Affiliate Marketing - Trying To Earn Money Online

30% Off Web Hosting

2012-01-16T13:59:00.000-08:00

So I run about 20 Wordpress sites where I earn money by using adsense and amazon on those websites. When I first set up a Wordpress site I bought some hosting with GoDaddy and it cost me (I think) $3.95 per month for each site. After I had set up 2 sites on there (and their domains are the best value so I do think there is a place for them) I realised that I could have unlimited Wordpress sites via HostGator Hosting for only $9.95 a month. So I moved my sites to HostGator and set up all of my other sites there too.

To get the unlimited sites (and they don't have to be Wordpress) you need to set up an initial site and then create Add-On domains. If anyone wants any more information on how to do this then I will elaborate.

Anyway, until the end of January HostGator are running a promotion to give 30% off the cost of their hosting plans. If you want to take advantage of this then use the code JAN30 when you sign up.

2011 Earnings Summary

2012-01-01T14:03:00.000-08:00

So 2011 was my second year of trying to earn money online. There is so much to learn that you are really only going to succeed if you keep persevering, trying new things, learning more and more and basically just not giving up when the going gets tough and you think you are never going to earn any money. I can tell you that there have been quite a few times when I wonder why I started this and if it is ever going to reap any rewards for me. I think the hardest thing that I found was the fact that I only wanted to sell things that I believed in and I didn't want in any way to be seen to be conning people. That was the spur of moving the focus of my earnings to adsense and Amazon. When I was first introduced to affiliate marketing then one thing I was advised to focus on was ClickBank. Now there are some legitimate products in ClickBank but by and large I think that I would not want to be selling the majority of the stuff on there.

Anyway, I persevered, mainly with a focus on HubPages and also creating my own websites half way through the year and that saw my earnings increase significantly. Now most of my earnings come from Adsense and Amazon and although I would like to have my eggs split between a few more baskets, this is a good start.

So having totalled up my earnings for 2011 I made $807.30. Although it is not as much as I would have wanted (obviously!) it is a great start to build on. I am currently looking at earnings or around $200 a month and am aiming to increase that to $500 a month by the end of the year so I am hoping that I am looking at at least $3000 in total for next year.

Get Unlimited Wordpress Site Hosting

2012-01-01T07:34:00.000-08:00

So one way to make more money is to scale things up and decrease your costs. One way of doing this is to use an unlimited hosting account to host all of your websites. Personally I use Hostgator to host my sites and I have their Baby plan which gives me unlimited domains and unlimited hosting. So the only thing I have to pay for on top of it each year are the domain name fees. This hosting is less than $10 a month and you can get a 25% discount by using the code AZURE25OFF.

They also have a simple wordpress install facility (all of my for-profit websites currently run on Wordpress) so you can be up and running with a website in no time.

New Website Launched and One Rebuilt

2011-12-11T03:25:00.000-08:00

So I figured that if I was to start increasing my earnings then I need to increase the number of websites that I have so I started a new one based on an article that I had written in the past that had done well. I did some keyword research and came up with a URL which I liked which was New Golf Clubs.

Although I know a particular big time affiliate marketer that I follow does not like to have hyphens in his URLs, I decided to ignore this fact as my best producing website also has hyphens so I'm not sure that there is a problem. The keyword phrase 'new golf clubs' has approx 74k searches every month and low competition so I thought I would give it a shot, even though I know the golf market is a very difficult and competitive one.

I know it will take time for the site to grow and get hits so for this one I am going to aim for 6 months until I get into profit either through amazon sales or adsense earnings.

Oh yes, and I also completely rebuilt my original site that I started with. I had built it on Sharepoint which is what I knew about but that was too expensive as I had Wordpress hosting available for free (unlimited hosting on the one I was paying for) so that would save me some money by bringing it over there.

I am also contemplating selling off my best producing site to get some capital to fund newer sites...

New Google Update

2011-11-10T02:19:00.000-08:00

So I read that there has been another Google update a few days ago that may change which results are seen in the search engine. The figure I saw quoted was that there may be a change of about 12% in where websites are placed in the rankings and this is due to the fact that the update takes into account websites that have been more recently updated.

So basically this is saying that you need to keep your websites up to date. What I am trying to do with mine is to make sure that they are updated at least every 2 weeks. For some of them I find it hard to generate extra content on a regular basis as all the information is already there pretty much but I guess the best thing is to add in some extra news articles etc to keep things fresh.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any changes in my viewing stats this week but at the moment things look like they are on the up for most of my sites.

Great Month in October

2011-11-05T09:29:00.000-07:00

So although in September I hit my target of making $100, I wasn't sure that I could keep up that kind of pace in October. However, after writing a bunch of Halloween Costume hubs on Hubpages that got me over $100 in Amazon sales alone, I managed to achieve earnings of $205 in total in October.

Once again I am not sure it I will be able to top this in November. I need to get on with writing Christmas product articles to kick things off but I think unless these really take off now I will be back looking at maybe $100 again for November if I am lucky.

I really want to reach the $500 target but I will probably have to build more websites for that to happen.

Adsense down, Amazon and Hubpages up for October.

2011-10-16T10:55:00.001-07:00

So this month started with a significant decrease in adsense earnings for some reason. So I decided if I was going to make $100 again (or hopefully more) I would have to do something about it. With this in mind I wrote a number of Halloween hubs targeting selling products on Amazon. These started off doing really well but then suddenly died off. Maybe it was because of the weekend but I am not sure why, I'll check on Monday but it is not looking so good. At least I made a bunch of sales on them before they died so that was a good thing.

