Useless Affiliate » how to make money online

Affiliate Marketing is a Scam?

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:12:05 +0000

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.

O yeah smart guy I will snitch on the IRS

So what? Go ahead but let me post a video of it on youtube and we can all laugh on how you will get pwned. Seriously. We get TAXED. I had to do my taxes for these. You can even get a LLC to do business take or a SP. Its the same thing as a contractor from a construction site.

Its a scam like that google bucks web site where it promises you income.

No.. they are legit too. And they don’t PROMISE anything. They give you to secrets but 99% of people are lazy

Its a pyramid scam

You sign up for offers by your own will through an affiliate network. No one tells you to refer people. No one is on a conga line. You have chances to advance when you double triple your earnings. You are a sales person. Sigh..

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Affiliate PayCheck Screenshot

admin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:42:58 +0000

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.

Ringtones was a very saturated market and the people who made money would be the ones who started it back then when the niche was top secret. Now everyone is starting to promote it. A word of caution though, ringtones is not for newbies. When I was a super noob, I started off with ringtones. So this will be one of my earning screenshots but will not be my last. The past few months I have not been working online very productive. I have just been trying to get through life since everyone is broke nowadays. I’m just focusing on school right now.

Paycheck

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Incentive Website Method

admin — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 10:29:31 +0000

Get your free ipod now!!!, FREE FLAT SCREEN LCD!!! Free $250! , Free Iphone, FREE XBOX360, FREE WII, FREE PS3, FREE GAMES FOR CONSOLES!!

AHHH!! FREE INCENTIVES!!! WOOOT

Sample Incentive Web Site

So who has heard of these offers? Anyone who has been on the internet for a certain period of time has seen these ads. There are 2 ways where I have seen this done. One of them is when you have an advertisement on a page and a user clicks on it and all they do is enter an email or a zip code. After the User enters the required information the affiliate gets paid from .70-$2 depending on the email submit then the user usually just clicks the “X”on their browser. The second method is actually the most common one and you can actually count the web sites. There are only a few that create these sites. I will not list them due to privacy of other web pages. Basically you Sign Up > Fill out the amount of offers required > Get free ipod or whatever they are going to give you as an incentive. I’m going to explain the 2nd one in this case because I believe it is very important to know.

These web sites give you a FAQ but they never tell you how they are actually marketing their offers. A sample would be an offer that says something like this.

This is a Sample FAQ from incentives

These type of incentive web sites are slowly getting banned by different affiliate networks because the affiliate offers are getting a lot of refunds. I’m not talking about the simple survey offers but the “free trial” offers that these incentive sites make you do. Usually you have a script that generates the links to all the affiliate offer the web site has. The publishers are realizing that by giving out free samples and getting refunds back they are actually losing money instead of a normal organic traffic that somebody would actually buy the product. These web sites, publishers know a huge percentage would refund.

But how does Incentive Web sites work? The first step when a user signs up they have are told to fill out an offer or refer someone. Some of them are based on “points” for each offer completed. For example lets take an ipod. Ipod nowadays cost around $250-$300. When you want to get a “free ipod” you will have to get about 500 points. The points are probably based on the amount of profit they will gain after the ipod is sent. I don’t have an accurate number since I don’t run any of these sites. The following is an estimate of how many points an offer makes

Shopping Essentials+ 46
Buyers Advantage 36
GE Critics Choice Entertainment 60
Everyday Values 34
HudHomesNow.com 52
At Home Rewards 46
Passport to Fun 46
Video Professor 80
Value Max 46
Advantage Language 74
True.com 66
Todays Escapes 46
Simply You 40
Price Store 44
AutoVantage 44
Health Saver 36
Pc Safety Plus 34
NetMarket 36
The Grant Assistant 42
eAuction Tutor 56
Privacy Matters 123 46

When you sign up with the offer they have some script that credits your account. The cheap easy surveys give you easy points. The more information they get from you like a Credit Card, the more points you get. The reason being for that is when you sign up for a “free sample” those offers actually pay the affiliate over $15-$30 a sign up. Once you hit 500 points by adding up all the offers above, you get an ipod within a few weeks. As a matter a fact I don’t know how much they would profit from the offer but maybe they are hoping that someone will stop and get lazy with the offers and not accumulate enough points to be eligible for the reward to be sent.

