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We don’t often mention big marketers latest hype after all they get enough publicity but for a change I thought we should cover this one. a) because it’s the launch of Butterfly Marketing 2.0 but also because it’s FREE!

Yep Free barring shipping, a thousand pound + course coming on dvd to your door

Claim your copy now

It really is that simple, go watch the video, grab your copy before they run out.

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Bit of shameless self promotion but over at newmedias.co.uk we just released Your CAPTCHA advert the idea is instead of the traditional math puzzles or copy the secret word the CAPTCHA is based around an advert allowing you to present an advert that for a change the user has to read!

You can check out the details of how it works Your CAPTCHA Advert at $24 its a cheap method for brand and product reinforcement as well as making your sites monetization strategy just that little bit different.

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So some people might have been wondering what was with yesterdays out of the blue post regarding Theme Forest, sure it was news but it’s not really our style. Well today was going to be the day where I introduced one really simple easy tip via a case study but it didn’t go according to plan.

Breaking news

Being the first news source while great is not normally very profitable if your small, chances are the big sites just simply will not link to you. Even if your well known in the industry people are far more likely to read a news portal such as Techcrunch. These sites tend to have a massive readership but most of those readers use them more as a central location for information following the links (trackbacks) to other sites for their review and commentary. If your going to break a story or write a story its worth looking to either initially link to one or more of these portals or if you broke the story before them link to them via an update (you need to be quick) if you are in the first couple of links on a story from a major portal you can expect a level of traffic similar to many social networking sites. What’s more this traffic is highly targeted.

Cashing in

Well if you targeting news stories that are press releases for products (such as theme stores) simple referral links work well. It’s free traffic and unlikely to convert to long term readers unless you have spent time working on some good commentary (which in turn means with breaking stories you are likely to have missed the boat)

Obviously to take advantage you need a method of generating trackbacks blogging software does this automatically and CMS like Drupal have specific plugins.

Theme Forest - Case Study (how it went wrong)

So this was the point I was going to show you how with Theme Forest I got a few hundred visitors most of whom clicked through using my affiliate link and while sure the vast majority won’t be paying out I could look forward to a meal out for my ten minute effort….

Wrong.
Instead I had 0 visitors from Techcrunch, so what went wrong? Simple Nick runs another couple of sites on this server one of which is a proxy, which means we tend to have problems with Akismet and Typepad spam protection system. Unbeknown to me at the time all trackbacks are being thrown into Akismet hell from this server consequently the case study brought 0 visitors from Techcrunch though a few bemused passers buy did click the link probably wondering why I had suddenly gone uber spammy. That said it has worked in the past, even on a Saturday story being the second or third trackback has resulted in a couple of hundred visitors with direct referrals to the product nearly all those arriving on the site via Techcrunch and a couple of other sites have gone on to click through to the product mentioned in the article. Every time barring Theme Forest a meal out has been paid for (sometimes it might have been a local Kebab shop )

Is it right, is it spam?

The big news sites rarely are a good source for news they tend to present bite size chunks and not some in depth commentary that add to a discussion for many the only reason for linking to them is for the reciprocal link (though some nice minded souls at least give credit if the site was their source). The problem comes if your using them as a source of traffic you need to be quick, to be quick your not always adding commentary yourself. One tactic I like to use is “Live Blogging” this can get terribly messy but you start out with a skeleton post link through to your source then expand the post over the next few hours taking in more commentary and views. Depending on the type of site you are using your community might find this style of blogging confusing and frustrating though it can work well with the community supporting it.

Combining live blogging with Microblogging

Let’s take the idea of live blogging and mix in Microblogging (services like Twitter) if we generate a post with a brief article about what it is about, along with commentary being pulled in from a microblogging source the page can quickly fill with content. Rather then just pulling general comments from everywhere it is easy to setup a system where 2 or 3 “Authors” provide the commentary from their own microblogging accounts responding to each other to form the conversation, while if other people join in their own thoughts are vetted before going live. Combine with normal blog comments and not only do you have a non spam legit conversation going, but one people may wish to join in. Suddenly breaking news can create a new community.

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Well Nick is in the army still doing his year long stint as a potato scraper extraordinare! While I have been engaged on a top secret project that only, myself and half the world have known about, but what is this top secret project well I can tell you this have you ever wanted a Wordpress Membership Site plugin that actually works?

Of course you do which is why you will run out and purchase Your Members in about 10 minutes time!

In the mean time I have managed to log back into PaymentBlogger so normal if somewhat erratic service will resume soon!

