This was originally a report created by me for a membership site. The membership site is now defunct, but the information still valid so hopefully some of you will benefit from it.

The exact method that will be covered today is polls and email / zip submits.

“That’s old!” I hear you say. It’s old, but it works. You can pull in an easy $50 or more profit per day with this, and you’d be a fool not to try it.

Driving traffic to a page that will convert is one of THE easiest ways to get started and make money in affiliate marketing. It’s so easy, that you can make enough doing it and nothing else to live pretty comfortably on the web.

What we will be doing, is setting up polls… polls about various subjects, and then sending targeted traffic to it. What we will focus on is expanding the profitable campaigns, and ditching the unprofitable ones, until eventually you have campaigns that run on clockwork generating you a steady $10/day or more. Once you have such campaigns up, all you do is rinse and repeat whatever you did until you’re satisfied with the amount you’re making.

Let’s get started on choosing an offer.

Choosing An Offer

The offers that do best are uncomplicated, one field email or zip submits. You do not care about what the user does next; all they have to do is input their email and you will get paid.

Remember that the people you are targeting are not the smartest on the planet (people who think that if they enter their email they will get a free iPod – dumb!) so you don’t want to complicate things. You also DON’T want to give them too many options… the only way they should be able to leave your landing page is through either clicking your affiliate link, or pressing the red X. Most will click your affiliate link.

The best offers that I’ve used are iPod / iPhone related offers combined with celebrity landing pages. I will explain how to setup a landing page in the next section, but let’s talk about your offers first.

Of course, you need to be signed up to a good affiliate network to find a good offer. Here’s some of the networks that I recommend:

Some of the best networks to join for this are:

http://neverblueads.com

NeverBlue Ads have over 200 free CPA lead offers at any given time, quite a few of them iPod / iPhone based.

http://www.advaliant.com/

Advaliant are another affiliate network which is very easy to get accepted to.

http://www.marketleverage.com/

Although their interface can be at times confusing, Market Leverage has very helpful affiliate managers who will guide you through choosing the perfect offer for your campaign.

The three above are the ones we like best (especially NeverBlue Ads) but you may use any affiliate network you like.

Make sure the affiliate network you use can be trusted and pays how you like. You can choose Paypal, cheque or sometimes even direct bank transfer.

What should you look at when selecting offers?

Good landing page. Graphics always help conversion – if the page looks ugly to you, it’s going to look ugly to the people you’re targeting.

Optin box above the fold. Looks of the graphic page are one thing, but you want to make it as easy as possible for your target audience to enter their email. Make sure they don’t have to scroll down.

Terms and conditions below the fold. Terms and Conditions always scare people, so make sure they’re out of sight or out of focus. The prime focus has to be that opt in box.

Looking at the above three things as well as the commission offer will give you an idea of which offer to best choose.

Your average email submit offer pays around $1.25; you will find a few higher and lower. Remember, you only want offers that want an email submit, nothing more as the more work your target has to do, the less conversions you will get.

Setting Up A Landing Page

You cannot direct link in Adwords; although it is certainly possible, you will make little to no profit if you do this starting out. The best way to go about this is by setting up a landing page. Here is what your average landing page looks like:

This is just one campaign; you can create as many as you want.

Whichever option someone chooses, it will take them to a page that looks like the one below.

This is an example of a great page… although it allows you to choose a colour, this looks more likely that someone could possibly win something.

Here’s the two types of questions you should ask:

Question A: Relating to current events. For example, the USA Presidential elections when they were happening. You can check out what current events are happening by reading your daily newspaper or the front page of Yahoo / Google News.

Question B: A question that anyone can answer. For example, ‘Do You Love Or Hate Google’. These questions are good because even though you’ll have to use mainly the content network, you can get very cheap clicks as few are competing against you

The best of the two to do is obviously the first method… why? Simply because the first gets more interest, as people are actually searching for such things. Do not choose complicated topics, like nuclear physics; remember, those kind of people will generally not enter their email to win something. Anything related to celebrities, movies, fashion, politics and sport tends to do well.

You can find a list of what’s hot and what people are searching for by using Google Trends. Select topics that fit into the above categories.

Your landing page needs to be simple, and have no doubts about exactly what you are offering… use images for the two options and add some text too. The text helps a) increase your quality score (for bidding) and b) gives visitors to the page a further idea of what they need to do. Make sure you emphasize how easy it is to win the offer you are promoting.

Setting up landing pages takes fifteen minutes or less for me, especially once you have done the first one… all you have to do is change the images and write up a new paragraph of text. If you are too lazy to create your own landing page though, you can buy Poll Factory which I recommend if you want to save time. If costs $100 but is well worth it.

Poll Factory produces fresh looking landing pages without you having to touch the code at all if you don’t want to. It is a HUGE time saver and essential if you want to limit the amount of work you have to do on each page. Remember that the less work you do, the better off you are.

Getting Ready With Pay Per Click

Some people are extremely scared of using pay per click… but why? PPC is one of the easiest ways to test your target market at a low price, and you can make 5x – 10x or more your investment… who wouldn’t take such a return.

For this method, we will be mainly targeting the content network; you will see a lot of impressions, but a low click through ratio. This is the reason why we have to set up a lot of campaigns for you to reach your required $100/day.

It is unlikely that you will reach $100/day off one campaign, which is why we need many; although it is possible, it needs a lot of tweaking and remember we are lazy. What you need to do is aim for your campaigns to make just $10/day, then rinse and repeat.

For me, I setup at least one campaign every day (which takes fifteen minutes) and spend around $10 on it (which gives me 100 clicks or so). If I am NOT making a profit, I ditch the campaign; if I am, I keep running it until profits start to drop. I have been trying to setup at least one new campaign every day for the last two months (give or take a few days, weekends… holidays etc) and now am reaping the rewards – you’ll soon find that one landing page can make you hundreds of dollars on autopilot.

You should NOT spend anything more than $0.05 – $0.15 per click… remember, we are not targeting expensive keywords.

In your ad, you MUST mention the subject and the prize. An example ad would be:

Does Britney Spears Suck?
Some say yes, some say no
Vote and win an iPod!

http://www.yourdomain.com

What we will be using for the bulk of our campaigns is Google Adwords, however you can try out other networks if you wish. The great thing for us is that Adwords gives you $50.00 free to start out with… at $10 per campaign, that is five spanking campaigns you can test out.

Not everything you try will turn into gold; some of your campaigns won’t even get off the ground and some will lose money. However, your goal is to find just two $10/day profit campaigns per week – at that rate, by the end of the month you will have eight campaigns producing $10 a day, leaving you with $80 per day. Of course, the more you work, the more you earn – you could setup those campaigns on your first day itself to make you a lot more than $80/day.