I was browsing through my favorite affiliate marketer’s pages such has many of the super affiliates. I found a survey that gave affiliate stats. I give shoemoney credit for finding this.
I found some surprising numbers. There was a pie graph of a piece that was saying “I have been an affilaite since..” Being myself as useless affiliate, I started around 2004 just barely making money online. 2007, which was 2 years ago was when I started geting into the business then, 2008 was when I was actually more aware. 2007 was the year that had 15% on the pie graph. It was the biggest slice of the pie. So what does this mean? It means that a lot of people started back in 2007. It means the market will get more saturated soon.
I get this a lot from people and we get into a conversation that leads no where. There are some things that I always get confronted with
Affiliate Marketing is Illegal!
Hold on for a second. First of all I dont’ want to repeat the question again asking you how you found out its illegal. Let me explain the legal issues. There is a catergory called, BlackHatSEO. This one is the illegal way to earn revenue. Most of it is bending the rules and hiding it and some are just wrong. There are some affiliate that do this but not a lot. There is whitehatseo which is purely legal. The way you are suppose to. Is adding a link with a banner and your affiliate link illegal? There are millions of sites that do this and no it is NOT illegal.
I just realized that setting up a blog, setting up a web site, iframing a site, signing up for affiliate networks, and desinging a web page isn’t too easy. In the beginning I was just like everyone else. I always refer back to a point where I was so frustrated at dreamweaver when I still new. I downloaded dreamweaver and then I bought my first domain which was commonsickness.com. My goal was to make a medical site and throw some adsense in it to make some revenue. So when I got to dreamweaver, I tested it out. First I wanted to post a picture in the body of the web site. Easy right? NOO!! It was so hard just to post it the way I wanted it. Believe it or not it took me 3-4hours to figure it out. That was how much I was a newbie back then. I also had a problem of getting the web site from my computer to the internet. That took another hour or so! But now I can do it very quickly since I learned from pure experience.
Shamwow! Watch this hilarious infomercial that aired last year in 2008. Hello? Do you know what year we are on? Basically if you try and analyze the cost of making this commercial it is going to be so cheap. All you need is rent some high definition (maybe not even) camcorder with a camera man and get your product with the examples such as a carpet and waterbowl. Go use someone’s kitchen and make it look so generic just for the commercials. Then have some noob who does video editing to do it. Bam! I’m telling you that they probably spent less than $1,000. Hell! I can even do that for low cost. The only expensive thing is actually getting the ad on air. Now that one is going to burn a hole.
When starting out a web site there is always a common question of “Does my web design have to look good?” Obviously there is no straight forward answer for that. There are many factors that would go into creating a web site and the content that it is going to have. As you can see, web sites like craigslist.org has the worst web design ever. Sorry! But your web design is crap. Also google has a bad web design. Yahoo.com Vs. Google.com, which looks better? Yahoo.com is leading with its design and user interface. The graphics and logo is way more superior compared to google’s. Actually I didn’t mean to target the logo because both of them have a good trademark. But so what if a web site has a crappy design? Is that all we need?
Answer is NO. If that were the case, Anyone can hire a professional designer and make a million dollar logo and beat every web site out there. People as in your traffic, look for more than the design. They also look for the contents. Craigslist.org is the best example for this type. Yes it looks like crap and looks like something out of a 1990s web site. I don’t even see any graphics. But there the web site gets millions of views a day if not more. The idea behind craig, was to create a network where people can do the basic thing. Sell your item, post an ad and buy from the seller. Very simple isn’t it? Of course. When somebody looks for information on the internet since this is the internet is mostly an information database. If you can give what the traffic what they want in the most least efficient way, you save money on hosting AND they love your web site because of its user interface. Google.com lured me in when I had 56k back in well….long long time ago. 56k as you know is so slow that it loads web sites so long. Back then load times were so important because people in this generation are always in a rush. So google.com was simple but got the job done and in today’s world that is all what we need.
So the question arises. . .When should we do a nice fancy design? EASY! Examples of web sites would be sites that have business. Landing pages are a MUST and web pages with information about a business. Those kind of web sites are trying to promote a product they are selling or trying to promote and give information about their corporation or small business. Most of these type of web sits are going to be direct linked through a business card. That is not always the case but if you are going to pass out business cards please have a good looking web site. This will increase your creditability and hold your content together.