Added to that Hubpages have changed their Ad program and over the last 3 days my CPM with them has doubled so I am hoping that stays that way. They have also added eBay in as an affiliate program which I have been accepted into so I will start having a look at that. At the moment I am about on target for similar earnings to September, so we will see how October pans out in the 2nd half of the month.

$100 Earnings Reached in September

2011-09-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

So although things have slightly slowed down since my last post i have still substantially increased my earnings since August and have made over $100 already this month. This is a big achievement for me and a great milestone as I had not expected to reach it that quickly.

The earnings have come from a combination of Amazon commissions (approximately $45 - mostly from hubpages), adsense earnings from websites and hubpages (approx $40) and Hubpages Ads (approx $15). With a few days of September still to go there is scope to increase on this and in October I hope to make it to £100, not dollars.

September Update - On Target for Double August Earnings

2011-09-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

So things are starting to ramp up a bit since I started my Wordpress websites - I knew it would take a few months for them to bed in and start getting some good traffic. I did quite a bit of link building in July and August but have let them rest a bit for the last few weeks to see what happens. After what may or may not have been another Google mini-panda update at the end of August where my Hubpages views almost quadrupled, my websites also started to show good increases in traffic. There are a couple that are stuck and I need to work on those but the best 2 are seeing some really good numbers.

Earnings for September are on target for being double those of August (in adsense) and my Amazon earnings have picked up as well from my product hubs and I am already on 2nd tier earnings with Amazon this month at 6% commission.

What Has Happened to the Advertising Manager Plugin?

2011-08-06T04:29:00.000-07:00

So I have been using the Advertising Manager plugin on my Wordpress websites but for the last week or so it has not been available. Also their website appears to be down so it looks like it might be a permanent problem. There are other plugins available for adding in Google adsense to your WordPress site but I just found that one to be the best and easiest to use. If anyone has any recommendations for another one to use then please let me know.

Doubled My Adsense Earnings

2011-08-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

So with the advent of the new websites I have been building over the last few months I have managed to double my adsense earnings in July, compared to June. Although the numbers are still small (well smaller than I want but a good start), this does mean that I will get an adsense payout this month. Next payout I hope will be in two months time if I can keep gradually growing the sites and the income.

In the meantime I am still thinking of selling one of my sites on Flippa to get some capital in to compensate for the money I have been spending on domains etc.

Get 25 Free Backlinks Every Day

2011-07-31T03:41:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to give another shoutout to Social Monkey which is a site that I use to get free backlinks. It is a really easy to use backlink site where you submit a short article that you need to spin (you only need to think up 160 characters which means you can spin it really easily to get 25 different versions of your wording). You can only submit one link a day so you need to make sure you use it every day to get your 25 free backlinks. You can also only submit each URL once but if you have a few websites then this can easily keep you going for weeks on end. I started on Social Monkey I think a few months ago and I still haven't run out of URLs to submit. You could also submit your hubpages links to get backlinks to your hubs.

This really is a good place for genuine free backlinks so make sure you check it out (and use it every day!).

On Page 1 of Google

2011-07-23T02:40:00.000-07:00

So one of the websites that I have built recently (less than 2 months ago) is now on page 1 of google in positions 4 and 5 for my main keyword, so I am very happy about that. I am considering trying to sell this website as the hits are reasonably good and climbing and the adsense income is starting to come in so it might make me some much needed money. As well as that I have a few amazon sales from it (in fact I need to check if any more have come in in the last week). Oh, the website is the one about Soft Cups.

New Website Under Construction

2011-07-20T08:13:00.000-07:00

So in my quest for increasing my adsense earnings I am starting to build some new websites. As the only cost is for the domain as my hosting covers unlimited websites, if I can find a decent URL with high traffic and low competition then that is something that I will go for if I know something about the content of the site.

My newest site is all about cranberry juice and I managed to find a nice wordpress template that I customised to look pretty good I think! SEO is commencing this week...

Website in the Google Sandbox?

2011-07-03T04:10:00.000-07:00

So I only recently heard about the mythological (or not?) Google Sandbox where some websites are sent for a period of time to cool off when Google finds something (who knows what?) that they don't like. Anyway, I think that one of my sites has been put there. It is the site that I bought from flippa and as soon as I got it the stats were not as good as those shown on the auction page. But even then, since that time about 3 weeks ago, the traffic on the site has been slowly dwindling to the point where it is now pretty much extinct.

So what to do about the Google sandbox? Well all advice seems to point to the fact that I need to keep working on the site and building backlinks and eventually it will be let out of the sandbox. opinions seems to differ as to how long that might be - anything from 2 months to 9 months, so I guess I will just have to wait it out :(

Domains I Forgot I Had!

2011-06-28T07:32:00.000-07:00

So probably about 10 years or so ago I bought a few domains that I did actually use for myself. However, I haven't used then for at least 5 years now and I had almost forgotten about them. Two of them were parked for profit (what profit???!) and another one was redirected to another URL that I used to own but no longer did, so it went to someone else's site - doh!

Anyway, I have a hosting account with Hostgator and with that hosting I can have an unlimited number of websites. So I have added the old domains to the hosting and changed the nameservers so that they point at my Hostgator account (the domains are with Easyspace and I can't easily move them as they are .co.uk ones) and I will build up wordpress sites for all 3 of them.

