Bitcoin Affiliate Mastery: Earn Bitcoins Promoting Products

Before I explain how to create a Bitcoin business, I want to make sure we're on the same page with understanding Bitcoin basics. This section will give you a full overview of the Bitcoin space. We will be starting with basic stuff like what Bitcoin is, general terminology, different Bitcoin businesses that are available today and will work all the way up to one of the most overlooked business models available in Bitcoin.

We're not going to cover all of the Bitcoin history and technical details in this section, only the bare necessities.

Imagine for a second that you are in charge of the task of inventing money. But you get this task today and not ages ago when money was initially invented. You're basically asked to find a way for people to exchange an agreed value between one another.

I know it's hard, but try to think. If this was done today, would we really be using metal coins and paper for this? Perhaps we can find a better way?

Satoshi, the guy who invented Bitcoin, wanted the number of Bitcoins that were mined each time to remain constant, no matter how many miners come on board. That's why the difficulty of mining increases as more miners join the network.

So if in 2009 you could mine 200 Bitcoins with your personal computer at home. In 2015 it will take you about 98 years to mine just 1…

This homework is crucial for you to be able and understand what we're going to talk about in the next section so I urge you to stop reading right this instant and get to it.

We'll see you in the next section.

As we near the middle of 2015 there are currently:

- Over 8.5 million Bitcoin wallets

- Over 88,000 merchants that accept Bitcoin

- 374 Bitcoin ATM machines

- More than $676 million invested in Bitcoin startups through venture capital

- 103 VC (venture capital) backed start-ups

Bitcoin has certain rules, also known as the Bitcoin protocol, which makes it work. The ingenious part of Bitcoin is not necessarily the creation of the currency but rather the creation of the Bitcoin protocol. For the first time in history, technology makes it possible to transfer property rights (such as shares, certificates, digital money, etc.) in a fast, transparent and very secure way.

Moreover, these transactions can take place without the involvement of a trusted intermediary such as a government, notary, or bank. Companies and governments are no longer needed as the “middle man” in all kinds of financial agreements.

Since Bitcoin came to public awareness in late 2013 (when the price spiked to around $1200 for one Bitcoin) a lot of new Bitcoin businesses started to show up.

This Bitcoin boom brought in new opportunities; now not only can you open a new Bitcoin business that caters the demand of the general public who all of a sudden is interested in Bitcoin, but also you can cater those exact same Bitcoin businesses that came about in 2014.

Probably the most common Bitcoin B2C market opportunity is to open up a Bitcoin exchange. When I say exchange I mean either an actual trading platform where people can trade Bitcoins with one another, or a broker (e.g. Coinbase) which is kind of a Bitcoin shop that lets you buy Bitcoins from it.

Up next are Bitcoin wallets. Bitcoin wallets are also a great idea for a Bitcoin business. It means that you get to create the software/web app that will hold Bitcoins for its owner. There are many kinds of Bitcoin wallets - mobile apps, desktop apps, software wallets and web wallets. The more well-known Bitcoin wallets are Blockchain.info, Coinbase (again…), TREZOR and GreenAddress.

When we come to talk about Bitcoin mining as a business there are three options we can discuss...

One of the main motives the gets people interested in Bitcoin is the fact that they believe they can profit from the fluctuating exchange rate. For that exact same reason, a lot of companies supply CFD trading (contracts for difference). In this sort of trading you don't actually by the Bitcoins but rather buy a contract on Bitcoin. If the price then goes up you can sell the contract for a profit. If it goes down you lose. You can also short sell Bitcoin CFDs and buy a contract that will earn you money if Bitcoin prices go down.

One of the earliest forms of Bitcoin businesses were the gambling sites. The most notorious of them “SatoshiDice” has taken over $15 million in bets and was eventually sold for $12.4 million . I will not go into details about the online gambling world in this course since it's not our area of expertise, but this too is another business model you may want to consider.

