www.affiliateconfession.com

It’s time for another income report here at AffiliateConfession.com and it’s a record month for affiliate earnings mainly due to some nice contest winnings in May which lets me cook the books a little. I didn’t report that I won $750 in cash from the Webmaster-Talk.com contest and I’ve used that to cover $543.66 worth of advertising expenses this month. When the $750 has been spent I’ll again take off advertising from the revenue total.

Google Adsense and the Microsoft Affiliate program contributed significantly to the record this month as well. The breakdown of earnings this month is as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,492.96
Commission Junction - $50.37
EPN - eBay - $778.60
Meal Planner Ebook - $119.00
TripAdvisor - $222.83
Clickbank - $189.95
Private Advertising - $105.00
AzoogleAds - $17.30
Microsoft - $400.00
Other Affiliate Programs - $103.60
 
Total Revenue - $3,479.61
 
Total Income - $3,479.61

You may have noticed that Commission Junction revenue is down by a large margin and that’s because most of what I was earning through them was from eBay who has now moved over to their own private program management and Pepperjam Network. Also, I was earning some decent money through generating leads with Apartments.com and had been up in the range of $200-$250 per month, but their landing pages stopped converting and now the same amount of clicks sent their way is earning me $40 rather than $200 per month.

I’m continuing to work on PPC and have had some limited success and with earnings this month I’ll have an even bigger advertising budget than last month, so things are looking up.

My monthly income report won’t be out until tomorrow because of the delay in the eBay Partner Network reporting, but I can tell you that last month, June 2008, was a record month for Google Adsense earnings. While I took apart Google in yesterday’s post, my main issue is dealing with things on the Adwords side, they have been very good to me on the Adsense side. June 2008 Adsense earnings came in at $1,492.96, a record by nearly $100.

The single best site for Adsense earned $711.33 and an additional $200+ from TripAdvisor.com bringing the total earnings for my top site in the travel niche to over $900 for the month. All this comes from a site that gets less than 300 visitors a day on average. If you haven’t heard me say it before I’ll say it again, travel is an incredible niche for Adsense. If you aren’t doing something in travel and monetizing your site with Adsense, you are leaving money on the table.

Usually when I post results such as this I get a ton of questions on how I did it, how many sites I have, how can you possibly earn that much from Adsense when I can only make $3 a day, where should I place my ads and so forth (by the way, there are several people who make that $1,400 every day with Adsense). You’re in luck this time (and so am I) because I’ve written a couple of long posts on how to get the most from Google Adsense. The first link is part 1 and part 2 is here. So, make sure you read those 2 posts before asking any of those, “How did you do that” questions.

The full income report will be out tomorrow.

Sometimes it’s better to look at your affiliate marketing efforts in more general than specific terms. If you are consistently finding that what you are doing isn’t working and you aren’t making any money, maybe operator error is the problem.

When I worked as a graphic artist I was pretty well versed in the workings of PhotoShop and Illustrator and it was amazing the things that people in our office consistently had trouble with when using these two applications. I can’t tell you how many times I’d hear the usual groan from another cubicle, signaling someone was stuck in an infinite PhotoShop loop they couldn’t get out of, and I’d walk over, look at their screen for 5 seconds and press Ctrl>{insert appropriate keystroke}, or say, “You’re on the wrong layer” and all would be well again.

Any chance that may be the issue with the latest Adsense optimization problem you’re trying to figure out, or why your site is nearly identical in content and look (without duplicating) than the site that’s on page one of Google for that money making keyword and yours is lost on page 11, or why you end up consistently getting banned from one affiliate network after another? I read in the comments section of a very popular blog a month or so back about someone who was making $50 a day from Adsense by asking all his friends to click on his ads. He had no idea why he eventually got banned because he didn’t think he had done anything wrong!

On a fairly regular basis I get people who want me to look at their Build A Niche Store eBay affiliate sites and want me to help them figure out why they aren’t getting any traffic, don’t have rankings and aren’t making any sales. Instead of answering that question directly and pointing out the obvious reasons it’s not happening for them, from now on I think my standard answer for 90% of those inquiries is going to be, “Would you shop at your own store?” I’ve run across hundreds of these BANS stores that have zero content (no product descriptions) and just think, ‘There’s another store not making any money.’

Sometimes it’s a simple as something I tell my wife to do when she can’t figure out what’s going on with her laptop. “Just reboot” is becoming a mantra in our house when we’re stuck on a problem we can’t seem to solve. Instead of reacting and hammering away at the same thing that isn’t going to solve the issue, sometimes it’s just better to reboot and take a fresh look at what’s going on.

Reacting to operator error just exacerbates the problem, try observing instead.

