www.affiliateconfession.com

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.

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.

I’ve been reading and thoroughly enjoying Aaron Wall’s SEOBook mainly because Aaron takes a very honest look at building businesses on the net, providing value for your visitors and what it takes to make a successful web site. In reading SEOBook I came across a quote that’s by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Internet (sorry Al Gore, the net wasn’t your baby). Aaron quotes a longer passage by Tim of which I’m only using a couple of sentences:

Core in my upbringing was a value system that put monetary gain well in it’s place, behind things like doing what I really wanted to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s sights on cash rather then what will actually make them happy.

While it is apparent to those of us who either work at home or are striving to do so, that working at a job and climbing the corporate ladder probably is not the thing that will make us happy, we can be equally as culpable in the things we strive for in the Dot Com world. I’ll be the first to raise my hand, not very high, and somewhat sheepishly exclaim, “guilty”. The prevalence of the get-rich-quick mentality on the Internet can be a detrimental influence that must be tamed.

What about you? What’s your perspective on the things that really provide happiness?

I’ve been telling my wife Jean for quite some time that if we could find a nutritional supplement company that wasn’t an MLM, that had an affiliate program, that we could do via the web only, that sold organic supplements with no artificial ingredients in them, then we might check it out and join up.

In setting all those conditions I thought I’d probably never be involved with nutritional supplements again. However, I believe we’ve found such a supplement company and it’s even better than all my conditions required, because it has a multi-tiered affiliate program.

All those conditions have been met in NuBody Supplements. I first read about NuBody in a review on John Chow’s site and I was excited about them because of the completely organic and 100% natural ingredients in all of their products. I have looked at several network marketing companies’ supplements including Melaleuca and others and they contain ingredients such as silicone dioxide and titanium dioxide used as anti-caking agents that I would rather not put into my body. I don’t have to worry about NuBody because none of their nutritionals contain these ingredients.

As I was writing this post I was emailing back and forth with customer service for some more specific information and my questions got passed on to the founder of the company. He emailed me back and this is what he said about their philosophy on those chemicals used in some other supplements:

Hi this is Ken Causey I’m the founder of NuBody Supplements, I would just like to thank you for your interest in our products.  Before I decided I am much happier being an entrepreneur, I was working on a Physics degree focusing on Nanotechnology with a minor in Biology, and while studying towards these degrees I learned a lot about titanium dioxide and other “ingredients” that are found in many major products, and what these really do to the human body. That is why we refuse to use them in any of our products…

We normally take very few supplements because we believe you should always get your nutrition from the food you eat in the form of fresh fruits and vegetables. However, we do realize that there are times such as when traveling or if you just can’t get to the store when a good nutritional supplement is the next best thing.

One of the supplements that caught my eye was NuBody’s Organic Health Mutli-Vitamin that contains a variety of vegetables, grasses, sprouted grains, herbs, anti-oxidants and more. Click on the link above and then click the link that says Click Here To View Ingredients when you get to that page to see everything that goes into these vitamins. They also have a supplement called Brain Control that can help you increase your mental activity and alertness, something I need dearly.

NuBody Affiliate Program

With NuBody you also have a chance to earn some money as an affiliate. For those of us with nutritionally based websites these supplements really are the perfect fit. As an affiliate, you receive 35% commission on the retail sale of their products, plus you get a 5% commission for any affiliates that sign up under your account. And if that’s not enough, you get a monthly commission if people are on autoship and there is a 365 day cookie for any returning visitors. I don’t know of many affiliate programs that are better than that. We are affiliate of VitaminShoppe.com and only get a 10% commission on their supplements.

NuBody Supplements is also running a contest for bloggers and affiliates. If you write a post on any of their supplements or the affiliate program you will be entered in a contest to win one of four prizes that include your choice or either a 8GB iPhone, 16GB iPod Touch, Xbox 360 Elite or a Playstation 3 80GB. You will also get a coupon to receive 50% off your first order. They are also having a contest for the affiliate who sells the highest number of units and the winner will also have their choice of one of the prizes listed above.

My Own Contest

I think this is a great opportunity for affiliates to make a nice income and I’ve already joined NuBody’s affiliate program. As soon as I get my coupon for writing this post I’m going to place an order for 2 bottles of Brain Control and give away one bottle valued at $50 to a fortunate reader of Affiliate Confession.

Also, if I were to win one of the contests Nubody is sponsoring I will choose the PlayStation 3 and give it away here on the blog. I’m not really into gaming, so I think it would be a great prize to give away to my readers.

If you are interested in making money with NuBody Supplements you can sign up as an affiliate here.

Alan