www.affiliateconfession.com

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?

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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.

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Today’s though or contemplation is about the deluge of information we are faced with every day and comes from Timothy Ferriss’ The 4 Hour Work Week.  The quote isn’t from Ferriss himself, it’s actually from Herbert Simon, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, but I discovered it in Ferriss’ book.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among an overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

The emphasis is mine and I am speaking to myself more than anyone else. Paring down my information intake is critical to be able to focus more on the things that are essential. I love to check stats, especially Adsense stats, but I spend way too much time doing this. All that information is not really necessary and it takes up space in my brain that I could rent out to other, more important things.

Paying attention to the essential things and being able to act on them is what matters. Is the information you are consuming contributing to your success in all areas of life or is it just taking up space?

What are you renting space in your brain to?

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Sunday’s around our house are usually a time of relaxing and reflecting on the week and life in general. After we get home from church (I usually spend most of the morning there because I’m in the band) we have a light lunch and enjoy a snack of tea, coffee, cookies, etc., while reading and then take a nap on couch. After the nap we usually go see my parents or take a trip to our local nursing home to hang out with some of the residents there. Consequently, not much work gets done and it’s a bit of a struggle to publish a blog post.

So, Sunday’s posts will be short and sweet from now on, normally not more than just a couple of paragraphs. They will consist of a thoughtful quote that may help you to reflect on life and or business as well, and then a question to make you think and possibly share those thoughts if you choose.

Today’s quote from What A Great Idea 2.0 (a great book by the way):

Life can only be understood backwards; but must be lived forwards.

Soren Keirkegard

This is essential in blogging and affiliate marketing. You must understand your mistakes and successes in order to move forward in your online ventures.

Your thoughts?

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Matthew 28:5-7 – But the angel answered and said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. 6 He is not here; for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 7 And go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead, and indeed He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him. Behold, I have told you.”

Happy Easter to everyone! Hope you have a great time with family and friends today and aren’t doing something like blogging or even reading this post.

See you Monday.

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