www.affiliateconfession.com

The nice thing about blogging is that you meet some really great people from them leaving comments on your blog and by you leaving comments on other blogs throughout the net. A frequent reader and commentator at Affiliate Confession has been Elijah from TheAtHomeCouple.com. Elijah and Veronica write about their journey into the realm of internet marketing to document the struggles and victories and also give advice on what’s working for them. Their blog is a refreshing change from much of the usual mess that clogs up the blogosphere.

Elijah recently asked if I’d be willing to to a 20 question interview for his blog, I gladly accepted and he published the interview today. The questions deal with all the important things in affiliate marketing like my shoe size and who my favorite superhero is and he also managed to slip in a few that deal with boring stuff like making money online. I had a great time answering the questions and tried to be as informative and witty as possible.

So instead of me writing a long-winded post today, just head over to The At Home Couple and read the interview. And don’t forget to leave a comment, cause that’s how this blogging thing works.

You may have noticed another link at the top of the page leading to the Affiliate Confession FAQ. I put this up because of the increasing amount of questions I’m getting for information that’s already on this blog.

I started writing Affiliate Confession to chronicle what I’ve been doing in affiliate marketing for the last 4 years or so, what’s happening in the world of making money on the internet, what Google’s up to (someone needs to keep an eye on them) and occasionally what Jean and I had for lunch or dinner or some other off topic rant. But the main purpose of this blog is to teach people how to make money online based on how I’ve done that.

Even though the main purpose is to explain how you can make around $3,000 to $3,500 per month in affiliate marketing and show people how I’ve done what I do, I still get tons of questions wanting me to explain how I do what I do. It’s kind of a vicious cycle in that the more posts that go up explaining what I do and the more traffic that comes to the blog, the more question come in asking about the same things I just wrote about.

I’m trying to keep this at one level below a rant because I really don’t want it to come off that way, but this is a little symptomatic of why people don’t make money in affiliate marketing. Sometimes the information is right in front of you, but we fail to act on it or dig for it a little and see that the secrets are right there in the previous post or in the archives section or just below the surface.

I certainly don’t mind answering questions that are well though out and cover topics or information not covered in the blog or that can’t be found by plugging in a search in the box between the most popular section at the top and where the posts start. And if you have a burning question that you can’t find the answer to by looking around or checking the FAQ, please feel free to contact me and ask it.

And if I haven’t answered your question you may have sent in some time ago, it doesn’t mean it has been ignored, it may simply be because I can’t answer every question personally. Sometimes though, your questions have been used as material for a post because I realize that topic hasn’t been covered adequately.

All that to say, don’t stop sending in questions, just check the FAQ first, or look around the blog, because there’s a good chance your question may have already been answered.

It has been several weeks since my last post on perseverance and this one concludes the series. In this post I’ll touch on getting schooled in not putting all your eggs in one basket, namely the Adsense basket and in being a spammy affiliate.

Somewhere around January of 2006 I saw a serious decline in my Adsense earnings and experienced a drop from a high of approximately $1,300 per month to around half that much at about $650 per month. Unfortunately at that time Adsense was one of the very few programs I was using to monetize my sites except for some leads I was generating for Rentalo.com that paid $1 each and earning a little with a log cabin decor merchant. Overall my online earnings went from about $1,900 per month to about $1,000 per month and I was in deep trouble, especially with a spec home on the market that we couldn’t sell.

My best guess on what happened was that Google assessed my Adsense account some penalty or there was an overall shake-up on the kinds of ads lower performing publishers were displaying on their sites. I had seen single clicks in the vacation niche pay me as much as $2.50 each and that dropped to a high of about $1 per click. Two other significant things that occurred were my vacation site went from getting about 400 visitors a day to around 60 to 80 visitors per day and my Blogger spam blogs (yes, I have participated in spammy techniques) were either being deleted or dropping in rankings from one of the first 10 spots on the serps to 100th place or worse.

I learned a huge lesson in avoiding the get rich quick mentality when I lost rankings on my Blogspot spam blogs. I had found a way to get 1st page rankings on Yahoo for almost any term with 1,000 or less monthly searches. The way it worked was that you could create a new blog with the name of your chosen keyword such as “log cabin decor”, which was also the first part of your url, you then added a description containing the keyword which would appear under your blog title. The next step was to write one post containing your keyword and an affiliate link and the most important step was next. You then would go into one or several MyYahoo accounts and subscribe to your own rss feed and just like magic, your blog would be indexed on the first page of Yahoo and sometimes MSN in 2 days or less.

