One problem marketeers face every day I can only describe as user evolution. People learn quickly and consequently stop falling for the common marketing tricks webmasters have in place for them. Take popups for example. Believe it or not back in the days they were used not only to annoy the crap out of your visitors but also to make money. How many of you even look at the popups these day when you are unfortunate enough to come across one? A quick hand reflex sends the mouse pointer flying to the little red x before you even get the chance to move your eyes.

Let me tell you a little story about a classic marketing technique. Lets say you have a mailing list of people interested in some rather interesting new software you have developed. You shoot them an email on the day you launch offering this marvelous piece of software for $100. Some of them will buy it but what about those who don’t? You wait for a week and ask them again but this time lower the price to lets say $50. This method is very effective… in the short run. In the long run however people will realize what you are doing and in their turn refrain from buying your product until you send them a second chance offer with 50% discount.

So when are you more likely to bump into a not so evolved user? Offline! You will be surprised how many old online marketing tricks will work a treat offline. Internet is flooded with free this and free that offers. In real world on the other hand things are much less saturated. Lets generate some leads! First of all we need to find a suitable CPA offer. I logged into affiliate.com and found a £150 free Tesco gift card offer which pays $1.15 per email submit (Because I am in UK). I then bought an easy to remember domain name similar to freetescovoucher.com and redirected it to my affiliate link. Finally I went and through some local magazines and newspapers and contacted them asking for a quote. A few days later my ad was up. It was a small square similar to this one

that people could cut out. (Please note that I am using an example from the top of my head which was similar to my campaign. I really don’t want hundreds of  people going out there and doing exactly the same thing. Think everything through before you do something similar. Make sure you can legally print tokens containing brand names or logos. Also, the last thing you want is people cutting out your tokens and going to the actual company, asking to redeem them.) My ad was running for a week. The conversion rate has been phenominal! I can’t post the exact figures but I can say that this campaign worked out at around 5 to 1 ROI. Are there any more tricks you can use? There certainly are!

Try searching on Google for “30 minute backlinks” or “seo elite” or any other popular product. Look at the sponsored search ads. What do you see? “Don’t buy seo elite”, “seo elite is a scam”, “30 minute backlinks scam”, “30 minute backlinks a waste of money” etc. Try visiting one of these sites. Can you see it now? They are not trying to stop you from buying the product. In fact they are trying to sell you the product… by telling you it’s a scam? Believe it or not some of these people make $30.000/month+ on pretty much auto pilot.

Here is how they do it:

You go on clickbank (Or any other affiliate website for that matter) and pick a raising product. With Clickbank you can use gravity as in indicator. 50 and bellow will do. The trick is to spot the right product at the right time. It needs to be popular enough but not too popular because you will end up with a whole bunch of competitors.

You then set up a PPC campaign for the products name eg. “something is a scam”. Set up a “squeeze” page for your traffic to land on with a sole purpose sell that particular product. I suggest you buy the product yourself and have a play with it so that you could write a good looking review. Sit back and get rich.

How it works:

You hear about a great product and you decide to buy it. You go on and search for it on Google. Suddenly, as you are about to buy that product you see an ad that says: “The product you are looking to buy is a scam!”. I can guarantee you almost every single person will click to investigate further. Then it turns out that the product does actually work and it is not a scam. Most people will get pissed off and leave. Around 15% of those who stay will follow through to buy the product. Do the maths. You spend $500 on 1000 $0.50 clicks. You will get around 150 conversions. 150 x $20 = $3000. You have just made $2500.

PS: There is no such thing as easy money. Yes, people make a living using this method but these people know what they are doing. They have experience with PPC and marketing. They spend a lot of time finding the right product, writing a spotless landing page and setting up their PPC campaigns. Don’t just expect to get rich. Experiment! Good luck!

PPS: Think about other products. “Nokia n95 sucks?”. I have made just under $400 with my first, a few hour long test campaign.

Ahhh the power of viral marketing. A successful viral marketing campaign can make you a millionaire overnight. I will not be talking about creating viral material however. Quite frankly if i was any good at that i doubt i would have been here writing this blog post right now. However, what i am good at is generating traffic from somebody else’s viral material.

You will need to be quick and you will need to be able to spot great material before it goes viral. Lets talk about viral videos for example. If a video posted on YouTube does extremely well and generates a lot of views you can assume that it will also do well on sites like Digg and Videosift. If another video appears on Google videos movers and shakers list we can assume it is a sign of a “shooting star” video that people are interested in it. Why would this video not do well on other sites?

What i have been doing for a number of projects i worked on, was taking that middle man position. I would take viral material from one person and show it to others via my own domain. The reason i decided to use videos as an example is because in most cases you don’t have to worry about copyrights, videos are easy to embed into your website and finally there is an existing market/infrastructure for entertaining videos.

You need an eye for such material. This will require quite a bit of practice and research. You will need to know what works and what does not. See what videos make it to the front page of videosift for example. See if you can notice any trends. Then try and spot such material on other sites such as YouTube and intercept it before someone else submits it to Digg.

Using this method i was able to hit front pages of huge websites day after day, generating huge streams of traffic. My domains would jump to PR6/7 like there is no tomorrow. And the best of all, this method will bring you huge long term benefits in the way any sort of linkbait would.

PS: I’m sorry if this post was slightly vague or lacked step by step instructions. Its just this method appeared in one of my Ebooks and me going any deeper into this subject would not be fair to those who have purchased that Ebook.
PPS: Oh and this Ebook is no longer for sale either.

Affiliate marketing is not easy money as you probably know. You need to have the right flow of the right people to buy the right product. Even when all 3 are just right you can still struggle to sell because you can’t get your visitor to switch into the buying mood. When the person does not want to buy a product any attempt to sell will only drive them away. When the person is in buying mood however you can even sell them 3 products in the raw. It has been proven that one of the best times to sell someone a product is straight after their first purchase, while you customer is still in the buying mode, with his/her credit card out.

So what if you already had a customer looking to buy one product or another? All you had to do was to find that product for them. Seems to good to be true? Not at all! I introduce you to Yahoo answers. What you do is simply scan for the right question. For example: “What spyware cleaner should i buy?”. That person has a problem and needs a solution. In this case he wants to buy a spyware cleaner. What you do is jump into your clickbank quickly. Go to marketplace and find a nice spyware cleaner. Create your hoplink and answer the guy’s question: “Hey! Here is a very good spyware cleaner i use -link-. Never had a problem with it. bla bla bla”. Then go and find some more questions. You will usually be able to find a nice product for most questions.

Think quality rather than quantity. Take your time to write a natural looking answer that does not look like a sales pitch. It is a good idea to cloak your affiliate links too. You can create a quick blog on blogger and then use the following code in your template to redirect people to your affiliate link: < meta HTTP-EQUIV="REFRESH" content="0; url=http://ww w.youraffiliatelink.com">. Now you can use your blogger url as your referral url in Yahoo answers.