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.
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 love article marketing because the only thing you waste is your own time IF you fail. Unlike PPC marketing, article marketing is doing everything the “old fashioned” way. S.E.O…. Pay Per Click is guaranteed traffic depending on the keywords you might get no traffic or high volume traffic. Usually high volume traffic gets you so much hits but you pay for it. The higher you pay the more traffic gets driven to your web site and/or landing page. For article marketing only one thing counts. “Organic Traffic”. hmm..remind me to add this to the affiliate dictionary. Organic Traffic is traffic is known as “unpaid listings” in a search engine or in a directory of some sort. The difference between organic traffic and paid traffic is the amount of money you spend. Simply, organic traffic is FREE but takes days to weeks and months! to rank #1. Pay Per Click Traffic gets you #1 spot but you pay for it. Some keywords can go up to $5-$10 with a low quality score.
As an affiliate marketer you need to learn this skill. There is no way you can go far without learning how to make a landing page. Sure people can buy landing pages and premade web sites. A nice way to cheat your way up to professional web design but after a while you start to get problems along the way. Maybe something happened and an image won’t load. Maybe the whole .index won’t load at all. Or maybe you want a new color or theme. You can either buy a landing page for another $20-$100. (jeez..) Seriously people do pay that much for a landing page and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone paid for $150+ for one. Show me the page you want and I can make it without breaking a sweat. I’m still noob at web design but I can probably get the same conversion rate with a $50+ landing page
In the past month I have made a few hundred USD. I tell people everyone who I talk to, if they are interested. I filter out people who wants to do it and who doesn’t. Believe me , I can tell who wants to start and who just wants to do it. There are two different types of people. One person jumps on it and read everything I posted and wants to get started. I will be impressed if someone IMs asking me “how do I start PPC?”. If I have to push someone then its a burden on them to get started. Basically its two groups of people. One is someone who wants to start and another who wants to earn a few bucks and handle it like a job. Here we go again with Employer vs. Employee. I am an Employer while someone who isn’t as motivated is an employee waiting for me to give them a job. When my business flys (yes it will i believe in me) then I can give you a job to do while I spend my vacation in cancun. I just don’t want to waste my time on someone who is interested and who just wants to jump with me and other affiliates in deep cold water not knowning what happens when you surface.
Wow its like 7am right now and I’m hard at work already. I feel that in the morning my productivity rate is at its peak performance. No one is awake and everyone is still sleepy and no one to talk to. The best time of day to manage everything. The hardest part of finding the right keyword is well. . finding the right keyword. If I knew all the answers right now, I would be a super affiliate. But for now I’m not. There are so many keyword tools out there and I have not tried them yet. So far for my niche I am focusing on the long tail keyword.
A long tailed keyword is a chain of keywords that has about 3-5 keywords. For example, if you were promoting acne, you would use :
How to treat acne
Best acne medicine for teenagers
remove blackheads with best medication
Best medicine to treat blackhead
free proactive trial
Those are just a few examples. So why wouldn’t you just use “treat acne”, or “acne medicine”. This has to do with the type of customers you are looking for. In PPC you don’t want to waste your money on people who are just researching acne. The customer has to be someone who has a potential of buying the product.
In reallife situations, lets say we go into a car dealership. So I walk in and you walk in with me. I talk to the sales rep and ask him I want that White BMW Z4 in the corner. So simple enough because I know what I want and he has a high potential to make a sale. After I buy my car you talk to the sales rep and ask him “I need a car”. In order for him to help you as much as possible hes going to ask, what kind of car? what color? you want a sports car? do you want 4 doors?. ETC. So now hes refining your search and you have a small potential of giving him a sale because you are not targeting what you want. Maybe you just came there to test drive every single car but don’t buy anything.