The great thing is that I did some adwords keyword checking and these 3 domains have really good stats on them - one is 6 figure global, 5 figure local searches with low competition (woohoo!), and the other 2 are 7 figure global, 6 figure local searches with medium competition, nice!

So let's see if I can get something built up on these 3 domains and get some more cash coming in. They will all have to be adsense sites I think as they are not really product related URLs.

Alexa Rank on New Website

2011-06-25T08:44:00.001-07:00

So the website I set up now has an Alexa rank which is great - it is only in the 22m range but I am happy with that for now as I only set it up about a month or so ago and it has a higher rank than the one I set up 2 months ago (not so good for that site). It seems to be doing quite well and I think that a lot of it is because I managed to secure a really good dot com url which is exactly the phrase I wanted. it is not often you get a url like that and I think it is because it is a product that not many people know about but at the moment a fair few are searching for.

Spam Comments With Spelling Mistakes

2011-06-24T01:47:00.000-07:00

So one of the websites I started, Folic Acid, gets a lot of spam comments. In fact in the beginning it got so many it was getting ridiculous so I installed a plugin that required any commenter to enter a number that was displayed.

Anyway, 99% of these comments were spam, some just looking for a backlink without having read what my site was about, and others, well I am not really sure why they were there as the website address they put would be google or bing - so what is the point of that? I'm sure google is not spamming blogs to get backlinks to the search engine!!

out of all these spam comments, one feature ran through them. They all had at least one word spelt wrong, where a few of the letters had been mixed about, e.g.

Hey, that's powefrul. Thanks for the news.
Extremely hleufpl article, please write more.
A good many vluabales you've given me.

So can anyone tell me what are the point of these spam comments with spelling errors? Obviously they get no further than being deleted but I really can't see why anyone would post them in the first place...

Website Ad Performance Related to Keyword Competition and Popularity

2011-06-19T13:37:00.000-07:00

So in the last few months I have started up 2 websites and bought one from flippa. The two I started up myself differed because the main keyword on website 1 had 450,000 global searches and low competition and website 2 had 2,900 searches with medium competition. Website 1 has been going for 2 months and I have done quite a bit of backlinking. Website 2 has been going for 1 month and I have done backlinking, but less. Bizarrely website 2 is performing better in terms of traffic and adsense income and I am not sure why this is! Also, the 3rd site that I bought from flippa was supposed to generate $80 a month in adsense income a month and have a certain amount of traffic. Well it has pretty much done nothing since I bought it. I'm not accusing the guy who sold it of fabricating the figures but I can't figure out why this would be. Perhaps it was because it was offline for about a day whilst it was transferred to me. I don't know. I have since added in some amazon and commission junction ads just to see if I can generate something but at the moment it seems like I may have wasted quite a bit of money...

Starting my Own Websites

2011-06-08T14:46:00.001-07:00

So I have started up a couple of my own websites almost as an experiment. I wanted to buy an existing one on Flippa but I haven't seen anything recently that I thought I could make a go of. There were a couple of sites when I first signed up that looked interesting but it was early days and I missed out on them. So now I have started my own Wordpress blog sites, writing content about things that I know about. I have been practicing the SEO and backlinking and seeing how I get on. One site has more potential than the other in terms of the search numbers but the other has low competition. Already I am getting organic searches through but not in great numbers. I know it is going to take a few months to build them up so I need to be patient. I have maximised the site for Google adsense so that is the main aim of them (as well as to provide quality content).

Another Great Backlink Tool

2011-05-23T00:36:00.000-07:00

So of course we are all looking for more free backlinks and I have found another great place where you can get 25 free backlinks every day with about a half hour's work and I would recommend this to anyone who is looking to get backlinks for their websites or articles. Check out Social Monkee.

Setting Up My Own Website

2011-05-21T01:04:00.000-07:00

So I have decided to go the route of setting up my own website in a specialist niche. It is something that I am finding out a lot about so I feel like I can write authoritative articles on the subject. I have set up the website as a wordpress blog at GoDaddy and I also bought the domain there. The website if all about folic acid and I have generated quite a few pages of original content so far.

I am doing a lot of SEO work on it to try and bring it up in the rankings. There are SEO plugins that you can add to your wordpress blog and I have been doing a lot of backlinking and some article marketing.

I know that I need to work on this for at least a few months before I see some results so I will post back in July or August.

Great Site For Backlinks and Revenue Sharing

2011-05-03T22:21:00.000-07:00

So if you want to get some free backlinks but also have the chance of earning some adsense income at the same time then you need to check out SheToldMe. Here you can create a 'scoop' - which is essentially a type of announcement about your article or website elsewhere so you can then add a link to it.

The revenue sharing percentage is 80/20 to the writer so is a good percentage and I have already started earning some adsense income from this site. It is quick and easy to add stuff so make sure you add this site to your list of places for backlinks.

Get Free Traffic and Backlinks

2011-05-03T04:38:00.000-07:00

A Website Offering Free Traffic
So we could all do with more traffic couldn't we? Traffic is the key to earning more as the more traffic we get the more we are likely to earn from our websites/blogs/hubs etc. There are plenty of paid for products out there that propose to give you endless streams of traffic to your website and whether or not they work, I don't know as I don't use them. I prefer to look for free ways to generate more traffic.

