OK, this is it. I know, I know, there are a ton of guides out there, most of them wanting money and most of them promising financial independence and near-instant wealth. You too can earn $3,768.18 a day!
Well maybe you can, but if that's the type of program you're looking for, read no further, because that's not the type of program I'm going to talk about.
I'm talking about a real, working-as-I-type-this program that has, for the last year, earned me between $1,000 - $2,000 a month. At my peak in December 2005, I had over $10,000 in revenue and just over $9,000 in gross profit.
But that's another story, for another time, and in another time, before the search engines had their huge affiliate crackdown in early 2006 and I went from $300 a day to $30. Ouch! Good thing I hadn't quit my day job....
That's probably worth making a rule: Don't quit your day job.
The type of pay-per-lead and pay-per-sale marketing I'm talking about can be a finicky beast, with companies and offers and products coming in and out of the marketplace and marketing terms being changed all the time. Nothing hurts quite so bad as having a well performing offer pulled out from under you or the terms changed to prohibit your most profitable marketing channel, but it happens all the time, for any reason (or for no reason at all).
Example: In 2007 I was doing $5,000 a month of a very popular diet program, only to have the company change their affiliate terms to prohibit pay-per-click marketing, because--Iwas told--they felt I was stealing sales they would have been getting! Bye-bye $5k....
This isn't to say if you ever do reach $3,768.18 that you couldn't quit. If you did, and it was coming in spread acorss a large number of offers and sites, and you had been saving $3,468.18 a day (or more) for the last 6 months, you still need to work. In that case, you probably don't.
If you're still reading, I'll assume you aren't making anything, or at least not that much, and you want to know the secret. By the end of all this, I think you'll see this isn't much of a secret at all. It's a proven method (at least proven for me in that it works and I get checks), based on some pretty solid and repeatable actions.
In other words, anyone can do it. But there are some things you need to have in place before you can get started.
Stay Tuned for Part 2: What you Need to get Started
Showing posts with label affiliate marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label affiliate marketing. Show all posts
Monday, August 03, 2009
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Taking the eCommerce Plunge
Phase 1: Affiliate Links
For almost 10 years now, I've been trying to earn a living online, enough so that I could work for myself and own my time. I've been very successful earning extra money, but I never made enough, and with enough consistency (the most important thing), to quit my 'real' job.
The most I ever made was almost $10,000 net in one month (December 2005). Up to that point, my revenue had been growing every month for the better part of a year. I was giddy.
In March 2005, just three months later, after a big affiliate link 'crack down' by the search engine, I made just under $400. I was no longer giddy. Good thing I hadn't quit my job!
Phase 2: Pay-per-sale and Lead Gen
I started tinkered with other affiliate marketing, pay-per-sale, and lead gen programs, this time looking for offers I could market through PPC, and thus have control over my fate: Pay the mony, show up in the results, thus elminating the organic component. I had success there as well, but once again learned that in such a system, my fate was not in my own hands. Driving the traffic was, but the offer itself.....
I would research the offers, register a domain, build a mini site, do keyword research, and drive traffic through PPC on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Some offers were successful, but most weren't. The ones that were I ran with, for the ones that weren't I simply stopped spening money on marketing.
The successful ones almost always ended up being retail offers for strongly branded products (think late night TV commercials). Time and again I would build the site and get the ads out only to be contacted after a month or two and be told that the terms had changed and I was no longer allowed to bid on trademark terms (usually the product name). Down came the ads, and away went the traffic.
As an example, I used to run an offer for Nutrisystem. My revenue was around $8,000 a month on $3,000 in spend for a profit of around $5k. I did this for three months and was then told to pull my ads. Bye-bye to $5K.
This scenario played out repeatedly and I finally gave up. Term changes (no more PPC!) or the offers being pulled unexpectedly, leaving me with a worthless site, finally wore me down. I pretty much stopped trying.
Most of my sites still sit out there since. I was hosting them myself on my own server and they don't cost anything. They'll stay until the domain names expire. Recently, some of the sites started picking up some significant organic traffic, mainly from Yahoo and Bing. I've since reworked these, found some good fitting offers, and currently make between $1,000 to $1,500 a month. Not much, but I'll take it. It gave me enough moeny to try....
