As I read this article about Google’s new ad format on Techcrunch I got really excited about it. Google says

We’re currently running a small experiment of a new ad format that helps users sign up more easily for email subscriptions or other free newsletters. This new ad format contains a box within the ad that displays a user’s Google email address (if logged in). If a user chooses to click ‘Subscribe to newsletter’ then the email address is sent to the advertiser directly, which is clearly disclosed within the ad itself.

See the ads in Action. Images credit TechCrunch.

And when you are subscribed you see

Thank you Google, what a great way to start The New Year! I am really excited to get those ads rolled out to my Adwords account. I think you should also start using AWeber now for your blog.

For those who are not aware about what AWeber can do for your blog, read my AWeber review

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Multinational companies even don’t understand the concept of Email spam and send emails which are actually spam. Let me first clarify what is an email spam with an example?

Yesterday I got an email from TimesJobs.com – A Job portal where I registered few years back.

See the email I received from them. Click on image to view the complete Email.

Taking few points from the CAN-SPAM Act (PDF Link), all email messages must:

• Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future emails (unsubscribe).
• Tell recipients where you’re located i.e. a valid physical postal address.

Email from Timesjobs has neither. They don’t have their physical postal address nor offer any unsubscribe link in the email and so according to CAN SPAM Act this is spam.

Yes I do agree that I registered at Timesjobs.com but that does not allow them to spam me for the rest of my life? Priorities changes for user. I am not looking for jobs and on the flip side I am looking to hire people.

If I remember correctly I was not looking for a job switch even in 2006-2007 when I joined my so called last job. I have not logged on to any job site for years and still get emails from majority of the job sites because I registered with them few years back.

Getting on the other side of the table

As a business I prefer AWeber which apart from handling all those issues of being compliance with CAN SPAM Act can allow you to have list of inactive users i.e. users who have no activities for some months / years. You can create segment users who are inactive.

Notify them that due to inactivity for such a long period their emails are being deleted. You will see more unsubscribe from these segment of users but users like me who don’t have the time to open those emails can safely be removed from your list to create more active and responsive list of users.

So are you sending spam Emails unknowingly?

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2. Stop vBulletin Spam Part II
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Online Reputation management is a very common term used by SEO experts these days and so I am going to give you real live example to help you not only understand online reputation management but also enhance your online reputation.

What is Online Reputation?

When you search in Google for the term Apple, as expected you see everything about the Apple Inc and nothing about the Apple as fruit.

Couple points to notice in the screenshot above.

1. Apple beats Wikipedia for the term Apple.
2. Apple Inc page of Wikipedia beats the Apple page of Wikipedia

Online Reputation Management

The goal of online reputation management is to suppress the negative mentions (or other mentions) by pushing them lower on search engine results pages and push positive mentions higher on search engine results page to decrease the negative visibility of the person, company, business or brand.

Now the same reputation management effect is happening to my Sharekhan PMS Review.

I rank pretty well in Google for the term – Sharekhan PMS review.

But I was pretty much in the first 3 results even for the term Sharekhan PMS but over time my article is being pushed down. Currently is on 9th spot. I don’t care much but the ranking for the term Sharekhan PMS but this is how you should be working on getting your online reputation managed. Well done Sharekhan.

How to Manage Online Reputation?

The answer to the question how I am being pushed down the search engine results page will help understand how you can manage your online reputation.

1. I am seeing lot of one page websites are being created. Domains like www.sharekhan-<keyword>.com. Just to mention few domains –  http://www.sharekhan-india.com/, http://www.sharekhan-pms.com/, http://www.sharekhan-tradetiger.com/, http://www.sharekhan-firststep.com/ …
2. Those domains are not hosted on the same server as the main site but mainly on different shared hosts. Different IPs and different hosts. You can even make whois private if you want. Note: Sharekhan uses BlueHost which is one of my recommended shared hosts as well. See iPage Review.
3. Apart from secondary domains some sub-domains are also created to boost the number of results in the search engine results page. Have some sub-domains for your site that makes sense.
4. Build links to positive reviews that are ranked in search engines but not very highly ranked. Find positive reviews that are on second or third page of search engine results page and try building links to those sites to boost their ranking higher to improve your online reputation.
5. Create keyword rich content for the authority website in the niche. This content can rank well in Google almost instantly because of the authority of the website.