One of these free traffic websites is one I found recently called Free Traffic System and this is an interesting one in that you do have to actually do some work to get your backlinks (and hopefully subsequent traffic).

What To Do To Get Free Backlinks
You need to write an article that will be submitted to 30 different blogs and you can have a link (or possibly links) in your article. As it is submitted as 30 articles you have to effectively generate 30 different versions of the article. The website gives you some good ideas on how to do this and once you have created your articles it gets published gradually over the 30 blogs or article sites so that you don't suddenly get inundated with backlinks (which can look suspicious).

The other good thing about this site is that you can get free content for your wordpress blogs by submitting your blogs to be part of the process. This is great for you too as it means you don't need to keep updating your blogs with original content as often as you might otherwise. So essentially it is a win win situation for everyone.

I think you need to use this site carefully and make sure that all of your 30 articles are substantially different, but as anyone knows to get 30 backlinks quickly, and without having to go round searching for relevant blogs to comment on, is a time consuming task. So give it a try, it is completely free, although there is obviously an upgraded version that you can pay for :-)

Google Panda Update/Algorithm Change - 2 months on

2011-05-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

So a couple of months ago Google implemented their algorithm change for the search results which resulted in a whole bunch of sites being penalised for being 'content farms'. Two of the sites that I use for my articles were penalised - ezine articles and Hubpages and indeed traffic has fallen a bit. I have mostly been using Hubpages recently and I know they are trying to do a lot to get their reputation back up by implementing some new rules to ensure more quality writing.

Perhaps there will be another algorithm change in the future so it is not worth giving up just because things take a bit of a turn for the worse. Traffic is always hard to come by but by doing lots of SEO, backlinking etc it is possible to get good SERPS rankings still.

Writing Competition for Niche Articles - Cash Prizes!

2011-03-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

So Hubpages, where I have recently been focusing my article writing efforts, are running a writing competition where you can win cash prizes :-) The competition starts on 31st March so you have time to start writing and doing your keyword research as well as checking out the competition rules.

You can write up to 5 articles a day for the month that the competition runs but the articles must be your own original content and not be found anywhere else on the internet.

Hubpages is a great place for article marketing as you are allowed to use affiliate links (a limited number) in your articles but not only that you can earn revenue from adsense that is shown when your articles are read. You can also put in capsules from Amazon and eBay if you are affiliates of those companies too so the earning opportunities are good.

More on HubPages

2011-02-01T01:40:00.001-08:00

So Hubpages is a great way to get adsense revenue in particular, as I have alluded to before. Yesterday I found this great hub by a guy who last year made over $27,000 dollars in adsense revenue just from his hubs. Wow! Now I need to set myself the same targets to get to this level too. It's not going to be easy, you have to be dedicated and maybe I will take a couple of years to get to that stage but even if it takes 5 then it is worth it!

Moving On Slowly

2011-01-26T08:12:00.000-08:00

I didn't realise it had been so long since I had posted about my affiliate marketing activities! To be honest it has taken a bit of a back seat in the last 6 months as I have moved countries and am also getting on with my work as an artist. I have made some ongoing progress with things ticking away in the background and got the the stage where I can now get my ClickBank earnings sent straight to my bank account which is much better than having them send a USD cheque that I then had to convert to GBP.

Added to that I have started increasing my adsense revenue by writing more articles on HubPages which is a great tool. I have written 30 articles on there so far and had over 6000 views. You get a share of the ad revenue and you can track which hubs get revenue in your adsense interface.

Up To 5000 Views on Ezine Articles

2010-06-22T08:17:00.000-07:00

So I have around 85 articles on Ezine articles and have just reached 5000 views. Not sure if this is good or bad for the 4 months or so that I have been submitting for. The click through rate at the moment remains at a reasonably static 12% which I think could so with a bit of increasing but is obviously hampered by the early articles where the resource boxes were not that good. I have been gradually updating old articles but it seems that some of them have not had any recent views so I need to work on some backlinking and changing of keywords in those to keep them on the first pages of the search engines.

I have submitted articles to other sites but as I have said before here I prefer Ezine because of the stats and the fact that they are quite strict on wanting good quality original articles so they tend to get a good rank.

One of my product sites is having a big sale starting tomorrow so I have written about 20 articles to be released tonight on the various subjects that are linked to those products. I could have done with writing more but I have been a bit stuck for time. Hopefully I can write more before the sale ends!

Back Into Action

2010-06-17T09:45:00.000-07:00

So over the last few days I have started to ramp things up again. I am writing a few articles each day and doing some keyword research as well as going through the training on Wealthy Affiliate. I have a big sale to prepare for next week so i am writing a bunch of articles for that in order to get traffic over. It's sometimes difficult to balance the research with the actual work as you really need to do a bit of both.

Lots to do at Wealthy Affiliate

2010-06-10T03:01:00.000-07:00

So I've been going through the training at Wealthy Affiliate as there is a mine of information on there to get through. They call it WA University and there really seems like there is that much to study. I'm a bit stuck for time at the moment but need to get into checking out all the information that they have on niches to maybe pick something to add to my portfolio and to get some knowledge about.

New Mini Website on Affiliate Marketing

2010-06-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

So I have set up a new mini website that is going to be all about affiliate marketing. Here I will link to all of the articles that I have written and recommend specific products for prospective Affiliates. I will also be using it as a landing page for some of my promotions and articles. It will need more work but here it is for starters.

