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Our regular readers will already know that we use and love MaxBlog’s Ninja Affiliate plugin. And for those who don’t know why this is our favorite plugin, why not head on over and read our review about the benefits that you will gain by using it.

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• Create affiliate links in a flash – simply enter them once in the backend and your entire blog can have mass affiliate links added in a instant to both old and new posts
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• Add nofollow to affiliate links
• Add internal links within your website
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• Add the link in Ninja Affiliate and it changes the links even on old posts for you.

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FINALLY RELEASED - Our complete guide to making money online by promoting Amazon products. Head over to the AMAZONIAN PROFIT PLAN website for all the latest info.

I recently saw this question on an internet marketing forum. The writer was specifically looking for responses from ‘successful internet marketers and veterans’ to see what they would do if they had to start out from scratch again. I thought it was a really good question for a newbie to ask.

Most people spend years becoming truly successful online and most will have made every mistake known to man to get there so asking them what they would do if they had to start again from scratch is an ideal question.

Interestingly enough, all of the responses were different. So what does that say?…well, to me it simply says that there are plenty of ways to make money online. How wonderful is that?! You don’t need to worry if it will work or not because once you find a system or method that suits you; it WILL work if you keep at it. Persistence is the key with this business but most people don’t have it in them to keep at it until they do eventually succeed. And they keep buying the next “big thing’ hoping it will help them make money overnight, and of course that doesn’t work for them either because they don’t put the time in.

So let’s look at some of the responses to that post to see what some of the ‘successful’ internet marketers would do:

1. ‘Create your own product’– in other words, write your own ebook, create a membership site, create and sell your own WordPress theme, build a plugin etc. Now prior to us releasing our ebook we wouldn’t have put much stock into this one but I can say with hand on heart that this is one that I would recommend, to someone with experience on the web. However, for someone new to it all, it’s not an easy one to start with and personally I wouldn’t suggest it to someone brand new on the internet. Others may disagree on that one but I really think you need to know the basics on how to build a website and how to market a product on the internet before you get into something like this.

2. ‘Give value in everything you do’ – now I love that response because that has become our philosophy. If I were starting again I would make certain that I have that line floating around in my head instead of ‘How can I make money online’.

3. ‘Approach article marketing differently’ – basically this poster said that he wouldn’t have wasted his time posting to Ezine etc and instead would have created a relationship with a couple of authority sites and submitted his articles to them exclusively. Personally I wouldn’t just stick to one or two but the basic idea is there. If you can get your articles on authority sites or blogs that relate to your niche then you will be streets ahead of the rest of those who simply submit to article directories.

4. ‘Create an email list’ – this one was a common response. This is the one thing we have been a bit slow to take on although that is changing now. If you have a nice list of people who follow the same things you follow then you can promote products to the list and make money that way. One of the main advantages of a list is if your websites suddenly disappeared overnight then you will still have a following of people and it won’t take long to get back up and running.

5. ‘Create a plan’ – as the poster said, most newbies don’t have a plan or a set of goals – all they think about is the money. Setting goals is extremely important. We have a roll of butchers’ paper that we roll out and write our plans, ideas, and goals. And we do this at the very least once a week. Its not set in concrete, we can make adjustments to suit what is happening but by doing this we always know exactly what we need to do in the coming days, weeks and months.

6. And finally my response to the question was that if I were starting out again I would create only one website instead of many and would create 5 really good product reviews for that site using Amazon products. I would then spend 80% working on getting traffic and backlinks to those 5 pages and the other 20% of my time writing informational type articles to add to the site. That’s all I would do. Nice and simple and this is the one method that I know absolutely works.

This is a post that we actually send out to one of our email lists but we thought it was worth while posting to our blog here as well as it is a question we get asked regularly. Our answer to that question is always the same: NO. Actually we say it a lot nicer than that but that in essence is our response.

Why?…well for a couple of reasons actually. The first is the age old problem of people copying the site. We’ve had the experience of people not only copying individual pages but also in some instances copying the whole site. And although the old adage says ‘being copied is the greatest form of flattery’ when it comes to the internet, this doesn’t hold true. Copying our site doesn’t help anyone and no one benefits, not the person copying our site and certainly not us.

The other reason is that we have made so many mistakes in the past that giving someone one of our websites to look at will only result in them making the same mistakes we did. I have already read reviews from people who have obviously copied the format of some of our reviews. Unfortunately the particular format they copied didn’t work for us and I know it won’t work for them either.

Then there are others that attempt to follow our site structure because they found one of our websites and think they should structure it the same way. They are wasting their time because the site structure has very little to do with our success. We have sites structured in all sorts of different ways and the reviews still work regardless of how the site is structured.

And one more reason that we don’t give out our websites is that we are forever testing different things. We might try an Amazon plugin out for example. And because we are trying it out, it doesn’t mean that it is actually working for us, but people who visit the site may assume that because we are using that plugin then they should do the same.

What made this all work for us in the end wasn’t how our sites were structured or the plugins we used, the niche we chose,  or whether we used a blog or a html site – what worked was creating quality reviews and working our butts off getting traffic to those reviews.

We want you to be thinking in the same way. Just create a fantastic content for your site and spend the rest of your time getting traffic/backlinks to that content. That should be your primary goal. You don’t need to see our websites for this to work. You don’t need to see anyone’s website for this to work. You simply need to focus on your website, provide value and work on getting traffic.