Do you know of other ways to improve online reputation? Please share them in the comments.

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I sent out greetings for Eid-ul-Fitr (31st August 2011) to my blog readers, family members, friends and online friends using multiple methods. For family members I used phone and sms. For friends it was through the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. For blog readers it was through email.

The response to the greetings reveals an astonishing fact. Email Marketing Crushes Social Media Marketing by a huge margin. Facebook saw quite a few responses and it was highest among social media platforms but I expected lot more responses on social media platform especially Facebook because it is where everybody interacts and share greetings these days.

The greetings Email I sent out to my email list, received thousands of replies and best wishes.

My email list is of course few times larger than my social media following but mathematically email list generated 250% more responses than social media.

So Stop Promoting Social Media Profiles, and focus on growing your Email List. This is one of the main reason I have my email signup form in much more prominent position on my both blogs than the social media profiles. You can still link to your social media profiles from somewhere but at it is always the email signup form that should have the most prominent position.

You can start growing your email list now. You’ll need a reliable email service provider. I use and recommend Aweber because it is very easy to use and is loaded with tons of features (See here). (Note, if you’re using Feedburner by email, you’re missing out real power of email marketing. See here)

Email marketing is very powerful if you do it the RIGHT way.  You should also focus on social media marketing but not at the cost of email marketing? I’d like to hear your thoughts on the same.

More Related Posts:

1. What is actually Social Media Marketing?
2. How to Track Social Media Traffic in Google Analytics
3. All you need to know about Effective Email Marketing

Many readers ask me if I have any Google Adwords coupons. Let me share how anybody can get as many Adwords coupons as you want.

Signup for new account at Google Adwords with new email address and phone number. Google will review your request and send you a coupon via email within a couple of hours after you signup.

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/adwordscoupon/

If you have any issues do post them in comments below and I will be more than happy to help to the extent I can but also understand the decision to give you an Adwords coupons lies with Google only.

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2. How to Link Multiple Adwords Account in Google Analytics?
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Thousands of webmaster’s try affiliate marketing every year and only small percentage of them make enough to quit their job or significantly change their lifestyle. What could be the reason for so many people trying to get into affiliate marketing but could not make a major impact?

Is it something to do with competition? I don’t think so.

Let me share what I found the reason for failure among many affiliate marketers and webmasters.

1. Dedication

Dedication is one of the most common things missing among the new affiliate marketers. Let’s take an example of Sachin Tendulkar once again. You are not trying to be as great as Sachin Tendulkar but let us say you just want to make a living playing cricket, do you think you could just go out hit balls a few times a week and expect to be a pro?

Author Malcolm Gladwell, who studied exceptionally talented and successful people of the world, in his book Outliers, wrote that to be in the top tier of any endeavour requires incredible dedication and they have put in at least 10,000 hours of work over the years of time.

To be a successful affiliate I am sure you will not need 10,000 hours but you will surely need the same kind of dedication to be the better affiliate. I have seen many people start an Internet Marketing training system, read it and get really excited and then either don’t actually follow the system till the end or just do it for a week or two and give up.

Let me share some numbers here of my free e-Course on how to make money online. I see people start with great enthusiasm but in a 10 days time many even don’t care about opening the email.

There can be two reasons for the opening rate of emails going down. Either the content of the email is not what they expect or they lost the interest. From the emails and feedback I get it is more to do with later. After few chapters I get emails and as I interact with them they tell me that they’ve been doing what I am suggesting for months but with no success and even point out the flaw in the products I recommend. In reply I ask only two questions whose answer I know will be “Not many or not much”.

1. How many articles have you written for the months you are working on it?
2. How many backlinks have you actively build for your site over the past few months?

