One of the things about Marketing ICE that really sets us apart is our community.  Paid members get access to the community where they can ask questions about videos. The really great part is that this information is available to you when you become a member because you can read through the old forum postings and search the forum.

I thought this was a particular important post.  One of our members is asking about "affiliate marketing" and wants to know if he is wasting his time with this affiliate program or not. 

I just realized that I set up a couple old blogger blogs back when I was just playing around. But, they have both been around for a while. They probably don't have any page rank, but I can at least set them up with a domain name etc http://internetmarketingsecrets.blogspot.com/ http://whoisfabiomoro.blogspot.com/

I'm still working on trying to change my descriptions on my site to make them original. Honestly, I feel like I'm not getting anywhere. But, then again I was told that Google puts new sites in the sandbox for about 6 months. I've been at it for just under 3. I dunno…do you think a site like mine…www.healthdynamite.com has potential? It doesn't have an integrated shopping cart. Instead it goes to the vendor page when you hit the buy button. So, because I am an affiliate, I only get a small percentage. I wonder if that percentage will add up to anything significant? Then again, I've heard that people can make good money as an affiliate.

Oh well, enough babble. I'll try to work on setting up those blogs for pay per post so I can make a buck…maybe rent. Do they have Google page rank? How do I tell? Wow a lot of questions.

The sandbox is real, but it is also entirely possible to get a site ranking well even if it is a new site. You just won't get it ranking well for a phrase that has a lot of competition, because the sand box will hurt you. (Jack and Mark can comment more on the Sandbox)

As far as checking the page rank simply go to the home page for each blog.  If you have the SearchStatus extension for Firefox? It will show your alexa ranking and google page rank.  You can see a picture in the bottom right hand corner of your Firefox web browser which shows your rankings graphically, and you can hold the mouse over a ranking to see the numeric ranking:

As far as making money as an affiliate… It's pretty easy to figure out.

What is the percentage you get paid on your sales? Simply figure out how much you want to make…

So if you make say 5% on your sales. And you want to make $1,000 a month. You'd need to do $20,000 a month in sales in order to make $1,000 a month from your affiliate commissions.

Want to know the DIRTY secret about affiliate marketing?

ALL the top affiliate marketers all have built their own mailing lists (usually) from having some of their own products, like ebooks, or whatever. The ebook helps them build a mailing list of qualified leads, within the ebook they have affiliate links, AND they have built an email list they can continue to market to over and over again and sell more affiliate products to.

So you can be a top affiliate but usually you also need to develop your own products…  All the guys making $100k or more a year all have mailing lists. (And the ones who make 1 million or more a year have their own mailing lists to recommend other people's products AND they launch their own products and partner with the other top affiliates.)

The good news is we have an entire video series on using sites like Rent A Coder where you can hire someone to help you create your own special reports, ebooks, etc to help you build your mailing list.  We also have begun a series of videos on how to use Aweber to host your mailing list.

- Ben Fitts 

We have had a lot of request to add some basic skill sets to the video library.  These two are the next steps in building out what we are calling Newbies Corner.  

The fist video teaches you how to use a Cpanel Host to install a Wordpress Blog.  While we have a video that shows you how to download the software and FTP it to your server and do the install in a manual fashion, if you have a web host that uses Cpanel and Fantastico it is MUCH easier to do and much faster to do.  The video is only about 6 minutes long but you will be able to actually do the install in about 60 seconds once you watch it.  That video is located at,

• Setting Up a Wordpress Blog with Cpanel and Fantastico

The next new video teaches you some really simple photo editing skills with MS Paint.  We provided this video primarly because most web marketers need to edit images at times and anyone with a PC has MS Paint, this video is located at.

• Resizing, Cropping And Text Editing Images With Microsoft Paint

I also wanted to let our paid members know that the video on Wordpress with Cpanel video is going to be very valuable to you in the future.  I am doing some "black hat experimenting" with a few really cool Wordpress Plugins.  I can't and won't really explain that on our public blog but this will be one of the first new things we will be teaching in our other new area.  We are calling that area the "Dark Basement - Beta" for the time being.  All I am saying is if you don't have a host using Cpanel you might want to pick up some cheap Cpanel (with Fantastico) hosting some time soon.