How I got started as an affiliate marketer
This is an autobiographical post of sorts. It details how I started making money as an affiliate marketer and is probably still a pretty valid process. You will notice throughout this post that when I first started I was a dumbass. Sometimes I still am but at least I’m making money now and I think it’s possible that pretty much anyone else can too.
I hate having jobs. I mean, I love getting paid and when I was employed I was a very hard worker. But $14 an hour is shit pay and I knew it. Being a bit egotistical I knew I was worth a bit more than that. Like maybe $16.50 an hour 
When I discovered internet marketing I thought it was a brand new thing. And it might have been, I don’t know. It was about 2003. Somehow, and I don’t remember exactly how though it was probably an Adwords ad, I discovered the now famous Rich Jerk and was floored by his sales letter. I didn’t buy his book (not right away) but read his sales letter over and over and over. I got so excited by the possibility of it all. For all I knew the Rich Jerk was the only guy in the universe doing this sort of thing.
Eventually I bought his book and read it about 13,000 times. One, I was excited, and two I had no idea what most of it meant. I didn’t know what Adwords or Adsense was, what an affiliate was, what all those bastard acronyms like CPC, PPC, CPM meant. I was clueless and just read it over and over in the hopes that I’d finally get it.
It was a great book and was really like going to kindergarten for internet marketing. While I did learn a lot, it wasn’t entirely clear what I should do next so ended up buying another ebook. This, like the Rich Jerk book, was another Clickbank product. I started seeing more and more Clickbank products out there, started seeing “become an affiliate for me” links on more and more sites and things slowly started to hit home.
The last Clickbank purchase I made was for a product that was excellent. I don’t actually remember what it was but it was the tipping point for me and took me from a theoretical understanding to a practicing affiliate marketer. The following actions made me my very first commission in affiliate marketing: $47.
Get an Adwords account
You don’t necessarily need an Adwords account, but you should get one anyway. Yahoo and MSN also have ad programs, but I’ve never used them. I will be soon as the Adwords playing field is getting saturated and a bit finicky.
I got an Adwords account because I’d read it’s the fastest way to make some money. I still think it is. There was also a $50 Adwords bonus I had through my web host, so that was another reason. I put in another $100 of my own for a total of $150.
Get an affiliate account somewhere
There are many places that offer affiliate accounts where you can find hundreds upon hundreds of products to sell. For starters, you can stick with the following:
Clickbank - great for ebooks and other products for download
Commission Junction
Copeac
Those are the three that I still use a lot to this day. There are many many others but you’ll get overwhelmed if you go signing up for all those programs.
Anyway, I started with Clickbank and found a product to advertise. It was one of those “Get rich taking online surveys” products. I got my affiliate link through Clickbank and started creating ad groups in Adwords.
Creating Adwords ads
Man, I didn’t know jack about Adwords. I look back on it now and realize I was just plain old dumb lucky to make any sales at all. I created hundreds of keywords and keyword phrases using various suggestion tools, placed all of them in the same ad group, if you can believe it. I later learned ways to price each keyword separately, but for this initial attempt I just picked an arbitrary amount that Google informed me would get me on the first page, and not deplete my measly $150 too fast.
After this, most of my time writing ads I thought would get a good CTR. And they did. Again, I think it was luck and just sheer force because I wanted it to work so badly! I ended up making one sale the first day for $47. It was the easiest money ever, especially considering I still had no clue what the hell I was doing.
The next day I made another two sales of the same product. I couldn’t believe. I mean for real I couldn’t believe. I actually thought I was doing something wrong because it was so easy.
It turns it I was doing something wrong. You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned landing pages yet.
Creating landing pages
What I was doing was just shuffling people who clicked on my ad directly to the product site. I had no landing pages at all. I did know about them, I remember that, but I didn’t really get the whole point. And frankly, I didn’t read Google’s TOS well enough either, because they explicitly say that you should have one. Oh well.
That was it. When all was said and done, I’d burnt up my $150 and made $141.
So this wasn’t exactly a profitable excursion but it taught me a lot. One major thing it taught me was that I was still clueless. I’d made some sales but really had no idea why and didn’t really know what to do to make it profitable. I’d read that if you can somehow manage to break even early on in a campaign, you can surely manage to make a profit by tweaking and optimizing your ads, landing pages, etc. But I had no idea how to do that, so what I did was slow down, go back to square one and figure out what was working and why.
From that point on things started going a lot better. Profits got bigger, I found more products and began testing testing testing.
The truth about getting rich quick
I don’t know why this is still a question that people actually want answered.
Yes, there are a couple ways to get rich quick:
- Win the lottery
- Inherit it
- Steal it
There may be other ways but these are the ones I know. They all suck for one or more reasons. Either they’re undependable, based on luck, unethical or someone you love has to die. Not good and I highly DO NOT recommend you go this route.