Starting soon in earnest

2010-06-07T02:24:00.000-07:00

So, now that I have moved country and although I don't actually have my own house back yet I am going to start putting more time in to the affiliate marketing again. I made a couple of sales last week without actually much work as I now have a bunch of articles out there. But to really start in earnest I have decided to join Wealthy Affiliate as they offer a whole host of stuff to help you including website hosting, a step by step action plan, forums, personal support etc. You can join on a month by month basis and I believe that I will make back the cost of membership by implementing the stuff that they recommend.

All Quiet on the Affiliate Marketing Front!

2010-06-03T01:54:00.000-07:00

So I sold up my home and have been travelling to a few countries for about a month now. However, it's time to get myself another home again soon and kick back off on the AM work. Unfortunately I won't be getting my house back in the Uk until at least 1st July so I may not be able to put the work in until then. After that I will be ramping it up and concentrating on more article marketing, hubpages and development of my website and landing pages...watch this space!

Google PageRanking on my Website

2010-05-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

So Google seem to update their page ranking approximately 3 times a year as I understand it. I set up my website for my affiliate marketing products in February and was waiting to see if I would get a page ranking at any time soon. I have just gone to check it (you can check by using the Internet Explorer toolbar) and I have now got a page rank - OK it is only 1 but this is just the start and hopefully I can build up on that. As I have not done any work on my AM in the last 3-4 weeks I need to get this moving again once I have a home :-)

Clickbank Cheque Arrived!

2010-05-04T01:11:00.001-07:00

So today my first Clickbank cheque finally arrived. Unfortunately it can take about a month to clear in the UK but hey, it's a great feeling to get it and I'm sure it is the first of many!

Homeless for now but ticking over!

2010-05-03T01:47:00.001-07:00

So at the moment I am homeless and wandering the world but the great thing about affiliate marketing is that as long as you have a laptop and an internet connection you can pretty much work from wherever. I am still on a go slow at the moment as I am visiting friends and relatives that I have not seen for a long time but in the meanwhile I am still getting the hits on all my articles that I put out there in the last few months and hence some traffic going to my website.

Slowing Down!

2010-04-23T10:31:00.001-07:00

So things have slowed down a bit this week and last as I am in the process of moving house and country so lots of other things to think about. The articles are still getting hits and clickthroughs and I have a couple of PPC campaigns running so it's all still ticking away in the background but I'll start back up with the article marketing and stuff again once I am settled. Meanwhile the first Clickbank pay cheque is on it's way!

Ethical Marketing and Making Money

2010-04-15T01:44:00.000-07:00

I have to say that since becoming involved in affiliate marketing I have become a bit disillusioned about various things. Firstly, before I knew anything about AM, I believed that review sites gave you an honest review of a product. More fool me. I guess there are some honest ones out there but it seems like most review sites that I now come across are blatantly just trying to sell you something and are not a review at all.

I don't want to be like this. I want anything I sell to be sold honestly by just stating the facts of the product. As long as the vendor is giving honest facts about their product then I can be sure to be doing that too. If they are not then the buyer always has the option of a refund.

I have found a couple of products that I think are great and also pay good money to affiliates. Those are the ones that I will be promoting most - they are transparent and you know exactly what you are getting.

Also now I am going to concentrate on doing what I enjoy - which is writing. I am going to write about what I enjoy and what I know about and maybe I will make some money. Making money with adsense on Hubpages is one goal now so I will concentrate on that for a bit.

Squidoo / Hubpages

2010-04-13T23:50:00.001-07:00

So I started on Squidoo a few weeks ago but basically don't feel like I am getting much in the way of results there. I may continue to use it to get backlinks but I'm not overly impressed, maybe I am just missing something!

However, I have just started using HubPages and am really finding this much easier to use, more fun (not sure why), and enjoyable. Also it feels like there is more interaction and a community on hubpages and it's a place where I want to share quality information with others of the same mindset.

Whether it brings any sales is another story but there are opportunities to get revenue from adsense, Amazon and eBay amongst others.

Magic of Making Up

2010-04-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

So I am marketing the magic of making up as it seems like a great product and as an affiliate I get an article a day to respin and use myself. I am actually completely rewriting the articles and submitting them to ezine as I much prefer ezine's membership data and you can tell how many clickthrough's you get on each article, whereas you can't on other article directories. The articles are now completely original and my own as I basically just take the idea around them and do a complete rewrite from scratch without even referring to the article. Ezine have accepted them so far so that seems OK.

Article Click Through Rate Increasing

2010-04-08T04:02:00.000-07:00

So I am obviously learning something as I go along as my article click through rate on ezine articles is increasing pretty much daily. I think maybe my first set of articles gave all the information away and didn't leave readers wanting more so I've tried to correct that in the later ones. Am still favouring ezine as they seem to have better stat reporting for one thing but also submitting to some others including articlesbase and goarticles.

Keywords - trying something new

2010-04-03T00:47:00.001-07:00

So I am playing about with my article marketing a bit and trying something new with the keywords. Instead of looking for keywords that return around 5,000 results and under (as they tell you to), I am looking for keywords with a minimal number of results - i.e. less than 100. OK so these are going to be longtail keywords but they are phrases that people would use. I figure that if I can target these then my articles will stay on top of the search results for those phrases for much longer...we'll see.

April starts...

