Net Strife - providing smashing tips on Internet Marketing

This isn’t related to Internet Marketing, but I’m posting this here just to vent. I was driving home from uni the other day coming home from an exam when I turned into another car and messed up the paintwork on both cars pretty bad. The crash was entirely my fault so I’m glad the driver of the other car wasn’t too mad. Pics of my car before:

… And after:

Although the damage isn’t that bad, I have to pay my insurance company $2600 just to fix this (on top of the $3200/year insurance I already pay for my car). This is in AUD (about 0.65 USD = 1.00 AUD), but it’s definitely really expensive and something I could have done without. Being 19 and male means insurance is insanely expensive, especially with my car.

Anyways, I’ve been pretty busy the last couple of weeks with exams but will get some more posts up on this blog now that I have some free time. I’m planning on writing more on SEO since that’s what I know most about (especially the new MSN loophole method which a lot of people are talking about), but if you would like to see Net Strife cover some specific internet marketing topic, comment below and I’ll see if I can write about it.

So I just stopped over at the Warrior Forum and noticed about a gazillion threads talking about clickbank’s affiliate tracking system not working. I checked my own links, and for a couple of products I have been promoting (I have tons of niche sites that promote products on clickbank), the affiliate ID isn’t being passed through.

When people started talking about how clickbank was having tracking problems and sales were declining, I just ignored it — but now I have no doubts that something fishy is going on. Clickbank has always been a great company to deal with for me so I really hope they can sort this out.

If you promote clickbank products as an affiliate, check your affiliate links now.

I was playing this cool Fantastic Contraption game last night with my brother, who said something like “I wish I had the idea to make a game like this - these guys must be making a fortune”. It got me wondering whether having a unique idea and useful product was enough by itself to become successful, without knowing much about marketing. Unfortunately, however, my experience is that you can make ANYTHING sell with the right marketing - whereas having a great product doesn’t guarantee success.

In fact, I regularly come across great products — in huge markets with plenty of demand, I should add — that don’t sell, simply because the product owner doesn’t know how to market their product effectively. I think of brilliant products I use everyday like PromoSoft that are mostly unknown. On the other side of the coin, there are totally useless products that sell into the thousands everyday, because (you guessed it) the product owner knows how to market effectively.

I’m regularly involved with promoting products off ClickBank as an affiliate, and one thing I have definitely noticed is that the top gravity products that sell really well aren’t actually that good. Most of them are hyped-up “get rich quick” scheme’s that get promoted by thousands of affiliates just because they offer a generous 75% commission. And when you do a Google search for reviews of a product on clickbank, you’ll find all of them are simply disguised affiliate marketing “reviews” that just want you to buy it so they’ll get a commission from it.

There was a thread on the Warrior Forum about this a while back (I’ll try to dig it up) where the forum admin (who I am sure makes at least $1 million per year) went on about how providing value isn’t the most important thing to make money - it’s your system. Without a proper system for generating traffic, promoting the right things and converting your visitors, you don’t make money. There are marketers who have a system nailed down for generating huge profits each day. But the quality of products they sell simply don’t have much to do with how much they money they make.

I believe that you definitely SHOULD provide 100x the value someone ever pays for your product. Always try to underpromise and overdeliver to people, regardless of what you are selling. Your profits may not dramatically increase, but you will have a reputable business that genuinely helps people, and that’s becoming something of a rarity with online businesses today.

Anyways, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue - Does having a great product guarantee success? Or is your marketing strategy more important? I know a lot of people will disagree with the above. Let me know what you think.

One of my favourite ways to test if a market is profitable and generate some sales is to build simple software applications, and submit them to download sites. There are hundreds of software download sites (like download.com, softpedia, best freeware download, tucows etc) that get tons of traffic. If you go to download.com, it shows you how many times each program has been downloaded, just to give you an idea. You’ll find that many software programs have millions of downloads and that’s just from download.com alone.

The good news is that you don’t need to be a programmer to tap into this huge traffic source. In fact, I can put something together in about half an hour that is likely to get accepted into download.com and any other software directory, that will then easily get hundreds of downloads in the next few months. And I don’t know anything about programming (I’m mostly too lazy to learn )

Anyways, here’s how to do it…

Things you can submit to software directories:

Most people don’t realize that download.com accepts simple ebooks and video’s. Basically, what you’ll be doing is making a simple .exe file, that opens up your little application. It can just consist of a few articles, a video from youtube, or a simple form the user fills in. Anything cool that a user might be interested in, you can submit to these software directories. I regularly go to places like Widget Box looking for simple things I can turn into an .exe file and submit to download.com.

