www.affiliateconfession.com

It seems as though Commission Junction is a bit delayed in reporting commissions this evening. Not only that, but their click reports are several hours behind as well. Most of the time they also have the previous days earnings posted by 9:00 pm.

I usually get around 150 clicks  to CJ merchants a day and by 9 pm I’m showing 75% of those clicks, but as of this post around 11 pm Eastern time I’m only showing 32 clicks. More than likely this is because of a buying frenzy all over the net today being that it’s Cyber Monday and CJ is having a hard time running its regularly scheduled reports.

I’m sure it’s not because people aren’t clicking through on my sites as my Adsense impressions are already equal with what they were for all of yesterday. Adsense usually runs about 3 to 4 hours behind so I should be getting impressions reported for 5 more hours. Right now my Adsense clicks are close to record earnings for 24 hours.

All this to say Cyber Monday is shaping up to be a good day.

Alan

Tags: commission junction, cj, adsense impressions, cyber monday, clicks

My wife and I have a saying that goes, “There’s always more to the story.” We began saying this in our MLM days with EcoQuest International when we couldn’t seem to figure out why some dealers did so well and others couldn’t get off the ground. We came to find out that many of the big time dealers were doing things the average air purifier sales person didn’t have the funds or time to do such as set up call centers, buy thousands of leads and call 500 people a day.

The same is true with much of the hype about making big money online and many of the other so-called viral things that happen in the world of internet business. Case in point is the truth behind many of the videos that show up on YouTube and go insanely viral. I came across a post today on TechCrunch where this guy explains how he takes your average funny or interesting video and turns it into a viral sensation that gets from 100,000 to 1,000,000 views.

Sure, there are videos that just happen to get a million views because all the providential forces in the net universe come together and a sensation is created, but after reading the above mentioned post, I believe most viral YouTube videos have more than a little clandestine marketing behind them.

Which brings me to Digg, StumbleUpon and Propeller. I know for sure many of the top stories on these social bookmarking / networking sites are actually helped to the top. I was introduced to a little tool, or more like community, where you can post a story and have other people Digg or Stumble it when you Stumble or Digg their stories. Do I have a problem with that? Not in the least! Unfortunately Digg, and and my least favorite, Reddit.com are the two most cliqueish social networking sites around. I can’t post anything to Reddit and ever get more than 2 or 3 positive ratings, even if my finds are very interesting and closely related to other front page stories. My stories always get buried.

So I guess when you find a tool like the one I use to Digg, Stumble and Propel my stories and pages, you should exploit it to its full potential. Am I going to tell you what it is? No, but just remember…

There’s always more to the story.

Alan

Tags: youtube, viral videos, ecoquest, stumbleupon, techcrunch

One thing that I’m constantly amazed at with all the plans and PPC campaigns and pages of content and focus on one particular affiliate program, is that the bulk of my commissions usually come from some unexpected source.

Just recently I made a big push to get people to sign up for eBay because eBay pays its affiliates $25 for first tier sign-ups. I put up 6 or 8 pages and blog posts about how terrific eBay is and what a great deal it is to sell your stuff and start a business, blah, blah, blah. The next day I got 2 sign-ups from sources other than those 6 or 8 new posts. That happens all the time.

This does have a caveat though, it probably happens because I have multiple other sources to earn commissions and sign-ups from eBay as well. The same goes for most other affiliate programs I belong to.

Much of earning income on the net is a complete mystery as to the buying patterns of people. I won’t get sales on a particular item for several days and then two sales will happen the same day within 10 minutes of each other. I was fortunate enough to sell $5,500 worth of furniture once from one of my sites and earn a nice $275 commission in a singe day. That has not happened again in almost 2 years.

My wife Jean sells a set of counseling forms on her counseling site and we will go 2 to 3 weeks without a sale and then boom, we get 3 in 2 days time. Another example of weird sales patterns is a 160 x 600 banner I put on one of our sites for making money with paid surveys. I put the banner on about 200 pages of this site and made a sale within 2 hours. I have not made a sale since placing the banner more than 2 months ago. Go figure. I thought this one was going to make us rich.

I’m hoping that  next week and tomorrow in particular will prove to be a day when all the intenet forces align and sales roll in like a tsunami. After all it is Cyber Monday and something good is likely to happen, but it will happen for me and other affiliate marketers only because we are prepared.

Alan

Tags: affiliate sales, ppc campaigns, ebay, cyber monday, earning income

Even though I’ve been involved in affiliate marketing for 4 years or so, this is the first Cyber Monday coming up that I will really be prepared for. Most of the last 4 years I’ve anticipated its arriving by doing absolutely nothing, other than just hoping what I had done so far would get me through and there would be some money made. It normally doesn’t work like that.

In preparing for Cyber Monday I’ve installed a new Build A Niche Store on a gift site I run and on a site that has local information about the city I live in. I’ve also put up more than one hundred classified ads at USFreeads.com dealing with all sorts of Christmas and gift giving type stuff. No that’s not a lot of work done to promote the Christmas buying frenzy we will hopefully see online on Monday, but it’s significantly more than I’ve ever done before.

Supposedly many online marketers earn as much as 10% of their entire years income in a single day on this special shopping day for online buyers. For me that would me I should earn $2,400 tomorrow. While I don’t think that will likely happen it certainly could. I have the content and infrastructure set up in my online businesses to make that a definite possibility. It sure would be great if it happened.

What I will do is report on exactly how much I made from Cyber Monday commissions and post that probably on Wednesday giving it enough time to get all the commissions posted to all the affiliate programs.

Of course, it won’t be the end of the world if this Monday turns out to be a flop because there are still 30 more shopping days till Christmas as of today!

Merry Cyber Monday,

Alan

Tags: cyber monday, affiliate marketing, build a niche store, classified ads, christmas

Procrastination is the death of many a would be internet entrepreneur. I don’t know how many people I come across that tell me they’d like to do something on the web someday. Well, most people are doing something on the web, they’re surfing it. But unfortunately that won’t make you any money.

If you have a great idea for a business on the net, then you should have built a website for it yesterday, or last week, or last month. To start getting serious traffic to a website or blog is normally a six month process. In other words, you can’t even begin to judge how well a site or blog will do unless it has been up and running at least for six months. It takes that long to get indexed by all of the search engines, build a loyal readership and start getting inbound links.

With that said, you can see why it is important not to procrastinate on the web. When newbie site builders do this and then finally get around to getting something done, they tend to expect immediate results. When that doesn’t happen they get discouraged and give up.

I know people who have been talking about building a web site for more than 2 years now and if they would have started their site long ago and put up 20 or so pages, at least they would have something and a couple of years on the maturity of their domain. Domain maturity is another factor in the success of a website. The age of a domain is something Google looks at when indexing a site and the older sites get priority in some respect over newer domains.

And usually people who procrastinate aren’t that serious in the first place. Don’t talk about doing something on the web someday because someday will never come.

Start building your web empire today. In fact don’t wait another second, start right now!

Alan

Tags: build a website, google, internet entrepreneur, domain maturity, procrastination