2010-04-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

So I have been continuing with my article marketing which I am using as a large part of my traffic campaign. I now have over 60 articles live so I have been doing OK but just need to keep it up. My click through rate is about 10% and I have about 1,500 article views. I also have some organic traffic coming to my website so that is a good thing. Hopefully when they next do the page ranking I will get a rank on my website. I hear that they only do it every few months so as my site is new I don't expect that yet. Sales are still regular but I need to try and increase the frequency a bit more. I don't think I am targeting specific products enough, just general niches.

The Lowdown on the Amazing Commission Blueprint 2.0!

2010-03-26T05:09:00.000-07:00

So, unless you have only just got into affiliate marketing, you will most likely have heard of a course called Commission Blueprint. It was released in August 2008 and sold over 20,000 copies in less than 12 months - it was one of the fastest selling Clickbank products of all time.

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Article Marketing Milestone!

2010-03-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

So I reached a milestone today with my article marketing. I have had 41 articles published and those articles have had 980 views in total. in those views I have had 100 clickthroughs to my various websites and blogs. All my articles are written by myself about stuff I know things about so that is my key and I really enjoy writing them. I think there is a chance that I might not be able to keep up the volume in future but for now I will keep going with this free traffic opportunity.

Commission Blueprint v 2.0

2010-03-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

So at the moment I am looking into Commission Blueprint v 2.0. Apparently this is the king of all tools for affiliate marketers. I wasn't around (in terms of affiliate marketing!) for version 1 but it sounds like this was one of the best sellers with the greatest feedback from AMers. There is lots of stuff that CB2 has to offer so I am just going through it all before I post any more...

Free Traffic Volcano

2010-03-23T06:46:00.001-07:00

So this is the info on Free Traffic Volcano - get all the free traffic you need to generate an income. This is what it shows you:
- How to research the best keywords using only free tools.
- How to harness web 2.0 for free traffic.
- How to create viral traffic for free.
- How to put in less work for bigger traffic results.
- 7 Video tutorials showing you secret tips on how to boost your traffic.
- MORE than 16 revolutionary techniques to drive traffic for free.
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Making Money Online the Free Way

2010-03-21T23:09:00.000-07:00

So I have been looking at some of the free ways to make money online in affiliate marketing. There are a few ways to do this and the most obvious is article marketing. you really need to get the volume of articles out there but also quality content that makes the reader want to click on your link. Give them something useful is the key or they won't bother looking any further. Take one article that has done well and then look at it from another angle with maybe different keywords.

Another option is to set up web pages or 'lenses' in squidoo. You can essentially set up as many as you like for free so you can have lenses on different topics or ones to review specific products. Once again make sure you have something interesting on there and some images to engage the reader.

Registered with Commission Junction

2010-03-19T06:32:00.000-07:00

So as well as Clickbank I am also now registered with Commission Junction and have a few products there to promote. I wanted actual physical products to go with the ebooks that I have on my website. It is quite difficult to become an affiliate particularly for me as I am not based in the US, but I just need to communicate with the publishers to let them know that I am targeting the US on my website.

Article Marketing Getting Better

2010-03-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

So I have submitted about 30 articles so far and am trying to do about 3-4 articles a day for the 4-5 days a week that I am able to write. CTR is definitely up recently so I think my resource box is better or I am focusing more on what people want to know. The title suggestion feature that ezine have introduced for Platinum authors helps too as it can save me from trying to think up article titles. Also CTR has improved since I added a photo so maybe that puts more of a personal slant on things?

Talk of Lower Hop Count on ClickBank

2010-03-16T22:27:00.001-07:00

So there is talk about people getting lower than normal number of hops attributed to them on their ClickBank accounts in the last few days. i have noticed a bit of a drop but I'm not sure if statistically I have enough data to draw too many conclusions. Hop data is delayed by about 6 hours at the moment so there is obviously something going on...guess it will sort itself out in the end.

Today's work!

2010-03-14T07:08:00.000-07:00

So I submitted 2 new articles today, created a new landing page and added some more amazon widgets in to my site. I also updated some more of my PPC keywords to ensure that my bids were high enough to get impressions. Added a new PPC in a different region for a product I have been promoting. This will link to my new landing page rather than directly through the affiliate link so I'll see if this makes any difference.

So much to do!

2010-03-13T09:53:00.001-08:00

There really is so much to do and learn with affiliate marketing. I thought it was all very simple when I first went to an internet marketing seminar about making money online but sine then (2 months ago!) I have discovered there is a lot more to it. Am doing lots of article marketing and backlinking but setting myself up on social bookmarking sites etc etc but still need to build a couple more landing pages and another section to my website plus am continually analysing the PPC marketing campaign and keyword effectiveness...

My First Sale!

2010-03-09T02:37:00.001-08:00

So today I woke up to good news which was my first clickbank sale. The product was one I thought looked really good so i am happy about that. I also went to my PO box and picked up my first ever adsense cheque - not so much to do with internet marketing as I have had adsense on my own website for 5 years now and this is pretty much the sum of that. Hopefully though by doing the affiliate marketing website I can get more revenue in future from adsense too though.

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2010-03-07T03:25:00.000-08:00

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10 Articles Submitted to Ezine Articles

2010-03-06T10:50:00.000-08:00

So I have now submitted my initial 10 items to EZA and now need to wait until they move me up to Basic Plus level before I can submit any more. Hopefully that will happen as I have a few more articles waiting in the wings to load up. I have added some more content to my website and am focusing my articles on information relating to the products I am selling. Article views are just under 300 but CTR on the articles is only about 4% so I need to get that up a bit higher.