My main point here is, content will always be key but there is a certain ratio where it should balance out. I would have to say that
Its been a while since I actually did some hardcore PPCing. Life just doesn’t get any easier. I earned this “revenue” last summer in one month. Not a bad start right? This is just a screenshot evidence of how people make money online through affiliate marketing. First I ran the ringtones campaign which was very saturated and about 70%-80% of that just came from ringtones alone. The other ones are just random niches that I will not post due to the future. I mean even if a campaign is dead, it can still be brought to life. Notice that I said REVENUE and not Net Income. I really didn’t EARN that as 100% revenue. If you can make that with 100% revenue I give you my respects. That would mean that your web site would be SEO’d. However this is just PAID TRAFFIC and Paid traffic is expensive. Can someone guess what my revenue is? Well lets just put it this way. It was under $1,000 since I had a bunch of keywords that would not convert. For now my plan is to PPC but not like how it was with ringtones since ringtones was always going up and down and it was a very high maintenance campaign. Even though, some affiliate networks such as NBA is promoting ringtones with a payout of $20, I don’t think you can make ends meet.
The worst thing you can do with Pay Per Click traffic is use it for useless reasons. I was looking at some forums where they were giving out Free $250 Facebook traffic. I would post the coupons but it is now expired and you can not use it. The forum that I was looking through is where people post deals. The people here are people looking for deals and sales. Well I saw there was a post for Free Facebook Traffic.
There are plenty of ways where new affiliates use the pay per click traffic for anything other than affiliate marketing.
Do Not Use Pay Per Click Traffic for the Following:
3) Marketing your Blog. If you just made a wordpress blog and you want to people to give you comments and get traffic this will be so useless. So what if 100people click your campaign that has a title of “earn money” or “(insert name of blog) – my blog click here”. You will get traffic but you will not make anything out of it. If you have an affiliate link chances are no one will join under you.
2) Your Personal Myspace/Facebook/Friendster. etc Account Profile. I don’t know if you would even get approved for this but someone out there probably wants to get friend requests so they will put up the ad. This will only make you lose money and I don’t see what you will gain out of it.
1) Selling Physical Items. Unless you are a distributor or have your own production plant do not sell it. I’m talking about putting your car for sale. Or putting your rare baseball card. No ONE will buy it. You can drive $1,000 worth of traffic and I gurantee that no one will even inquire. Do yourself a favor and go on craigslist.org and post your damn car. In 5 mins someone will be all over it.
The reason why I am posting this is because someone on that forum posted they will use $250 worth of facebook traffic to advertise the car they are selling.So please.. use PPC just for the sake of commissioned revenue.
I can’t believe I missed this huge problem that affiliates make. Its not really a mistake its just being ignorant. This always used to happen to me all the time while I was running my ringtones campaign. The ringtones campaign was high maintenance so I was always checking my keywords religiously. What happens is when you try to check your stats and you see that you did not spend money and you have no impressions.
TroubleShooting :
1) First of all check if your campaign is not on “pause”. If you pause a campaign it will not run. The pause feature is great when you want to modify your keywords and update your ad copy.
2) Keywords. Your Campaign can be up and running but your keywords and be all paused. Maybe you were up last night and paused every keyword in your ad group. Or worst yet, you paused your whole ad group Yes Laugh at yourself.
3) Editorial Status. After you complete the ad copy, yahoo will have to approve your ad. This takes about to 10mins and even days. If it takes 2 days go email them or resubmit it.
4) Keyword Relevance. Not all keywords will be searched. Lets take for example 2 keywords. Keyword #1 is “macbook”. and Keyword #2 is “platypus”. Macbook will give you thousands if not millions more of searches instead of a low traffic keyword like platypus.
5) Biggest Trouble. Check the DATE of report!!!!!! countless times i spent half an hour trying to figure out why my campaign is not getting hits when I have 5,000+ keywords and #1-4 is accurate. Then I figured I’m looking at a date when I was born or when your grandparents were born. So yeah make sure if you want todays impressions/ctr CHECK THE CALENDAR!!!
When starting off any web site with your domain and hosting stuff, you have to keep doing this over and over and it never gets easier. Let me explain what a Domain is. A domain is a unique name that helps other web sites distinguish itself. However domain names are really just a set of numbers. In reality you are just typing a bunch of letters that are being transcribed with numbers through the HTTP or hyper text transfer protocol. Yup that sounds familiar since this is suppose to be on your address bar. So instead of having to type in a bunch of ip numbers such as 12.345.678.9.10. you can just type in my domain name which is uselessaffiliate.com
I have Katrina Darrell Pictures. Click here!Actually if you guys are wondering who this girl is. She appeared on American idol wearing only a bikini. What does that have to do with affiliate marketing? First of all this is a quick money maker. It probably won’t last long but for sure you will at least make a few bucks. Well this will not work on PPC. I’m nobody to say that but usually if you are going to PPC using her keyword it would involve some blackhat seo which I will not be sharing. Maybe you can find a good way to black hat and not get caught. Well how do we and what do we promote using this girl?
