Merry Christmas from Downunder

Merry Christmas from Australia

Ron Passfield
Affiliate Marketing Coach


(Photo - Courtesy of Bill Ockendon)

Affiliate Marketing: Why Go It Alone?

One of the advantages I have found with the Affiliate Classroom is that I have been able to develop a learning partnership with my affiliates.

The Affiliate Classroom provides all the up-to-date resources for affiliate marketing - success case studies, tutorials, step-by-step coaching approach, niche product profiles, conference calls and interviews with leading affiliate marketers and an e-marketing library with software and ebooks.

I have been able to add value to these offerings by engaging my affiliate members in a learning partnership. What this means is that we share what we learn through the Affiliate Classroom as well as our other resources. We also provide supportive critiques of each other's articles, websites, strategies, etc. In this way, we are able to help each other focus and develop an integrated approach to what we are trying to achieve with affiliate marketing.

Sometimes the solution is right in front of you but you need another pair of eyes and another brain to help you see it. I think "two heads are better than one" in affiliate marketing. You also need someone who is willing to ask you questions to test your assumptions about your approach.

We have been able to use the free voice over internet service provided by Skype.com as part of our strategy for exploring the way forward together.

The approach underlying my coaching strategy is known as "action learning".

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Ron Passfield, PhD, affiliate marketing coach, is developing his affiliate business through the step-by-step coaching offered by the Affiliate Classroom:
http://affiliateclassroom.com/x.cgi?a=r&id=1&aid=1270

Enrol in the Affiliate Classroom's FREE affiliate marketing course today:
http://tinyurl.com/ar9ta

Paul Colligan talks about Podcasting for Affiliates

Anik Singal of the Affiliate Classroom recently interviewed Paul Colligan about the use of podcasting for affiliates.

Paul is a widely recognized expert in a new exploding industry - podcasting. He explains how he uses podcasting to generate several streams of income.

In the interview (recorded as an mp3 file), Paul maintains that the real benefit of podcasting lies in the ability to catch a person's attention for a concentrated period of time. Typically people listen to podcasts on their iPods or mp3 players when they are travelling in their car, on the train or bus, or at the gym. People will spend up to 20 minutes of dedicated time listening to a podcast but only 20 seconds on an email.

Paul covers the following topics in his extensive interview:

• How affiliates use Podcasting
• How to start with podcasting
  
• What equipment you can use - free and paid sources of equipment/software
  
• Where to broadcast your podcast - the best podcast directories
• Will podcast replace ezines?
• The power of podcasting
• Paul Colligan's many podcasts -tools for podcasting, affiliate reviews
• Podcasting for niche marketing
• How to market premium (paid subscription) podcasting
• The "must do's" and "things to avoid" when podcasting
• The future of podcasting

You can access free open source software for podcasting at:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

You can access Paul Colligan's interview and the Affiliate Classroom case studies, tutorials, marketing library, niche product profiles, conference calls and unique step-by-step coaching, by taking the $1 trial:
http://affiliateclassroom.com/x.cgi?a=r&id=1&aid=1270

Find Your Niche - Get Niche Product Profiles

The Affiliate Classroom provides numerous Niche Product Profiles

Each Niche Product Profile gives you these details:

• Company
• Niche
• Company Background
• Description
• Commission Type
• Target Market
• Marketing Plan/Ideas
• Pros
• Cons
• Competing Merchants
• Other Relevant Information
• Our Recommendations
• Our Rating (1-10)

Niches enable you to focus your energy, your spending and your marketing. By focusing on a niche product you can learn the best way to market that product and how to develop an integrated marketing approach. You can also learn how to dominate a niche. The Affiliate Classroom has done the research for you and offers marketing plans/ideas for each niche product.

You can FIND YOUR NICHE by taking the Affiliate Classroom $1 trial:
http://affiliateclassroom.com/x.cgi?a=r&id=1&aid=1270

Automate Your Article Submissions

Anik Singal has written two case studies on article marketing for members of the Affiliate Classroom. The first covers the reasons for article marketing and how to write and submit articles. The second covers Anik's results and new strategies he has used to have 17,300 sites refer targeted traffic to him.

Central to Anik's strategy is the automatic submission of articles which enables you to achieve a critical mass of exposure very quickly. Anik uses and recommends SubmitYourArticle.com for automatic submission to article directories and article announcement lists.

