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Review Of The Super Affiliate Handbook
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This article presents a comprehensive review of the Super Affiliate Handbook, or How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online. This ebook, offered by internet marketing celebrity Rosalind Gardner, is a #1 BestSeller in Clickbank's Business-to-Business category, and is known to sit on the digital shelf of many an Affiliate Program Manager.
Review Rosalind Gardner's ebook offering is segmented into 11 chapters totalling 275 pages. Here is my assessment of the Super Affiliate Handbook, broken down chapter by chapter. CHAPTER 1: Introduction This chapter is like the soft bubble-wrap layer you find inside a box of chocolates when you lift the lid. There is not much here, just a little "pep talk" to get you psyched for what is to follow, and an entreaty to promote the book if you discover you like it. I would have preferred to hear more about who Rosalind Gardner is at this stage, rather than have to wait until the end of the book (where there actually is a page devoted to the subject). So, for the record, I did skip to the end, I read her bio, then I came back to get started... CHAPTER 2: Internet & Affiliate Marketing Basics Rosalind Gardner begins this chapter disspelling myths about running a business on the web. Basically this can be boiled down to a simple declaration: "There is no path to overnight riches on the web, but with perseverance and insight (such as can be derived from this book) it is quite possible to couple the advantages of low online operating costs and ever emerging--and lucrative--affiliate marketing opportunities to establish a highly profitable online business model. In addition, Big Money is entirely possible". So far, so good. Then the ABC's of affiliate and reseller marketing follow. If you don't know the difference between an affiliate and a reseller, here's where you'll find out the differences and learn which marketing method suits you better. Finally, Rosalind Gardner paints a portrait of her typical work day as a Super Affiliate, contrasting it with the lifestyle of your average 9 to 5 wage earner. Not suprisingly, her life sounds like one long holiday in comparison... CHAPTER 3: Setting Up Shop Before you can run an online business you need to ensure that some basic equipment and services are in place. This chapter runs through the list of items that Rosalind Gardner considers important, often justifying her recommendations with anecdotal tales of things that went horribly wrong for her in the past because she had overlooked one thing or another. This chapter contains lots of ancilliary affiliate links to her recommended products and services. Nothing wrong with that, but unless you are totally new to the web you'll probably find little in the way of new information in this part of the book. Her recommendation to dump your slow modem connection and upgrade to high-speed cable or DSL because it will save you LOTS of time (and time is money) moving information around on the web is probably the best advice in this section. At this stage I am 40-odd pages into the book and still looking for the first really useful piece of information. But I'm patient, and there is still a lot of material ahead of me. CHAPTER 4: Research A Profitable Topic The crux of this chapter is the idea that if you are hoping to succeed at selling other people's products you'll do best if you choose a line of products about which you are knowledgeable and for which you have a passion. Of course, you'll have to balance this against the ultimate aim of making money, and she covers that too later in the chapter. Rosalind Gardner tells you how to go about selecting your "niche" area. You really want to get this part of your business right as you'll be at this game for several years; you don't want to wake up one morning after investing all your time and effort into something and discover that the fizz has gone out of it for you. If you are entirely new to keyword research you will find the discussion on keyword research tools very exciting as Rosalind Gardner explains how to assess the demand or "profit potential" associated with a given niche. She spells out in explicit detail how to calculate the net profit a given niche is likely to generate using keyword lists and industry averages. So you get a very good idea of whether or not to proceed with your idea. As an example, she explores "online dating", a niche with which she has personally done very nicely. CHAPTER 5: How To Find Merchants After spelling out the definition of an Affiliate Network, and listing 48 such networks, Rosalind Gardner takes the time to briefly review the following few: Advertising.com, AffiliateFuel.com, BeFree.com, CasinoCoins.com, CasinoRewards.com, Clickbank, ClickxChange.com, ClixGalore.com, Commission Junction (which she declares her favorite and goes into some depth to justify her choice), CommissionSoup.com, DarkBlue.com, FineClicks.com, iWhiz.com, LeadHound.com, Linkshare.com, Performics.com, PrimaryAds.com, Quinstreet.com, ReferBack.com, Search4Clicks.com, ShareaSale.com, and WebSponsors.com. In addition there is some discussion on the topic of Affiliate Directories: places on the web where large accumulations of affiliate programs are listed, oftentimes with a rating submitted by someone who has taken the time to review the program. CHAPTER 6: How To Choose Products & Affiliate Programs One of the central pieces of advice found in this chapter is that you should only endorse those products that you can recommend because you have personally used them yourself and found them to be of high quality. However, personal recommendations need not appear alone in the copy of your web pages. You can also tap into the "pay per click" advertising streams of such programs as Google Adsense, and Rosalind Gardner reports that top Adsense affiliates are making a very healthy living at this game. Covered next is the important question of how you distinguish between the reputable merchants who offer an affiliate program, and those who might be running fraudulent operations which you desperately want to avoid (every affiliate network has its share). Once you have found a reputable merchant you'll need to understand the contract offered. Do you know the difference between one-time, residual, and