Another Article Published

2010-03-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

So I have been keeping up with my target one 1 article a day (or more). I have just had another one published here. I have been trying to focus on the keywords and now i have become more focused on articles that will take people to my website. To do this I have to give them useful information and then see if they want some more of the same. The next few articles will be refining this better I hope and getting a better CTR.

Have also been spending lots more time on the website but it is going to be weeks if not months before it is anywhere near complete!

New Goal: An Article a Day

2010-03-02T22:44:00.000-08:00

So I am setting myself a target in my internet marketing campaign to write an article a day. When I fist heard about article marketing I thought - 'What on earth can I wrtite about?' But after working pretty much full time on the affiliate marketing over the past few weeks I have really come to the conclusion that there is a lot of information that I can share about things I know! Now that I have started writing my articles I am also really enjoying it which comes as a little bit of a surprise to me but possibly shouldn't have as I have alsways enjoyed writing letters and essays and the like. So hopefully these articles will really help in my affiliate marketing campaign. I will post all the links in the links section here to all the articles I have written. I will also be posting them all on my website.

Website Beta Launched

2010-03-02T07:56:00.001-08:00

So I have released a very early version of my new internet marketing website which I have started. It is really not complete but I think I can make it live and available now as I have been working hard on it non-stop for days and there are a few good affiliate products in there to start to promote. Now I need to find out if I can change the links in my resource box for my existing articles... Oh yes, the website is HERE!

Website Portal/Landing Page is Being Created!

2010-03-02T02:56:00.001-08:00

So I have bought my domain name and have started to build by website which will effectively be a bunch of landing pages to which I will link my articles (mostly on ezine at the moment) so that i can hopefully kick off my affiliate marketing career with some clickbank sales. making money online is surely not an easy task and definitely needs time and dedication but I am really enthusiastic about getting this to work. Once I have the prototype of the website up (which is all to do with leisure), I will post the link.

Website Portal

2010-02-28T22:34:00.000-08:00

So I have decided to set up a website portal that will promote some of the really interesting products that I have found. I have become very picky about some of the products I am promoting and had a rant about some of the really poor landing pages on the Digital Points forum recently. However, this has led me to find some really good ones so am hoping to use those to make sales. It's just a question of sorting out the wheat from the chaff as they say :)

Going to be working on the portal in the next few days, at least I have some web experience so I can do this although I have to say my design skills aren't the best but I'll give it a go and hope I don't become like one of the pages I despise! I have an idea of the url but just need to finalise that in my mind too...

Still need to keep up with the blogs and the article writing (just had another one published today so need to promote that later).

Still waiting for that first sale!

2010-02-27T09:51:00.000-08:00

So I have been keeping my blogs updated, the PPC ads are still ongoing although I am changing them if they don't work out. I still have doubts about google adwords but I think it is too early to give it up yet as I am not spending a huge amount of money on it. I think I just need to find the right product that suits adwords. I have a few products that I am promoting through my blogs but I think I need to see from other people who are making money, how they are promoting them. Maybe I need to try and get more review copies of the products so that I can promote them better. Hopefully this week I will have more time to spend on my affiliate marketing campaigns and try and get to my first sale.

Product Demo

2010-02-21T22:26:00.000-08:00

So I contacted a couple of vendors for whom I am promoting products. One of them has come back to me to see if they can help which is great. The product looks good so I need to be able to see it for myself and promote it properly which they have let me do. Hopefully this will enable some sales but we will see...

PPC Advertising Still Disappointing

2010-02-05T19:58:00.000-08:00

So yesterday I worked on getting a new PPC ad campaign up and running. Found a product I thought looked good, spent ages getting lots of keywords and did a couple of ads to see which one would work better. Waited on the ad to be reviewed and then found that once it was all of my keywords were getting a really low score (1/10) due to the landing page quality...back to the drawing board.

So after over a 1,000 hops on all my PPC campaigns together, still no sales :-(

Nofollow Links - What the heck are they?

2010-02-03T10:05:00.001-08:00

Am getting very confused on what they are, why and how I would use them and whether they help or hinder you in google search...more research needed.

Affiliate Marketing Work for Today!

2010-02-03T07:36:00.000-08:00

So today I was out most of the day at the golf. As this is one of my main hobbies I am going to have this as one of my niche markets. I chose today to go as it was pro-am day and they allow cameras. So I managed to get some video footage of some of the top players taking their shot. I need to put some of it together - I have no idea about videos but I found some good editing software on my laptop so I am playing about with that. I think I should also add my golf blog url on the videos so that people can click on it from the video as I have seen people do that - need to figure that one out.

Other thing today is that of the 2 articles I submitted to ezine one was approved today and has gone live here - think i need some backlinks on that but I'm not sure what that invloves so need to investigate further...

Feeling much more upbeat today!

2010-02-01T10:21:00.001-08:00

As I realise I have a bunch of material I can use and I have things that I am interested and passionate about that I can use to generate articles and leads. And that makes it fun because at the end of the day even if I don't sell much I am learning loads!

