Archive for the ‘Affiliate Marketing’ Category
About two weeks ago I quit my day job. I just didn’t see eye to eye with my employer. I wasn’t making enough yet through my online businesses to cover what I made at my day job either. I still don’t make what I made there. I am getting closer and closer every day though. I would say that within the next two weeks or so I will get to the point where I am happy with my online income. I have learned a few tips and tricks over the past couple of weeks that have really boosted my progress with my online business goals. You may think that my tips are some sort of big affiliate marketing secret that involves sneeky tricks to get people to purchase products that I push but they really aren’t. The tricks that I have learned that have boosted my progress the most involve rethinking how I look at my business and just flat out getting more organized.
What do I mean by rethinking how I look at business? I no longer look at affiliate marketing as a way to make money. I have to look at it as a way of providing a service to people. Basically, the trick is to look for something that people need and try to fill that need. For example, instead of trying to plaster banner ads all over all of my blogs, I am focusing my time on writing articles to teach people how to do things. Why focus on plastering banners everywhere if you are not providing something that people want in order to get them to your site. Provide the content that helps people and generates traffic and the people will trust you and value you recommendations more.
What I meant by getting organized is that I have better structured my days. Since I am focusing on this full time now, it is hard to keep focused. The biggest tip that I can offer to stay focused is to create a list. Write down all of the tasks that you intend to complete during the day and just start working down the list. My biggest struggle has been too much research. I spend time in the forums and downloading ebooks and not enough time taking the actions that move my business forward. I get overwhelmed with information when I really know what I need to be doing. I neeed to be writing, and I need to be promoting. Those are the tasks that I see a return from. I do, however, set aside some time do some research. I love learning about different marketing techniques. I add about 1 hour of my day to focus on research and I put it on my list. Once I’ve used that hour, I check it off my list and I move on.
If you want to create a business out of online marketing, the two biggest tricks that I can possibly teach are to rethink and to get organized.
Joe and I have spent time and money hunting for the best tips and techniques to get going in affiliate marketing. We want to make sure that we’ve got the strategies right, we are promoting companies in an ethical and acceptable manner, and above all, we are making money. We’ve purchased e-books, hard-copy books, videos and joined various training programs. We want to make sure that what we are doing is going to work. The funny thing about all of this is that the absolute best information that we have come up with so far, we haven’t had to pay a cent for. That’s right… All of the best information about how to be a successful affiliate marketer is totally free. There are so many discussion boards and blogs filled with people that just love to share information. Some of them have ulterior motives but many just want to help. Some of my favorite posts about success in this industry are in the forum at ClickBankSuccessForum.com. I highly recommend flipping through the posts and learning what those guys are teaching.
This post isn’t to say that you should completely steer clear of the e-books and the various programs that cost money to learn. Many of them have amazing advice and will give a different angle on various techniques. I have several at the moment that I am really fond of. I will probably make an eventual post of various e-books that offer sound advice. My best advice right now on buying in to programs about affiliate marketing is to steer clear of any ad campaign that claims to make you rich overnight. If there is anything that we’ve learned in this hunt for knowledge of this industry is that it takes a lot of time, dedication, and can be extremely hard work. Some people may get lucky and get rich overnight. It is highly unlikely that you will repeat that success, not to mention there is no saying that whatever method was used then is a relevant method to use now. Be careful, do you homework, and remember that if it sounds too good to be true… It probably is.
-Matt
My name is Matt Wolfe and, along with my buddy, Joe Fier, we are diving in to the affiliate marketing world. We are starting from the beginning and blogging about our progression through this world that holds so much potential. We will talk about what steps we have taken and what types of things are generating results. We ultimately plan to quit our day jobs and focus on this endeavor full time. Right now, it’s a hobby and a way to make extra money.
Since I want to give you the whole picture of how we started, I need to explain where we are at now. About two and a half years ago, Joe and I learned about blogging. We learned that, using wordpress, we could easily create websites that we can share our ideas, talk about our goals, and track or progress. We started by creating a blog about personal finance called How I Will Be Rich. We thought it would be a good way to learn. They say that teaching is the fastest way to learn. A few months after creating that site, we decided to dive in to discussions about health, fitness, and relaxation. We created the blog Be Healthy and Relax. We loved posting our ideas, personal progress and interacting with readers. It was very rewarding for us.
Not long after creating our blogs we learned that money can actually be made with these things. We learned about Google Adsense and Text-Link-Ads and quickly started generating little bits of money here and there. This was the coolest thing in the world. We can write journals about things that interested us in our free time and actually get paid a little extra money here and there to do it.
We learned that one of the best ways to promote our blog was to be active participants in the blogging community. We posted on others blogs and learned about various other opportunities that existed. One particular blog that we frequented was called Shoemoney. This blog discussed affiliate marketing and how to make money in that field. Joe and I started planning and executing our plans to become affiliate marketers. We bought a couple of ebooks on the topic, formed a general partnership, filed for a tax id number and opened a bank account.
That leads me to where we stand today. We are members of a few affiliate marketing firms and we are beginning to plan our various campaigns to test the waters of this industry. Bookmark this page if you want to follow our journey, learn from our mistakes, and profit from our learnings.
-Matt