A simple calculation for this would be Amount of offer/sign ups vs the cost of the reward vs the amount of points per revenue made. So meaning the person willing to receive a free gift, has to complete at least the minimum reward costs (ipod). Now if that is not the case for these web sites then we would have to use another formula. The amount of uncompleted offers has to exceed the amount of completed offers. So a margin of the uncompleted offer has to compensate for completed rewards.

EXAMPLE:

10points to complete reward < This is an EXPENSE OF $1,000

User X has 8 points and quit. < $800 Profit since no reward is sent

User Y has 5points and quit. <$500 profit since no reward is sent

User Z has 10points. < Expense of $1,000

Lets assume @ 10points the offer only gave the affiliate $700. That would mean that he can not give the user $1,000 since he would have a net loss of $300. So what do you do? Take profit from User X & Y to compensate for the reward. Whew! that was confusing. But its just pretty simple technique that tricks many people including people like myself when I didn’t know much about affiliate marketing.

Summary : User Signs up, Script is generated to offer, User signs up with offer. Affiliate gets paid and User gets credited points. Affiliate sends user an ipod. If that sort of made sense, that is ok since I will be going over this in deep detail in my next post.

The Final Question is, does it work? Answer, YES

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Introduction to Article Marketing

admin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:27:47 +0000

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.

Anyways, we use we article marketing to promote offers that is usually an ebook. There is an ebook for over thousands of things from weight loss, how to ( insert problem), cookbooks, etc. So pretty much this is flexible and writing an article wouldn’t be so tough when you pick your favorite niche to produce. So should we start? Here is the beginning of article marketing.

Step 1 : First of all sign up for ClickBank. This is the most popular place for promotion of ebooks. Search the web site for any niche you wish. Clickbank is some what challenging to understand its many properties such as gravity and last sale, etc. I will go over this when I write about how to use clickbank in a later post right now I do not want to overload you with information. You need to create a hoplink. Don’t know how? click here http://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_faq.html. Do not be afraid of having no web site because clickbank does NOT call you or approve you. Everyone is approved.

Step 2: Sign up for ezinearticles.com. This is where you will write up and BS your articles. Once you are signed up search your niche and see how many people posted articles. If your niche comes up to be <10,000 you can dominate it easily. If its in the triple digits as 100,000, then its a bit harder to gain. I think ezine lets you add 2 links to the article. This is used to make the traffic click on your link. Ezine does NOT accept direct linking so you will need to set up a web page. If you can write about 1 article a day then you should be good for that niche. In the beginning it takes about a week for them to actually approve your article. YES you will have to be patient. Make sure it fits an article criteria. So now you have an OFFER and a place where traffic accumulates.
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Step 3: Go make an account on blogspot or wordpress.com if you don’t have a domain + hosting. Now write like a continuation on your article that is very general so you can use it over and over again since all your articles will link to that exact same web site. Now the link to the offer will be somewhere on that page usually at the top of the end or both of the written mini article. Once you have that up check your hoplink if it works and try to hide it by using a hyperlink text. There is another way to hide it completely but for now this know this basic. Sometimes people steal your sales by putting in their own hoplink to replace with theirs.

Step 4 : Now your job is to create more and more articles to populate the niche. This will give your article higher rankings on google and more hits. In this type of marketing, the more the hits the more you earn money. Conversion rates are VERY low but your high volume assuming you have over 100 articles will compensate for that. That is one reason why you would not want to PPC an Ebook because after 20 – 50
+ hits you will lose money and no one will buy your ebook.

There are more ways to promote the article but for now good luck and be creative! If you need to learn anything from the minor details like hiding a hoplink just google it! However in the future I’m going to go over everything you should do. The only thing i won’t tell you is my niche !

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How to Make a Landing Page

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:28:21 +0000

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

So if you are not lazy unlike thousands of people out there, I can teach you a thing or two on how to create one.

A Landing page is basically the same set up on how you would show people what you are offering. For this post I won’t go over what the contents are but I will go over in detail how to at least set one up. There are so many ways and this is the way I have mastered.

