Creating a Long-term Cash Cow with the Rocket Profit Affiliate Network

Posted by Selfpreneurs

February 7, 2008

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Originally, the title of this post was either going to be something like “The Killer Guide to Making Money Online with the Rocket Profit Affiliate Network”, or “The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online with a Rocket Profit Affiliate Program.”

Then I realized that no way truly is the best, the best is whatever works for you depending on your situation.

Landing site or Landing Page?

Most affiliates will go for the fast buck and create a landing page for their offer. You can make money - but conversion rates may be low (you’re only getting ppc traffic), which means you’ll have to spend a lot of money upfront to turn a profit. Secondly, if the offer gets pulled from the affiliate network (this happens more than you might think) - what are you going to do?

I prefer to build a viable online business in the form of a landing site around a product or offer. I can start with no money at all, I don’t have to worry about offers being pulled (you can just substitute another related product), I get my own website in the process - and in the end I can sell the whole operation for 100x my initial investment. It takes longer, but in the long term it pays off more and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this by picking an offer from a hot, new affiliate network - Rocket Profit.

Rocket Profit

First of all, let me just say that Rocket Profit has to be the MOST exciting affiliate network that I belong to right now (and I belong to a ton of networks). Rocket Profit has a lot of great offers, and more especially some really juicy, exclusive offers. The people behind Rocket Profit really know their stuff. There’s a lot to like about the network - for example the parent company is traded on the Nasdaq so that should tell you there’s nothing shady about the company - but 2 of the most important things that should matter to you as an affiliate are:

Payment - how fast and what’s the minimum payout level?
Communication

Rocket Profit offers super fast commissions which is extremely important and better yet they have a low payout level, $25. I belong to some affiliate networks where you don’t get paid for months (credit card affiliate programs are notorious for this) and others where you have to earn at least a $100 before you get paid (Adsense anybody?). Better yet, Rocket Profit sends payment by Paypal without any extra fees! See Rocket Profit’s payment options here, click on FAQ.

Secondly, I haven’t seen a more pro-communication network than Rocket Profit. They have 24/7 customer service, and when you login - your affiliate manager information is displayed prominently on the top right of your user panel. Which brings me to my first step towards creating your long term cash cow …

Know your Affiliate Manager

This factor is often overlooked by a majority of affiliates. Upon joining a new network - most just look through the available offers and pick the offer with the highest payout. I used to be guilty of doing this. What you might not realize is that sometimes the offers with the highest payouts are the hardest to convert - that’s why they pay so high! Unless you are a super affiliate, stay away from those kinds of offers. Now, I always make it a point to introduce myself to my affiliate manager for two major reasons:

Your affiliate manager will tell you what the hottest offers are
Your affiliate manager can provide you with conversion rates and eCPC - essential if you are going to be run a PPC campaign

Choose an Offer

So after introducing yourself to your affiliate manager, the next step is to pick an offer. You can take your affiliate managers advice and pick a hot offer - or you can pick your own offer. The two main criteria I use to pick offers are:

Exclusivity - why market something thousands of other affiliate marketers are promoting the same thing? I want something nobody else has and I like to get in early. Plus common offers means a lot of competition - which in turn means my keywords might cost me more in a PPC campaign
Promote something I’m interested in - I’m in this for the long haul, and I’m going to put in the hours. I pick something I would enjoy telling my best friend about. If I really don’t care about a product or offer - my campaign will turn out sloppy.

The offer I decided to pick is Shaq’s Big Family Challenge. It’s in a very hot niche - weight loss. It’s a family oriented activity which is excellent because it opens up avenues for cross selling opportunities to everyone in the family, and best of all, it’s associated with one of the most famous athletes on the planet, Shaquille O’Neal. By default, the product has already sold itself by association - who would you rather listen to about weight loss, Shaq or some guy in a white frock on a herbal supplement site?

Next, I always try to increase the amount of my payout by looking for the kinds of offers that send free samples of a related, complementary product and all the customer has to pay for is s&h. The customer gets this as a sort of thank you for signing up - and it turns out to be a win-win situation for everybody. Rocket Profit has such an offer, the Power Tea Weight Loss Sample.

Build a site

I would start a self-hosted Wordpress blog as opposed to a site - primarily because I can rank easier for organic search traffic and Wordpress has so many free design templates and plugins this makes it easy to build a really professional looking blog in no time. Plus a blog allows me to build a connection with my potential audience and most importantly - I can easily build a RSS base which I can also monetize. I won’t go into the details of building a Wordpress blog - but Caroline Middlebrook has an excellent resource here. I would name the blog something like familyweightloss.com - notice that there’s no mention of the actual specific product in the title. This is important because if for some reason the offer is no longer available, I can just substitute another weight loss product.

Another advantage of picking an offer based on a famous celebrity is that you just might run into this person and grab the chance for a photo. Post that prominently on your blog and your credibility is through the roof! Anybody attending NBA All Star Weekend 2008 this year?

Create a Target Customer Profile

I’d create a profile of my target audience. In this case they are families - where do families hang out online? Weight-loss forums? Health & Fitness sites? I would target Dad & Mom, especially Moms because they often control the diet for the entire household. Plus, Moms will tell other Moms and you can’t beat word of mouth advertising.

Drive traffic to my site

Traffic can either come to your offer directly, or indirectly (organically) via a search engine. I focus 80% of my efforts in driving direct traffic to my site, you are at the mercy of the search engines for organic traffic. I would do these things to send direct traffic to my offer:

Article Submission - submit well written, original weight loss articles to ezinearticles etc on the challenges families face trying to stay healthy, obesity in teens, etc with a link back to my site
Leverage social media sites such as squidoo, stumbleupon
Hang out at weight loss forums
Hang out where parents hang out online - school message boars, community bulletin boards etc. This will not be difficult if you have an accurate customer profile
Become an active, relevant commentator at high powered health related blogs in my niche
Employ some offline marketing such as leaving some flyers at a gym or fitness club, buying some custom t-shirts with my url - handing these out to friends etc

All the above items also have the added benefit of creating organic traffic for you. I would also launch a PPC campaign with a focus on highly targeted keywords and phrases. There’s an excellent article here that I recommend you read on running a PPC campaign on a low budget. Even if you have lots of money to spend, this article will help you stretch your dollars longer.

Conclusion

There’s no secret to making money as an affiliate marketer - it takes working smart and time. Build something valuable, something that fills a need with an eye towards long term growth. You have the solution, drive the people who need your solution to your site directly or organically. Install free tracking software on your site such as Google Analytics, optimize and tweak accordingly. Turn yourself into an authority in your niche. Rinse, dry and repeat. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a long-term cash cow to go build.

A Few Mentioned Resources

Sign up for Rocket Profit here

Lose Weight with Shaq’s Big Family Weight Loss Challenge

Receive a Free Sample of Power Tea Weight Loss

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