By answering not many they themselves answered their own question of why things are not working for them because no matter what product and system you are following, as a webmaster you should be able to generate solid content and good quality links to your site. Isn’t it?

Getting to cricket as an example, if you plan to make cricket as your career and if your coach instructed to practice for 8 hours a day but if you are just doing just for an hour a day, can you blame the cricket as a career or even your coach for that?

2. Invest in Education

I see many people look for most of the things for free when it comes to online and I am sure you will find lot very good stuff for free but what if someone has bundled the same free stuff for you in one place and asking some small bucks for doing that. It can save lot of time searching each of them. Isn’t it?

Successful people invest lot of their time and money in the business and then spend what is left over but I have seen many others go the other way round. They spend vast majority of their time and money on other things in life and invest what is left in their online business.

Make sure you are investing in your education and empowering your business. Learn from other successful people and try to avoid working alone or even listen to people who can have a negative influence on you. If you cannot network with people face to face, try to learn as much as possible through books, DVDs etc. Recently I reviewed Job Crusher program and it is one such programs that can help you build your expertise in internet marketing as well as help you network with many more successful webmasters online.

In the process of educating yourself you can have failures and successful affiliates enjoy the process of learning, even when they’re learning from their failures and appreciate the experience of failing in order to learn and grow. You can see how I handled failures when I started online in 2004.

3. Embrace the Competition

As an affiliate marketer you should understand that affiliate marketing means competition. You are not alone in the niche and you will never be alone even if you start alone. You can look for small and unique niche to begin testing affiliate marketing but  in the long run to make more and more money online, you need to get into major niches i.e. health, wealth and relationship. Learn from the small niche and plunge into the competition.

Remember Affiliate Marketing  is one of the easiest way to make money online if done the right way. Share your experience and view about affiliate marketing in comments below.

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2. Affiliate Marketing – Easiest way to Make Money Online
3. 5 Tips to become a better Affiliate

What is Revresponse?

RevResponse is an ad network that pays you for generating leads using your website, blog, newsletters and even mailing lists. You refer a user to sign-up for the free content or magazine and RevResponse pays you commission on every qualified subscription. There are many other affiliate networks that do the same only for US users but Revresponse accepts international traffic.

1. Pays for Lead

Revresponse pays you for leads (i.e. free signups) and so your users don’t need to buy anything for you to be getting paid. It means better conversions. Payout per signup is in range of $1.50 to $20.00 per action.

2. Payments

Revresponse offers PayPal as the payment method with minimum payout level as $50. Payment is on a net-45 payment model, i.e. money will be sent approximately 45 days after the end of the month where a publisher crosses the minimum payout level.

3. Co-branded site integration

Like any other Affiliate network, Revresponse also offers normal banners and links but they also offer a Co-branded site that you can integrate and design like your own site. See this or this

4. Wide range of offers

Revresponse not only accepts international publishers but also offers wide range of products and offers ranging from Agriculture to manufacturing to Energy services and lots more.

5. Referral Program

The referral program pays 20% of the earnings that a publisher generates for the first six months. (Signup as my referral here) 20% is really good cut but there are very few publishers who would generate considerable income in the first 6 months. Ideally I would like to have lower percentage say 10% or so of publisher earnings for lifetime.

6. Can promote without a website

This is a big advantage of Revresponse over other ad networks. You don’t even need to have a website to be promoting their offers. You can even monetize your email newsletters, 3rd party lists, blogs, RSS feeds, your Facebook friends and lot more…

7. Offers

There are no clear cut guidelines as to what a valid lead is and what is not. Lead Qualification criteria are determined by the magazine owners, and are not very transparent to publishers. Reports reveal very little information as to why leads get rejected. Go4Expert saw 98% rejection.

And you can see that most of the offers were much related to Go4Expert audience i.e. technical.

Offer listing doesn’t reveal any helpful information either.

And many a times, magazines become unavailable without any notice to the publishers.

