www.affiliateconfession.com

I’ve been hearing this ridiculous commercial on talk radio in our area lately from beach bum Ty Coughlin of the Reverse Funnel System (sorry dude, no link) and it’s beginning to make me ill. The radio spot starts out with Ty laughing like some big shot, bragging about making a bunch of money on the Internet and then going into his spiel about how a group of his students just passed the $10 million mark with his system and they’re now ready to take on another group of students.

Some time back I had someone ask me to do a review of this system and I asked to actually see it before I did the review, and guess what the answer was…Sorry, I can’t do that. This kind of nonsense should raise red flags, make the hair on the back of your neck stand up and alert your Spidey Sense, or if you’re normal it should just make you want to flee like the bad guys you see on COPS. Don’t ask questions, just run!

I think to get into this deal, you have to pay $50 up front just to turn in your “application” and find out what it’s all about and then it’s another higher monetary commitment after that. Remember, don’t ask, just run.

This is where the Internet gurus get you to believe you can “make money on the internet” just like they did and to play nice I’ll just call it a misconception instead of what it really is, propaganda. Telling people they will make money on the net is a flat out scam. It gets you to believe that all you need is the cyberforce of the web and a computer and you can be rich too. The terminology is used to deflect the desperate into thinking they don’t have to work and do what it really takes to succeed online, build a business.

Gurus claiming they make money from the net or whatever line they’re using is like saying the guy we buy produce from at the flea market is “making money from the flea market”. No, he has a business at the flea market and he busts his tail setting up shop, ordering produce, doing paperwork, stacking watermelons, sweeping the floor, unpacking his truck and so on. The flea market has no magic, it’s the work that John does in his produce business that puts food on his table and pays his bills.

The Internet has no Luke-Skywalker-magic-use-the-force-power either, it’s just a tool like a hammer, it ain’t going to work unless you use some elbow grease and swing it or get really smart and get one of those powered ones where all you have to do is pull the trigger. But nothing’s going to happen unless you have something to put nails into.

Set up shop and use the Internet as a tool to build a business and stay away from the guys that tell you you can build a building without getting sweaty and pounding some nails.

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The following is a guest post by Jerry from NicheFree.com where you can find Free Niche Marketing Ideas.

Finding a great idea for a niche market is as easy as standing in line at the grocery store.

Next time you are standing around waiting for the cashier to ring you up, take a few minutes to browse through the gold mines along the counter – the magazines.

Want to know what people are buying? Look in the pages before you – and take notes.

Check out the topics on the front cover. They are probably about finances, weight loss and health. Then dig deeper and see what the articles are about. What specific issue do they address?

Another great way to get ideas? Check out all of the small mini-magazines and booklets at the counter. Those are also full of great ideas for niches.

I keep a small notepad with me and jot down notes as I shop. (Why not get ideas for making money while I kill time, right?)  I can get 10 or 12 ideas in a single afternoon of running errands. Do I use all of them? No, of course not, but out of 10 or 12 I can usually have an idea I use.

Here is how I got  an idea for a wonderful niche:

While waiting in line, I saw several booklets for diabetics. Magazine articles, too. But I also saw one booklet that had quick, easy recipes that were diabetic-friendly. Hmmm…

So I started a blog that has recipe tips for quick, easy meals that are suitable for diabetics. I put up about 10 posts to put some good content on there and attract visitors. How do I monetize that? Simple. I use Adsense and I advertise products that promote diabetes control through a healthier diet (because it is a blog with meal tips) as well as Once a Month Cooking (TM).

Using the ideas all around you, you can create a moneymaking website or blog in a matter of hours – and be making money soon after.

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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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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.

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I’ve been listening to The Black Ink Project over the last 6 weeks and have been impressed with the speakers, the thoroughness of the material Jeremy Palmer has prepared and the step-by-step instructions he and all the other speakers have been giving since the beginning of the class. The first week was pretty basic stuff for me, but it was valuable information for affiliate marketers just getting into the business, because it is info that everyone needs to know.

After listening for these several weeks to the BIP I’ve decided I’m going to reveal the secret to making money in affiliate marketing and I learned it by listening to the BIP. I hope Jeremy isn’t going to be too upset with me for revealing this secret to those of you who haven’t been taking the class.

Okay, here it is, the secret to being successful and creating vast riches on the internet…

There really is no secret. Hard work is the way to make money on the internet.

There, now you know. I’ve known this secret for some time, but the Black Ink Project has just confirmed it. Honestly, I thought listening to the BIP would be it and it would propel me to super affiliate status just by listening in. What I realized when listening to either the 11th or 12th session was that all of what I was hearing wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before. What made the most impact though was that the principles being talked about were being done on a persistent and consistent basis by Jeremy and the other presenters.

Oh yea, they also each do their own thing and are focused on what they do. Jeremy Palmer builds his affiliate web sites, Amit Mehta does PPC, Aaron Wall does SEO, everybody does their specialty. But their secrets, and anyone else who has made a decent amount of money online, are that they have been in the trenches, failed, lost money on PPC, built crummy web sites, had dumb ideas and then succeeded with something, and then something else and so on and so forth. The amount of money someone makes from their internet businesses is probably proportional to the amount of failures, plus the amount of work, plus the amount of time they’ve been doing affiliate marketing and been online.

I can tell people want to earn a quick buck and don’t put that formula together by some of the questions and comments I get on this blog. People ask me all the time, “How do you get traffic to your BANS stores?”, “Where do you submit your articles?”, “How do you come up with ideas for blogging?”, “How do you find keywords?”, “How many web sites do you have?” And while those are all good questions, the fact that people ask them so often, tells me that they want a short cut instead of taking time to read this blog, because the answer to all those questions are right here if you take the time to look and dig in.

It’s just like someone buying the latest “Make A Million Dollars With This Secret” ebook. Nintey-nine percent of those things are ripoffs, but people want shortcuts instead of taking the time to get into the trenches and learning this stuff on their own or at least doing some research and finding most of this information is available for free all over the net.

Sure, every guru has their little secrets they don’t want to tell because many times letting a secret out of the bag ends up ruining it for everyone. I have my secrets and you will develop your own once you read enough, lose enough money on PPC or whatever and then start developing techniques of your own just by thinking outside the box and putting all the pieces together. But you can’t put all the pieces together if you don’t build the puzzle by hand yourself.

Get in the trenches, get dirty, lose money, get mad at the bad advice you learned in that $97 ebook, take notes along the way and begin building your internet empire from all of that experience. That is the secret.

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