lifetime commissions? Well, this is important stuff to know. 2nd-tier affiliate marketing schemes? Rosalind Gardner helps you sort it all out. But even if you "know it all" as we can assume Super Affiliate Rosalind Gardner does, things won't always work out for you, and some of the more interesting passages in this chapter involve rejection and termination letters that she has received over the years. In this case fore-warned is fore-armed, and the intent here is to ensure that you do not repeat her mistakes. CHAPTER 7: Plan & Build Your Site Selection of a suitable web host and a great domain name are just a couple of the important site-building related tasks considered by Rosalind Gardner in this part of the Super Affiliate Handbook. Particular emphasis is placed on the choice of a domain name as, among other things, this will determine to some extent the frequency with which your pages appear in the keyword search results of the main search engines. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of HTML page design you have a number of choices, ranging from do it yourself by hand, use specialized software to help you, or hire someone to handle it all for you. Rosalind Gardner discusses the pros and cons of each approach. Site logo, slogan, privacy statement. These all need to be given serious attention by the affiliate marketer designing their site. To be honest, a lot of the information found in this chapter--and there are lots of resources presented, including javascript code for pop-ups, pop-unders and so on--is really general web building advice, not affiliate-specific infomation which is the kind I am looking for when I purchase an affiliate marketing ebook. I look ahead and see that the title of the next chapter sounds more promising for me... CHAPTER 8: The Job Of Selling The art of the Super Affiliate Rosalind Gardner reminds us, is to put words on a web page in such a way that causes visitors to send us money, with no expectation that we will provide any further service for them. Put that way, it isn't hard to appreciate that Super Affiliates are not that different from writers in any other industry. All make their livings converting words in cash. For this reason, knowing how to write great ad copy is a critical affiliate skill, and a good number of ad copy writing resources are listed in this section. Furthermore, there are shortcuts to obtaining ad copy. It doesn't always need to come directly from your own pen, and ways to go about that are suggested. This includes a discussion on datafeeds, which are a way of getting bulk information on your items from the merchants web site to yours with little pain. Personally, I think that most merchants just don't get the value of a datafeed, so I regard this as an area of opportunity in my own affiliate marketing efforts. CHAPTER 9: 31 Ways To Market Your Site Marketing is, without doubt, the most difficult part of any online enterprise. No traffic = no sales. It's as simple as that. There is an enormous advertising industry built on the premise that people just do not know how to get visitors to their site. This is, of course, the reason why affiliate programs exist. We, the affiliates, are a vital part of the solution. Therefore, this chapter must be considered the most important in the book. Rosalind Gardner suggests 8 Ways To Get Traffic Fast by paying for it one way or another, then another 12 Ways To Get FREE Traffic To Your Site. FREE here means NO reaching into your wallet, but you'll still pay for traffic in the TIME you allocate to these methods (for example, by writing articles for ezines and RSS feeds for directories). With luck, the payoff in traffic send to your site will be worth many times what you put into it. Unfortunately some of the FREE "traffic solutions" discussed are only mentioned so as to warn you that they are a waste of time. So the solution space is smaller than it seems as first. Next up, 11 Ways To Market Your Site Offline. But again, the message here is that these are largely a waste of your valuable online marketing time. So the moral here is that you will need to invest some money and time into getting your affiliate marketing business off the ground and knowing what NOT to do will improve your chances of achieving a payout. CHAPTER 10: Manage & Grow Your Business When you finally succeed at making money as an affiliate you will need to spend some time ensuring that the wheels keep spinning. Rosalind Gardner offers suggestions on how to go about this on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. This involves tracking income and determining the return on investment for each of your monetization methods. But if you are just starting off, this information will likely seem utterly important to you, as it did to me. Perhaps I'll reread this chapter in six months. Well, there is one subject covered here that one ought not put off until later, and that is affiliate link cloaking: if your site has affiliate links on it, you want to be sure visitors don't remove your affiliate ID before visiting a merchant site. Then there is the list of 25 Avoidable Mistakes. OK, so it might pay to read that too before we jump head-first into things. The Super Affiliate Handbook concludes with a list of affiliate marketing related forums where you can learn a great deal about affiliate marketing. CHAPTER 11: Resources All in all, in addition to the Glossary and resources listed in this final chapter, Rosalind Gardner has provided a significant amount of information in her ebook offering. More than enough to justify the price. Especially if you are just starting out with affiliate marketing, an appreciation of the concepts covered in this ebook will undoubtedly help guide you toward success as you begin your marketing efforts. This is why I would recommend the Super Affiliate Handbook as one of the first affiliate marketing texts to add to your digital library. Finally, it's not a bad idea to keep in mind that 90 percent of all commissions earned in the affiliate marketing industry go into the pockets of just the top 1 or 2 percent of affiliates. Rosalind Gardner IS one of these Super Affiliates. As she has said herself, you owe it to yourself to get your information from someone who actually works the trenches and whose Internet Marketing business stands the test of time. |
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