The general idea of today's faucets is this:

1. Drive massive amounts of traffic to the site by promising free Bitcoins.

2. Place a disturbing amount of ads on their website.

3. Hand out insignificant amount of Bitcoins so they won't have to pay you because they know you won't be able to withdraw the coins. There's usually a minimal amount you need to reach in order to withdraw.

4. Keep you on the page for a certain amount of time – probably so you'll click on of the ads and that the website will rank better on Google.

5. Make you keep coming back by promising you more Bitcoins within the hour.

Some of the best examples you can find for great information sites are Coindesk, CryptoCoinsNews and of course…99Bitcoins. The advantages of setting up an information site are that it's pretty easy and you can get it up and running quickly. We'll talk more about how to set up such a specific site in in the part of the course that gets into - Creating Your Bitcoin Business.

But setting up an information site is not all sunshine and rainbows. Since it's probably the easiest business to set up, you're going to have tons of competitors. You're going to have to differentiate yourself - meaning find a way to add value to your customers that other businesses don't supply.

A lot of Bitcoin lovers, their friends and family members are on the lookout for Bitcoin gifts and other sorts of merchandise. A few cool examples would be casascious coins, shirts and pins and practically anything else you can think about.

At the time of creating this course, Bitcoin's market cap is 14X larger than the next Altcoin in line. I don't see many advantages to creating a new form of coin whereas there are major disadvantages such as fierce competition, lack of a clear business model and basically - no real need.

Now that we've covered most of the Bitcoin B2C market opportunities let's move on to B2B market opportunities. The Bitcoin B2B space will usually be less crowded but also have fewer potential customers since in this case you're selling to businesses and not to individuals.

These are extremely technological companies and while owners of such companies will benefit a lot from this course, I will not focus on this type of business, simply because I don't have the technological know-how that's relevant.

Bitcoin infrastructure companies are one of the best B2B opportunity examples since they cater almost all of the Bitcoin businesses out there.

One of the most overlooked opportunities in the Bitcoin space is the website add-ons market. This involves anything thing from creating Bitcoin related WordPress themes, to different Bitcoin widgets such as price tickers, donation buttons or the latest Bitcoin news.

Through affiliate programs you basically become a marketing agent for a Bitcoin business and can now generate revenue without ever having a product. All you need to do is make sure you bring targeted customers to your vendor. Affiliate programs are amazing in the sense that they allow you to start creating revenue from day one, and they are super simple to get started.

So up until know we've talked about the known businesses that are available for you. But what if you want to think about an idea that's not on this list. Well this is exactly what this section is about - tools to help you brainstorm additional Bitcoin business ideas.

Soon this section will end and you'll be face with the task of choosing your Bitcoin business idea. You could just copy and paste what I did with 99Bitcoins but you'll still have to put in your own fresh angle to it if you want to be successful.

One of the main tools you can use to find out which idea suits you best is called a SWOT analysis and it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This is a very common analysis in the business world and amazingly enough no one takes actual credit it for inventing it until today.

For each business idea you come want to test write down the following...

Imagine that I'd like to create an eBook about making money through Bitcoin (how on earth did I think of that??). Now I'll show you how I create my own SWOT analysis for this specific project...

One more analysis you can do is the one I did when I started out 99Bitcoins. It's some sort of a variation of the SWOT analysis which I will now call “The Beigel Analysis” (dramatic drum roll please….). By using this analysis I got to the conclusion that pursuing the road of creating 99Bitcoins will be the best use of my time and effort.

What I do is take each idea and give it a number from 1 to 5 in each of the following categories...

Now that you are familiar with the various business opportunities inside the Bitcoin space I want you to start thinking about which type of business is best suited for you. Pick three different ideas for Bitcoin businesses from any of the categories above, or if you have your own idea that isn't listed here even better!

Welcome back! Did you do your homework? Have you thought about three ideas you'd like to test in the Bitcoin space? If you did, great! If you didn't, stop reading now and go back to doing your homework. You see just listening to this course won't get you anywhere. You have to take massive action in order to reach the success that I was able to reach and be successful. I didn't just sit down and read a bunch of books. I tested out stuff, failed and learned along the way and that's how you get results.

