www.affiliateconfession.com

Three months ago was a big milestone for me as I passed the $2,000 per month mark for online earnings. No, that’s not huge by any stretch of the imagination, but it is certainly a level at which many people could begin to work at home which is a big time goal for most online affiliate marketers.

My next goal is to be able to maintain a consistent $100 per day in earnings. There have been several days where earnings have be significantly over $100, but that unfortunately hasn’t been the average. I think my best day’s earnings so far was around $300. Then there are days where earnings are only $40 or so. That’s just the way it goes when you’re making a living online.

Anyway, I thought I’d spell out a little bit of what I do just so you can get a feel for what it takes to make $2,000 per month online.

I belong to several affiliate programs and I’m an affiliate for probably 50 to 60 merchants, very few of which make money for me. My two top earners are Google Adsense and the eBay affiliate program through which I use a site building program called Build A Niche Store. BANS for short, allows you to build web sites and put eBay auctions right on your site automatically. 

Another affiliate program I use to make a little money is Clickbank.com which I’ve had minor success with. I signed up in July and made a little over $900 so far. Most of the stuff sold through Clickbank is pure garbage and nothing more than junk ebooks making supposed internet guru’s rich. However, some legit merchants use Clickbank for great products like Build A Niche Store. BANS is in a completely different league than 99% of the stuff sold through Clickbank.

I have a travel related site that earns the most for me through Adsense, probably around $400 to $500 per month. Travel seems to me to be one of the niches that has the highest earning potential of just about anything. When people shop for travel, they will click on just about anything to find the best deal or the nicest place to stay and they will go to several pages of your site clicking away to continue to find what they’re looking for. Yes, travel is very profitable and if you don’t have a travel related site of some kind, you are missing out.

The next best niche is probably computers. People buy computers and computer related accessories at an astonishing rate online and people particularly like to buy on eBay. That’s why I like the eBay affiliate program so much. Everybody loves to buy stuff on eBay, so if you haven’t figured it out, my number one affiliate tip is to do whatever you can to send traffic to eBay. I like eBay much better than Adsense. It’s a lot less hassle with the way Google changes the rules all the time and has the potential to earn you much more than Adsense.

Other niches I have websites and blogs in are nutrition and healthy eating, coin collecting, raw food, cell phones, home decor, air purifiers and home based businesses.

So how do I get traffic to my sites? Isn’t that the number one question any affiliate marketer wants to know? The best kind of traffic will always be free search engine traffic. When people find your site in a natural search without clicking on an ad, or banner, or go to it from a social networking site they are the most primed for buying or clicking on ads or considering whatever offer you have presented to them.

Getting natural search traffic is best achieved in no other way than hard work and great content. Giving people the information they’re looking for is the hands down best way to get them to your site.  The best way to get your site noticed quickly, especially a new site, is to write at least one article and submit it to these 3 article sites:

EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleBlast.com

In the author’s box at the bottom of your article you can put in 2 or 3 links back to your site. I have had brand new sites and blogs get indexed in Google and start getting traffic in 3 days by doing this properly. You must use a relevant keyword phrase in your anchor text to get full SEO benefit from this technique.

The next best way to get traffic is through Craigslist. I get a few hundred visitors a day to my sites through posting up to 16 ads a day on Craigslist. I could go into lots of detail about how to do this and how to avoid their spam filters, but I will save it for my upcoming ebook. I will give you one warning though. If you are a member of Commission Junction, do not use Craigslist for traffic!This could cause you to get banned by CJ or have your commissions reversed.

I’ve started using USFreeads.com to drive some traffic and although some have reported getting good results, I have yet to see much of a benefit. But I’ve also heard it takes a month or so to get established on the site with your ads. I signed up for a premium membership at a cost of $10 per month. I’ll use the site for a couple of months and report on the results.

There are many more things you can do to get traffic and many more affiliate programs I use that I’ve have limited to fairly decent success with which I will cover in more detail later.

Most of my day is spent writing blog posts, posting classified ads or updating or adding web pages to already existing sites. The secret is to focus, which I am terrible at, on the affiliate programs that make you money and trash the rest of them. I get 5 to 10 emails a day asking me to join some affiliate program that usually doesn’t interest me in the least.

My two biggest online money making tips are send as much traffic as you can to eBay and build a travel related site and put Adsense on it. You can easily make at least $1,000 per month with a good eBay niche and a travel site with a combined total of around 300 to 400 pages of quality content.

