www.affiliateconfession.com

Very shortly, probably within the next few days, our home will be turned into a construction zone. We’re having our back porch enclosed and the bedroom across from the home office redone. Once the porch is enclosed and a new window put in the bedroom, our sliding glass doors leading to the porch will be removed, half the wall knocked out, the kitchen extended a couple of feet and all new flooring will be put in the porch, bedroom and a third of the kitchen.

While my wife has been wanting to do this project for years because we don’t really have a proper dining area in our small 1,300 sq ft home, the next couple of months (at least) will be rather stressful around the LeStourgeon home. It will be great when the project is finished, but in the mean time it will be nearly impossible to get any work done with the demolition, hammering, sawing, dust and general noise that goes along with an undertaking such as this.

I’m looking forward to having all the work done as well, but in the mean time, I’m going to have to have some place to carry on my blogging and affiliate marketing duties for several hours a day where interruptions will be kept to a minimum. There are a few places around the Palm Bay, Melbourne FL area that have “free” WiFi, but at many of them you should buy at least a cup of coffee or something every hour or two so as not to be a complete bum. That can add up when you end up spending $4 to $6 a day, plus gas, just to work away from home, plus I don’t really need to be drinking coffee and rotting out my gut every day.

As I’m writing this I’m thinking of at least two places where you don’t need to buy anything and can work as long as you need. One is the local library, but the connection there slow and you keep having to log in every 20 to 30 minutes. The other is the Calvary Chapel of Melbourne cafe, but they keep it so cold in the cafe you need to buy coffee every 30 minutes to keep warm or go outside to thaw out.

It will take some adjustments and planning to work away from home for an extended period of time. I do occasionally go to one of my favorite spots 3 or 4 times a month just for a change of pace, but this is going to have to probably be at least 3 times a week for a month or longer, so that makes it a different matter.

Maybe I could just rent a corner of an office or a cubicle somewhere for a couple of months. If I could find a nice space for $100 a month or so it might be worth it. I wouldn’t save any money over the cost of coffee and those tempting macadamia nut, chocolate chip cookies at Calvary Chapel Cafe, but I’m sure the office space and my water bottle would be much healthier.

I’m open to suggestions.

I finished up the Harsh Realities of Affiliate Marketing series a few days ago but wanted to write a short review and have 1 single post where you can find all 7 posts in the series and get a quick summary of what each one is about.

I did the series to let mainly new affiliates know that as much as the ebook pimps want you to think how easy affiliate marketing is, it takes lots and lots of work, there really isn’t any shortcut. But as long as you are willing to put in the time, it can be very rewarding and can give you the freedom from a job that so many look forward to, you just may want to be aware of the obstacles in the road ahead though.

The post titles and a short summary of each are listed below:

Harsh Reality 1 - Ranking For Keywords That Get Zero Traffic Means Nothing
Don’t make the mistake of spending time getting your blog or web site to rank for keyword phrases that don’t bring you any traffic.

Harsh Reality 2 - You Will Lose Money Starting In PPC
If you are going to try your hand at PPC, be prepared to lose money before you make money. Set a budget you can afford to lose before you get started.

Harsh Reality 3 - You’ll Never Make A Living With Banner Ads
We’ve all seen those websites plastered with nothing but affiliate banners. If you own a site like that, I can guarantee you aren’t making enough money to buy yourself a decent dinner once a week, probably not even once a month.

Harsh Reality 4 - There Will Be A Major Setback In Your Affiliate Career
If you don’t get slammed at least once in your affiliate marketing efforts and have a disappointing setback, you aren’t trying hard enough.

Harsh Reality 5 - No Risk Equals No Reward
If you’re going to make money at affiliate marketing, you will have to risk time, money or other goodies until you get the whole thing figured out. Even when you start making some money, you’ll have to take risks to get to that next level.

Harsh Reality 6 - Those Who Analyse The Most, Do The Least
If you’re stuck in the perpetual cycle of over analysing and planning, the only way out is to actually do something. Ultimately it is the action part of affiliate marketing that earns you the money.

Harsh Reality 7 - Don’t Count On Your Blog Making Money
If you are blogging about how to make money online, it’s probably a good idea that you go out and make some money first.

