Bitcoin Affiliate Mastery: Earn Bitcoins Promoting Products

Before I reveal any Bitcoin secrets…

We'd like to congratulate you for taking the first step towards creating your next successful Bitcoin business. It doesn't matter if you're totally new to Bitcoin and this is the first course you're taking, or if you're a complete expert on Bitcoin - this course isn't about the technical side of Bitcoin. I wanted to take advantage of this intro and set some expectations about what we'll achieve throughout this course.

[Please Note: The course image icon is made by Freepik from Flaticon and are licensed under Creative Commons BY 3.0.]

But before we begin I'm sure you have a lot of questions, so let me try and ease your mind a bit:

“Are you telling me all of this just to brag?”

No. We're trying to emphasis the fact that, just like you, we had no knowledge of Bitcoin when we started out - the only thing we knew was how to market stuff online. But combining this knowledge with the land of opportunities, we were able to make it to where we are today.

More FAQ's within this lecture...

Part 1: The Bitcoin Ecosystem

This part covers all of the Bitcoin basics you'll need to know. If you're new to Bitcoin you'll get a crash course in what Bitcoin is, the different terminology and generally get you up to speed on everything Bitcoin. This part also covers the different Bitcoin opportunities that are hiding inside the Bitcoin space and how to come up with new Bitcoin business ideas.

The final section in this part talks about my own dirty little secret about Bitcoin and how I make money from this space without even having my own product.

Part 2: Creating your Bitcoin business

This part is all about how to create your Bitcoin business with as little time and money as possible. I will give you the exact methods I used on 99Bitcoins and which I still use today to generate new income streams.

After this part you will have a working prototype of your business, which you can then take to the next level and start bringing customers in.

Part 3: Marketing your Bitcoin business like a pro

In the last part of this course we're going to talk about how to bring customers to your new Bitcoin business. If you already own a Bitcoin business you could jump straight on to this part, but I highly recommend going over the entire course before doing so.

In this part we will discuss how to get users for free, how and where to put up ads for your Bitcoin business, how to track what's working and I will also show you some personal “marketing hacks” that I believe only a few Bitcoin businesses out there know about.

1. Throughout this course we're going to refer you to different online services. ALL of the services I refer to are first rate, and in 99% of the time I use them myself. Having said that, I do get paid for referring people to some of these services. We're telling you this so you'll know right off the bat that we're not going to hide anything from you. If you don't want to use my referral link (which in some cases gets you a discount) then you are more than welcome to just google the service's name and get to it without any referral involved, no hard feelings :)

2. Though you can take this course on a mobile device, it's highly recommended to take it on a computer. The reason is simple: I often link out to different resources I use and I want you to be able to check them out as you go along.

3. We've spent a considerable amount of time and money in creating this course and we take our creations very seriously. In order to protect this course from being passed along without permission there are certain lectures which are generated automatically and are unique. This way, if a copy makes its way online we can trace it back to the source.

When Bitcoin boomed on November 2013 to $1200 my profits grew by more than 500%. On November-December alone I made $34,623. I remember waking up on Saturday and doing a routine check on my profits when I saw I already made $1000 (it was only 10am). I couldn't believe my eyes….all of my hard work has finally paid off.

Ever since that infamous Saturday I put all of my time and effort to explore this new method of making money with Bitcoin. I managed to end 2014 with $120,264 in revenues and 2015 has been doing great so far as well.

We're going to be talking over many terms in this course, even though we've aimed to make each lecture "non-techie", there are some phrases especially in the Bitcoin world that we just can't avoid. So for that reason we've included our very own Bitcoin glossary for you, which you can refer to whenever you wish.

This quiz covers everything about getting started on your journey with creating a successful business in a niche.

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 quiz covers everything about understanding how bitcoin works in order to profit on its popularity.

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.

This quiz covers everything about identifying profit making Bitcoin business ventures you could launch.

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...

This quiz covers everything about undertaking a thorough SWOT analysis on your business idea to assess its viability.

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...

This quiz covers everything about generating revenue by getting started with your first Bitcoin affiliate program.

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.

This quiz covers everything about taking your business idea into the real world and ensure you gain maximum success.

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 quiz covers everything about building your own minimum viable product to assess the profit potential.

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...

This quiz covers everything about replicating the lean methodology I use to grow your MVP quickly.

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.

This quiz covers eveything about gaining maximum benefit by using freelancers and profit from their expertise.