Alan

Tags: make money online, online earnings, affiliate marketing, adsense, ebay affiliates

As I mentioned 2 posts ago, I think the PPC game run by Google and Yahoo are complete scams with high end advertisers being able to get away with anything and us little guys left out in the cold. This is evident in my ongoing battle over trying to advertise for keywords related to iPod downloads. Yahoo will not let me advertise using these terms because they claim that they no longer allow advertisers to send people to these P2P or file sharing sites.

This simply is not the case as can be seen by searching on ipod movie downloads over at Yahoo. I have ongoing correspondence with Yahoo Search Marketing to let them know this is a bunch of nonsense and they keep telling me they will submit a complaint so their editors will check on these other sites, baloney!

Here’s is part of the text in my first email dated Nov 1st to Yahoo after my iPod Downloads campaign was stopped:

I don’t get it? I’m having a hard time understanding why keywords in my Ad Group iPod Downloads are not able to run when there are ads all over your site using the exact keywords I’m using going to the same kind of sites I am trying to promote.

And here is Yahoo’s response:

Advertisers are not able to advertise their website if it promotes P2P file sharing any longer. At one point, we did allow this type of website to advertise on the Yahoo! network. We have recently revised this guideline, so the sites you still see advertising may not have been removed as of yet. We will submit a sales complaint to have our editors review their site to ensure they are abiding by our guidelines.

Two weeks later I sent another email pointing out that although Yahoo wouldn’t allow me to advertise these sites, they wouldn’t even allow me to START a campaign, the advertising I originally complained about is still up and running full blast.

Here is part of Yahoo’s response. Read it carefully…

We appreciate your interest in our editorial review process and appreciate your patience as we continue to look into the advertisers you referenced. Please note that the decision of our editorial staff regarding other advertisers is not something that we are able to disclose.

So the editorial staff at Yahoo can’t disclose their dealings with other advertisers, oh really. This is the best evidence I have at this point that there actually is a double standard. That highlighted line didn’t even need to be in their response to me, so I guess they must be hiding something. When I wrote back letting the nice editors know I caught them in their evil scheme to crush the little guy, (okay, it’s not that evil) they assured me this wan’t the case.

Right, plug ipod downloads into Yahoo and see what you get.

I found a supposedly “legal” iPod download site I’m going to advertise on. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Alan

Tags: ipod downloads, yahoo search marketing, ppc, google, file sharing

As reported by JohnChow.com and originally on ProBlogger.net as of Nov 15th the folks at Google Adsense have made the clickable portion of their ads smaller by a huge degree. As you can see above, the title and the url are now the only clickable portions of Adsense as opposed to the entire area around the ad.

Many people are lamenting this change and finally throwing in the towel with respect to using Adsense as a source of revenue for their blog or websites. Bloggers such as John Chow are commenting that this new change will “bitch slap” your earnings and many of the comments on his post about this reflect that same sentiment.

I’m taking exactly the opposite outlook as I believe this this will eventually turn out to earn publishers more money. Here’s why: when I run an Adwords campaign I never use the content network option and I’m assuming many smart Adwords advertisers don’t either. Why, because the traffic and conversions are just plain crappy. Even though you can have different, and lower, bids on the content network, the traffic is not as quality as when people searching for specific keywords through search engines. That’s why I only target Google’s search network when running Adwords. It’s hard enough making money with Adwords!

The whole point of Google making this move is to benefit their advertisers which in turn will eventually benefit those that use Adsense as a revenue stream. It will work out this way because if Google can provide a better value to its advertisers there will be more money for publishers in the form of more cash per click and more advertisers willing to use the content network. It might take six months or so before the word gets out that Google’s content network might actually be a good value again, but it will eventually happen. Heck, I might even start using it again.

By the way, I haven’t noticed a drop in my click-thru rates at all since Google reduced the size of the clickzone on Adsense. Really, the only people who have to worry about this are those that run made for Adsense sites or people who are purposely trying to trick others into clicking on their ads.

Alan

Tags: google adsense, adwords, problogger, john chow, search network

Let’s face it, Google Adsense is a pain in the butt! If you spend any time in affiliate forums at all, every week you hear some sob story about how someone got banned because they didn’t follow the terms of service or Google alerted them as to the placement of their ads or other such stories. Like anything else though there are those that seem to be able to get away with just about anything. Just look at the Adsense spam sites out there and you know Google is giving special attention to some.

