PayPal (part of eBay’s Payments division) is one of the key pieces of the auction giants empire, powering it’s payment capability. It’s in the process of launching a revamp:

Although these are somewhat pleasant features to have, they’ll have to contend with a group of disgruntled Internet Marketers, particularly users of Jonathan Leger’s $7 script, which administers a mini affiliate marketing scheme through PayPal’s APIs.

Read through this thread at Jon Leger’s 7Dollar Forum and you’ll get the distinct impression that PayPal’s frontline customer service seems ill equipped to deal with the issues that Garrie Wilson, Patrick Petty and Jon himself have raised.

Is it because PayPal staff are used to dealing with auction payments and assume that the 7Dollar delivery mechanism is some type of nefarious multilevel/ponzi/pyramid scheme?

It’s not clear, though seeming to arbitraily freezing PayPal accounts certainly doesn’t seem to be a pro-customer measure.

Surely, you can hear us Internet Marketers out, PayPal?

Many of us use PayPal as a payment gateway for our smaller product launches, we contributed a fair amount of your $1.44 billion revenue last year.

As a payment processor, PayPal already generates income from the following revenue streams (from eBay’s financial filings):

PayPal earns revenues in the following ways.

• First, PayPal earns transaction fees when a Business or Premier account receives a payment.
• Second, PayPal earns a foreign exchange fee when an account holder converts a balance from one currency to another.
• Third, PayPal may earn fees when a user withdraws money to a non-U.S. bank account,depending on the amount of the withdrawal.
• Fourth, PayPal earns a return on certain customer balances. Finally, PayPal may earn ancillary revenues from a suite of financial products, including the PayPal-branded debit card, the PayPal-branded credit card and the PayPal Buyer Credit offering.

While PayPal can certainly determine it’s own policies without close dialogue with its non-eBay users, it’s merely a matter of time before alternatives such as Google Checkout, 2Checkout or Clickbank more aggressively market their services and expand their service offerings to meet the growing needs of Internet Marketers.

When that happens, it will certainly be interesting to watch the market develop.

And if you’re using a system (with formalized processes), you’re much more likely to succeed.

Every campaign will be different and things may not go the way you’ve planned, even if you’ve adopted the best practises from an affiliate marketing system, whether it’s from a super affiliate like Ewen Chia or Ros Gardner or a system like Affiliate Project X.

Nothing quite beats having hands-on experience though because real world experience is the ‘bridge’ between what you read about, and the actual affiliate commissions you will earn.

There are a number of factors to a successful campaign.

• Product

Without a product, there’s no transaction. You may hear advice about checking for a good payout and a high conversion ratio (ie a high percentage of leads being converted to transactions).

It’s a good idea to invest or subscribe to the product too, so you’ll have firsthand experience of it’s features and benefits.

Some affiliate marketers stop at this stage, shortlisting products and start promoting them. I feel you could get better results if you consider the other factors too.

• Prospects

What’s the profile of the traffic you’re sending to the page?

You might want to direct your prospects to an intermediate landing page before sending them to a landing page.

If you’ve a package like awstats (which comes with my webhosting service), you’ll have a breakdown by country, browser type, operating system, origination of traffic.

These analytics will give you a holistic picture of your traffic profile and help you measure your traffic generation strategies, so you can focus on more effective ones and drop those that fail to produce results.

It’s worth collecting prospect data via an autoresponder like Aweber or GetResponse as it may take up to 7 exposures before the prospect takes an action.

• Promotion Channel Strategy

You will likely have a dominant channel strategy such as PayPerClick traffic, blogging, forum marketing, email marketing or social networking to reach your prospects.

Match the affiliate products characteristics to your channel.

You will get better results if you shift your promotion strategy to match the product and prospects.

If necessary, use an offline direct marketing strategy to promote your products to get an edge over ‘online-only’ marketers.

For beginner type products like introductory Internet Marketing products, offline methods such as giving talks and interviews, distributing flyers and relationship marketing can be especially effective.

• Persistance and Innovation

Affiliate marketing is a constantly evolving game. A technique that worked a month ago, may be less effective now. The mantra “test, test and test” is a truism, especially if you’re shooting for, or aiming to maintain your super affiliate status.

Innovation is a process of adapting a technique from one medium to another (email marketing is seen as an extension to direct mailing). Observe a successful offline marketing technique, adapt it to the online context and test.

• The Affiliate Marketing Reality

Although newer affiliate marketers seem to complain that they have few sales because ‘people aren’t buying’, this will result in a long spiral downwards because ‘people’ are not within our direct control.

Instead, it’d be more useful to focus on making changes to the affiliate marketing process (which we can influence/control) to yield the outcomes we’re aiming at.

If a user to your landing page runs spybot and deletes your cookie, it means you will not get credit for the affiliate sale.

Spybot already identifies Alexa as spyware, although Alexa tracks the sites you visit and depending on your perspective, it could be viewed as either a web metrics tool, or ‘spyware’.

But having Spybot detect and offer the option to delete tracking cookies from the likes of Clickbank and Azoogle could have massive implications.

Is it all bad?

There is some upside for product creators as it means they will get full credit for the sale (less the affiliate networks commissions).

It is, however, very bad news for affiliate marketers if your cookie gets crunched.

Cookies are the primary means by which affiliate networks track referrals and until something secure comes along, it means as an affiliate you’ll have to be extra diligent in getting your prospect to complete the sale.

This means closing the prospect as comfortably as you can.