Final Thoughts

Success with Revresponse depends largely on the fact that there are offers that fits your niche. I think it would be worth trying Revresponse because they don’t need a banner space at all and you can even test them on certain specific pages of your site like a thanks page. Just after user register’s you can offer your user some free magazines. That is where I saw maximum leads were submitted for Go4Expert. If you see your leads are being accepted by the magazine owners, you can continue using them.

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Clickbank does not allow you to have different sales page for your affiliates especially the super affiliates. I wanted to have a different sales page for some of my super affiliates and so created this plugin. I have gone through the Clickbank terms and condition where I did not found anything that is against this plugin provided you redirect users to new sales page which follows Clickbank’s sales page guidelines.

If you would like to get started with Clickbank check out Step By Step Guide to Start Selling With Clickbank

Installation

1. Download the Zip file. Extract the php file inside it and Upload the file at wp-content/plugins.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. Open the plugin configuration page, which is located under Settings -> Clickbank Multi Sales page and enter the Redirection URLs one affiliate per line in the form of affiliateid|URL.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get the affiliate id of my affiliates?

There are multiple ways to get the affiliate id of your affiliates.

1. Ask them. You can ask your super affiliates what is their Clickbank id so you can customize sales page for them.
2. Use your clickbank reports to know who your super affiliates are? Offer them a custom sales page.

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2. Step By Step Guide to Start Selling With Clickbank
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Yesterday 30th March 2011 India Vs Pakistan match was termed as one of the biggest match of the century and the result of the match was inline with what was expected by every Indian but there is lot more to be learnt from that match especially marketing policy of ICC.

Every news channel almost said one thing. This match could be most watched match ever with a TRP (Television viewer-ship rating point) of 40 beating the yet another India-Pakistan world cup encounter in 2003 which had a TRP rating of 32.45.

Phew!!!

If you are not sure how good the number 40 is just compare it with the India Australia quarter final match which was also termed as one of the biggest match of 2011 world cup and had a TRP of 6.53.

Now what is the biggest marketing lesson from the match.

Scarcity

India Pakistan Matches are not played very often and that too on Indian soil. ICC (read BCCI) made sure that India plays all their matches in India because India is ranked 2 in ICC world ranking and so any other Asian country if qualifies for the Quarter final or semi final will play a match in India.

In World cup ICC makes every attempt to keep India and Pakistan in separate groups. This makes India Pakistan encounters less in World Cup. Yet another way to make it scarce. If there is a match between the two nation it is always in the knock out stages and India has managed to knock Pakistan out of the World cup every time.

How to apply the same to your own product?

I am sure you now have the question as to how you can apply the same marketing principle of India and Pakistan Match for your own product. 

The way to make the item scarce is to limit the numbers.

• If you selling a physical product you can have a time limit before the price of the product goes higher.
• If you are selling a digital product you can have limited no of seats or downloads available for people at a particular price point before the price goes higher.

Share your thoughts in comments below.

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Affiliate links comes with many inherent issues and some of the major issues are

1. Affiliate links are not user friendly

My Clickbank affiliate link looks something like http://943abcf7xdqjjx1d4yy-2k5obd.hop.clickbank.net/ or http://sbhimani.npclass.hop.clickbank.net. Encrypted link are not user friendly and links with usernames can be manipulated very easily.

2. Affiliate links are Redirects

All affiliates links are redirects to the sales page of the vendor. It means you cannot do much on for SEO nor you can run Google Adwords text ads very effectively. The reason I say very effectively is because Adwords Text Ad requires final destination URL to be displayed in an ad and many a times people try to do you a favor by typing the URL instead of clicking it thinking clicking on an ad can cost you money but in reality they saved you few cents at the cost of a big affiliate commission.

Setting up a domain prevents all of the above problems. In fact, now you want people to type the domain name instead of clicking on the an ad to not only save you from PPC cents but also get affiliate commissions.

How to cloak domain in Godaddy

I use Godaddy for domains and so I will share first how to get the domain cloaking done in Godaddy. Godaddy provides free domain forwarding options for your domains.