Phase 3: Drop shipping
All this frustration ultimately led me to deciding I needed to have my own ecommerce site. No more depending on selling other people stuff. I'd sell it myself! I wanted to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible, so drop ship looked like the perfect solution.
After a bunch of boring research, I choose a niche, found a supplier, and went with a hosted cart solution. The niche I chose only had two drop shippers in it. I spoke to them both and did my due diligence. One was hopelessly disorganized and the other seemed to have their ducks in a row, so I went with them.
Alas, appearances can be deceiving. After getting the site configured and the inventory loaded, I went out slow, slow, slow with the marketing to test the waters. The orders started coming in. Not much, maybe an average of 1 a day. But it was a enough to rapidly figure out that the supplier took anywhere from 2-6 weeks to fulfill an order.
Tip: when people order something, 2 weeks is about the longest they'll wait before they start asking you where it is.
Added to this was the manul process of passing the order to the supplier. No automated solution there; I had to send email(s) for every order, send email(s) to ask if they got the orders, then send follow-up email(s) for them to notify me when the order shipped, then send the tracking number to the customer. Not smooth, not easy, not efficient.
Turns out their primary business is manufacturing for retail stores, so drop ship items got tacked when ever they had to fulfill a wholesale bulk order, hence the wait. Order a blue widget? Have to wait until a retail store ordered 50, then they would make 51 and send yours out.
So after 4 months of operation, I shut it down. I ended up breaking even for the effort, but it was a lot of effort and a lot of emails.
Phase 4: Do It All Yourself
Still searching for some way to escape my corporate overlords, I once again forged into ecommerce.
My dealing with the supplier mentioned above led me to believe that although they hadn't worked as a drop shipper, they would as a wholesaler. I already had a decent relationship with them. It was OK to wait 4-6 weeks to get your stuff when you had stock on hand to do your own fulfillment, all you had to do was order ahead to keep your inventory level up.
The drawback here was the cash outlay for inventory. The benefit was you were in charge of getting the item to the customer and you got another 20% off pricing for wholeslae orders over a certain amount. That gave me a larger margin to work with for profit.
So I re-engaged with them and am currently getting things lined up for yet another effort to break free of my corporate bonds....
Wish me luck!
For almost 10 years now, I've been trying to earn a living online, enough so that I could work for myself and own my time. I've been very successful earning extra money, but I never made enough, and with enough consistency (the most important thing), to quit my 'real' job.
The most I ever made was almost $10,000 net in one month (December 2005). Up to that point, my revenue had been growing every month for the better part of a year. I was giddy.
In March 2005, just three months later, after a big affiliate link 'crack down' by the search engine, I made just under $400. I was no longer giddy. Good thing I hadn't quit my job!
Phase 2: Pay-per-sale and Lead Gen
I started tinkered with other affiliate marketing, pay-per-sale, and lead gen programs, this time looking for offers I could market through PPC, and thus have control over my fate: Pay the mony, show up in the results, thus elminating the organic component. I had success there as well, but once again learned that in such a system, my fate was not in my own hands. Driving the traffic was, but the offer itself.....
I would research the offers, register a domain, build a mini site, do keyword research, and drive traffic through PPC on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Some offers were successful, but most weren't. The ones that were I ran with, for the ones that weren't I simply stopped spening money on marketing.
The successful ones almost always ended up being retail offers for strongly branded products (think late night TV commercials). Time and again I would build the site and get the ads out only to be contacted after a month or two and be told that the terms had changed and I was no longer allowed to bid on trademark terms (usually the product name). Down came the ads, and away went the traffic.
As an example, I used to run an offer for Nutrisystem. My revenue was around $8,000 a month on $3,000 in spend for a profit of around $5k. I did this for three months and was then told to pull my ads. Bye-bye to $5K.
This scenario played out repeatedly and I finally gave up. Term changes (no more PPC!) or the offers being pulled unexpectedly, leaving me with a worthless site, finally wore me down. I pretty much stopped trying.
Most of my sites still sit out there since. I was hosting them myself on my own server and they don't cost anything. They'll stay until the domain names expire. Recently, some of the sites started picking up some significant organic traffic, mainly from Yahoo and Bing. I've since reworked these, found some good fitting offers, and currently make between $1,000 to $1,500 a month. Not much, but I'll take it. It gave me enough moeny to try....
Phase 3: Drop shipping
All this frustration ultimately led me to deciding I needed to have my own ecommerce site. No more depending on selling other people stuff. I'd sell it myself! I wanted to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible, so drop ship looked like the perfect solution.
After a bunch of boring research, I choose a niche, found a supplier, and went with a hosted cart solution. The niche I chose only had two drop shippers in it. I spoke to them both and did my due diligence. One was hopelessly disorganized and the other seemed to have their ducks in a row, so I went with them.
Alas, appearances can be deceiving. After getting the site configured and the inventory loaded, I went out slow, slow, slow with the marketing to test the waters. The orders started coming in. Not much, maybe an average of 1 a day. But it was a enough to rapidly figure out that the supplier took anywhere from 2-6 weeks to fulfill an order.
Tip: when people order something, 2 weeks is about the longest they'll wait before they start asking you where it is.
Added to this was the manul process of passing the order to the supplier. No automated solution there; I had to send email(s) for every order, send email(s) to ask if they got the orders, then send follow-up email(s) for them to notify me when the order shipped, then send the tracking number to the customer. Not smooth, not easy, not efficient.
Turns out their primary business is manufacturing for retail stores, so drop ship items got tacked when ever they had to fulfill a wholesale bulk order, hence the wait. Order a blue widget? Have to wait until a retail store ordered 50, then they would make 51 and send yours out.
So after 4 months of operation, I shut it down. I ended up breaking even for the effort, but it was a lot of effort and a lot of emails.
Phase 4: Do It All Yourself
Still searching for some way to escape my corporate overlords, I once again forged into ecommerce.
My dealing with the supplier mentioned above led me to believe that although they hadn't worked as a drop shipper, they would as a wholesaler. I already had a decent relationship with them. It was OK to wait 4-6 weeks to get your stuff when you had stock on hand to do your own fulfillment, all you had to do was order ahead to keep your inventory level up.
The drawback here was the cash outlay for inventory. The benefit was you were in charge of getting the item to the customer and you got another 20% off pricing for wholeslae orders over a certain amount. That gave me a larger margin to work with for profit.
So I re-engaged with them and am currently getting things lined up for yet another effort to break free of my corporate bonds....
Wish me luck!
Monday, February 12, 2007
Money Making on the Web - Affiliate Marketing
Making money on the web is still very much possible, even for the hobbyist webmaster working in his or her spare time from the computer in the corner of the family room. Affiliate martketing is alive and well, albeit in a diffferent form than is was a few years before. Heck, if you've gone through all the trouble to learn ASP, you might as well try to put it to your own use!
For those of you who don't know, affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which you are rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale you drive through your efforts. So it's sort of like traffic directing - you send the traffic, and if the custoemr completes a transaction, be it a sale or sign up, you get a cut.
Merchants like affiliate marketing because it's "pay for performance", meaning the merchant doesn't pay anything unless there are results. Some merchants run their own affiliate programs while others use third party services like Linkshare, Commission Junction, or Performics for tracking.
At it's most basic level, it works like this: You build a site about widgets becasue you collect them. You talk about them and rate them and, on your review pages, you proviode an affiliate link to a store that sells widgets. If any visitors to your website click throguh that special link and buy a widget, you get paid. Sweet.
Getting started with an affiliate program is easier than you think. Just head over to Amazon and sign up (it's called their Associates program). Then, on your blog write a review of a book you just read or a DVD movie you just watched. Amazon makes it simple to look up that product and drop in a bit of JavaScript code that will put an image of the book or movie up along with a coded link. Visitors pour into your site, read your glowing review, and hasten over to Amazon (through your link) and snap up the book. Viola! Instant Taco Bell money!
Stay tuned for more advanced money making conversations....
For those of you who don't know, affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which you are rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, and/or sale you drive through your efforts. So it's sort of like traffic directing - you send the traffic, and if the custoemr completes a transaction, be it a sale or sign up, you get a cut.