This is a guest post from Richard Adams at No More Compromise

Starting your own Internet business isn’t just necessarily good for your wallet - it can also be an experience in personal development of the best possible kind in which you develop new or existing qualities.

Here are just a small sample of the character-building benefits you may experience as a result of starting your own business…

1) Resilience

More often than not it will take weeks if not months for a new Internet entrepreneur to start earning money online. *Significant* figures can take even longer so one’s ability to stick it out and to refuse to give up despite the lack of results is a real test of whether you are likely to succeed. As Thomas Edison said “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up”.

2) Self Confidence

You’ll only manage to keep chipping away at building your business for so long unless you have real confidence in your own abilities to succeed online and the fire to make it happen.

3) Discipline

This is where a lot of people come unstuck. They’re passionate and confident, but when it comes down to it, they can’t actually motivate themselves to do what they know they need to do. It’s just too much hassle. It’s easier just to make a weak excuse and flip the TV on.

Successful entrepreneurs are different. They *make* themselves work. The *find* ways to motivate themselves. And they’re proactive at getting things done and seeing the results.

4) Willingness To Listen

Advice, both from other experienced marketers on what they think you should be doing, and from customers on what they’d like to see from you, provide real direction for your business if you’re willing to keep your eyes and ears open. This sort of feedback and constructive criticism can make a huge difference to your bottom line.

5) Strong Work Ethic

Very few people become successful in any area of life without significant hard work before they got there. So get used to it, and get on with it. There’s no way round it.

For some reading this post, it is going to be very basic affiliate and eBay related information mainly because you probably work with these kind of things every day. However, there are people who don’t have eBay accounts, have never purchased merchandise or have very limited experience buying anything online and don’t have much of an idea of how ecommerce or affiliate marketing works.

Lest you think negative of this, don’t, because it is a huge opportunity as there are still hundreds of thousands to millions of people yet to be added to the economy of the Internet. And many of these individuals also want to learn how to make money online, but don’t know what hosting is, don’t know how to build a web site, don’t know how to upload files to a hosting account and so forth. They have no idea where to start. This post is for those people and actually came out of a conversation I had with a friend recently who wants to break into this field.

For someone who wants to get started in affiliate marketing and knows nothing about how any of this works, I recommend the eBay affiliate program known as the eBay Partner Network (EPN) and Build A Niche Store (BANS) to fully take advantage of the EPN.

Here are the most basic sequential steps you take to get started with EPN and BANS. (there are other ways to do this, but these are the steps I have taken or feel most comfortable with)

These are all steps to do after you have either decided on a niche to exploit or have done your own research. (that’s a whole other lesson) In the case of the friend I was talking with a few days ago, she already had a pretty good idea of what she wanted to do and after a little research on my own, it looks to be a very profitable niche. You of course never know though until you get in there and do the work.

Take these steps to build your eBay affiliate niche store:

Get a Linux hosting account at either 1and1.com or HostGator.com. I have used 1and1.com and HostGator is the recommended web hosting service by the BANS developers.

Look up domain names at Godaddy.com. Try and get a good keyword phrase in your domain name without making it too long. I like to use Godaddy.com to look up names because of the suggestions they recommend if yours isn’t available. They are very basic suggestions, but if you don’t know it by now, I like simple.

Purchase your domain name. 1and1.com gives you 3 free domains with the $9.95 per month hosting plan and your domains are $15 extra per year with HostGator’s $7.95 per month plan.

Sign up to be a member of eBay if you don’t have an account already. You need to be a member of eBay to be an eBay affiliate.

Sign up with the eBay Partner Network.

Buy Build A Niche Store.

Read the Build A Niche Store manual so you understand how everything works.

Log into your hosting plan control panel and set up an ftp account. This is a simple operation and instructions for this should be easy to find once you log in to your hosting account.

Download Filezilla if you don’t already have a program to ftp (transfer) files to your web host. This is a great free program that allows you to upload all your files to your online account.

Sign up for the BANS forum because there will be issues with your store or with eBay (get use to it) and the forums are a great place to get help when you can’t figure things out on your own.

Upload and install the BANS software according to the instructions in the BANS manual.

Find the correct eBay category number(s) for your niche and create your store. Also, make a logo for your header according to the sizes for the template you are using (found in the manual).

Add titles, meta keywords, meta descriptions and H1 title tags (in content titles at the top of your pages) and product descriptions for every page on your site. Depending on the size of your site you can do all this in an afternoon or for larger sites it can take several weeks.

Continue to add content pages on an ongoing basis.

Once you get your store in working order, it is important to stay connected to the BANS forum for some time so you can understand the process of how your store works by seeing what other people are doing or are having trouble with. You can also get inspiration and ideas from other BANS users for new stores.

These are just the most basic steps to get your store up and running, but beyond this you need to promote your store which you can learn about in this post, and in this post.