Hi Guys,

I had a couple of people recommend that I test out MSN’s new Online Commercial Intention tool, www.affilorama.com/oci, so I thought I’d check to see if the recommendations that it gives are accurate.

In fact I’ve heard that a large number of you are using this tool, that’s why I thought it was important that someone like me who has a LOT of data to test it with, had a look to see what’s really going on. Here’s my review.

What is this tool, first of all?

The tool is located at: http://www.affilorama.com/oci

When you click on the ‘query’ radio button, you can enter a query in the search box above it.

Then what the tool does is gives you a number between 0 and 1, which shows the probability that the searcher is searching with commercial intent (ie, they are thinking about buying something, rather than just browsing for free information).

Over the last few years, I’ve collected a LOT of accurate data about which keywords are profitable and which ones aren’t. Here’s a screenshot of one of my google adwords accounts just so you can see the level of spending I’m talking about:

At first I started playing around with a few dog training keywords and then I looked at some others across different markets, time and time again this tool proves to be accurate about 75-80% of the time.

Yes it does some silly things, like the word "free" it ranks as 0.5 (which is very high according to this tool). Then again, I haven’t tested this keyword, but common sense tells me that by itself, the word ‘free’ wouldn’t be selling anything.

So with that in mind, you wouldn’t want to put your house on the data you get from it, but you can get a pretty good idea of where to start when you have a bunch of keywords to kick off with.

Here’s an example of some of the keywords that I punched in. You’ll have to click the smaller image to see the full size image. You’ll see that for the 6 different learn guitar keywords, MSN’s Online Commercial Intent tool (www.affilorama.com/oci) was correct in it’s estimates 5 out of 6 times:

Not bad data to get for free. I spent thousands of dollars learning that information from my own tracking.

So anyway, I recommend that if you are serious about pay per click as a method of making money online that you check out this tool.

No I’m not an affiliate of this tool (it’s free), I’m just recommending it via this redirect here because the url for it is quite long and hard to remember: http://www.affilorama.com/oci

What are your thoughts on it? I’m interested in hearing what you have to say about it and the results that it gives you.

Mark

Hi Guys, 

Twitter is a relatively new (launched July 2006) microblogging and social networking website that allows you to make short text posts (140 characters max) to the twitter website, via twitter itself, or even craftier… though your cellphone, or a third party application such as Facebook.

Sound complicated?

Actually it isn’t. Perhaps many of you reading this are Twittering already. There are millions of people using this service, posting over 3 million messages a day.

I’ve recently set up my own personal twitter profile (not to be confused with the twitter profile’s I set up under a pen-name for my affiliate sites).

Here it is: http://www.twitter.com/markling

The way I twitter is pretty much whenever I suddenly remember to do it, I spend about 60 seconds, log into twitter and make a post (140 characters max) about what I’m up to right now.

It is just a short snapshot of my stream of consciousness.

I’ve been encouraging my writers lately to do the same and have recently developed a plan for using twitter to assist me in my search engine rankings (actually Mr K of my web 2.0 traffic secrets interview created most of this plan).

Many other marketers use twitter itself to make money (not just to help their organic search rankings improve for their websites).

Here are the most common ways of using twitter to make money:

1. Every 10th post you make, advertise a product that is relevant to the market that you twitter about. E.g. if you are always twittering about golf and your golf results, then every 10th twitter post could recommend a different affiliate product that you’ve found success with (or every 20th if you twitter often).

2. Business networking. It is a great way of keeping up with the play and actually getting to know some people who are high up in your industry that you are interested in. For example, it is not difficult to post a message and get a reply from John Reese, or Robert Kiyosaki (of Rich Dad, Poor Dad).

3. Getting more visitors to their websites from people who search twitter and follow people who they are interested in. For example, an avid dog lover might follow you if you regularly twitter about stuff to do with dogs. It is simply another avenue for getting traffic.

4. This is what I do, I follow what Mr K recommended to me and am implementing a cross linking strategy to get higher rankings in organic search results. Listen to my interview with Mr K for details on that. I’ll let you know my results in a few months. I have a lot of confidence in this as it makes a lot of SEO sense to me.

Anyway, if you haven’t set up a twitter account for yourself. It only takes a couple of minutes. I recommend that you set up a test account for yourself today and post about a topic that interests you (preferably one that you are an affiliate in).

All comments are welcome.

Mark

p.s. Sign up to twitter and follow me: www.twitter.com/markling

I get emails from people every day asking what are some profitable affiliate markets.

I do teach you how to find them for yourselves inside of the affilorama members area. (Sign up for a free account and you’ll receive over 50 step-by-step training videos inside).

However if you just want a list to take a look at, then here is a good list of profitable affiliate markets. There are MANY MANY more, but if you do decide to affiliate in any one of these markets, they are certainly worthwhile:

If you are looking for profitable affiliate markets in clickbank, here are a few:

Tattoos
save marriage tips
Learn Japanese
Body building
weight loss
Wholesale Supplier databases
learn french, spanish, german etc
learn guitar
learn to sing
learn songwriting
learn piano
turn your car into a hybrid (water & fuel)
conversational hypnosis
dog training
cat training
stop panic attacks
cure yeast infections
fix your computer’s registry
how to be irresistible to men
how to be irresistible to women
learn sign language
how to get pregnant
learn german, spanish, french
world of warcraft strategy

and there are many more…

Those ones are particularly in reference to affiliate products at Clickbank. You could also look at some really good CPA affiliate offers at places like Azoogle.com and CPA Empire.com.