Cheers for the support and the emails asking about us, I can tell you as far as I know Nick is fine if a little bored thankfully the Greek Army is about as active as a sloth.

Before I forget Join the Cambridge New Media Affiliates scheme let me know you done so and I will let you in on some cool new ideas that will blow your minds.

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So the recent press headlines here in the UK have not been great for British Airways their brand spanking new terminal “T5″ has gone down like a lead balloon. The disaster now means thousands of bags are separated from their owners indeed many people even the most loyal BA customer I suspect are now thinking it’s time to look at what the other airlines are doing.

So it comes as no surprise that one airline is currently flying high. At the start of the year Virgin Atlantic started a ?£6 million pound advertising campaign to promote their new first class lounge and existing services at Heathrow. Now Virgin is a brand everyone is familiar with because of one guy but it has recently attempted to move the Virgin brand away from being the soul domain of Richard Branson and attempt to sell on the individual companies merits.

Affiliate Marketing with Virgin Atlantic

So what this got to do with affiliate marketing, well once you have started to get your first few cheques in, it’s worth putting some a side into a quick project slush fund. Not millions just a couple of hundred dollars for when events are just to quick to miss. So lets see how I would spend that fund right now:

1. Buy a domain name
2. Setup a quick mini site 3 pages or so on the current problems at T5
3. Create a dedicated landing page for Virgins new lounge
4. Base the headlines around the air line that gets you and your baggage their
5. Sign up for Virgin Atlantic 2 Affiliate schemes
6. Drive traffic

Buy a domain name

Domain names are cheap, so it’s worth setting the majority of your projects up on their own domain name for a $8 investment you have nothing to lose, if the project fails and or is similar to existing projects you can redirect the domain when you are finished for a little benefit from search engine traffic. When buying a domain name either keep it very generic or very specific, in this case be care to avoid domain names with Virgin Atlantic, Premium Economy or Upper Class in them as the Virgin affiliate program prohibits those terms. Given the current crisis and it will be in peoples minds right the way through the summer is baggage I would start there. Indeed flywithyourbaggage.co.uk is available from me if anyone is interested

Setup your mini site

We don’t really need to tell you how to do this part, suffice to say content, template rinse repeat. Find a suitable theme if your pushing the first class lounge aspect or Virigin all the way then Reds and Purple colour scheme will be your best bet. There is plenty of content out there, so use your imagination or scraper depending on your hat preference.

Create a Dedicated Landing Page

Or two, it really is worth creating specific pages dedicated to Virgins Services and those of others I’m using Virgin as the example, but let’s take Virgins Chauffeur pick up service, their are plenty of companies offering this service many with Affiliate Programs of their own. Each product your planning should have it’s own page. You might even want to consider a US to UK page and a UK to US version.

Sign up for Virgin Atlantic 2 Affiliate schemes

Following up from the 2 pages their are in fact 3 Virgin Atlantic Flights affiliate program and several others based round their credit cards. Both of the ones we are interested in for this article are run by the same company but require you to sign up twice. Why? Well the first is the UK based version of the program, this allows you to make money selling Flights booked from the UK to the US and to sign up you need to visit AffiliateFuture UK To make money booked from flights from US to the UK you will need the US version AffiliateFuture USA their is also a European option. Each program only pays out in its currency Sterling, Dollars, Euros and only by wire transfer. This is not a problem as your bank will do the conversions for you automatically just be aware when your looking at your currency values if you have never worked in multiple currencies before.

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GeoTarget - Given you are using two programs you don’t want a Brit accidentally clicking your US link so Geotarget this is not very hard you could use Nick PHP Class to make sure Brits only see the right code

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Drive traffic

You can drive traffic to your site via all the normal methods while the story is hot I would suggest PPC just be careful what you bid on. Terms such as Virgin Atlantic are out but Baggage Chaos is in. Focus on the terms that are topical today. Avoid things like Cheap Flights the cost per click certainly isn’t cheap. Ultimately while this example is a throw away site it could be a long term investment. Baggage going missing is a fact of life and people will be discussing terminal 5 for the next 10 years so don’t just use PPC build up more long term traffic streams and search engine traffic.

This was a quick example

This was an example in a pretty unsaturated market, but with a couple of hundred dollar slush fund and an eye on the news (ideally before the story breaks big time) you can make these sort of opportunist sites. Affiliate Future have an interesting range of travel related sites and I picked virgin because they are riding just so high at the moment. Just think in a few years time you could be promoting Virgin Galactic and making money off people going into space!