Today I went ahead and created a lens titled ‘How to Dress Like Jimi Hendrix’ . Honestly, it’s the first thing that popped into my mind that wasn’t something like ‘Buy Jimi Hendrix..blah..blah..blah’ .

When crafting titles, especially for ‘affiliate’ lenses, I definitely try to make it something that I would click on if I saw it on a search results page.

Here are a few screenshots of the lens setup. I think most of the first couple steps are pretty self-explanatory. If you need help with setting up a lens for the first time, check out the training center (top of the blog), I’ve got a bunch of lensbuilding 10 1 videos on there from about 6 months ago.

After having my lens all set up, I then opened up Pepperjam and clicked on ‘Generate Links – Program List’ and found Jimi Hendrix Clothing and viewed the banner ads. You’ll notice there’s a box above the auto-generated ads that looks like this:

If you notice, Deep Linking is ‘Allowed’ which means that we can link directly to specific pages on the Jimi Hendrix Clothing site.

Opening up the Jimi Hendrix site, I navigate to a page selling a shirt I want to put on the lens that looks like this:

Right-click on an image, save it to your computer, and upload it to somewhere on the internet (your web host, flickr, photobucket, etc.).

Next, create the HTML to display the Image on your lens. (full info on this at my Image linking lens)

now, we fill in the box for the SID code (this code identifies where the traffic comes from on your link reports, use something short and descriptive) and copy/paste the URL to the URL box on the Pepperjam page.

It should look something like this:

Next, hit update and all of your links in your banner codes will update to reflect the SID code and the destination URL.

copy JUST the URL and make that URL what your image in your content links to.

Now, each time someone clicks on the image of that shirt in the lens, they will be taken directly to the page that has that shirt for sale. Pretty neat huh?

I repeated this step a few more times and added some other content (videos and a poll at the end) to come up with the finished product – How to Dress Like Jimi Hendrix.

A few points to remember -

Make sure the links are ‘nofollow’ – here’s how to make no-follow links

Actually write some content or modify product descriptions a bit, using the default isn’t going to get you a lot of love with visitors or with search engines.

Add some other things to interact with (videos, polls, guestbooks, etc) so visitors feel comfortable clicking stuff on your lens.

Use all kinds of links to the site – if you notice, I have text links, a banner, as well as the linked product pictures.

Here’s a little bonus – the HTML code I used for the main Text/Write module so you can see exactly how I did it.

These lenses don’t have to be super long, but they need to have a point and not just be a list of products with no explanation or back story.

I’m sure there are going to be a bunch of questions (hopefully ) so ask away and I’ll address them in a follow-up post.

I’m also working on a super secret project that will help you guys build these lenses SUPER fast and will cost you a whopping $0 … stay tuned for that as it’s still in early development.

Now, I’m going to use Pepperjam specifically, but a lot of these techniques can be used with any network. I could probably write an e-book on this or something but 1) I’ma nice pirate and 2) I don’t have the time,  so instead I’ll do a series of posts here on Captain Squid outlining how to build lenses that are high quality, useful, unique, rank well, and convert at much higher percentages than most affiliate ’sales pitch’ lenses do.

Step 1: Find an Affiliate Program on PepperJam

When you first log in, you will see a menu across the top, click on the menu item that says ‘Find Partners’

You are now at the list of all the available affiliates for PepperJam. Just so everyone can follow along, I’m going to pick a program that has ‘automatic’ acceptance on it meaning that approval or denial will be instant (and it’s usually approved).

I did a search for the affiliates in the ‘Art/Photo/Music’ category and immediately noticed the ‘Jimi Hendrix Clothing Store’. I like classic rock, so we’ll build this lens with that store in mind.

Click on ‘view terms’ to see what the payouts are like for a particular affiliate.

when you click ‘view terms’ a new window will pop open, showing you a bunch of information about the program:

I’ve highlighted a few key areas : The website for the program (make sure and check it out), the commissions (click ‘Sale’ to expand it and show all the terms), and the ‘Join Now’ Button.

It looks like our commissions start out at 8% and can go up to 10% with significant sales ($2500 a month) with a bunch of shirts in the $89 range, that works out to just about 1 sale a day, definitely doable.

Okay, go ahead and click ‘Join Now’ on your program and you should be ready to go!

Okay, now that we have our affiliate, tomorrow we will begin building our lens so stay tuned…