issue 25 - traffic from eBay, PayDotCom vs ClickBank and more

Hi again,

what a pleasant surprise when I came back home from Munich yesterday evening. The 5 books I had recently ordered at Alibris, the mega online store for used books, had finally arrived.

Alibris.com is a great place to find used books, including old rare public domain books. All five books I´ve bought there are about dental care, dental treatments and dental hygiene. Two of them are in the public domain and I´ll see if I can use some of the content for my dental care site and webblog.

The remaining three are more or less new and I´m going to use them in the first place to get more used to the english terminology for dental care related topics (You know - I´m German).

However, the preface for one of the books tought me a great website marketing technique that can be applied to any market niche and that´s why I want to share this with you now.

Other topics in this newsletter are:

- Yahoo´s attack on Google AdSense
- Does eBay buy traffic for you on Overture ?
- PayDotCom vs. ClickBank

I hope you enjoy this month´s newsletter.

Truely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

1) How other people joyfully and voluntarily create content for you that you can use for your website or to create a book.

“Grinning and Grinding” is the title of a book - a collection of humorous (real) stories that happened in the dental care business. Basically, the book is nothing else than a compilation of funny stories that happened to dentists in the USA during their past years of practicing dentistry.

To create this book, the author - a dentist himself - simply sent a letter (we´re talking about good old print letters here - not email !) to hundreds of colleagues across the country and asked them to submit humorous (true) experiences that had happened to them in their career.

Then he simply chose the best stories, spiced them up a little bit where necessary, added a couple of his own stories and voilá - a 250+ pages cool book has been created.

Sure, you could use the same technique to collect content for a niche e-book, but that´s not all. It must not necessarily be a book that you create. Instead, you could ask people to submit their stories / articles directly to your website in order to create traffic pulling web content for you.

This way you won´t even have to spend time editing and compiling.

The important point is that you should not only email those authors in your niche whose contact infos you find on the ezine article directories, but rather send print letters to experts in your niche and private persons who are passionate in your niche topic - i.e. those persons who are probably not online yet - and ask them to participate in your online community.

To make it easy for them to participate and submit stories, articles and other niche related information, you could use any of the following free tools - alone or combined - to create your niche community:

1. Start a niche forum with the phpBB forum software

2. Start an article directory with the new ArticleDashbord software - http://www.articledashboard.com

3. Start a niche blog with WordPress, which also gives you the option to let other people register as authors.

I would do a combination of both - an article directory and either a forum or a blog, but this depends on your niche.

For example, if you have a website for a niche topic like “fishing” where there are many passionate people who neither have their own websites or blogs nor are in any way involved in online business, then you should do very well with a forum, because these people love to hang out with like-minded folks and share their experiences in a like-minded community.

To get these private persons to your online community, you could send letters to offline communities (clubs, associations, etc…) where these people meet and tell them about your forum to meet online with more like-minded folks all over the country and even all over the world.

Another story is to start a niche article directory and get expert authors to submit their original articles. To stay within the above example niche, you could find the addresses of offline stores for fishing supplies in the yellow pages and write letters to the store owners asking them to submit helpful articles to your online article directory.

Point out that their benefit would be to have a short classified ad for their stores below each article and that their articles will also be syndicated on lots of other fishing related websites, so their ads will be seen and possibly drive offline customers to their stores.

Probably even better would be to ask manufacturers of fishing supplies and accessories to submit articles and participate in your forum. This way they could have their brand advertised for free in article resource boxes and the signatures of their posts.

Another important point to really get people to participate is that your website makes the impression of being genuinely useful and that it´s not just designed to make you money. So I would only very sparingly display affiliate links and other advertisements (if any) on my site, at least at the beginning.

With a genuinely useful site you also have the advantage of getting valuable links from other websites without having to link back or even pay for the links.

2) Yahoo´s attack on Google AdSense

To expand its advertising network, Yahoo is currently beta testing a new service, very similar to Google AdSense.

If you have been looking for an alternative to Google AdSense, especially because you experienced like many others that AdSense ads are not always as targeted as they should be, then you might want to try Yahoo´s ad service, which offers some additional features many people would like to see in AdSense.

Unfortunately, during the beta phase, only website publishers in the USA may participate. Others need to wait until next year when this service comes out of its beta phase.

http://publishers.yahoo.com

The ad formats are pretty much the same like the ones you know from AdSense and you can also customize the colors.

But the main features that make Yahoo´s service different and pretty attractive are the ability for publishers to block ads from competing websites and to choose ad categories for their webpages in order to get more relevant ads displayed on their sites.

3) Is eBay buying traffic for you on Overture ?

Have you ever been using the pay per click search engine Overture or just out of curiosity looked at the bid prices for keywords in your niche through Overture´s view bid tool ?

There are lots of keywords in many different market niches where eBay appears within the top 5 bids. And the links go directly to search result pages on eBay using the same keyword.