Here’re some tips:

• Promote Programs with High Conversions: Look through the sales page. Would you buy it as a prospect? Doubtless you might find the product very effective, however it could be let down by poor sales copy. If necessary, create your own pre-sales material, reports, or ebooks.
• Close the Sale Immediately: Do whatever it takes to close the prospect the moment they visit the page. I’m assuming you’re promoting something you personally believe in and are using. If you are sincere and honest in your dealings with your list, this should not be an issue.
• Maintain Focus: I know some newer affiliate marketers will suffer from the “Chicken Little” mentality. As in “oh no, the Google Slap! Everything is going to bits, oh no, oh no!”. Subsequently with the release of each of the “Death of (insert pet subject here)” reports, they experience the “oh no, oh no, the bit has hit the fan”, it’s easy to lose perspective. But the reality is that you could potentially lose some sales to having your cookie deleted, and sometimes tracking cookies do not lodge correctly and I’ve not received commissions for some transactions too. But if you are going to obsess with a few lost transactions, you could lose sight of the entire picture and go off track. That could be the biggest pitfall of all. Maintain focus on the task at hand.

Bottomline? Be aware that Spybot and other anti-spyware applications might affect some of your transactions, take note of the pitfalls and move on.

You are here to win the war.

For one, I knew a transaction had been processed, but it hadn’t appeared in my sales screen.

I checked with the content publisher and they confirmed it appeared on their screen.

So why hadn’t it appeared on my screen?

I got my answer this morning (and the sale appeared too).

Clickbank has upgraded their systems.

The reporting screens have a cleaner interface. The information is aggregated in one screen (You can see your sales, refunds, chargebacks on one page, instead of going back and forth to look at individual reports).

But they’ve saved the best for last.

I like Clickbank’s Transaction Analytics!

It’ll be a useful tool for both publishers and affiliates.

Although it’s not extremely sophisticated [it doesn’t incorporate geographic tracking features, which normally appear on your screen…yet], it lists your affiliate campaigns by product.

I find the ability to sort your campaigns by tracking ID a useful tools, especially when monitoring the effectiveness of a specific marketing channel. You could:

• Assign different tracking IDs to each PPC campaign
• Have a unique tag for a forum ID
• And a separate one for your blog posts

I’ve heard that 90% of Internet Marketers don’t use analytics tools in their business. This may not be the best choice, because analytics are an effective feedback tool, through the prospects most powerful voting tool: their dollar.

By concentrating on your highest yielding product, you can maximize your marketing efforts and climb the Super Affiliate ranks even faster.

August 23rd, 2006 seems like a lifetime ago.

I’ve come so far in such a short period of time.

Without the advice from helpful friends like:

• Stuart “I’m speechless” Tan
• Ryan “in pursuit of excellence” Chua
• Rachit Dayal (http://www.RachitDayal.com) and others,

it would’ve been a more challenging journey.This is just the start of the journey and the destination is still far away.

But here’s a spot of inspiration…

Click on the check to blow it up.

A little spot of inspiration so to speak.

I’d been waiting for my first Clickbank check with anticipation.

The fruits of my first month in Internet Marketing.

Along the journey, it’s been great meeting and working with lots of motivated individuals like:

• Chee Shan whose ShredGuitarNow.com site will be one to look out for.
• Yi Chen who valiantly launch SimCooks.com a week after getting SecretBlogWeapon.com. Check out the lovely pictures. She promptly joined Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger.net Writing Project and made a splash.

Am I happy about getting $908.69?

Well, I guess $9,086.90 would be nicer. And $90,869 would be really cool.

We all start from somewhere though.

I get lots of emails and comments from people who keep complaining that it’s impossible to earn money from Internet Marketing.

A task is only as ‘impossible’ as you choose for it to be.

And at the end of the day, you will only be as successful as you want to be.

I spoke to a number of people yesterday at Stuart’s Internet Marketing seminar for Internet Money Secrets and even after seeing the screenshots of Google Adsense, Clickbank and other proof, they are still skeptical.

As Stuart has said before: You can bring a horse to water, and it can still choose to die of thirst.

I guess there’s only so much any of us can do. The rest is an individual decision.

If you don’t think it will work, then not only will Internet Marketing not work, neither will much else you encounter.

However, if you are looking to generate a new income stream, or even embark on a new career in Internet Marketing, consider the following steps.

Take action!

• Sign up for the $99 worth of Internet Marketing bonuses (still free)
• Visit the DigitalKeiretsu.com forum, take a look at the materials we’ve laid out, and the videos too.
• Come for the last Internet Money Secrets preview. The date/venue are next Thursday, 12 Oct, 7pm – 930pm. Except for the date, the instructions are the same as found in: Internet Money Secrets Revealed!

Regardless of what you do, the next phase of your Internet Marketing development could depend on whether you invest in:

• SecretBlogWeapon.com
• UltimateAffiliateWeapon.com

If you are going for Internet Money Secrets, they’ll give you a strong foundation in blogging, adsense and affiliate marketing before you go.

If you aren’t attending, you will need it all the more (or I guess you could spend a couple of hundred hours surfing various blogs and websites for the same information).

—

But back to my aims in Internet Marketing.

• My first month (Aug 21 – Sep 20) amounted to about $1,500 in profit (almost entirely from affliate marketing.)
• My second month (Sep 21 – Oct 20) I’m expecting it to hit $2,000
• By March 2007, my plan is to achieve a consistent $20,000 per month from Internet Marketing.

Sounds ambitious?

Stay tuned.