The real harsh reality of affiliate marketing is that you can make some very good money having an online business, you just have to watch out for the lazy work habits, stupid mistakes, bad advice, deceptive marketing and false dreams that can end up hurting you in the end. However, some of these trials are a good thing to work through, that way you know what not to do. The better perspective you have on the truth about being an affiliate, the better chance you have of making a living at it.

I hope you enjoyed and benefited from the Harsh Reality series.

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.

If you got into blogging to write about how you already make money online, you stand a much better chance of making money with your blog. The harsh reality is that if you got into blogging just to make money, you probably won’t.

Bloggers that write about how to make money online that don’t already do that, stick out like a sore thumb and have zero credibility. Spend 10 minutes going through the blogs in the Make Money Online section at EntreCard and you’ll know exactly what I mean (It’s one of the reasons I’m thinking of dropping Entrecard). Probably 95% of them are pushing ridiculous traffic exchanges, actually display the fact that they have 10 RSS readers or less, have blog widgets and advertising down their sidebars 4 times longer than the length of their posts and promote lame programs that no serious affiliate in their right mind would join.

Almost all the bloggers that make good money with their blogs have already made substantial incomes online long before they started blogging. Shoemoney made money with Mac games before he started blogging, John Chow was making money writing about tech gadgets years before he started his blog that now makes $30k per month and Zac Johnson made money with his own affiliate offers and earned revenue by monetizing a free MySpace widgets site before staring his blog. All these guys had substantial knowledge, experience and content stored away in their brains before they wrote their first blog post.

That’s also what I’m trying to do with Affiliate Confession. Although I was ultimately inspired to start this blog by the ridiculous income reports from John Chow, the blog is mainly to report on what I do to make money online and also to report on various happenings related to affiliate marketing, yes and occasionally quirky posts about food or whatever strikes me at the moment. I honestly don’t make all that much money with this blog and I’m past the point of that being any big deal because I make my money elsewhere. It’s become more of a labor of love than anything else.

A great alternative to the blogging for money, when you haven’t made a dime, style of writing is what you will find from Elijah and Veronica over at TheAtHomeCouple.com. It is a refreshing thing to read the chronicles of a couple living in Toronto, Canada who are looking for a way out of the college to cubicle, deferred life plan (as Timothy Ferriss puts it) and are trying to figure out this affiliate marketing thing. Nothing pretentious here, just pure honest blogging.

Honesty will do worlds more for your blog and your affiliate business than putting up a front and pretending to be something you aren’t. If you aren’t honest about your blogging, you probably aren’t honest about what you are doing with your business. Where do you suppose that’s going to lead?

I learned a lesson in the last several days that I assume could have been much worse. Sometimes no matter what you hear or read about, you just have to try something for yourself. It’s probably a good idea to follow the advice you read about in some cases rather than being the Lone Ranger and doing it your way.

Case in point, I recently bought a text link on a very high profile blog, which will remain nameless, and thought I would get some traffic and maybe a little PR juice as well. Needless to say, I ignored the most recent advice I heard from Jeremy Palmer, I believe it was through the Black Ink Project, in an online session. Jeremy remarked that he thought he would boost some of his sites by buying text links and ended up getting them all penalized and losing some serious rankings.

Of course I thought, that’s Jeremy, Google knows about him because he’s a big shot, I’m just a medium order of fries, they don’t know about me. Wrong!

I don’t get a lot of traffic from Google here at Affiliate Confession, but it is enough that I don’t want to lose it, mainly because it is a source of ever changing new traffic. The 30 or 40 organic searchers that Google sends my way every day come from a huge variety of long tail keywords that are pretty diverse in the niches they come from. I jeopardized that traffic last week when I purchased the text link on May 28th and only 3 days later my traffic from Google dropped by 80% as you can see below:

Luckily I realized what was going on the second day after purchase and immediately converted that text link to an affiliate offer. It took a couple of days for the link to change, but when it did, the traffic returned to normal. I’m thinking I didn’t do any long term damage to this blog because I caught what was happening in time and changed it in just a couple of days. My strategy for buying text links now is to either use them only for affiliate offers or to experiment with links on lower profile sites sending traffic to sites that I can afford to do without. I’ll probably just stick with affiliate offers though.

Sometimes you just have to do something stupid before you realize how stupid it is. Don’t be stupid.