Can You Be A Marketer & A University Student?

Before I get into it, let me just point out that I’ve taken this article directly from an email I sent out, but I know a lot of you are on the RSS feed rather than the mailing list so I’m posting it here as well…just ignore any references I might make to “the email” 🙂

I’m going to tell you a really cool story about someone who started marketing at around the same time as me, he’s actually a few years younger than me as well so he must still have been at school when he started. (I was in college)

He’s from the UK (like me), he’s called James Penn and he is currently a full time University Student studying* Psychology, which isn’t anything out of the ordinary for a 19 year old guy, but here’s the cool bit.

He hasn’t put his marketing business on hold, he is actually running a full time business whilst studying* at University.

So how does he manage to do this?

Well, he tends to work in different niches to me. I’m into the marketing and hosting niches, while he’s into anti-aging and stretch marks…must resist the urge to make a joke!

In these “underground” niches he specializes in creating products and building targeted opt-in mailing lists.

By building these mailing lists in all the different niches, he is able to promote related products to the niches whenever he needs more drinking money….sorry – study books.

As an example, he needed to do some revision for an exam that was taking place the following day, but before opening up his revision books, he spent 15 minutes writing an email promoting a membership site in the niche. Four hours later after he had finished the revision, he returned to his inbox and discovered almost $1,000 in sales – that’s one way to pay off your student loan!!

And that’s just in one niche; he is using his targeted niche mailing lists to put himself through University!

The methods he uses to build these lists are what makes him stand out from the crowd, he doesn’t just rely on the tried and tested formulas for list building, he actually looks at different methods, THINKS ABOUT THEM (there’s a plan!) and then makes them better – it’s a simple idea but be honest, how many of us actually do this?

Like any good marketer, he knows when he’s onto something that works, and like any good marketer, he knows you can make a very tidy amount by selling the details…come on, we all know how it works by now 🙂

Thankfully though, beer is still quite cheap at his University, so he hasn’t given it a home study course price, he’s going to show you exactly how he builds these highly targeted mailing lists for just $10.

And by my accounts, you should be able to buy 2 pints of beer for $10 from his University bar, and he aims to sell 1,000 of his guides….I’ll let you work out the rest of it 😉

So if you are looking for different ways to build your mailing list, or if you already have a good sized list and just want to get some fresh ideas, then do check out his report, it’s a steal at just $10!

http://elpassoblog.com/recs/james_penn.php

And before signing off, I would like to mention I’m not being serious with all the drinking stuff, I’m being very stereotypical and tongue in cheek – James is a top guy, and certainly isn’t a “layabout” student 😉

Thanks for reading, and as always let me know if you have any questions.

Dan

*Drinking and hitting on girls

How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program

How To Run The Perfect Affiliate Program

Hello and welcome to another article. This weeks article was actually supposed to be a video showing you around one of my affiliate programs and how it is all run, I recorded the video last night but whilst it was being produced the program crashed and I lost the recording, so you’ll have to put up with my writing instead 😉

It’s no co-incidence that I am writing this article at the same time as my Boomerang List Builder affiliate program launch, but I was going to tell you about the launch anyway so I figured I would kill 2 birds with 1 stone and write a newsletter on the same subject.

Running your own affiliate program for your product can be the difference between 10 and 100 sales, if I didn’t have an affiliate program in place, I wouldn’t have sold as many copies of the Boomerang List Builder as I have done, but setting up an affiliate program isn’t all plain sailing. Let me take you by the hand (UK Hell’s Kitchen viewers please note that I am in no way affiliated with Marco Pierre White!) and guide you through setting up your own affiliate program.

Now regular readers will remember that I did a very similar post in February of this year, you can view the article here:

https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-set-up-your-own-affiliate-program/

So I won’t be going over any of that again, if you don’t understand some of the things in this article, refer to the older one above and it should clear a few things up!

Step 1

The first thing that you need to do is decide how you will be running your program, will you be using an in house program, or will you be using someone like clickbank to manage affiliates and commissions?

For the Boomerang List Builder launch I used clickbank, this was because they have a huge affiliate network and they handle all affiliate payments for me. However, due to circumstances beyond my control, clickbank were unable to support the Boomerang List Builder after the launch, so I decided to use my own hosted solution, I use the script “Post Affiliate Pro”.

Step 2

The next step is to set up the tracking, different scripts have different tracking and integration methods so check the instruction manual for your script. Most will require you to add some sort of code to your landing pages, and to your thankyou pages so sales can be tracked. When you are confident everything has been set up, do some testing, I can’t stress how important this is, you need to make sure sales are tracking before you offer your program to the public!

Step 3

This step is something that a lot of people miss out on – customize your affiliate area and affiliate pages! I lose count on the number of times I have joined an affiliate program and I am presented with the same generic sign up pages, it’s only a small thing but it makes me think that if the product creator can’t be bothered to integrate a sign up form into his site design then he obviously doesn’t think much of his affiliates!

Take a look at my sign up page, it’s integrated into my site design and only took 10 minutes to put up:

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Step 4

You need to give your affiliates a reason to promote your product, when they go to your page, they don’t know how the product converts or anything about the product. You can see that on my sign up page I have added a screen shot showing affiliates how the product is converting. With a product that converts at 4.7% (The Boomerang List Builder) they would expect to get, on average, about 5 sales for every 100 visitors they send to the website.

I used DLGuard to process payments and handle the software delivery as it includes a cool little feature that shows you how well your products are converting! You can see my conversions here:

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Step 5

Give your affiliates some resources! And by “resources” I don’t just mean the odd affiliate banner. With the Boomerang List Builder program I have provided affiliates with a range of banners, articles (created just for the affiliate program), promotional emails and even a couple of text links that can be used as forum or email sigs!

Here’s on of my “different” banner designs, don’t worry, there are also some conventional
ones in there as well!

Step 6

Ask existing subscribers and customers to kindly sign up for the affiliate program and help you promote the product, this is where you guys come in 😉

http://www.boomeranglistbuilder.com/affiliate/affsignup.php

Many thanks for reading, I do hope that you have found some of this article useful. As I said at the start, if you need to know about things in more detail, including how you go about starting an affiliate program, check out the article here:

https://elpassoblog.com/how-to-set-up-your-own-affiliate-program/

Until next time,
Dan