Here´s an example:

To see who´s bidding for the term “birding” on Overture, simply type in this keyword in the view bid tool.

When you click on eBay´s listing you´ll be taken to a search result page for the term “birding” at eBay with auctions containing this keyword in the auction title.

So everybody who has a birding related website - I mean not only those who have an online store selling physical products but also affiliate marketers - may benefit from this traffic.

What you need are small products or an e-book that you can place on eBay as teasers and you also need to write the description of your auction in a way that entices people to visit your website and include links to your site, of course.

Once they are at your website, you may try to directly sell them related products, try to get them on a list or - if you are an affiliate - recommend relevant merchants to them.

Here´s what you may do right now to find out if you can benefit from this strategy:

1. Go to Overture´s view bid tool

2. Type in a couple of main keywords related to your niche and see if eBay is among the advertisers.

3. If yes, note down those keywords and think of a teaser product you could use for an eBay auction.

When it comes to placing your auctions on eBay, you should make sure that they appear on the first result page for each keyword if you want traffic fast. In order to achieve this, you should not let your auctions run for too many days. Those auctions closing sooner get listed first, so you may check out first with how many days your auctions are still listed on the first day - simply type in each keyword at eBay and see how many days are left for the auction at the bottom of the first result page.

This applies to your first auction. In order to get traffic continuously, you should place more auctions (can be the same product) in time intervals of 2-5 days.

Guess what - eBay even bids on the term “HTML”, so I´ll be using this technique for my HTML video tutorial once it is finished and let you know my experiences then.

4) PayDotCom vs. ClickBank

When PayDotCom started in June 2005, they claimed something like to be ClickBank´s worst nightmare. There was a comparison chart on their site which listed lots of advantages, but leaving out the points where ClickBank would beat PayDotCom, of course.

Since then, some things have changed and I think it´s a good time to take a look at both to see wich one is the better choice for you.

1) The Affiliate System

The first big advantage PayDotCom had at the beginning was the 2-tier affiliate program, so you as vendor could choose whether you would like to pay commissions on a single tier or on two tiers.

But PayPal´s policies have changed and now they don´t allow multi-tier (including two-tier) programs of any kind to be paid out through their system. That was the end of PayDotCom´s 2-tier affiliate program.

So both, Clickbank and PayDotCom are now on a single tier only.

2) The Processing Fees

PayDotCom´s claim to have lower fees was only partially true in the beginning because they had a flat fee of 3$ for every product sold which meant that for lower priced products ( 20$ and less), ClickBank was the better option.

But now, PayDotCom´s fee schedule has been adjusted and the fees are now less than the ClickBank fees. You can easily compare the fees between PayDotCom, ClickBank and 2CheckOut at https://paydotcom.com/fees.php

3) The Signup Fees

To become a ClickBank vendor, you need to pay a one-time fee of approx. 50 $, PayDotCom is free for your first product.

If you want to sell more products, PayDotCom asks for a low one-time fee of 29 $ and with ClickBank you have basically two options:

- pay another 50 $ fee for each additional product or
- use a tool like EasyClickMate, which allows you to sell up to 50 different products from one ClickBank account and also manage your affiliates and customers. ( 69 $ )

4) Product Types

An important point for your decision whether you go with ClickBank or PayDotCom is the type of product you want to sell. While you can only sell digital products at ClickBank, PayDotCom gives you the ability to sell digital and physical products and on top of that you can even use PayDotCom to charge recurring billings for membership sites.

5) Payment options for your customers

At ClickBank, your customers can now pay either with their credit cards or with their PayPal funds. With PayDotCom they can only pay through PayPal.

At PayDotCom´s website you´ll find the information that customers can pay also with their credit cards, but this applies only if you - the vendor - have an US PayPal account and have set it up to receive direct credit card payments from non PayPal users (you need to pay 29$ per month to PayPal for this options).

6) Affiliate Payment

The biggest advantage of ClickBank is that they handle the affiliate payment for you, so you do not have to worry about that part. But that´s actually the only big advantage ClickBank has over PayDotCom.

With PayDotCom, you will need to take care of the affiliate payment yourself. They will send you a mass payment file that you can use with your PayPal account to send your affiliates their commissions, so it´s actually quite easy to pay your affiliates.

7) Managing Affiliates

With ClickBank, everybody with a nickname can promote your products and you have no sales statistics unless you are using a tool like the above mentioned EasyClickMate.

PayDotCom however gives you access to all people promoting your products and reports their traffic and sales convertion statistics.

To sum it all up, PayDotCom is a great alternative to ClickBank with many advantages. Hence, you should really try it out by adding at least one product to the PayDotCom marketplace, which you can do free of charge.

The only advantage I still see in ClickBank is that they handle all the affiliate payments for you, so you never need to worry about that part.

I wish you a great week and if you have any questions or comments, simply send me an email.

Sincerely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer