www.affiliateconfession.com

For the last couple of months or so I’ve been outsourcing major amounts of content to build up my top TripAdvisor and Adsense earnings websites and blogs, for article marketing and to build up my top earning BANS eBay store as well. When I wrote about my goals for 2009 back in December 2008, I had stated I wanted to focus on the things that had been solid money makers and Adsense was one of them. One thing I didn’t include was the top BANS site that has at times made over $1,000 per month. That site, along with another site in the same niche, only broader, will be included in this year’s work because they have way too much potential to just let them go. They are especially relevant to today’s troubled financial times.

This past Friday I received my second order of 100 articles bringing the total number of outsourced articles so far this year to 210. I have used Elance.com in the past with good success, but decided not to go through them this time because of the amount of work I want to get done. The thought of waiting for bids, screening writers and working with possibly 10 or 20 different people to help accomplish my goals for content this year wasn’t appealing, so I instead found 1 company that can write all the articles I need. I’m looking at doing possibly as many as 1,000 articles this year.

I initially sent a test set of 10 travel articles at the end of December to SEO Article Writing Pros and they did such a good job that I have since sent them 2 additional orders for 100 articles each. The first set of 10 travel articles were written as if they were reading my mind. Except for a few minor spelling mistakes, the articles were exactly what I needed. Then the first set of 100 articles were for 2 different niches and 3 different sites, plus for article marketing. There were a couple of articles that need to be re-done and they were promptly back to me the same day.

To alleviate any miscommunication for the next set of 100 articles, which were much more technical, I included from 1 to 3 urls for the writers that gave specific information on exactly what I was looking for. Initial instructions always include a keyword phrase or title for the article and a 1 to 2 sentence description of what I’m looking for. It’s very important to give as much information as possible to your writers so you won’t be disappointed with what you get back.

Cost for articles at SEO Article Writing Pros is 10 articles for $10 each, 25 articles at $9.50 each, 50 at $9 each or 100 at $8.50 each. Smaller quantities are available at either $13 per single article or $12 each for 5 articles.

The plan was to originally have about 20 to 30 articles done per month, but I immediately brought that up to 100 articles per month because I wanted to start off the year with a bang. I’ll probably skip sending in an order for March, but will send in another for April.

The articles are being used for adding content to travel sites and blogs to ultimately earn more Adsense revenue through organic search traffic. For the BANS site the content will be to get more organic search engine traffic that ultimately ends up at eBay. The BANS site will eventually have more Adsense added to the site depending on how much traffic it ends up getting, again, from organic search. The articles will also be used for article marketing to get more incoming links and boost the natural search traffic to those sites and blogs.

I’ll go into exactly how I’m doing the article marketing and adding the content to the sites and blogs in a future post. In the mean time, if you want to jam out some serious content, give SEO Article Writing Pros a look. Go ahead and check them out, I don’t earn anything for recommending them.

On the heels of Monday’s PPC earnings of over $200, yesterday was a significant milestone in my affiliate career as I realized a record profit of over $500, of which $446 came from pay per click. The two PPC campaigns that are the most profitable for me more than doubled in volume and earnings from the previous day.

The last few days of nice profits have been a really great way to end the month, however I don’t think it will be a record overall for the entire month. I got hammered this month on eBay earnings and Adsense income suffered a bit because of the slowdown during this time of year in the travel industry. I make the bulk of my Adsense earnings from travel. While earnings from PPC is up significantly this month, combined Adsense and eBay income is down by more than $1,000.

While it is great to earn this much in a day, and do the bulk of it from PPC, it’s not really where I want to be with by online endeavors. The earnings from paying for traffic are very tenuous and could go away tomorrow. One of the campaigns is a little more stable than the other and should be able to  make a profit for the next few months, but I don’t expect the other to last that long.

This is why it’s so important to diversify your income as an affiliate and why I sometimes harp on this point. You just never know where your income might come from month to month. It has been the story of my affiliate career to do really well with one source of income only to have another source drop significantly or even completely dry up. I used to make $200 to $300 per month producing $1 leads for Rentalo.com from my travel sites, but no longer use their program.

It’s nice to make $500 in one day, but at this point I’m only considering it bonus money. I’ll get really excited when I make that kind of money every day for a month. 

If you have heard of or followed the Black Ink Project, you are in for a treat because Jeremy Palmer will be starting the second set of classes today in the appropriately named Black Ink Project 2.0. If you don’t already know Jeremy, he consistently brings in well over $1 million a year in affiliate revenue and with those kind of results, is probably someone you should listen to.

The first Black Ink Project was loaded with information from the very basics on how to find a profitable niche and how to set up your affiliate business to more advanced topics such as building a sticky site that people come back to and pay-per-click mastery amongst many other topics. Jeremy also included some rather high profile internet marketers in his training sessions such as Amit Mehta and Aaron Wall and all this info cost participants exactly nothing.

What I got most out of the Black Ink Project was seeing Jeremy set up an affiliate web site and hearing his mindset on how he builds sites so as to give his visitors the whole experience of the product he’s promoting, not just a landing page and then sending them off through an affiliate link. While Jeremy does build nice quality landing pages, he also has lots of other value added info for his visitors who want to stick around for a little longer and learn about the product they are considering.

Where Black Ink Project 2.0 is going to differ from part 1 is it will be laser focused on building one website promoting one and only one product. Jeremy will include a detailed step-by-step process on how to build a site and how to launch a PPC campaign to get traffic to it. The 15 part training course will be 10% theory and 90% work as we get to see exactly how Jeremy builds the site through high res videos. Black Ink Project was live and BIP 2.0 will be recorded and each days session will be available at 4pm Pacific time for download. A chat session to answer question and discuss the training will be available at the end of each of the 3 weeks of sessions.

And to top it all off, when you participate in the class you get a free copy of his affiliate tracking and cloaking software, Optimize My Site. This is a self hosted program that will help you track your PPC campaigns to achieve maximum profitability, and you get it for free just for participating in the free training.

Again, the course is completely free, limited to only 1,250 participants and only requires that you sign up for a free trial of the Meet Me Now WebEx web presentation and meeting system. You can cancel the free trial at any time as I have already done and can still participate in the class. Meet Me Now is a robust system that allows you to hold PowerPoint and computer screen video like presentations and training sessions on the web with your customers, prospects or other participants. I gave it the once over and although it is a nice system for those needing to do online training and classes, it just isn’t something I’m going to be using at the present time.

The Black Ink Project 2.0 starts today and is something you should definitely participate in if you are serious about your affiliate marketing career. Don’t forget it’s completely free and you can sign up for the classes here.

I had a post already planned for today, and then I came across The Shrinking Window Of Opportunity by Gyutae Park over at his blog. It is a great article that’s really a wake-up call for Internet marketers to get busy because of the way the landscape of the net is changing. If you aren’t building your web empire yet, it could be too late real soon for the small, independent webmaster.

I’ve always believed that if you have an idea for a business on the web, you should have started it yesterday, because of the time it takes to get established and now this seems more important that ever with Google’s preference for older, well established web properties.

Even though we all know how evil Google is, the simple fact is that they control the game. While you may be able to get some traffic from various sources on the net, at this point if you don’t have traffic from Google, you probably aren’t doing all that well, and it’s only going to get worse. Gyutae points out that Google seems to be giving less relevance to or even completely discounting things like paid links, directories, widgets and more, resulting in the small business person on the web being driven out of business.

What Google supposedly wants is more relevance and in their eyes, large, established web sites will get more attention and will be pushing out the little guy and soon start to take over search results. So goes the day when everything on the web was to be on equal footing.

I don’t believe it is the end of the road for Internet and affiliate marketers and neither does Gyutae, but now is not the time to procrastinate with your ideas. If you are going to make your mark on the web, you have to start to establish yourself as an authority in your niche today. Rather than explain again how to go about that, go read Gyutae’s post about the dwindling opportunity for the independent webmaster.

As a little counterpoint though, I’m not so sure Google will always have the monopoly they do. Google’s track record as of late is to just make people mad. We aren’t reading about how wonderful Google has been to webmasters lately, we’re hearing about exactly the opposite, from lots of different sources. While they are trying to create a cleaner search index with more relevance, they could (some would argue they already have) become out of touch and elitist somewhat like the United States government.

Not that I would ever want to see such a thing, but companies who control commerce in such a way that it effects the economic stability of a large mass of people, attract the snooping eye of government intervention. With Google’s increasing record of putting people out of business, no telling what could happen if this were to manifest itself on a much larger scale. We would then have one out of touch bureaucracy giving orders to an out of touch company that controls a huge portion of commerce. Can you spell disaster?

The point of all this is to start building a relevant web empire today that will add value to the web for years to come. Don’t wait until the entry point for the small businessperson is beyond your reach.

Over this last week I’ve been listening in live to Jeremy Palmer’s course, The Black Ink Project which Jeremy is graciously offering for free. This first week covered some pretty basic stuff, but was very good info for the beginning affiliate as it mostly covered setting up your business, finding niches and developing a plan for your business. Even though this week was basic info, the last session on Friday was probably the most important one for me as it dealt with time management and work habits of which I struggle with.

Now, if you don’t know Jeremy Palmer, he is one of the top performers at Commission Junction earning over a million dollars in commissions per year for the last 3 years or so. What makes Jeremy different from a lot of the top guru affiliate marketers is that he is probably the most transparent person in this industry. With his decision some time ago to get completely out of information marketing, because he doesn’t want to be associated with the clowns selling worthless ebooks, that makes him all the more trustworthy. Jeremy used to sell an ebook entitled High Performance Affiliate Marketing for $49 which I bought a while ago, but he now gives it away for free for the reason that there is very valuable information in it, but he doesn’t want to position himself as selling the six-figure-per-year-dream just from buying an ebook.

Along with the ebook being available for free, Jeremy also runs the Quit Your Day Job forums and came up with the idea for The Black In Project to get people excited and increase participation at the forums. With participation by some of the top money making affiliates and internet business experts, The Black Ink Project could cost you a couple thousand dollars or more, but if you click this link and join the course, you can get it for the unbelievable price of…absolutely nothing. That’s correct the course is free and you really don’t have to click on the link to get it for that price, I guess you could type in theblackinkproject.com if you wanted to. The course was originally intended for only 1,000 people, but it filled up so fast that Jeremy decided to open it up to 2,000 more people. But seriously, don’t even get involved if you aren’t committed to it.

The next three weeks will get more into the meat of the course and will cover topics such as designing an eye appealing site, individual landing page design, mastering pay-per-click marketing, building links, social media, outsourcing and more. It will also feature top name affiliates such as Amit Mehta, Aaron Wall of SEOBook and more. I’m really looking forward to the PPC marketing course because I am a PPC guru at losing money. If you want to know how to lose money at Google Adwords, I can definitely show you how to do that. I’m dedicating the next couple of months to taking a completely fresh look at PPC so someday I might actually know what I’m doing in that arena and be able to help people out.

If you are serious about improving your affiliate marketing, and I do mean serious, you can join The Black In Project here. You can also read more about Jeremy’s free ebook here.