Internet Marketing for Newbies - Advanced Affiliate Marketing Strategies for Free Traffic

Lets take a look at some more complex - yet still very simple to scale up and out our CL campaigns on a national - or even international scope.

As with any sort of large marketing effort ,you are dealing in the law of large numbers - you want to drive lots of traffic, have lots of eyeballs in front of what you selling - and fall back on the fact that if enough people are interested in the ad to begin with - click the link - or email you for more info - they are obviously pretty interested in finding a solution for whatever it is they are searching (and you are advertising) for. Some markets are better than others, but in general, any affiliate programs you can find online, you can certainly promote on Craigslist successfully.

You have a lot of possibilities here - from the standpoint of technique, tactics as well as your overall strategy. Lets take a closer look at a few possible approaches we might take for each - and the specific steps we will need to take to accomplish our goal of a successful, profitable affiliate campaign on Craigslist.

After a little bit of research, you decide that you want to promote a consumer foreclosure affiliate offer - as all of the nightly newsshows beat a daily, deafening drumbeat about the precarious mortgage market - and we know that a lot of sub prime loans were issued over the past 5 years - and people are defaulting on those loans in record numbers. We know this to be so because Anderson Cooper and Bill Orielly both said it was true - and those two guys havent' agreed on anything since the O.J Simpson trial...:-) It's a large and growing demographic, lots of desperate people, seems like a pretty good market to get our grubby little hands dirty with ( and of course be of service to the population we are serving ). We know, however about as much about prime interest rates and consumer foreclosure law as we do about Hindu Evolutionary Cosmology. Not to worry - we go over to Azoogle ads - or Cj.com - and sign up ( we preferably did this a few days ago ) and do a search for offers related to Foreclosures - or even a little bit wider out - ( for a potential back end ) an equally as expanding and pressing current marketplace - credit cards for people who have pooped on their credit rating.

You how have an offer to present - as an affiliate of * ABC Foreclosure Salvation Service* - you now need to get their message out to the broadest widest spectrum of potential new customers, and using Craigslist we are going to endeavor to accomplish this, largely for free.

( obviously you could buy traffic targeting the very same audience - but that isn't the purpose of this article )

Using the very same principles we learned in part one of this series - you could very simply log in to the craigslist account for your home city - post and ad for foreclosure help - leave an email address as the contact - or link out to yoursite.com - which would re-direct to the main affiliate site with your cookie - if they buy - you get paid - if they don't - you get babushkas.

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( Speaking of links - some people wonder why their ads get flagged/blocked/deleted even before making the showroom floor - there are very few Craigslist rules that I've seen as universally agreed upon as the following: Do not put naked affiliate links in your ads. Just don't do it. You'd be better off spending the 5 minutes it took to construct the ad just thinking deeply about the universe because that's about the same effect you are going to get from putting a click bank code in your copy. Don't use Tinyurl or any other wholesale link cloaking/ rewriting service either - you will get deleted. Trust me, it took my uninformed, cognitively chaotic intellect three nights to figure that out wondering what I had possibly done wrong for the God's of Craigslist to hate my ads so much, so quickly before I had a Eureka moment ) Use simple re-directs - from yoursite.com --> to affiliate site and all will be well with the world )

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The problem with the preceding scenario - I have found anyway - is you really need a lot of eyeballs for good Craiglist conversions ( for most markets - we will talk about a few you don't later )

So 1 ad - 1 city - 1 offer - might not cut it if you are trying to make real money, and fast.

How about 2 ads - ( two categories ) 1 city - 1 offer?

Better - might get lucky - but still in most affiliate markets, you aren't going to get rich doing this - ( might make a few bucks everyday - which is a good start - but you aren't optimizing your efforts and outcome with this approach.

OK - let's scale it up - 1 offer - 10 ads - 10 cities. Will this work with our foreclosure market? Absolutely it will. How are we going to do it? Lots of ways - let's take a simple look at 1.

Find the 10 biggest cities with the highest rate of foreclosures. Search the news wires, Google, yahoo news, etc....Take the list - match it up with the corresponding set of Craigslist Cities - and start getting organized. ( alternatively, you could just post to the 10 largest CL cities per their corresponding page views/rank - CL used to list their most viewed/trafficked cities on their main page - while writing this today I understand that is no longer the case )

1. Register 10 new CL accounts. Simply open up free email accounts with either Gmail, Mail.com or the like - and correspond those new email addresses with a given city in your preceding list of * top foreclosure cities * When done - you will now have one new CL account for each city you intend on posting in to promote your new affiliate offer.

2. Write 5 good pieces of ad copy. Yea, yeah, yea.....I know - this is supposed to be a given, yet everyone just sort of cheaps out on this because it seems so blasé and you are chomping at the bit to jump in there and start making some money. I understand - I've been equally as impatient and have been equally as unhappy with my results as you are going to be if you simply gloss over this crucial step. Unless you are an absolute tech genius and can control inordinately large volumes of traffic at the simplest snap of your fingers - your success on line ( or off ) will invariably be traced back to the effectiveness of your ad copy. Good copy almost always wins.

3. Take the preceding 5 pieces of ad copy - and re-write them - only this time use a program that will allow you to save your text as an image file. ( I use illustrator - I know there is probably easier/better for this purpose )You are going to simply save this image and ftp it to a web server somewhere - ie - mysite.com/foreclosure.jpg - and point the CL browser to that image rather than using a text ad - thereby giving us effectively, from the CL filter standpoint ( where ad's will be blocked and or deleted for duplicate content ) 10 unique ads. I simply center the image so that it looks just like text in the browser - and then put a unique keyword link both centered above, and below the image directing the visitor to my affiliate re-direct page.

4. Post the 10 ads! I change the email address from the random CL reply address to the main one I am using for this ad ( same one you used to sign for this particular CL account ) just for the random direct emails you will infrequently get - but - with good headlines - good body copy and most importantly - good affiliate offers - you are going to be sending a lot of traffic to the Affiliate - and you will start to make sales! ( if they aren't converting your traffic - go find someone else that will. )

( all affiliate networks have metrics in place which will let you pick the best performing advertisers in your space - don't scrimp on this step either - as a bad affiliate offer or landing page is a waste of your effort and hard work to generate the traffic. So do a little bit of detective work ahead of time - check EPC, network earnings, conversion percentage if available, etc - and you will be in good shape from the standpoint of expectation - vs real earnings. As a side note I have always found a marked decline in the conversion percentage of CL traffic - this is to be expected of course - relative to ppc or even organic traffic - there are far more happy clickers on CL than you will find in your other properly optimized ad campaigns - but - this is the price you pay for FREE TRAFFIC...:-)

Okay - let's look at some potential proverbial flies in our ointment as we plan on affiliate marketing mastery and world domination.

Your Ads are being blocked. Why? TOS violation. Ad's are too similar to others posted in another city. ( your other ads ) Ads are being over posted. Your email address and or account has been blocked ( very rare, and only typically happens for big time spammers to the Adult Personals sections.) Your domain is being blocked ( mysite.com from where you are sending your re-directs ) Your IP is being blocked. Lots of things can happen - ( I have had almost none of the above happen to me - but I know some people who have) so let's cover them below.

First - let's get something very simple out of the way:

Don't be a Jerk. What does that mean? Well - you know what they say - if you have to ask - you already are. But just for those sort of on the edge of the ass who haven't quite fallen all the way in - doing anything destructive, abusive or detrimental to the CL community qualifies you.

Posting a foreclosure ad as an affiliate offer that helps people facing a loss of their home - even if that ad is in 10 cities ( and you only reside locally in one ) does not. Are there some people who disagree with that? Surely there are. But -I don't care - so please don't email me about TOS violations or spammers or anything like that because I simply will not invest the mental motivation required to read it ( unless you fill the first paragraph up with nice things to say about me and my free advice and then stick the nasty stuff in the middle or something after I'm too far in to turn back- I'm a sucker for compliments )

To remedy the above potential problems - Get some throwaway domains - go to Go daddy - register 5 or 6 1.99 .info domain names for the explicit purpose of using these for re-directs and image hosting ( your ad copy that looks like text, but really is a jpg or gif or whatever you saved it as )

Rather than point all of the links to one domain - use multiple url's to diversify the ad campaign. If there is a problem with your Ad copy - re-write it! Don't spoil a great and recurring source of ongoing revenue because you are too lazy to write 10 ads. ( or for that matter 20 or 30 ads, why stop with 10 cities?) Use an old fashioned dial up connection if your IP seems to be giving you ( or CL ) problems. Keep your ads original and as unique as possible - make great offers - time sensitive whenever possible ( and conforms obviously to the affiliate offer they will ultimately see ) etc.