I hope this short post sparks some of you into action. If you can’t figure out how to find a profitable affiliate program (and you really should check out my video lessons in the affilorama members area, which you can sign up to here), then just choose one of those markets above, I’ve made it easy for you!

All the best to your success!

Mark

Hi Guys,

I’m writing this blog post to give back to some of the people who I’ve gained a lot of great advice from, which has produced noticable benefits in my business. You won’t see any affiliate links in this post.

I hope I don’t offend anyone that I may not have mentioned. Some of my personal friends, family, employees and business partners have been among the most instrumental in my learning.

I haven’t included their names in this list because they are private people who don’t necessarily want their names on this blog. What I have here for you is a list of people that YOU can learn from (as they have books, and home study courses that you too can take a look at).

In no particular order, I’ve learned great things from:

John Reese, his original Traffic Secrets product really helped me get my head around how to boost profits from my own products through not only gaining extra traffic, but through increasing the conversion rates of my sales copy and success of my newsletters.

Eban Pagen, through closely following his ‘Double Your Dating’ product marketing sequence, I’ve learned a great deal about how to integrate, backend, cross-promote, write great sales copy and more. He now teaches what he does via his ‘Get Altitude’ course.

John Kehoe, other people have guys like Tony Robbins. I have John Kehoe. I first listened to his Mind Power tapes back when I was 16 and they forever changed my mindset and, as a result, my life. Whoever says this stuff doesn’t work doesn’t know what they’re talking about. His book is a lot cheaper, but not as engaging, I recommend his audios highly. Go get them on CD if you can.

Mark Joyner, he extended my knowledge of how to use human psychology in marketing. He has also been great at teaching me conversion rate secrets. He has a particularly great book called Mind Control Marketing, which I feel is an essential read.

Tom Hua, by purchasing his FreeToSell product quite a few years ago, I found out all about clickbank and the fact that I could make money selling eBooks (both as an affiliate and a merchant).

Brad Sugars, I used to read his books before I discovered online gurus, such as Corey Rudl and others. He has some fantastic books that you can get from Amazon.com at very affordable prices. Instant Cashflow is a must.

Corey Rudl, after spending the first 5 years of my internet marketing career going it alone (and doing reasonably well), I took the plunge and purchased his ‘Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet’ product. As a result of coming across this product I finally understood how sales copy writing really works. Since then I’ve devoured over 100 copywriting books and courses and split tested and learned a lot. But this is where it all began for me in successful copywriting and I owe Corey a great Thank YOU. (Note Corey Died in a freak car accident and his company, The Internet Marketing Center, is now run by Derek Gehl)

Frank Kern, the most recent guy that I’ve learned a lot from. His mass control stuff works really well and is fantastic for any intermediate to advanced marketer wanting to take their online business to the next level.

Marc Lindsay and Daniel Turner of PlrPro, they really helped me a lot get my SEO knowledge up to an expert level. I was doing very well online when I met them, but they helped me get a much better grip on the search engine side of things.

David Allen, his ‘Getting things done’ book has been instrumental on me raising my productivity levels.

Gauher Chaudhry, I’m still in the process of learning from him as far as CPA offers goes (he is the best at teaching that method of making money online), but have learnt a great deal about PPC marketing in general from him.

Me, yep, I listed myself as you can learn from me too. In fact, like me, you can learn the greatest lessons from YOURSELF. I’ve done a LOT of testing, measuring, reading, and more. Ultimately, the most learning comes from TAKING ACTION AND DOING. I’ve done a lot, seen immense results and learned from my own observations and testing, and that ultimately has the biggest impact as I’ve seen first hand what works with my own eyes. You can too. Just get out there and TAKE ACTION ON A DAILY BASIS.

Other books you should check out are:

* 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
* Blueprint to a Billion
* The Google Story

So, that’s my list. I’ve probably missed a few there, there are certainly others that I’ve learned from, but I’ve done my best to produce a great list for you to have a look at.

Have you got any to share with me? Leave them in your comments, no hyperlinks in this set of comments please, just genuine link-free recommendations thanks.

Mark

Hi Guys,

I’m just going to keep this post short.

There was a major error that went on in my affiliate link during the launch of Blog Classroom.

In order to make it up to you, my affilorama readers, Anik has thrown in a bunch of superstar bonuses to go on top of the bonuses that I’m offering to anyone who purchases Affilorama through my link.

These bonuses that Anik is offering includes lifetime membership to Affiliate Classroom, and some even higher value bonuses which you can take a look at here:

http://www.affilorama.com/recommends/blogclassroom

You should check those out, there’s some extremely valuable bonuses listed on that page (even more value than the actual Blog Classroom!)

All the best,

Mark