Select domain forwarding with masking to forward your domain to your affiliate landing page. You can add a title for the page, meta keyword and meta description to your domain name. See my example IMakeMoneyOn.net. Unless you know, it’s almost impossible to tell if a domain is just a normal site or a cloaked affiliate landing page.

How to cloak domain with HTML

What if your host does not allow domain forwarding like GoDaddy? Don’t worry. You can still do the same with few lines of HTML code.

<html>
<head>
  <title>PAGE_TITLE</title>
  <meta name="description" content="META_DESCRIPTION">
  <meta name="keywords" content="META_KEYWORDS">
</head>
<frameset rows="100%,*" border="0">
  <frame src="YOUR_AFFILIATE_URL" frameborder="0" />
  <frame frameborder="0" noresize />
</frameset>
</html>

Use the above HTML to create an index page for your domain.

Issues with cloaking

Cloaking domains are not completely white-hat. They are ideal for Clickbank products because most of the advertisers won’t have any issue with you using your own domain name but if you try to create a domain name for well known brands, you can be in trouble. So before applying the above method make sure you have the permission from the advertiser.

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A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words and this speaks about 200 USD. Click on image to enlarge.

When I planned to sale my Book – Understanding Chart Pattern in Clickbank the only question I had in my mind was will Indian user’s purchase my ebook if they see a price in USD. Assuming they will not I always wanted to opt for Indian payment gateway. I tried many payment gateways and was not very convinced with the quality of the service. Finally decided to go with Clickbank and within one month I have my first Clickbank check in my hand waiting to be deposited into my bank account.

Share your Clickbank success story.

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If you are planning to integrate Clickbank (See how to get started selling with Clickbank here) with AWeber (what is AWeber here) the first thing you should look for is AWeber recommended way of doing it. AWeber blog tells you how to integrate AWeber with Clickbank but the official way of AWeber comes with lot of inherent issues.

Option 1 from the above link i.e. Integrate with Clickbank Using the Email Parser – It has the disadvantage that Clickbank only permits one email address to be specified as notification in each account. This means if you use AWeber email address to get the subscriber’s added into the list then it can result in you not receiving other important emails from Clickbank. According to me this is not at all an option.

Option 2 from the above link i.e. Integrate with Clickbank Using an Opt-In Form – It has an inherent disadvantage that user will need to enter his name and email again into the AWeber forms. I don’t want my user to be doing that un-necessarily.

So I have come up with a new way of integrating AWeber with Clickbank without missing an email from Clickbank and also making sure user don’t need to enter the same details again and again.

This integration includes very simple programming but if you have any issues you can post in comments and I will be more than happy to help or else you can even hire me at Elance to get this done for you.

Clickbank

The first step is setting your intermediate thank you page in Clickbank. Enter any URL. This is not your final thanks page but an intermediate thanks page which will redirect to the final thank you page once we process the data and subscribe user to AWeber list.

AWeber

Once we have our Clickbank product setup done we will move to AWeber interface to generate a web form.

There are few things to consider when generating an AWeber web form.

1. Make sure you generate an inline AWeber web form.
2. In step 2 of your AWeber Web form Generator, enter the final thanks page URL. This is the page which complies with the Clickbank’s thanks page requirement (See Clickbank’s thanks page requirements here). See my settings in AWeber
   
3. Once you save your web form and grab the Raw HTML code for your form. Un-check Include beautiful form styles before grabbing the HTML code for your form to minimize the HTML code.

Grab User Details

Once we have the inline AWeber html code for web form we create the thanks.php file and grab the user details that Clickbank pass to our thanks page in PHP.

$cb_cname=$_REQUEST['cname'];
$cb_cemail=$_REQUEST['cemail'];

Edit HTML

Edit the form HTML to add form name. Add the following to your form HTML

name="aweberfrm" id="aweberfrm"

If you have AWeber to submit form in a new window you will also find

target="_new"

Remove it and so final form HTML line should look like this.