We have a number of affiliate marketing websites. These are a hangover from when we first came into affiliate marketing when we felt that having more websites meant making more money. If we were starting out now we would only have a couple as it is so much more manageable. But having lots of websites means we have lots of product reviews and we realized early on that if we were going to keep track of where sales were coming from that we needed to start using Amazon tracking ids.

If you have begun to add product reviews to your own website and are using Amazon then you should really be doing the same thing. This will make it so much easier to check your sales on Amazon as you will be able to see exactly from which pages on your website the sales came from.

Choose Your Tracking IDs Carefully

Be very selective in how you want your tracking ID’s to look as you cannot delete or change them once they have been approved by Amazon. Bummer I know.

We found this out the hard way, we had started using a set of ID’s and then found it didn’t really help us when we came to determining which products were performing the best and we had to start over, but the original ID’s could not be deleted or changed, and keep in mind that you can only have 100 tracking ID’s per account. This may sound a lot but once you get started you will find it doesn’t take long to start using up your quota.  Having said that, we haven’t used ours up yet but that is because we track a mix of websites and products.  So we only bother about tracking products that meet our product review criteria.

We use one tracking ID per product review page so it will be used for both the images and the text links on that page. However, if you want to go even deeper and see which individual links are performing the best, you can use a tracking id for each individual link. So you might have a tracking id for the image link, a different tracking id for the first link in your product review, a different tracking id for the second link and so on. But as we said previously, you only ever get 100 tracking ids per Amazon account so doing it this way will mean that you have the potential for running out of tracking ids fairly quickly.

So how do you Create a Tracking ID in Amazon?

1. Sign into your Amazon Associates account.

2. Click on Account Settings in the top right hand corner of your screen.

3. In the Account Information Section find the bullet point “Manage your tracking IDs” and click on it.

4. Click the Add Tracking ID button and you will be presented with a page where you can add a tracking ID (see image below). Add the tracking ID that you have decided to use for a particular product or website in the blank box. We usually type in a word that relates to the product we are promoting. So for instance, say that we have written a product review for the iPod Touch. If we wanted to create a tracking ID for that page we might enter the words “ipod-touch” into that tracking ID field. So the tracking ID would look like this - ipod-touch-20 (Note that Amazon IDs end in ’20′ in North America).

5. Click the search button and Amazon will do a search to make sure the Tracking ID is unique. Amazon will let you know straight away whether the ID is available and if it is you can start using it on your product review page.

How to Add the Tracking ID to the Product Review

1. Open your product review post in WordPress. Also open your Amazon Product page in a new tab or window, whichever suits the way you work with multiple internet windows.

2. On the top line of the product page in Amazon you will find the words “Link to this page”. Click on that link. This will open the ‘Customize and Get HTML’ pop-up.

3.You will see two drop-down boxes – one says “Signed in as” and the other says “Tracking ID” Click the down arrow and select the Tracking ID for the product review you just created (see image below). Amazon will automatically change the code in the HTML code box so that it now includes your tracking ID.

4. Now, you can simply grab the code and add it to either your image or text links as you would normally do and the tracking id will be included. (For instructions on adding Amazon links to images click here.)

So there you have it a quick and easy way to keep track of where your clicks and conversions are coming from as your Tracking ID will show in your Amazon Tracking ID Summary report.

You will be able to see at a glance, how many clicks, items ordered, items shipped, shipped item revenue and commissions or Advertising Fees each product is producing.

Well it’s certainly been an absolutely amazing week. We are so glad that our ‘Amazonian Profit Plan‘ ebook has finally been released, and the response has been quite overwhelming, which makes all the time and effort to get it finished, well worthwhile.

A great big thank you to everyone who provided such wonderful feedback. We are still getting through the questions so don’t be concerned if you haven’t had a response, you will be hearing from us fairly soon.

It’s also nice to finally get some time back for our business. For those that have read the ebook, you will know that we focus on five product reviews at a time and we had developed another five a couple of months ago. The only problem was that we didn’t have much time to focus on them as we were spending most of our time on the ebook. So we will be starting back on those in the next couple of weeks as things  quieten down a little.

We will also be getting back to our regular posts so you will see the first of those in the next day or so…Wanda is working on a blog post as we speak.

And finally for those that have been asking about an affiliate program for the ebook, it is ready to go, and here is – the Affiliate Program Link.

We still haven’t had a chance to get any banners created as yet, so there are only text links available for the moment. However,  those of you who are regular readers to our blog will be aware that we tend to find that text links work way better than widgets or banner ads.

If you have any questions about the Affiliate Program please contact us here.

This is just going to be a fairly short post to let everyone know that the ebook is finished. We have just released it to our email list and I have to say that we are quite overwhelmed with the fantastic feedback we have received so far. We were trying to deliver something worthwhile so from the comments received, we think we achieved it.

So it  is now ready to be released to the rest of the world – if you are interested please click on the link below. We are offering the ebook at a discounted rate for the next 72 hours after which the price will be going up.

The ebook includes our complete blueprint for making money online by promoting Amazon products. You will learn our criteria for choosing products that convert, how to write a product review from start to finish and you also get to see an actual finished example. And we will also detail our main method for getting traffic to our reviews.

It includes step-by-steps for everything so you won’t be left thinking what to do next. This is 75 pages of solid information.

Click the link for the Amazonian Profit Plan