Affiliate marketing - testing different methods

To follow my previous blog...

1.) creating a Clickbank account, very simple, just go to www.clickbank.com enter your details and you're away.

2.) create free website, I used www.weebly.com with this service you can set up 2 free sites which are very good for information only sites, simple to set up and no HTML skills needed (although helpful for embedding certain tracking codes/analytics etc.).

Get started by picking a product from Clickbank marketplace (at the top of the screen www.clickbank.com). To start you should choose a product with a reasonably high gravity (shows that she product sells or no-one else would market it!), something you either know a bit about or have a background in or even something very simple to sell (like free money!) would be a good place to start.

To make decent money lots of people say to pick a "niche" that no-one else is selling, while this may be true these "niches" can be a lot harder to find a market for so I personally started with something that would sell easily. The first sale will motivate you a lot, the sooner it comes the higher the motivation.

3.) Promote your site/product - I say product as you can do this by just by marketing your "hoplink" but you may find it difficult to get an ongoing income without a permanent base on the web.

I aim to test several promotion methods over a 7-day period per method, gaining analytics from the following week (giving 7-days for methods to take effect) and giving my results on this blog!

a.) posting to relevant forum questions (adding a link to your site either in the body of text or signature.
b.) link gaining
c.) search engine submission.
d.) search engine optimisation
e.) search engine submission post s.e.o.
f.) pay-per-click program - not sure if I will try this as goes against my original plans of spending any of my own money, however if I make significant amounts from a.) to e.) I may use this to see if this improves traffic levels and if so how much.

For each method I intend to record the analytics by using Google (www.google.com/analytics), this is a free service from Google, you need to register and imbed the HTML code into your site, this then records number of unique vistors, geographic location, source of referral and other detailed statistics such as time on page (seems inaccurate when I have used this) and number of pages visited.

I also aim to use www.clicktale.com another free service which again when embedded will give statistics on your site and an additional bonus of actually recording what your vistors get up to when on your site, will record 100 visits per week and shows exactly what the vistors click on, how long they stay and their journey through your site until they leave.

Finally I will note the vistor stats provided automatically from www.weebly.com and probably the most important of all, the number of people that actually click through from you site to your Clickbank hoplink.

This is recorded on www.clickbank.com under my account, reporting tab, then analytics, you can set the dates you want stats on under affiliate reporting, it will show how many visitors have clicked (and hopefully purchased!) from your hoplinks for the given period.

Because of the time it will take me to set up accurate recordings, and embedding of Clicktale and Google.com/analytics HTML source code I aim to start recordings Friday 24th to Friday 1st May. In the meantime I will decide exactly what stats I will record on a weekly basis. To make the reporting accurate and balanced I will spend 2 hours/night on each method of promotion.