<form method="post" name="aweberfrm" id="aweberfrm" action="http://www.aweber.com/scripts/addlead.pl"  >

The next thing you should be doing is add the name and email field automatically you received from Clickbank. So in the name and email field we add the values from the PHP variables.

<input type="text" name="name" value="<?php echo $cb_cname ?>" />
<input type="text" name="email" value="<?php echo $cb_cemail ?>"  />

Remove the submit button from the HTML code because we will submit the form automatically so user don’t need to be doing anything. I.e. Remove the line that contains input type=”submit”. Submit button’s final HTML code can have slight variations but for me it was

<input name="submit" type="submit" value="Submit" tabindex="502" />

Remember if you don’t remove the submit button code the auto submission will not work. Once you have removed the submit button code, add the following JavaScript code at the end.

<script type="text/javascript">
document.forms['aweberfrm'].submit();
</script>

It automatically submits the HTML form data to AWeber by grabbing the Clickbank data and then AWeber will redirect user to your thank you page.

The sample I have shown here is using PHP but this can be easily extended to ASP or JSP.

I know this involves a bit of programming. If you have any issues post your queries in comments and I will be more than happy to help. If you are not sure you can get all this done by me.

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3. Clickbank Multiple Sales Page

Recently I launched my first paid eBook in finance and I preferred Clickbank because of its ease of use as an e-commerce platform. On top of that it is one of the top preferred website by affiliates. My aim is not to use Affiliates to that extent but I don’t mind if I get few extra sales.

As this is my first product I was doing lot of reading about what I should be using and though I found the help of Clickbank useful, it was too much in lot of places and so let me put all things in one place and write a step by step process to get your first product live in Clickbank.

First you will need to have a ClickBank vendor account. If you have an affiliate account you can use the same account but if you don’t have an account with Clickbank, get one now using my affiliate link here or direct link here. Account is free and there is nothing you need to pay upfront to start selling. You only pay once your product is approved for selling in Clickbank. The only requirement to have an account is your own top level domain name. Clickbank does not allow you to use sub-domains on another site, such as blogspot.com or wordpress.com. If you don’t have your own domain and hosting you can look for some of the best cheap shared hosting article and get one now.

Once you have your account ready you will need to have a product which you want to be selling. Clickbank accepts the following type of products

• Audio
• EBook
• Games
• Membership Site
• Software
• Video

Once your product is ready all you need to start selling through Clickbank is a sales page and a thank you page. The complete information about what should be in a sales page and thank you page can be found here but still I will mention some of the key points that will help you move things faster.

1. Sales Page

The Sales Page or Pitch Page should describe your product to visitors to convert them into potential customers. Clickbank has some minimum requirements about the sales page.

• Detail description of the product.
• Cost of the product and if product is recurring billing, the re-bill schedule.
• The file format of your product, as well as any pre-requisite software required. For eBooks normally it is an Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Method of deliver of your product like a direct download link or through email and the time frame when the product will be delivered.
• A prominent contact link or email address
• Last but by no means least – the payment link to buy the product which is of the form http://ITEM_NUMBER.VENDOR.pay.clickbank.net. VENDOR is your Clickbank username and ITEM_NUMBER I will explain later when we add the product itself.

2. Thank you Page

After you have your sales page the next step is to create the thank you page. Thank you page is something where you instruct the user on how to get the product he just paid for and what to expect from the product. You can also add how to use the product more effectively as well as suggest few more recommended products.

Clickbank needs some vital piece of information to be on the thanks page.

1. Customers must be able to reach you very easily and so a prominent contact link or an email address.
2. Remind customer that his or her credit card or bank statement will show a charge by CLKBANK*COM.

Once you have completed both sales and thanks page the next step is to upload your product details in Clickbank.

Login to your Clickbank account and visit Account Settings > My Site.

See if you have your site details configured correctly. Make sure you update affiliate commission percentage you are willing to pay to your affiliates in the Marketplace Information.

If you see something not right for your product, edit now to get it right. If you are not sure about getting the description right it does not matter because you can edit it later. Make sure you have the category selected as right because it is something you cannot edit later. Target URL is editable even after the product is approved but not category.

3. Product Details

Once you have your site data in your Clickbank account the next step is to add your product. Login to your Clickbank account and visit Account Settings > My Products and add your new product.

Your thanks page and price are the two fields which you need to enter into your product details.

The item number is the field ITEM_NUMBER used for the payment link (explained above). For my eBook the payment link becomes http://1.sbhimani.pay.clickbank.net/. Thanks page URL is the page we created above.

Remember Clickbank charges fees of 7.5% +$1 per transaction and so make sure you price your product accordingly.

Now once your product is added it is not yet submitted for approval and you have to complete one last step before you submit your product for approval – i.e. a test sale.

4. Test Sale

Visit Account Settings > My Site and scroll to the bottom where you see Testing your product. Generate a test credit card. Once you have the credit card. Visit your sales page and click on the payment link. Test credit card details only have card number and expiry and so email and name can be anything but use the real email address so you get the notification of the test sale correctly.

Once your test sale is complete you should end up on your thanks page and you should be able to download the product you tested for.

5. Submit Product

You are now ready to submit the product for approval. Clickbank suggest waiting for 3-5 business days for it to get approved but normally if you have completed all steps correctly it should get done by next business day.

Once your product is approved this is when you need to pay a one-time $49.95 activation charge to Clickbank for listing your product. Remember Clickbank balance cannot be used to pay the fees but they do accept PayPal as a payment method.

Clickbank Fees

If you are using you should know all the fees Clickbank will charge to get your money into your bank account.

• $49.95 as product activation fees.
• $2.50 pay period processing charge for every payment that ClickBank issues to you
• Each sale commission is 7.5% plus $1.

Refer Fees for more details on Clickbank charges.

What we have done till now is the minimum we need to get the product listed in Clickbank and start selling but there are few additional recommended things you should be doing.

6. Have An Affiliates Page

You can have ready made resources for your Affiliates to use like Banners and other content like reviews and email body. Once you have your affiliates resource done you can add them into a page on your website and specify the URL in Clickbank.

Visit Account Settings > My Spotlight and under the My Spotlight Profile Add the Affiliate Tools URL. Adding Affiliate resources will add an extra icon () to your Marketplace listing.

7. HopAds

Clickbank recommends that every ClickBank vendor should create HopAds for their product(s), because without any extra effort and cost you can potentially gain lots of extra sales from other affiliates. HopAds are displayed on other affiliates Web sites as part of contextual HopAds program.

Visit Account Settings > My Ads and create your ad. You only need to specify Headline, Description and Keywords for your product and it starts running on affiliate’s website.

I hope I have not missed anything and I am sure it will help all new to Clickbank with information that can impact their success in Clickbank. Share your views in comments below.

To really get a strong lift in your online presence, you may consider working with a web agency.

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I was shocked to get this email from Adwords for a small test campaign I started for IMTips.co.

Hello Shabbir,

Thank you for your email. I understand that you have questions regarding the status of your site ‘imtips.co.’ I can confirm that your site has been flagged for Unacceptable Business Practices and was consequently disabled.

In response to multiple complaints received from users and publishers about this category of ads, our policies no longer allow sites that promote low-quality affiliate advertisements, the sale of free items, and other business models about which we have received multiple complaints. At this time, it is Google’s policy to not accept ads that make unverifiable, misleading claims about income opportunities for low risk and minimal effort.

I recommend that you modify your site so that it more realistically and accurately conveys the benefits of your product. Be transparent to users about any risks involved in using your product.

If you have made changes to your site and would like to submit a site re-enabling request, please respond to this email outlining the reasons supporting your case.

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter and I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,

Sindhu
The Google AdWords Team

Not sure if it was a humanly email or an automated but I see 4 reasons for it to be an automated one.

1. Low-quality affiliate advertisements

I am not sure what Google considers high quality affiliate advertisements, may be affiliates by connect commerce aka Google Affiliate networks are only good for Adwords.