So let’s say you want to submit a really simple program that has a video from youtube and a few articles. You’ll make money from it by promoting an affiliate product from clickbank (or anywhere else) in the software program you’re submitting. When users download your program, they’ll see your advertisement and can visit your site.

How to make your simple software application:

It’s actually really simple. Just open your favourite HTML editor like dreamweaver or frontpage, and make your application. In this case we’re just going to have a few articles and a video. So say I’m in the weight loss niche, I’ll find a few articles on how to lose weight, and go to youtube and find a nice weight loss video I can embed. Then have a simple pitch for a clickbank weight loss product in the software that you’ll get a commission on if the user buys it. It’s just like making a normal site.

When you’re done, you need to turn the HTML file into an .exe file. There are several software products that can do this for you. My favourite one is HTML Executable (non affiliate link) which is really an awesome product that does everything you’ll ever need. Sometimes, I also use eBook Maestro which is simpler and also does the job fine. This will make a .exe file that will open up your HTML page when the user double clicks on it.

And that’s it! You now have a simple software application that can be submitted to major download sites.

How to submit your software application to download sites:

This is the most important part. First, you need to make a PAD (Portable Application Description) file, which basically just describes your software including things like the date of release, version number, the URL of where to download the software, size of the file etc. You’ll be making this with PadGen. You just fill in the blanks and the software makes the PAD file for you.

Now that you have made the PAD file, you are ready to submit the PAD file to download sites. To submit to hundreds of download sites automatically I use PromoSoft (non affiliate link) which is BY FAR the #1 tool to submit your software to hundreds of download sites. This will save you a ton of time over submitting your software to sites manually. You just import the PAD file into promosoft, and let it submit.

Promosoft doesn’t submit to download.com, so you will need to submit to that site seperately. To do this, just go to upload.com, create an account, fill in the form and submit your software. It normally takes them a while to approve your software and put it on their site for people to download unless you pay for it to be done faster. However, once your software is approved and published on download.com, it can easily get a ton of downloads, more so than every other software directory on the net COMBINED. So I always submit to download.com.

More general information:

When you use PromoSoft and submit the PAD file if your software to hundreds of download sites, it actually does (believe it or not) have some SEO benefits since the software download sites you submit to will link back to your site. However, the main reason to try this method is simple because it often produces a lot of traffic with relatively little effort.

I’ve been doing this since last year and have submitted well over 100 software applications to download.com and through promosoft, which accounts for a large portion of my income. I submit programs in all kinds of niches. It’s a little ‘hit and miss’ which software applications you submit really take off — some of the things I submit get thousands of downloads a month and make sales every day, while others fizzle out after just a few hundred downloads, and some hardly ever get downloaded. The more programs you submit, the more money you’ll make over time. You can in fact make a full time income doing this without really even having a proper website. Normally, I don’t spend over 1 hour creating something to submit, so it’s usually well worth the effort of making something.

By the way, when you do this, make sure it’s valuable for the person downloading it. Don’t just create a blatant advertisement. It HAS to have something useful, otherwise it won’t get accepted at download.com or any major software directory.

Here’s an example of a simple application I made in the earth 4 energy niche, just to give you a basic idea. When you download this, it has a few articles on the topic, and an ad for a product on clickbank. I make money when people download it, click on the link, and buy the product.

If you want to know more about how this works, feel free to comment below. I don’t know if all of the above sounded complicated, but this method is actually quite straightforward once you’ve done it a few times.

Net Strife was recently sold on sitepoint for a BIN price of $1500 (you can see the auction here) and for the next few months we plan on building up the blog with more great content and contests. My name is Louis Edwards and with a couple of other people I plan on covering a lot of new topics - from SEO, to PPC/AdWords, Affiliate marketing and more.

In case you’re wondering who I am, I’ve been doing internet marketing (mostly affiliate marketing with clickbank) for a couple of years and earn a very comfortable living doing it. I brought Net Strife just on the fly, since I thought the blog had some good quality posts, and we definitely want to add to it. Of course I want to make sure this blog maintains its level of quality and so I’ll only be posting things that GENUINELY will help people build an online business - mostly stuff that I actually do myself, so I know it works.

Anyways feel free to comment below if you want to know anything else.