www.affiliateconfession.com

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.

A triple milestone has been reached on this blog and in my internet businesses. You are reading post number 100 at Affiliate Confession today. I started the blog on November 1, 2007 and started blogging consistently every day on November 22nd and haven’t stopped since. The second part of the triple play is that the blog now has exactly 100 rss subscribers and number 3 is that my affiliate income has reached $100 per day as reported yesterday.

Also, as this post is being written there are 494 published comments for which I am very grateful and want to thank everyone for participating in the conversation here at this blog. The comments have been immensly helpful in coming up with new ideas and answering questions. Numerous comments in one form or another have been turned into posts and they will continue to be used to inspire me.

In the 2.5 months I’ve been blogging consistently, Affiliate Confession has received 12,919 total visits and had 23,396 page views. The number one refering site has been StumbleUpon and the top refering word from Google has been ‘affilate confession’. The most read post on the blog has been Money And Fame Or Freedom And Lifestyle about aging rock stars and the most commented on post has been Taking The 30 Day Blogging Challenge.

To celebrate the triple play, I will be starting another blog contest tomorrow. For this one I will be giving away a free bottle of all-natural, Nubody Organic Health Multi-Vitamins valued at $40. What impresses me most about NuBody Supplements is that they are 100% organic and all natural and they offer an affiliate program that pays a generous 35% commission plus 5% commission on second tier affiliates.

I blogged about joining their affiliate program several days ago and had mentioned a contest in the works. I had originally planned on giving away a free bottle of their Brain Control supplement, but when I contacted NuBody to place an order, they informed me Brain Control was on back order so they sent 2 bottles of Organic Health Multi-Vitamins for free. I will use one and give one away.

The rules to the contest will be simple and anyone can enter, but I’m waiting until tomorrow to let everyone in on how it’s going to work.

Thanks again for reading and stay tuned for the contest.

Alan

Tags: affiliate income, $100 per day, blogging, nubody, blog contest

I just got an email the other day from Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer to let me know the ebook he used to charge $45 for (I actually bought it) is now going to be free. If you don’t know about Jeremy, he is one of the top publishers at CJ and made around $1.7 million in commissions in 2006. Jeremy has over 100 web sites and works pretty much by himself.

I bought Jeremy’s ebook High Performance Affiliate Marketing a couple of years ago and at the time I thought it was pretty good, but now it has gone through either 2 or 3 revisions and is completely free. I was pretty impressed with Jeremy because he wasn’t in the business of just selling nonsense and pushing you to buy his next silly ebook for even more information. He also personally answered questions in his forum and even personally answered some of mine. I thought that was pretty decent of him considering he had more than 100 web sites to manage.

Jeremy has since renamed his ebook Quit Your Day Job - A Blueprint For Affiliate Marketing Success and not only is he giving the 2007 version away for free, he is working on a version for 2008 and giving that away free as well. The book is filled with his insights, techniques and lot of resources that are a huge benefit to the affiliate marketer. And you can’t beat the free price. He decided to give the book away because he no longer wants to sell info products and as he quotes in the email:

The fact is, making money on the Internet isn’t easy. It takes a lot of knowledge, hard work, and above all - persistence. But it’s hard to get people to understand that on an e-book sales page.  Many think that if they just buy this one product or service all of their financial problems will be solved. This thinking is completely unrealistic and a recipe for failure.

I think that statement is quite revealing and says a lot about the get-rich-quick ebook industry, especially coming from one of the top publishers at Commission Junction who’s ebook wasn’t about getting rich quickly at all. 

Jeremy is also redesigning his QuitYourDayJob.com web site to add new content, an updated member forum, scripts and more. His goal is to have the site be a more community driven one than it has been in the past.

If you want to learn from the very best affiliate marketer in the business, then check out Jeremy Palmer’s free ebook. You can also get a sneak peak at the new design of his web site here.

Alan

Tags: jeremy palmer, ebook, quit your day job, affiliate marketing

I just found out yesterday that Microsoft AdCenter is extending its $50 in free clicks* offer until April 15th. When I originally posted about this, the deadline was January 15th, but I guess they’ve had such a big response they’ve decided to continue it until the middle of April.

Some affiliates have reported Live Search from Microsoft has a different demographic and can convert better. They reportedly have a higher percentage of buyers rather than just shoppers on other search engines. With this offer you can get $50 to check it out and do your own testing without any financial risk to your own pocketbook except a $5 deposit.

The $50 free click offer does require a small deposit* of $5 to open your account and it is for new customers only. Make sure you use the coupon code on the sign up page so you will get the free clicks credit.

If you are tired of $10 and $15 minimum bids and impossible to comply with landing page guidelines from Google, try Microsoft and see what you can do.

Alan

Tags: adcenter, microsoft, live search, ppc, landing pages