YouTube Videos

2010-02-01T06:10:00.001-08:00

So the affiliate marketing officianados have said that one good way of generating traffic is to use youtube videos. Well I started thinking about this and I did a search on my computer as to what videos I had to use and realised I had a bunch of golf ones including a nice little video of Tiger Woods practising a chip shot. It's amazing the stuff you find to use when you think about it (including what is in your brain!). I have been playing golf for about 20 years so have started a blog on that and will upload the videos that I have periodically to try and generate some traffic to it.

Getting Confused and just a little Disheartened :(

2010-01-31T05:39:00.000-08:00

So now I am getting confused on the best way to promote the products. Articles about the products or the subject? Web pages about he subject selling various products? PPC with adwords does or doesn't work?

Need someone to keep my morale up and tell me to keep going, no wonder 90% of affiliates earn nothing!

First Article Submitted!

2010-01-31T03:07:00.000-08:00

So today I submitted my first article to ezinearticles.com...only to be met with the message that the article would be reviewed within 7 days! Oh dear I am too impatient to get this up and running but I guess I might have to just keep hanging in there!

Now for the next article!

When to stop on a product campaign?

2010-01-30T20:58:00.000-08:00

So the 2 main adwords campaigns I have running are still racking up the hops - about 275 each now but still no sales on either. I guess if they get to 500 hops each and no sales I need to stop them and start something new...

To Do List!

2010-01-30T20:54:00.000-08:00

Stuff I need to look in to that I have no idea about:
squidoo
wordpress
Web 2.0 linkwheel/s with subwheel/s
article directories
SENuke
socialbot
Angelina's PR list
dofollow
Article base
PLR
I don't even know what most of these are so this week will be spent doing a lot of investigative work. Lucky for me I have time available for this and need to make use of it when I can...

more to add:
deals.com and tophotdeal.com to add amazon products to
blogcatalog and mybloglog to add blogs to

Adwords Campaigns - The First 2 Weeks

2010-01-30T11:44:00.000-08:00

So, to cut a long story short I now have 1 deleted, 2 paused and 3 running ads on adwords. One of the campains has been running for over a week and has got around 300 hops. Another one hsa been running for maybe half that time and is already up to 200 hops. The third one I jsut started and so it is early days but it is looking a bit light on hops so I'll give it a little while longer and then make a decision.

But the bad news is that I have not had any sales :-(

I wasn't really sure why that was so I posted a question on the ClickBank forum that I had joined. I was given some advice that I needed to start writing articles and link them back to my websites etc plus youtube videos and the like so I need to start working on that. I have joined ezinearticles.com and have just written my first article about painting with oils as painting is a subject I know a fair bit about. I haven't uploaded it yet as I want to link it back to my art blog and I am just waiting to be accepted by amazon Uk as an associate on that so that I can post some links to some products I bought from them that I really like and can recommend (and possibly earn some commission on). I actually really enjoyed writing the article so this might be something that I can keep doing and will only take up my time and not cost me anything. I have already come up with a few ideas about other articles.

I also need to investigate some other websites that were mentioned that I had never heard of...more on those after I have found out about them!

First Adwords Campaigns

2010-01-30T11:33:00.000-08:00

So after a few days I was monitoring my campaigns. I was checking on the keywords scores, the number of impressions and the click through rate (CTR). One of the campaigns was looking OK but the other one was not doing well. The keywords scores were very low and most of the time the ads were not showing. I couldn't figure out why as they were entirely relevant to my product but after a few days I decided to can one of the campaigns. I'm not sure if I was right or wrong in doing this but it was not looking good and I thought there were plenty more products to choose from.

The other product seemed to be getting a few clicks, although not huge numbers so I spent some more time looking through the ClickBank marketplace for another suitable product. I found one which was in the area that I worked in and I thought it looked good so to hit a more targeted audience and to hedge my bets I thought I would use facebook marketing on this one. I could then target people who had specified the product as one of their interests and also target a specific country (USA in this case). I also sought out another product for the adwords campaigns.

Starting with ClickBank

2010-01-30T11:25:00.000-08:00

So ClickBank was the place recommended for me to start my affiliate marketing campaign. I chose 2 products that I thought had good potential and good landing pages to use for my first campaigns. I started with these 2 products in the first week and set up some adwords campaigns to get the ball rolling. I used the keywords tool to work out the best keywords to use for the campaign (I took a while to make sure I had at least a couple of hundred keywords) and set up my ads. As I had been using adwords for a while for my own website I was already registered and ready to go. I set my budget quite low just to see how things went and eagerly awaited my first sale!

Discussion Forum

2010-01-30T11:04:00.000-08:00

So I always say that you don't know something unless someone tells you it so what you really need to do to find out stuff about affiliate marketing is to ask the people who already know and have had experience. I found this great forum a few days ago and I'll be looking around to find others too where I can get more information about products etc.

Digital Point Affiliate Marketing Forum

Starting Out...

2010-01-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

So I really only just heard properly about Affiliate Marketing after going to a 2 hour seminar ("The Online Profit Bootcamp") in Dubai around 2 weeks ago. Although this gave a good glimpse into the subject it was really just a brief overview and although I was excited about the possibilities that it offered at the time I guess that maybe I thought it would be easier than it now seems to be!

In any case I am determined to keep pressing on and trying to build up my online presence so that I am able to earn some passive income in addition to my normal job.

In the next few days I will go into more detail about what I have learnt in the past 2 weeks and then as time goes on I will give more updates about what I am learning as I go. Hopefully you can also learn from my journey.