Anik maintains that automatic article submission is the key change he made to become successful:
I would say that the biggest change I have made in my strategy is that I no longer submit articles by hand to ANY website - it just takes too long.

I have followed Anik's recommendation and used SubmitYourArticle.com during this month. It was great to see my articles on multiple Google pages when I searched under the article title.

I am delighted to say that one of my articles reached the No1 position in Google for one of my major keywords. This article had been submitted to the relevant article directory, via SubmitYourArticle.com, less than three weeks previously.

Of course, one of the advantages of article submission is that your articles appear on article directories that are frequently ranked highly by Google because directories are content rich.

I found SubmitYourArticle.com very easy to use - no software installation involved! You still need to register manually with the relevant directories that require a username and password. However, SubmitYourArticle.com makes this easy through their article management system which takes you to the sign-up page of each directory and then enables you to store your username and password for easy access. Once registered, you do not need to register again.

Entering your article and related details to SubmitYourArticle.com is very easy and takes a minimal amount of time. I found the best strategy for me was to first submit my article to EzineArticles.com to ensure I had the format right and my article was acceptable to editors. I was then able to "cut and paste" to enter the article in the SubmitYourArticle.com data base.

Then it was a matter of pressing the "submit" button and my article was sent automatically to 10 major directories that required username and password, a further 10 not requiring these details and a number of article announcement lists as well as an undisclosed number of websites. The beauty of this is that the article directories, in turn, provide content for thousands of website owners and ezine marketers.

I can strongly recommend SubmitYourArticle.com to give your article marketing a turbo boost.

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You can access the Affiliate Classroom case studies, tutorials, marketing library, niche product profiles, conference calls and unique step-by-step coaching by taking the $1 trial:
http://affiliateclassroom.com/x.cgi?a=r&id=1&aid=1270

Affiliate Classroom Recommends Website Building Software

The September issue of the Affiliate Classroom Magazine strongly supports the use of site building software, especially for "newbies" to affiliate marketing.

Site building software designed for creating marketing web sites frequently have market-tested templates that "take much of the guesswork out of design". The Affiliate Classroom Magazine stresses some of these advantages:
These tools automate certain tasks and have SEO-friendly templates built right into them, which can save you time when you add content or products to your sites, or when you change the navigation. Their interfaces are primarily wizard-based, meaning you 'fill in the blanks', build a set number of pages, and interlink them without having to load in each template separatley and do a lot of hand-coding.

If you get the right site building software, you can easily build AdSense ads, sitemaps and navigation links. The Affiliate Classroom Magazine suggests that XSitePro, which was "designed by marketers for marketers" has a number of advantages. The Magazine author maintains that XSitePro has "excellent basic templates" and is "certainly the easiest of all site creation programs we've tested".

XSitePro is getting rave reviews from users in forums that I have visited recently.

The Affiliate Classroom Magazine is only one of the many services provided by the Affiliate Classroom. You can trial the Affiliate Classroom step-by-step coaching approach for $1 at:
http://affiliateclassroom.com/x.cgi?a=r&id=1&aid=1270

Rosalind Gardner Recommends Affiliate Classroom

In her blog post on the 15 November, Rosalind Gardner had this to say about the Affiliate Classroom:
I'm an Affiliate Classroom member, and I have also been working with Anik and his students (teleclasses and writing for his magazine), so I can vouch for the fact that his program literally takes you by the hand and walks you through until you’re making money.

Rosalind's full posting where she recommends the Affiliate Classroom can be found at:
http://www.netprofitstoday.com/blog/wp-trackback.php/65

The RSS feed for Rosalind's NetProfitsToday blog:
http://www.netprofitstoday.com/blog/wp-rss2.php

My own experience with the Affiliate Classroom confirms Rosalind's comments. The step-by-step coaching provided is unique and is supported by success case studies, detailed tutorials, conference calls with leading affiliate marketers such as Rosalind, the monthly Affiliate Classroom Magazine, articles and a marketing library with e-books and software. The "how to..." approach makes it easy to implement the ideas and techniques suggested by Anik in the Affiliate Classroom. A particular strength of the program is its capacity to keep you focused and on-track.

P.S . Rosalind Gardner is author of the best-selling “Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made *$436,797* in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online".