www.affiliateconfession.com

Have you ever had really big plans for something in affiliate marketing and then had it completely go south on you? Have you maybe even been making some money in a niche and started to make plans to ramp it up and all of a sudden your revenue drops like a rock before you get the chance to scale?

If you’ve been doing business as an affiliate for any length of time this may have happened to you, maybe even more than once. It happened to me in the apartment rentals niche about a year ago as I was planning to ramp things up considerably based on some very good results I was having with Apartments.com. I was making in the area of $200 to $250 per month producing leads for them at $10 each and getting one of those leads for about every 50 clicks I sent their way. Then they redesigned their landing pages about a year ago and I now produce a lead for every 200 clicks sent their way.

I’m not sure what happened there, but I was no longer able to send traffic directly to an email form that actually produced the lead. Apartments.com changed their landing pages to include a small email form on each page of an individual apartments set of pages and the conversion rate dropped by 75%. Couple that with the fact that my traffic had dropped by a little as the season changed, and I went from making an average of $225 per month promoting apartments to about $20 to $30 per month making it hardly worth the effort to continue to work in this niche.

The larger plan I was seeing was to develop a big site devoted to apartment rentals for a specific niche of renters all over the nation. In looking at Google Analytics stats for my apartment sites I could see that there is an overwhelmingly higher percentage of renters in a very specific market and I had plans to exploit that to its fullest. While that idea is still on the back burner of things I would like to do in affiliate marketing, after the bust, the steam kind of went out of my idea. But the good news is, Rent.com has just revamped their affiliate program and is now paying 20 cents per registered visitor and $25 to $70 per confirmed lease, so the big plan for an apartment rental site is a little closer to reality once again.

So what’s the whole point of this discussion?

Don’t play the single affiliate program game and get yourself stuck in the position of relying on only one source of income from one or even two programs. While I took a $200 per month hit a year or so ago, it was just another day in the life of an affiliate marketer. Sometimes I do look back at all the things I’ve made money from and thought if I could only get these at the level they once were, all at the same time I’d be making $6,000 or $7,000 per month. Yes, that would be great, but what I’m really thankful for is the programs that have been in place to cover for the ones that all-of-a-sudden decided to take a dive.

You will go for a ride on the ups and downs of affiliate marketing if you stay with the game long enough. The best thing to do is have a diverse selection of niches and programs to work with that will act as shock absorbers when the ride gets bumpy. Check out my Make Money Online page for the variety of networks and programs I use to earn a living.

This is a guest post from Richard Adams at No More Compromise

Starting your own Internet business isn’t just necessarily good for your wallet - it can also be an experience in personal development of the best possible kind in which you develop new or existing qualities.

Here are just a small sample of the character-building benefits you may experience as a result of starting your own business…

1) Resilience

More often than not it will take weeks if not months for a new Internet entrepreneur to start earning money online. *Significant* figures can take even longer so one’s ability to stick it out and to refuse to give up despite the lack of results is a real test of whether you are likely to succeed. As Thomas Edison said “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up”.

2) Self Confidence

You’ll only manage to keep chipping away at building your business for so long unless you have real confidence in your own abilities to succeed online and the fire to make it happen.

3) Discipline

This is where a lot of people come unstuck. They’re passionate and confident, but when it comes down to it, they can’t actually motivate themselves to do what they know they need to do. It’s just too much hassle. It’s easier just to make a weak excuse and flip the TV on.

Successful entrepreneurs are different. They *make* themselves work. The *find* ways to motivate themselves. And they’re proactive at getting things done and seeing the results.

4) Willingness To Listen

Advice, both from other experienced marketers on what they think you should be doing, and from customers on what they’d like to see from you, provide real direction for your business if you’re willing to keep your eyes and ears open. This sort of feedback and constructive criticism can make a huge difference to your bottom line.

5) Strong Work Ethic

Very few people become successful in any area of life without significant hard work before they got there. So get used to it, and get on with it. There’s no way round it.

If you haven’t noticed, there’s a new link at the top of Affiliate Confession leading to my Make Money Online page. This page covers nearly every affiliate program, affiliate network and even some individual systems I use to make money on the web. I don’t go into every individual affiliate program, because there are several in a few networks such as CJ. In fact, there are 27 different merchants I’m an affiliate of through CJ and at one time or another I’ve probably made a little money with roughly 75% of them.

I get several questions asking me what I do, or how I make money, or what affiliate programs I’m a part of, so to hopefully alleviate some of those questions I decided to put up the new page. I go into a little explanation of most of the programs I’m involved with and provide a link to that merchant. Unfortunately, one of my better merchants, TripAdvisor.com, no longer is accepting new affiliates. A couple of months ago they must have increased their payout because I started earning nearly double what I had previously earned without actually doing any more work or getting that much more traffic. Maybe they decided to pay their present affiliates more and not take on additional ones for right now.

It will be interesting to see what happens to my CJ income since eBay has switched over to the eBay Partner Network and now runs their own program. eBay was my biggest earner at Commission Junction to the tune of about 60% of my earnings there. But the EPN is looking real good at the present time and I’m seeing some very nice commissions reported so far. I also like that EPN is updating commissions early in the morning for the previous day rather than CJ taking 1 or 2 days at times for an update.

Anyway, check out the money makers page to see the merchants and affiliate programs that have been working for me. I’ll keep the page updated as I add new ones.