How to Hide Affiliate Links
This is not a new thing by any means, but I’m gonna stick it in as a quick post anyway just in case you haven’t seen it before.
An easy way to alter your links and thereby protect your commission is to use a PHP redirect. It’s incredibly easy to do.
Let’s say you’re linking to CreditRepair.com in a post you wrote about repairing credit. In your post you link to a credit program and if your visitor clicks over and enrolls, you get a percentage.
The link to the program might read like: www.EZCreditRepair.com/YourReferalId. It’s ugly and obviously an affiliate link and your reader might hesitate to click if he notices it. Or, and this does happen quite a bit, the visitor will simply type in the first part of the address and delete the affiliate ID, thus depriving you of your commission.
What you need to do is stick a folder in your site tree and call it “go” or something like that. You can pick any name you want really. Just make sure it doesn’t say something like “affiliate” or “referral” or any name that would defeat the purpose of doing this in the first place.
How I Make My Money Online – Top Earners for October
This is the question I’m asked more than any other. Even on other sites where making money is not at all the thrust, comments often lead to this question.
Before we get started I’d like to note again that these products are used over a few different websites.
So without further ado here are my top earners, in order from most the profitable to the least.
Google Adsense
Not all my sites do well with Adsense in comparison with other ad services which we’ll get to in a sec. On product-based sites, for example, Adsense doesn’t keep up. But over my network of sites Adsense is consistently the winner, no doubt because my sites are primarily content driven. If all of my sites were product-based I’d be singing a different tune for sure.
Read the rest →
How I’m Going to Build Site Traffic
Well, if there’s any such thing as a new site, this is it.
I checked my site stats last night and guess what?
This site had 2 Unique Visitors.
Not too impressed. And when I checked further to see where these two lucky folks had come from, I realized that one of them was me.
Yay.
Hell, I like this site but I don’t want to be 50% of the people who look at it. And aside from every making money, which is impossible without the traffic, it also sucks to feel like I’m talking to myself.
Read the rest →
My Money-Making Plans for October
This month I’m going to be concentrating mostly on two things:
- optimizing my various sites for income
- generating traffic
In this post, we’ll cover how I’m going to optimize my sites for monetization.
Now, in most cases, my sites already have affiliate links, ad blocks, etc. for I built them with the intention of eventually making money. But in light of some recent reading I’ve done I think they all need more or less significant tweaks.
Due to the Terms of Service of the various advertising products I use, I’m not at liberty to discuss my click-through-rate (CTR) or daily earnings. I can say that I have seen below average earnings with them. That’s my hunch anyway.
Read the rest →
When is it Time to Change an Ad?
I know you may be sick of your headline.
You may be fed up with the same old call to action and those antiquated bullet points. The deck copy you wrote six weeks ago might be haunting you, running through your head when you shower.
Does this mean it’s time to switch it up?
No, it doesn’t. You never ever ever change an ad while it’s making money.
There’s a reason Marlboro has been running the “same old ad” for more than 25 years.
It works.
Home Based Internet Businesses
While there are many kinds of internet businesses and many types of products and services one can provide, there are really only 3 major actual TYPES of businesses, and a 4th that isn’t really a business but an extra income opportunity. We’ll explore them here in broad detail and hopefully get you in a position where you can decide which would be the right option for you.
Selling Your Own Products
This is an obvious for as one of the more profitable internet businesses for the good reason that you have actual products to sell. Whether these are your own hand-crafted products, ebooks your customers can download, or a stash of old iPods that you want to sell on eBay, you can make money pretty easily this way.
Affiliate Program Basics
Affiliate Sales Programs are quite possibly the fastest way to go from total business beginner to lucrative business owner. Why?
Because they offer you the vast benefits of needing no products of your own, no physical or cyber-store, no inventory, no warehouse, etc. In fact, you don’t even need a website to become an effective and
wealthy affiliate, if you find the right program, of course.
As an affiliate you’ll never pay for shipping or postage and you’ll never get merchandise returned to you.
On top of all that, there is a very direct relationship between how much work you put into it and how much money you make. And believe me it doesn’t take much work at all to really get an affiliate program up and
running.
Let’s take a step back and cover the basics.
Become an Affiliate Making Money Online
Dreaming of the big bucks, eh? You want to become an affiliate making money online, passing hapless web surfers into the “checkout lane” for piles of dough. Well, here’s a surefire way to guarantee you’ll never make a dime.
By Making half the sale.
Poor affiliates, and by that I mean both poor in technique and poor in the pocketbook, fail because they do too little. They spend too little time with their potential customer, kicking him out right when he’s getting interested. Put yourself in the customers shoes and take a look at what happens with about 90% of the affiliates out there. They try to make the sale but get a sort of inverted sequence which looks like this:
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