It’s also a pain because you never know what you’re going to make. I’ve seen my Adsense income go from $70 a day to $20 a day in the same week. That’s not very consistent.

But that’s not the focus of this post, the eBay affiliate program is. I’m an affiliate of probably 100 or more merchants and the eBay affiliate program is the best program to be in by far. For some, eBay eclipses what  they earn through Adsense. It would be great to not have to deal with Adsense and have eBay be my primary money maker as Adsense now is.

Why is eBay so great? Because they have an incredible commission structure. For the US based program you get an amazing $25 per new sign up and a minimum of 50% of eBay commission on sales. If you don’t think people still sign up for eBay you may be shocked to know that 80,000 sign up per day. Yes, that’s right, eBay has 80,000 people join their site per day! All you need is a very small cut of that to make a good living.

The eBay affiliate program works well because everyone loves to buy something on eBay. Most people who shop at other ecommerce stores spend huge amounts of time researching their purchase online and then they might go buy that product from a physical store. Not so with eBay. The auction format encourages people to want to shop and win that auction. You know exactly what I mean if you’ve ever purchased anything on eBay. It’s the eBay auction fever that gets you every time. And that’s what makes being an eBay affiliate so profitable.

Sure there are tons of little $1-$5 items that sell on eBay by the millions that wont make you any money. The trick is finding products to promote that are in high demand and have a high final ending price. I typically look for items that sell for between $500 to $1000 at auction close. The US based eBay site has more than 23,000 categories so I’m sure you can find a niche to fit into whatever you are already doing on the web.

This is the first notice here. I’ll be coming out with an ebook one day that will have info on how to find those products and how to promote them.

That’s all for now. More on the ebook thing later.

Alan

Tags: ebay affiliate, google adsense, affiliate forums, affiliate programs, ebooks

Pay per click search marketing is a complete scam as Google and Yahoo run it. I find it truly amazing that Google and Yahoo both make the bulk of their revenue from something that so many people continue to lose money on.

That’s right, PPC advertising is a loser for most companies and individuals that use it.

I’m certainly not a big time player in the world of PPC, not with the $7,203.62 I’ve spent on Google Adwords in the last 3 years or so. But I have spent enough time, energy and money to know that making any money with the traditional bidding on keywords model is an extremely difficult task.  I’ve run more than 30 ad campaigns, totaling more than 100 ad groups and bid on more than 50,000 keywords to date and maybe, just maybe I’ve broken even. I certainly haven’t made any profit to speak of, and I’ll bet the average pay per click spender like myself, which numbers in the tens of thousands are in the same boat. 

One of the most egregious problems I see with PPC from Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing is that some advertisers are allowed to run apparently any kind of campaign they want, while the rest of the small time spenders are locked out of the game.

Here’s a great example:
I’ve been trying to run an ad campaign over at Yahoo promoting iPod downloads. Anything with the word iPod in it is subject to a review, so your campaign doesn’t start immediately. After three days of waiting, my reviewer at Yahoo informed me my ad needed to say I was promoting something that was iPod compatible. I complied and resubmitted my ads. Another review came back and said I was promoting a product that was not acceptable because Yahoo no longer allows advertising for P2P sites. Oh really, just take a look at a search for iPod movie downloads over at Yahoo and see what you find. There are at least 2 ads in this search that directly link to peer-to-peer file sharing sites and most of the rest are so-called review sites, which are scams, that link to these sites.

Somebody is obviously allowed to advertise these products, however it’s not me. Here’s part of the email I got back from the Yahoo person that reviewed my ad campaign.

“Advertisers are not able to advertise their website if it promotes P2P file sharing any longer. At one point, we did allow this type of website to advertise on the Yahoo! network. We have recently revised this guideline, so the sites you still see advertising may not have been removed as of yet. We will submit a sales complaint to have our editors review their site to ensure they are abiding by our guidelines. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.”

Does that sound like a big fat lie or what? As long as the playing field isn’t level and some advertisers get special privileges such as this and Yahoo and Google continue to lie about this, there will be black hat affiliate marketers and SEO’s trying to buck the system. Power to them!

Alan

Tags: ppc scam, google adwords, yahoo search marketing, black hat seo, affiliate marketing