2. Sale of free items

Not sure if I could understand the English here – Either an item can be free or it can be for sale.

3. Misleading claims about income opportunities

I wanted to know where they found such information at IMTips and I emailed them. I was shocked when I saw the reply. If you have Affiliate as a keyword on the landing page it can cause such problem. I was even advice to remove the keyword Affiliate in the landing page if I wanted to use Adwords.

This is something as shocking to me.

You are fine if I modify few keywords on the landing page and this means cheap sites that don’t care about changing category name are fine with Google Adwords program but not genuine sites and blogs like IMTips.

4. Be transparent to users

I think I am more transparent than the Adwords team themselves. At least I think that way.

Looking at the reasoning I definitely think it is an automated email.

Share your Adwords issues in comments below.

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If you have decided to use the power of opt-in email based marketing campaigns to grow your business and increase your profits, you will definitely want to consider send out email newsletters. To be effective, there are some things that every newsletter publisher should know. The following 10 email newsletter design tips are important and should be considered when you are setting up your marketing campaign.

1. Consistency and Timing are Key: If you are going to communicate with your potential or current clients via email newsletters, it is very important that you do it on a schedule or as close to a schedule as possible. For example, consider sending your newsletter on Thursday afternoon because people don’t want to be bombarded on Monday or Friday and on Thursday afternoon they start looking for distractions from work for a few minutes.
2. Proofread: Always proofread your marketing materials, especially email newsletters. If you are not a native speaker, get someone else to write the content if necessary. If you send out an email newsletter with bad spelling, grammar or language usage, you will find yourself losing potential clients quickly.
3. Use Fresh Content: If you can’t take the time to write content for your newsletter, it would be better not to send it. If you send people the same content they see in other places, they will lose faith in your expertise about your subject matter. There are many places where you can find writers to produce new content for you and it’s less expensive than you might expect.
4. Use Personalization When Possible: If you can address the newsletter specifically to the recipient, it will help you to build a relationship with them. Not every piece of content should be written in the first person perspective, but at least a hi should be included.
5. Have a Test Audience: Let someone, anyone, read the newsletter before it is sent. This will help you to make sure the information is well presented and that it will be well-received by your audience. Try to find readers who can relate with your target audience.
6. Use First Person When You Can: Using a first person perspective enables you to talk directly to the audience. Give snippets of your experience and tell the reader why you are a recognised expert in your field.
7. Don’t Overload with Ads: If you send a newsletter, it is important that any ads you include are not obtrusive. Keep ads to a minimum. Many affiliate marketers lost their lead lists due to spam blockers when they loaded their newsletters and emails with links and ads. Learn from their example and keep advertising for outsiders and yourself to a minimum.
8. Offer a Text Only Version: Many people still do not use html based email. If you are going to send out a newsletter via email, send it in plain text unless there is an option to subscribe to an html version. If you want to give everyone access to html formatted content, give them a link to your website instead.
9. Ask Your Readers for Comments and Content: Any time you are able to include content written by your readers, you are actually appealing to your other readers to stay in contact with you. A testimonial is word of mouth advertising that is not in the form of an ad. This is a great tool. Get actual testimonials, however. Fake testimonials are very obvious.
10. Incorporate Social Networking: Whenever possible, give links to your twitter and Facebook pages. If you don’t have these, get them! You must begin to publish your email newsletters on Facebook if you want to keep the attention of your audience. Today, there is a move away from email and toward social media websites like these. It is where people are meeting to discuss products, services and hot topics. You can’t afford not to include this information in your newsletters.

Using these ten hot tips for email newsletters, you will be on your way to more successful and productive marketing campaigns. You can get more leads when a high quality newsletter is passed from one reader to a few new readers each time it is sent out. Always send high quality newsletters and you will see an immediate return on your time and investment.

Contributed by James Adams, one of a team of writers working at CartridgeSave.co.uk as a product reviewer and blogger. Recently he has been writing reviews of new consumables for Epson printers and other brands.

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