Anyway I hope you're ready since this section is going to give you the complete rundown on Bitcoin affiliate programs. If you have your own Bitcoin product or don't plan on becoming an affiliate then you can skip this section, although I'd prefer you didn't. Since even if you already own a Bitcoin business with an actual product that sells, using the power of affiliate programs can help increase your revenue stream.

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards an affiliate for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts.

There are three players in this game...

As an affiliate of a company, your job is to bring as many sales or qualified leads (contact information of relevant customers) as you can. You'll get paid according to the terms of the specific affiliate program. For example, Coinbase only pays you if you refer a customer who actually made a purchase - this is called CPS (cost per sale) or CPA (cost per acquisition).

When you sign up to an affiliate program, you'll get a unique affiliate ID for that program and what is known as an affiliate link. Keep in mind that affiliate links have many names. For example they can also be called ref links, referral links, hop links and aff links. An affiliate link will usually look like the normal URL plus a tag to represent your specific affiliate ID.

“What actually happens when someone clicks your affiliate link? How are they “tagged”?

Well, when a visitor clicks my affiliate link he is moved over to the merchant's website and a cookie is installed on his browser. A cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while the user is browsing that website .

Simply put - once the user clicks your affiliate link, he is planted with a piece of code that now tracks where he came from. If the user ends up buying something on the site, the affiliate program will search to see if there are any cookies installed on the user's browser. When it finds your cookie it will attribute that sale to you, and you'll get a commission.

Many more FAQ's within this lecture...

Now that we know what affiliate marketing is, let's see what opportunities lie inside the Bitcoin space for affiliate marketing. Below is a list of the top known Bitcoin affiliate programs today. I've created this list from my own experience and all of the programs in this list have been tried and tested by me. For some, I've even published my actual stats and will share them with you later on. Since I do not promote gambling websites as an affiliate, Bitcoin casino websites aren't on this list.

Bitcoin exchanges affiliate programs:

Coinbase

Rewards you $1 in Bitcoin for every new depositing customer you bring to Coinbase. This is a self-hosted affiliate program (i.e. doesn't work through an affiliate network) and you need to sign up to Coinbase in order to get started. I did a comparison between this program and Local Bitcoin's program here.

Coinmama

A Bitcoin broker which allows customers to buy Bitcoins with a credit card. Pays up to 3% of the purchase amount.

CoinMX

A Bitcoin trading platform which pays you $15 in Bitcoins for each new depositing customer you bring on board. It is very popular because it accepts credit cards.

Many more Bitcoin affiliate programs within this lecture for you...

Before we conclude this section and the affiliate marketing section, I'd like to give you a little heads-up about what you need to look for when applying to an affiliate program. Even though the concept of affiliate marketing is the same on every different program, the terms may vary.

When you first sign up to an affiliate program, read the affiliate program terms carefully. I don't just say that to get myself off the hook. Read it ALL and read it thoroughly, as you may be surprised at what you'll find there. Here's a breakdown by order of importance of what to check.

On August 24th 2009 I got an email from Amazon, here are its highlights:

“We have found your Associate links are appearing as sponsored links on search engines under the term “kindle” and variations of this term. This activity is prohibited by the terms of the Operating Agreement…

…We may withhold any referral fees…

We also ask that you take preventative measures, such as adding Amazon's Proprietary Terms to your negative keywords. In addition, you will not receive payment for referral fees earned through the use of these keywords.”

Rule #1 – Test each affiliate program before investing efforts in promoting it.

Today, whenever I choose an affiliate program to work with, I always test it out first. This means that I invest as little amount as possible to test the following things...

Now that you've mastered the basics on affiliate marketing it's time to get to work. Pick just one program you'd like to test out. I'm telling you to choose only one program because I want you to focus on testing it out quickly and effectively. If it doesn't work out you can always move on to the next one.

Welcome back! Are you excited as I am to get started with your new Bitcoin idea? This part is all about getting your idea from a nice concept into a tangible business, whether it's a website, mobile up, eBook or anything else you can think about.

