www.affiliateconfession.com

If you don’t get kicked out of some program, banned from a forum, accused of spamming, have a site or two completely removed from Google’s index or lose a significant amount of money (for you) in advertising during your affiliate marketing career, then you aren’t working hard enough. Every one of those things has happened to me, but fortunately I’ve learned enough along the way that any dramatic incidents such as these should be reduced to a minimum from here on out.

With the way things develop and change at an ever increasing rate on the web and the sheer amount of advice (some shady some not so shady) available on affiliate marketing, you are bound to run afoul of someone’s “rules” at some point. There are things that are clearly wrong to do such as hacking someone’s site to steal their traffic stream or paying someone to click on your Adsense ads, and then there are other techniques that are merely loopholes in the system just waiting to be exploited.

For many successful affiliates that’s the game to be played. The more successful you are as an affiliate is probably in correlation with the risks you are willing to take and how far you think outside the box. Let’s face it, if it were all that obvious and we all played by the accepted rules, then we’d all be in the super rich affiliate category or at least on our way there. What can set you apart is looking at “the rules” and seeing an advantage that no one else sees and then exploiting it.

As an example, for all my whining about Facebook Ads, I’ve actually earned almost $200 in the last 2 days by finding a way to target dating offers in a not so obvious way, and if I told you about it, you’d probably go, “Duh, why didn’t I think of that!” However, the high school interns, or whoever it is, running the show in the Facebook Ads department might at some point decide what I’m doing is not acceptable, and that’s the end of my little windfall. Even though no rules have been broken, it’s the end of the party until the next unconventional technique somewhere outside the box is discovered.

Once loopholes such as this are closed they can possibly have a major impact on your business, that is if you don’t adapt well. And that’s the whole point of this post. Yes, at some point during your Internet ventures you will probably face a setback big enough that may make you want to hang it up and do the college and cubicle thing the rest of your life. But if you’ve built a stable and diversified business where your income comes from multiple sources, it will lessen the impact of a setback that either effects you financially or emotionally or both. Read the Affiliate Confession FAQ for various ways on how I’ve diversified my income and you can too.

Developing your ability to think outside the box and recognize and take advantage of opportunity and see between “the rules”, can turn major setbacks into minor inconveniences.

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.

I’m hoping Jason Calacanis can help me out here. Everyone knows that Jason loves to stir up trouble at Internet conferences and he recently caused quite a stir at Affiliate Summit West a couple months ago when he referred to Zac Johnson’s $300,000 check from Yahoo as pathetic.

Well Jason, here’s where you can help me out. I just received an extremely pathetic check of $1,309.21 from Google Adsense yesterday and I’m hoping you will embarrass me (and of course generate lots of publicity for me) at the next Internet related conference you attend by displaying the picture below of me holding that extremely pathetic check. What I’m trying to accomplish is rising from the ranks of extremely pathetic to just pathetic. I mean, if Zac can earn $300,000 in a month’s time from Yahoo Search Marketing and only be at the pathetic level, well, I’d darn sure like to be there.

Anyway Jason, here’s my pic and I’m hopin’ you think of me next time you speak somewhere. I need the publicity so I can afford to fix my teeth.

Thanks Jason. If you need one, I can send you a pic suitable for framing.