I was making about $250 to $300 per month in log cabin decor affiliate commissions and more in Adsense earnings, but this was a horrible business model because when Yahoo found out about this little trick, they shut it down and my earnings went with it. As a newbie affiliate I didn’t know any better, I was just reading and doing what was working for other people. However, I no longer spam because it only temporarily creates revenue and you can’t depend on it and as soon as you do, the party dries up. Here’s a great article about why you shouldn’t web spam.

I was also never really sure why my vacation site took a dive in traffic and was de-indexed. After a few months of tweaking and redirecting some 250 affiliate links, the site appears to be doing well again, but isn’t up to the traffic levels it once was. It is on my list to have another look at this site and redirect a few more affiliate links and continue to get incoming links. I use a meta-redirected page with a no-follow tag to redirect my affiliate links. In my experience, Google does not like to see too many affiliate links on a site and redirecting through what appears to be a link on your site helps take care of that. The practice of constantly trying to please Google however, is extremely annoying, but that discussion will have to wait for another post.

After all those adventures I’ve finally come to realize that the best practice is to build a strong foundation for your business and never rely on spammy techniques, one basket of eggs, one web hosting company, one niche or one way of doing things. While I’m not opposed to participating in a little gray hat fun when I read about a new technique, it is never anything I will spend serious time on again. A solid business foundation is much better for your long term bottom line.

If you haven’t had the chance, read part 1, part 2 and part 3 of Lessons In Perseverance.

Alan

We’re finally moving away from our adventures in MLM for this post and starting to cover how things went when I started to work full time on the web ventures and affiliate sites. For much of the time I’ve been working on the net the story is nearly the same. While not facing company regulations on a business that you supposedly owned, but couldn’t control, many of the challenges were still there. When an obstacle gets in your way you can either quit or find a way around it, through it, under it or take a different path altogether, but sometimes you just have to stick with your ultimate goal and eventually push your tractor up the hill when it breaks.

One of the first web sites I built was for the vacation rentals niche and when first getting started I had no idea how to make money with it. I thought I could form partnerships with cabins and vacation rentals and have them pay me on a per lead basis. I emailed about 300 cabin rental owners across the country and after getting several responses and talking with a few rental management companies, the pay per lead way of making money wasn’t really going to work. It was just going to be way more work than 1 person could handle.

Another idea that came about after looking into buying some land in Dunlap, Tennessee was I thought I could produce some leads for a developer who showed us around a project he was working on. I put up a page about buying lots and homes in his development on our vacation site and was sending him leads. It turned out I was able to outrank him in Google for both the terms tennessee land for sale and land in tennessee. In fact I had the number one spot for both those terms for several months, but the developer was not happy and chewed my butt for using pictures off his web site and copying his lead form. My plan was to start producing leads and then give him a call and see what he would pay for them. Unfortunately he was not impressed with what I had done and demanded I remove any copyrighted info immediately.

In retrospect I probably should have told him up front what my plan was because he thought I was trying to get information about people who were interested in his development and sell it to other companies. I certainly made a mistake there, but he was absolutely clueless about what I was doing. Trying to explain I was sending him about 20 to 30 people a day looking for his product didn’t seem to phase him, he just didn’t have a clue.

The most valuable lesson out of this was that I had my first real understanding about keywords, search engine rankings and how to make all that work. I was using (and still am on a couple of sites) a product called Site Build It that was very comprehensive in teaching me everything I needed to know about how to build a profitable web site. I don’t really recommend Site Build It for anyone other than noobs because there are some very significant limitations as to what you can do with it, but it sure helped me get a basic understanding on how the web worked.

The vacation rental site was started in Sept of 2004 and after the fiasco with the developer in Tennessee I still didn’t have a clue as to how I was really going to monetize this site, then I discovered Google Adsense. I signed up for Adsense on May 18, 2005 and my first full month with it I made $688. The next month, July 2005, I made $930 and thought I was going to be rich. Adsense revenue peaked right away because I had read tons of case studies and material about where to place ads for maximum click throughs. We had about 400 people per day coming to the vacation site and this was producing $25 to $35 in daily Adsense earnings.