In this part we are going to cover topics like how to research your idea in theory, test it in practice and analyze the results to know if it's a winner or not. We're also going to give you practical tools and tutorials on how to set up a website even if you've never done it before.

The best thing you can do before actually getting to work on your business is to plan how you're going to work on your business. One of the best methods I've found for this so far is called lean methodology. This methodology is derived originally from Toyota's production system and it's most popular with companies who want to penetrate the market fast and test if their ideas are viable businesses .

Lean methodology follows some very basic principles...

What is the need or problem that we are actually solving and is it big enough?

When I started 99Bitcoins, I aimed to solve one simple, laser-focused problem - how to buy Bitcoins with PayPal. That's it. This whole huge website that generates thousands of dollars in revenue every month started from a solution to one simple problem.

So my problem assumption was this:

I think people want to buy Bitcoins with PayPal and don't know how.

As a rule of thumb I consider anything with more than 1,000 monthly searches to count as a “big enough problem”. So in this case I consider this business idea to be valid in theory since it has 5,400 searches each month. There's still a long way to go to prove that I can actually pull it off but at least it pasted the initial test.

Once you're done with your problem assumption, it's time to move on to the solution assumption. In this step you'll need to assume what solution can help solve the need you validated in the first step and what outcome will happen as a result of that solution.

Going back to 99Bitcoins' example my proven problem assumption was:

People are looking for ways to buy Bitcoins with PayPal.

The final assumption deals with the business model of your business, or how will you make money from your solution. It's important to state that while this assumption is pretty important it can also be skipped at this point and thought about later. Google didn't have a clear business model in the first few years, same thing with Facebook.

Now that you know how to create your three assumptions I want you to do the following...

This lecture is all about measuring the assumptions of our newly formed MVP idea - so we will go through the processes required to come to a well rounded decision on the viability of our business idea.

Now this lecture is not about the film 300, for those of you who have seen it. In fact this lecture is about why we should only start making business changing decisions after sampling 300 customers, visitors, readers and so on. If we don't have enough samples we risk cripling our business's future growth.

There will come a time in your business when the decision is not clear at all, and we are at a crossroads. So when situations like this arise there are certain strategies we can deploy to combat them - and they are all explained in this lecture.

So there are tracking tools every affiliate marketer should be using online tools to increase visitors, and sales. So in this lecture let me go over all of them for you so you can maximize your ROI.

Many large companies have started as MVP's, some very well known companies in fact. So to give you some inspiration with where you could be heading, I've analyzed some MVP's in this lecture for you.

The first one is Facebook...

You can use things such as Facebook notes for your MVP - so by answering the questions in this lecture, you can get the perfect idea for your MVP. You don't need to start with a fully fledged website, it could be as small as a social media profile. But lets jump into these questions first.

This can be a fun, but daunting part of starting a business as you want to make sure you choose the perfect name. Let me tell you now, there is no such thing as perfect - so in this lecture we'll show you how to choose as close to perfect domain as possible, then move onto talking business.

If you create a website with a site such as Wordpress you will have to find your own host, so in this lecture I'll give you a run down of the most well known hosting providers you can choose from. There very cost effective, I'll also show my host used for 99Bitcoins.

This part is technical, but we're going to avoid any technical talk. So lets get started with setting up your CMS, remember we're going to be doing this with no technical jargon.

If you're a designer, or like things to look well designed - then you'll love this lecture. So we're going to talk about getting into designing your MVP the best we can.

This is the real meat for any informational website - the content. Forget design for a moment, we're going to focus on creating the best content possible. Google loves content, so we need to create as much high quality content as possible, but there are guidelines to follow as we'll explain.

In this lecture we've listed some awesome tools you can use for bilding your website, a lot of them are free - so take advatnage.

This homework concludes everything you've learned on how to implement lean methodology to your Bitcoin business idea.

Once finished you should have a clear idea if you're going to move forward with your idea and market it like a pro (later in the course) or go back to where you started and come up with a new idea.

Now you know how to create and validate an MVP. I wanted to take the opportunity in this section to show you the whole process I went through with 99Bitcoins from start to finish so you can see how I implemented everything we covered up until now.

