making ’something’.

After all the research, I hire a designer who does a design for me. I submit it to AKMG for approval and Eleah comes back with “approved as long as the remaining copy to be completed in the website does not in any way allude to or insinuate that you are part of Oriel Wine.”  The domains I submitted were also approved.

The design used all of Oriel’s provided graphics and the color scheme was closely tied in to their site. It was not a knock off and anyone with 1/2 a brain knew from reading the flog copy that it was for sure NOT Oriel Wine.

Fast forward to the day I start traffic, 2 hours in they have issues with the design and the domain(s) I’m using.

I stop traffic, they come back with some weak excuse that “the Oriel marketing guy approved your design, but the Oriel CEO did not, it’s too similar to their own site”. I explain to her that that info might have been useful a lot earlier in the process and that now I’m already $400 into designs (3 designs for 4 sites) and I wasn’t about to spend another $300 to have them updated.  On this day, AKMG wouldn’t provide me any further feedback detailing what exactly would make the lander compliant or what the merchant really wanted.  They just said “something else, a review site”.  They knew my plans (I have emails with Eleah) long before this and plans included flogs.

Long story short, I got pissed and said since you approved the design, let it run, or reimburse me design expenses.  I asked for a paltry $510 to cover the design fees (and domains) for the designs they approved and I can’t use now. They declined to let it run and later said (I have this recorded!) that they don’t feel they are responsible for the design fees even though they gave the approval. [UPDATE: At the point where I asked for approval, I had only spend $50 on the design.  The other expenses were having it coded as a wordpress theme and modified for Thesis.  The look/feel of the design did not change whatsoever, only difference was it went from Photoshop to a fully coded WP Thesis theme. The decision to have it coded up came AFTER Eleah approved the design.  Had she said the design wasn't approved, no biggie, eat the $50 and start from scratch using Eleah's feedback.  Since she approved the design and I moved forward, I felt that they should comp me for the additional expenses. This is no different than an AM telling you it's ok to run PPV and 2 months later, the merchant says it's not ok and wants to withhold 2 months of commissions... The network has a responsibility to cover it's mistake in both my situation and the PPV example.]

Before anyone starts down the “the merchant has the right…” path, let’s be clear that I agree 100% with what AKMG is saying  when they now communicate their merchant’s intentions. The problem is they communicated something totally different a lot earlier in this process and it ended up costing me.

I’m sure guys run with AKMG fine all the time, but if you’re new and looking for a quality network, AKMG sucks…

The real victim here is Oriel Wines.  I have the domains and the designs and the research and I’m going to push the heck out of these other offers, bumping out all the top Oriel SERPs.

UPDATE: I’m surprised I forgot to write what I was most angry about. My feelings were that if the merchant was pulling this indecisive crap this early in the relationship, I was concerned with the possibility they’d pull this sort of reversal later on, once they had $5K-10K in commissions payable to me. This is why I told AKMG that I was done with the offer and I didn’t trust the merchant or their NOOB internal staff.  I wasn’t gonna waste my time arguing with Oriel about keywords they didn’t have on their list, or approved keywords they later reconsidered, etc., and that’s EXACTLY where the situation would have landed had I ran traffic with AKMG.  It’s a network’s job to deal with the biz end of the merchant>network>affiliate relationship and I cannot see how AKMG could have failed more completely.

I’m at the point where I COULD go in an figure out just what the heck EPN’s problem is, but the reality is even if I DID know, they wouldn’t fix it NOR would they entertain any sort of negotiation for improving the payouts.

I’m just gonna say this once, if you’re presently making money from EPN, do yourself a favor and jump into something else. Abandon EPN completely. If you gamble on this one, you will get totally owned within the next 6 months.

My final EPN transaction will be driving traffic to my own product’s auction: the soapbox I just stepped off of.