Merchants like affiliate marketing because it's "pay for performance", meaning the merchant doesn't pay anything unless there are results. Some merchants run their own affiliate programs while others use third party services like Linkshare, Commission Junction, or Performics for tracking.
At it's most basic level, it works like this: You build a site about widgets becasue you collect them. You talk about them and rate them and, on your review pages, you proviode an affiliate link to a store that sells widgets. If any visitors to your website click throguh that special link and buy a widget, you get paid. Sweet.
Getting started with an affiliate program is easier than you think. Just head over to Amazon and sign up (it's called their Associates program). Then, on your blog write a review of a book you just read or a DVD movie you just watched. Amazon makes it simple to look up that product and drop in a bit of JavaScript code that will put an image of the book or movie up along with a coded link. Visitors pour into your site, read your glowing review, and hasten over to Amazon (through your link) and snap up the book. Viola! Instant Taco Bell money!
Stay tuned for more advanced money making conversations....
Thursday, August 24, 2006
What is Affiliate Marketing?
What is affiliate marketing? I get this question a lot. Simply put, affiliate marketing is selling someone else's stuff and then getting a cut. It's a pay-per-action model, where the affiliate marketer gets a percentage of each sale (pay-per-sale) or a fee for every sign up (pay-per-registration) or lead (pay-per-lead) he or she generates.
So www.Widgets.com sells widgets. You happen to collect widgets as a hobby. You build a site about your widget collection and on that site you have an affiliate link to www.Widgets.com. Whenever anyone clicks through that link and buys a Widget, you get a percentage of the sale. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Some companies run their affiliate programs in-house (eVitamins for example). Others use affiliate management companies. The big four affiliate management companies are:
I'm also an affiliate of Affiliate Fuel. Affiliate Fuel is a pay-per-lead and pay-per-registration outfit.
The nice thing about affiliate marketing? Anyone can do it. All you need is a computer. Depending on the product or service you are marketing, you might not even need a web site. The lead and registration generation I do for Affiliate Fuel is exclusively through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, mainly Google AdWords, and to a lesser extent Yahoo Search Marketing (previously known as Overture).
Personally, and based on my experience since launching my first affiliate marketing effort in July of 2000, I think it has gotten much harder to make money in affiliate marketing. There's a more competition, the search engines are much less tolerant of affiliate marketing sites and links, new rules prevent bidding on trademarks in PPC, advances in spyware and mal-ware, a general decrease in commissions... all of this and more has made it difficult to start a new site, drive traffic to it, and sell stuff for someone else.
Nevertheless, if you are looking for a way to potentially make some money on the Internet in your spare time, affiliate marketing remains an option worth investigating.
So www.Widgets.com sells widgets. You happen to collect widgets as a hobby. You build a site about your widget collection and on that site you have an affiliate link to www.Widgets.com. Whenever anyone clicks through that link and buys a Widget, you get a percentage of the sale. Sounds easy, doesn't it?
Some companies run their affiliate programs in-house (eVitamins for example). Others use affiliate management companies. The big four affiliate management companies are:
- Commission Junction
- Linkshare
- Performics
- BeFree (owned by Commission Junction)
I'm also an affiliate of Affiliate Fuel. Affiliate Fuel is a pay-per-lead and pay-per-registration outfit.
The nice thing about affiliate marketing? Anyone can do it. All you need is a computer. Depending on the product or service you are marketing, you might not even need a web site. The lead and registration generation I do for Affiliate Fuel is exclusively through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, mainly Google AdWords, and to a lesser extent Yahoo Search Marketing (previously known as Overture).
Personally, and based on my experience since launching my first affiliate marketing effort in July of 2000, I think it has gotten much harder to make money in affiliate marketing. There's a more competition, the search engines are much less tolerant of affiliate marketing sites and links, new rules prevent bidding on trademarks in PPC, advances in spyware and mal-ware, a general decrease in commissions... all of this and more has made it difficult to start a new site, drive traffic to it, and sell stuff for someone else.
Nevertheless, if you are looking for a way to potentially make some money on the Internet in your spare time, affiliate marketing remains an option worth investigating.
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