Things You Need

1) Adobe Photoshop w/ image ready

2) Dreamweaver (doesn’t matter which version)

3) Ftp (I recommend Fireftp for ease of use)

4) Domain / Host

5) Your Brain

First of all you need a domain and a host. I can hook you up with a good deal. I’m suppose to make around $100 with every referral but since I help everyone a lot I’m going to use up the $100 on your guys. (Free domains + disk space with package). Domain is the name of your web site. So my domain name is obviously “uselessaffiliate.com”. Domains are important because if you are selling laptops you would NOT want “potato.com”. Maybe depending on your niche you can use “laptopsonline.com”. I just threw those examples so don’t worry about clicking or checking. Domains are cheap but make sure you don’t get all those extras. Unless you are running some major web site with tons of traffic, you don’t need most of the extras. So don’t spent more than $8 for a domain. Hosting is next. This is where the domain is going to be hosted. This is basically where all your files will be located. This will normally take a day or two for everything to be approved / hosted. But for me I can set this domain and hosting in under 24hours.

Next is the page itself. You can use adobe photoshop to make a page. Select the size you want. I normally use 800 x 600 as a landing page. Make your design and have your banners , header..etc. etc. Make CLICKABLE BUTTONS which is where people will click and see your offer page. Something like “click here” wouldn’t be a good idea. . We will take ringtones. Select Carrier : att , verizon. Make a button for att and verizon and people will click it since that is what they will be looking for.

This is a very basic landin page

BTW i got the image off my old blog

Following me so far? Now flatten image (don’t really have to) and move to image ready on photoshop. I wish I had the time to post pics but I’m short right now. Get your Slice Tool. Slice the area where people will be clicking. So slice around the att , verizon buttons you just made. Good ? Now “save optimized as..” html / images.

Good job you made it this far. Open up dreamweaver and open the saved file. It should be a .html file. In dreamweaver you can edit your web site title under the codes. I should go in deep details with this but you will end up getting bored and click the “x” on your browser. Dreamweaver is where you can add all the codes you want and text. All set? Now save in dreamweaver. Make sure the web page is index.html. When you do this, it will tell the browser to open up that file and load everything. There has been so many times where people don’t do it and get an error. Everything is up but the browser will search the directory and we like.. uh-oh no index.html and will error.

Open up firefox and go to fireftp. This is where logins sucks. You will get many values and you will be like WTF is ftp. Well for ftp just use ftp.yourwebsite.com. Username and password is the username you given access to the web site. This step is hard for most people but you just have to go back and remember what the ftp access account you set up was. Now you should had been able to connect. Under the web site folder which is “yourwebsite.com” open it. Now drag your index.html and images in that folder. MAKE SURE that you upload in public_html but if you don’t have it just upload it to the root or where the FTP takes you. This is just a common problem that messes everyone up because of different hosing.Open another window or tab in firefox and see if your web site loads. It should had loaded if not there is like 100s of things to check but usually its not a problem. As long as its index.html.

And there you VERY VERY basic FAQ on how to make a landing page..

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Common Affiliate Mistakes

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:51:02 +0000

Just like everything in life, we make bad choices while we think it is better. Earlier today I had a collection of about 2,000+ keywords that I have been waiting to test out. So I was being aggressive because if I wanted to meet my goal this week I have no choice to to let it go. New landing page, new links, new beginnings was what I was thinking. As the day goes by I’m like getting confused. I set out 2,000+ keywords and I was actually thinking, “well if i let about 2,000 keywords go I should have a minimum of 3-5 leads today. My bids were just average and I was going to bid higher tomorrow when QUALITY SCORE kicks in. Remember that if I’m bidding at .50 and I have a higher quality score then you, I’m paying for clicks CHEAPER. So it was average because I’m on a budget. Just about 12 hours pass and I spent a lot of money on clicks already and I was thinking..what!? No leads. I was aware of the # of impressions and which keywords were being clicked. Hmm.. still no leads. Now I see it!! Quickly! Pause all campaigns! . I repeat Pause all campaigns!!

It seems that my new landing page was working properly. But 2/3 of the campaign was through a directory link so I can test out a new landing page. So I have tested 2 landing pages at once. 1/3 was on my main site which proved that it was able to convert and the other was through a directory www.uselessaffiliate.com/(landingpage here.html). So 2/3 of the clicks was going to the directory and it was going to a 404 page!! Affiliate Marketers worst nightmare!. So the 1/3 was getting traffic but the majority was in my new landing page in the directory. As of right now I’m trying to fix all my links and make sure they work properly. I also found out that in that move, I also messed up my tracking. I made a new campaign and multiple ad groups so all the links are all the same and that was the cause.

I hope that made sense to everyone. I’m like half asleep right now and in a state of panic.