Things moved along fairly smoothly for more than a year, but I had a hard time increasing revenue. I tried several different affiliate programs and some worked, but most didn’t. As one affiliate program would peak another would drop in revenue. That’s why it’s always important to continue to diversify your affiliate income sources. Adsense was a very good source of income for me for nearly a year and a half, but started to take a serious dive towards November of 2006 and by January I had seen a once profitable program bringing me less than half of what it peaked out at. I was eventually able to bring things up again after the drop, but I’ll save that story for part 4.

Alan

Tags: perseverance, adsense revenue, affiliate sites, site build it, google adsense

Yesterday I covered a little bit about how my wife and I persevered through the beginning of our MLM days in EcoQuest International. Today I’m going to cover how even when you get going, you still may be facing a bumpy ride. This will probably relate more closely with affiliate marketers and bloggers since getting started with a blog is fairly easy, but trying to make money once you get going may be a bit more difficult.

Once our network marketing business started to get going, things were pretty smooth for a while. We were getting close to what was called a Manager position which meant you had to have roughly $30,000 worth of air purifier sales go directly through you three months in a row. We made this happen 2 months in a row and then things got weird. EcoQuest headquarters found out I was generating my own recruiting and air purifier leads via one of my websites and they didn’t want anyone using their company name or images of their products on personal websites.

Of course, this is one of the basic things that is wrong with MLM. You supposedly own your own business, but you can’t advertise as you please and can’t actually use the company name in any of your advertising. So essentially you don’t own your business. This was a hard lesson for me to learn, but the value in all of it was that I had started to figure out how to generate traffic and do a little SEO in the process. After I removed the EcoQuest company name and pictures from my sites, the number of leads plummeted.

On top of all that, a friend who I was in business with, purchased some email leads from an unknown spammer on eBay for me. I used them and my autoresponder company banned me from using their service due to spam complaints and deleted all my legitimate email addresses in the process. Needless to say, I didn’t make the Manager qualification I had hope for and missed out on a significant percentage increase in bonus check income. However, we stuck it out and eventually qualified for the Manager position almost exactly 1 year later.

During that year I had learned more about internet marketing and PPC advertising and was able to produce my own retail leads without being in violation of any EcoQuest guidelines. We also got in with a group of people who were running an expensive, but profitable radio advertising campaign so things were looking fairly good for some time. I had also quit my job (the best paying job I had ever had) as a graphic artist with the Yellow Pages to work my EcoQuest business full time.

Things went pretty well in EcoQuest for a few months and we were making some good money, but our advertising expenses were very high. The radio advertising campaign was costing us over $1,000 per week and my ppc costs were about $500 per month. We were spending a total of around $4,500 per month on advertising. But there was a bigger issue, I was spending a huge amount of time helping retail customers fix or troubleshoot their air purifiers, ordering parts and shipping them to customers and even replacing machines on occasion.

The final straw with my mlm adventure in EcoQuest came when after returning from a drive to Maine for Christmas of 2004 we had a total of 8 phone messages or emails regarding quality issues with the air purifiers. To top it off I had to fight with EcoQuest customer service to get them to replace a couple of machines. I had been working at home around 8 months when we decided it was time to move on and leave the EcoQuest business. I could no longer in good conscience sell these air purifiers that were not top quality products, nor did I have the time to deal with 2 to 3 angry customers per week.

Fortunately because of what I had learned about internet marketing and because we had started a couple of websites that were making some decent money from Google Adsense we didn’t take too much of a hit on our income. We had also made a nice real estate investment back when things were still doing well and we made a nice chunk of change from that.

The lesson in all this is that it it so important to diversify and not let your income be generated from only one source. We didn’t rely completely on EcoQuest income to keep us going and internet marketers shouldn’t rely on one advertising source such as Adsense, or one affiliate program or even one single niche to generate their income. What is profitable and popular today may not be 6 months or a year from now.

In part 3 I will go over our ups and downs with Adsense, more PPC advertising and various affiliate ventures. Throught it all we stuck in there and rode the roller coaster. I’m hoping this year will be a much less bumpy ride.

I hope you are having a productive New Year so far. Stay tuned for more…

Alan

Tags: ecoquest international, internet marketing, mlm, air purifiers, ppc advertising