Building The Funnel For My "Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing Again" Project
As I mentioned in previous posts here on WA, a project/experiment I wanted to try this year was to see how easy or hard it would be to start again as an affiliate marketer, completely from scratch.
Things have not gone as smoothly as I'd hoped, and it's taken me a lot longer to get to where I am with the project today that I originally anticipated.
That's partly down to one of my current web hosting companies having broken their cPanel system and either being too incompetent to fix the issues I raised with them or simply not caring...neither of which is a recommendation of any sort.
So I've had to spend a lot of time migrating the sites I host with them (Hostnine/A Small Orange) to another web hosting company. I do some funky things with my WordPress sites and I've done test migrations here to WA but the sites never run correctly so that's why I had to go to another web host for these sites.
As it turns out, Hostnine/A Small Orange did a piss-poor job of monitoring sites for malware infections. And, as I migrated sites onto my new webhost, I got hit with malware abuse notices. So it took quite some time to remove infected plugins and files and patch sites up into working order that the new web host would accept.
I do applaud their commitment to keeping sites clean and site visitors free of malware but it just meant that migrating sites took waaaayyyy longer than I expected.
Naturally, that cut into the time I had to devote to the "starting from scratch" project which is why I haven't been in a position to post an update for several weeks.
But I eventually did get the funnel for my project set up and it's up and running now. Here's what the top of the opt-in page looks like:
It was all created using a single marketing platform, totally for free, and includes an opt-in page, thank you page, a popup I can put on other websites I own and an email campaign to offer subscribers various products along with reviews, news, free gifts, etc. Here's what the popup I can add to other websites looks like:
Given the popularity of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems at the moment, I made my lead magnet for this funnel a free video course about how to use ChatGPT and included a second course about how to use a competing AI system.
There are far too many details to go into here about how I set all of this up, where I found the lead magnet and so on, but if you're interested in the details, I've mapped it all out in this blog post:
Recent Comments
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Hi Gary, this sounds interesting. It will help you with your overall marketing efforts. Are you planning on using PPC for using your funnels? Or Social media? I have to read your other blog post about this. There are a lot of controversial issues about AI, and it's useful as a tool for affiliate marketers except for copying and pasting. I hope you won't teach your prospects that copying and pasting is okay because it is not ok!
Best wishes to you with your marketing. Your funnel and email banner is creative. I am impressed! Congratulations on working hard on this.
Hi Brenda, I'm not planning on running any PPC campaigns, st least not yet. The idea is to see if I can build a new affiliate marketing business from scratch as close to free as possible. Many people are on very tight budgets these days so I 'm trying to replicate that situation in this project.
I will be promoting on a variety of free platforms but these usually all have sellers rather than buyers (everyone pushing their own offers and not interested in looking at anyone else's), so these aren't great ways of getting targeted traffic.
But, if I can get a few sales, I can reinvest that money either into better tools or perhaps a small PPC campaign.
One thing that people are not being made aware of enough is that ChatGPT is a natural language processor and not specifically a content generator.
Obviously, it can be used to generate content but, as you say, copying and pasting that could be a mistake. ChatGPT often provides incorrect information - what you get from it depends heavily on how you phrase your query and the amount of information you include. The old adage of "Garbage in, garbage out" still holds true for ChatGPT and other language model systems.
Any AI generated content should be further researched to ensure that it is in fact correct and the human should then correct any fallacies or information that has been included.
The next thing I'll be focusing on is getting traffic and the right kind of traffic for this funnel.
Gary, thanks for clarifying your intentions. Yes, I agree further research is a must because all this AI-generated content tends to be repetitive and full of inaccuracies. I keep my fingers and toes crossed for you with getting traffic.
Thanks, Brenda. Free traffic is generally pretty untargeted and terrible at converting but I gotta start somewhere! :)
Gary, I am sure of that too. But you never know maybe you’d get some conversions. Yes, it's true we all, have to start somewhere. It's a good strategy to test it out to see if it works. Kyle announced a new opportunity for P plus members and it requires investment into that one which is the opposite of what you are doing. It might take a bit longer to do the free traffic vs paid (PPC) ads. 🤞
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Well done, Gary! It seems that you weathered the storm!
Jeff
Still not out of the storm yet, Jeffrey, though sunlight is beginning to appear through the wind and rain! :)
I feel a blog post about my dealsing with my old web host coming on...
Hang in there, Gary! It'll soon be over! I look forward to seeing what you have to say!
Jeff
I've now moved all my sites to a competent web host and am waving A Small Orange goodbye, Jeff.
Just sent them a stinker of a letter about how incompetent and unprofessional they are and asked for immediate account termination. That felt good, as I've washed myself clean of them at last.
Also instructed my credit card company not to honour any future payment requests A Small Orange make and have asked for 2 months of refunds from them since they've been in breach of contract that long.
I will write a blog post about my interactions with this company as I think people need to be made aware of how they treat customers. I'll give them a right to reply and we'll see what comes of that.
Now I can start concentrating on making money again. :)
Gary
You have to do what you have to do, Gary! I left a bad hosting site five years ago to come heere, and have never looked back.
In my opinion, this is the total package. That is your choice, of course, but you get so much more here than other hosting platforms can even hope to offer for the same price. We must remember that things happen, but we must take the time to get them resolved. Patience is a huge key in business, but you know that.
I do appreciate you letting me know though, and I wish you the best in success in your future endeavors, my friend!
Jeff