It’s been exactly one calendar month since I put up the jumperoo site.
I’m very pleased to say that my recent prediction of hitting the £50 in commissions mark after the first month has been hit. It was looking a bit shaky since Saturday with no commissions earned Sunday or Monday, but then 3 sales yesterday brought in £9.38 and pushed the final total to £51.10 ($75.49).
To say I’m thrilled and very pleased with that is an understatement.
As I’ve said before, I don’t believe the traffic for this product is exceptional. It’s not really a Christmas toy as such and it’s unlikely that a 6 month old baby would be bugging it’s parents to buy one…
I believe these are fairly typical results for any product when everything is set up properly, but only time will tell.
Other things then now, all associated with IPK. BTW, we’ve been working VERY hard getting this all sorted for you.
#1 – An IPK Working Group
I’ve had a few people ask me about setting up a forum. The way I see it is, for every 1 person that speaks up, there’s another 99 who haven’t, but are interested in the same thing.
I would be more than pleased to find 30 people who are interested in contributing in the way of sharing their results, tips, templates, PSDs, and even back links.
That last one is quite important I believe and to give each other a helping hand, I think it would be a good idea to give a few links on each site to other IPK users. I’m not sure about the best mechanism to do this yet, but I’ll have a think about it.
So, I’ve decided to set up a working group if I can get enough interest. If you want me to do this, then please “vote” by clicking the link at the end of this post and signing up.
To help this along, today I’ll be starting the process of contacting everyone who bought IPK via my affiliate link. I’ve downloaded the details from ClickBank and I’ll be sending out a manual email inviting everyone who’s also interested to “vote” by signing up.
When I feel there’s a decent amount of confirmed interest, I’ll get the ball rolling. 😉
I’ll also use that mailing list to let you know as soon as the Price Comparison is completely working.
And on that topic, I’ll just answer a few things now that came up in the lost blog post.
#2 – Price Comparison Trial
It’s not a free trial. 🙂
Okay it effectively is as it’s going to cost just $1.00 for the first month, and you can choose which of three plans you want to go with.
I apologise if it sounded like a free trial I was offering. I was careful not to say free and I think someone else did and the wrong impression was made. Now corrected.
But the good news is it will be half price for all the early takers. Make sure you choose the program you think will suit you best depending on how seriously you’re going to pursue the IPK methods.
Sadly, some people only put up a few sites and then drift off to do something else.
Like many income streams, you need to treat putting up your IPK sites as a JOB. You have to imagine there’s a big fire-breathing boss sitting a little way away from you and he expects you to put up a site a day. He’ll relax if you can put up two sites a day – he certainly expects five a week.
But after you’ve put up 50 sites, he’ll leave off a little and you’ll have some breathing space.
That’s the best way of looking at it and the best advice I can give you.
Take it seriously and work at it and you’ll do well. None of this is really hard and it will work out for you as long as you put the time in.
#3 – Other Affiliate Feeds.
At the moment we have Amazon US and UK working plus Affiliate Window (UK based). This is because I’m in the UK…
We looked at getting Trade Doubler up and running, but it’s going to take Paul a little more effort than the first three. This is because Amazon and Affiliate Window have APIs that Paul can use to get product and merchant data as required, in fact he said Affiliate Window’s was excellent.
But Trade Doubler only have a feed and so this is going to take more work and we haven’t yet agreed how we’re going to do it. I said grab their entire database every day, but Paul isn’t so sure we can do that.
I guess the same issue will arise with other affiliate companies who only supply an XML feed. We’ll have to address them all in the same way.
One thing I can guarantee you. Whatever method Paul decides on will be the best possible way of doing it. He’s very thorough and will examine all available methods before opting for the correct one.
As for US affiliate companies, we weren’t sure which ones we should target first. We thought maybe Commission Junction should be next, but we were really waiting for someone to point us in the right direction.
So thanks to Greg R for letting us know that Walmart and Toys R Us use LinkShare for their affiliate scheme. I’ve signed up with LinkShare and we’ll target them together with Trade Doubler as the next feeds we look at. We’ll add others as we go, based on feedback from you.
#4 – WordPress.
Yes the price comparisons should work fine with self-hosted WordPress blogs.
The process works like this.
A) Set up a comparison in the members area and download a snippet of PHP code.
B) FTP the code to your site and create a cron job or run it manually each day.
C) The first time you run it, it will create a snippet of HTML and another snippet of PHP code.
D) Use a PHP include to display the HTML snippet where you want the comparison to appear.
All your affiliate links in the comparison are cloaked and point to your domain rather than the target site.
If you’ve set up a cron job, then each day, the PHP code mentioned in A) and B) will update the HTML in C).
So it should all work with WordPress too, as all you’re doing is embedding a little bit of HTML into your page. The other bits work outside WordPress. At some point I’ll test this out.
#5 – Expansion.
While this system is designed to work with single products and create price comparisons for them, I can’t see any reason why we can’t later expand this into something bigger and give you the ability to create entire auto-generated price comparison sites.
We won’t even start to look at that though until we have a handle on all the various affiliate company feeds. So that will be in the new year some time. 😉
And speaking of the new year, we’ll also be looking at an automated site builder service. Fill in the placeholders, upload your images, fill in the FTP details, and publish. But one step at a time eh?
Finally, that link. If you want to vote for me to set up a working group, click the link below and join the mailing list. When I get enough subscribers to that list, I’ll sort it all out.
Tell your friends if you really want to get this ball rolling. 😉
-Frank Haywood
Update: I’ve just had a bit of a chuckle to myself as there’s a new PDF in the IPK members area called “IPK Xmas Bonus – Last Minute Shopping Profits”. There on pages 5 & 6 is an example all about the jumperoo.
Is he talking to me? 😉