The idea I chose for 99Bitcoins originally was just an information website about how to buy Bitcoins with PayPal. I found a single exchange that allows you to do so and luckily enough they also had an affiliate program.

Coming up with my best idea through analysis

Of course I measured this idea against other ideas with the “Beigel Analysis” as I explained in previously, and here's how I evaluated it...

Some people avoid starting their own online business since they lack the experience in fields like web design, web programming etc. The beauty of the 21st century is that thanks to the Internet you can now hire someone from the other side of the world to do all of those things for you and you will probably end up paying a fraction of what it would have cost you in the first place.

I use freelancers A LOT. And when I say a lot I mean I barely even deal with actually working on 99Bitcoins directly. Here are some of the things I delegate to my freelancers...

When you come to hire a freelancer you are basically holding an auction. You post your job and freelancers bid on your project. You choose the one you think is most suited. But you're not limited only to the people who bid on your auction, you can also invite specific freelancers which you think are qualified.

As always…the title is crucial.

There are so many job posts on Elance and Upwork that it's hard to stand out. Contractors browse through hundreds of job offers each day and you need to catch their attention. Try to make your title as descriptive as possible.

Now comes the fun part, screening applications. After writing a good job post this is probably the most important step of the process.

So by now you probably have chosen your freelancer, and it's time to maintain a good working relationship with him. The problem is that most people ignore this part and don't understand why their contractor under-delivers or doesn't continue working with them.

There's more to come...Move onto the next part to finish the blueprint.

Welcome back! I'm glad to see you've made it up to this point and I really appreciate you taking the time to master all of this stuff. Now we come to the actual tactics and techniques which will allow you to market your Bitcoin business like a pro.

If you already own a Bitcoin business and skipped the first few sections to get to this one that's ok, most of the stuff we'll cover here doesn't reference much of what we've already talked about. Having said that I think that even if you already own a Bitcoin business you have a lot to gain from going over the first few sections of this course.

In order for us to be able to understand each other, we have to speak the same language. Just like we covered the basics of Bitcoin in the beginning of this course now we need to cover the basics of online marketing. I promise you it will be more interesting than you can imagine.

So let's take a look at the different characters that are taking part in the Bitcoin universe and try to see which one best describes your target audience.

For example, 99Bitcoins' audience is built mainly from traders, buyers and hustlers. That's why you won't find any technical babble on the site. If you already own a site that has traffic coming in to it you can use Google Analytics to better understand your audience.

Online marketing is basically the art of getting people to take a desired action online. In order to do so we will use some sort of copy. That copy can be an Adwords ads, it can be a blog post, an image on Facebook or an email you send out to your subscribers. Whatever that copy is, you need to know how to craft it.

Luckily enough that's a pretty easy task once you know the rules for it. You see, there's a common logic to EVERY piece of effective marketing copy out there, and it's called AIDA. AIDA is short for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

Headline power technique #1 - Use negative key words

When you're writing a headline use negative key words to create more powerful emotions and thus encourage reaction. One of my most successful email headlines are these:

Create Desire

Now comes the hard part, since up until now we had all sorts of tips and techniques. At this point things get a bit more abstract. Once you've got the user's attention and aroused their interest they are ready to listen to you. Now it's time to create desire. Desire is created through great copy, and great copy usually has some of the following elements...

By now we've covered all of the online marketing basics you'll need to know, now let's tie everything up together. In the following lectures each time I'll cover a marketing channel I'll also explain how to craft the copy for that specific channel. So if, for example I'll explain about Google Adwords, I'll also talk about best practices to writing an Adwords ad. But for now I would like to use the information we've covered so far to explain how to build a high converting landing page.

In general there are four main marking channels we will use when promoting anything online. Each of these four channels can be divided into sub channels.

I know, I know, you want to start marketing already. But hold your horses! We have to finish the planning phase before creating any online campaign. The thing is that if you don't take the time to figure out the stuff we've talked about, your ads and other marketing efforts will be pretty much useless. So here's what I want you to do today...