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Affiliate Marketing Prerequisites

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 09:41:16 +0000

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.

I’m more than happy to help someone start, don’t get me wrong. But its hard to help someone who doesn’t want to start. Its the real world, no one tells you whats the best way to retire. Honestly I do plan my life but i have no idea WTF a 401k is or the # of work hours social security will pay you. But not to discourage anyone who wants to learn, I will help you. I don’t want to keep people from getting an education. Anyways the point of this post was to help anyone who wants to get started.

1) Please. Seriously, Read my blog. I know its not that much information but its gets you the mentality.

2) Before jumping in cold water PLEASE READ!. Seriously I can’t emphasize enough. I get people who’s trying to start ask me questions that are explained better in blogs than asking me. Just GOOGLE IT!!!

3) Know the following :

USE OF GOOGLE.COM OR YAHOO.COM !!! Html , Adobe Photoshop, dreamweaver, use of FTP,

Please search for the information you need. Thousands of bloggers like me have post this numerous times. I see people buying landing pages and they could had just spent about an hour or 2 making it themselves. Just know the VERY basic. I have not mastered any of the above and I don’t want to because knowning the basics will go a long way. 90% of you probably have a myspace and know what HTML is and some photoshop to crop your myspace pictures. Dreamweaver is a whole new ball park. It took me 2-3 hours to find out how to insert a picture on my first time. FTP is just moving files from your computer to the internet. Same thing as posting a picture on photobucket or myspace. They just make it easier for you so you don’t have to login and do all that easy stuff.

4). Buy Domain and Hosting ( Total Estimated Cost : $80 / year.)

Domains is your name. I bought www.uselessaffiliate.com for like $6. Hosting, I got mine for one year prepaid. If you need any of it, just let me know. I can probably hook it up with 2-3 free domains + 20-30% more disk / bandwidth space. I’m suppose to earn around $100 a referral but I’m just going to give it back to you guys so I don’t earn anything but able to get you guys started.

5) Sign up for affiliate Links. If you look in the right side I have links with my referral. I earn a very small amount for each referral. If you find this informative you guys can sign up and I can thank you. If you just hate me then just go to the web site itself. ( Sign up with me and I’ll help you more ). My income is not through referrals so I can careless of referring people.

6) Sign up for paid traffic. As of right now, just “google” free credits for adwords, msn, yahoo paid traffic. I have a link on my blog and you can sign up through me.

7) All set? Check if you have everything from steps 1-6.

Make a Landing Page ( will post in detail later on). The landing page is just links to your offers. You are the salesman, saleswomen of your company. Make it look NICE!

9) Get some tracking on the landing page. There are a bunch out there. Google it and find out which suits you well. I would recommen Tracking202

10) Add keywords. Keywords are gold coins and the source of your income. It is also the ugly duckling when it comes to getting the wrong ones. Just TEST TEST TEST.

Alright I think I covered it very briefly. There are more to it but this is the structure on how everything works. If you have any questions just IM me.

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Keyword Tips

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:52:42 +0000

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.

I hope the gives a bigger picture on the types of keywords you might need. Don’t get me wrong the short term keywords are good too if you have some money to burn.

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Make Money Online Step One

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:11:39 +0000

So you want to make some extra income online? Or Maybe you want to make a career with affiliate marketing. Whatever your situation is, you want money. Well if you do not know where to start, you can start here where I can give you a few pointers. For beginners start to read blogs and articles about affiliate marketing. However I repeat do not try to buy any books or videos. Do lots of research first because this will help you succeed on your way to start affiliate marketing. I spent countless hours just researching on how stuff works and trying to understand terms.

Affiliate marketing is just like school. First they teach you all the material and then they give you a test. However the test will be how well you can convert an offer to make money. Learn how to do research on your own. Affiliate Marketing does NOT teach you. There are some step by step books but that information is already on thousands of money making blogs. Someone just made it easier for you to read and put together while they are making a profit. Read READ READ before you make any assumptions. Make sure you also look at their form of advertisement and promotion methods.

So what you should do know is learn how to use GOOGLE.com and branch off the keyword affiliate marketing. You can search for PPC, CPC, EPC, MAKE MONEY ONLINE, AFFILIATE NETWORKS, HOW TO MAKE MONEY, ETC Just go through those terms and you should be up in late hours just to learn how everything works.

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