Chances are that you aren’t realizing the success that you dream about. You may be making money, but you know that there are thousands of other affiliates out there making tens of thousands of dollars more than you are. It sucks, but that’s just how it is, right?

Wrong. Those other affiliates aren’t geniuses, and they sure aren’t anything that you’re not. If they can do it, so can you.

It probably has nothing to do with the the offers that you’re promoting or the design of your website. Chances are good that you aren’t getting the kind of success that you want because of the things that you aren’t doing.

1. You don’t innovate, create, or even submit. If you spend the majority of your time thinking about new business ideas or marketing methods, yet you never seem to get any of them going, you’re wasting your time. Yes, you need good ideas to become successful, but you also need to focus on these ideas and get them going. If you have more ideas than you no what to do with, do what I do: register a domain related to the idea, write a quick blurb about the idea, and put in a folder where you can get back to it later when you have time. Focus on your current projects, finish them, and then expand.
2. You don’t have a plan. Making money on the internet quickly transforms from a personal hobby to a full fledged business. How do you plan to succeed? If you don’t have a business plan written down and memorized, don’t bother wasting your time until you do. If you don’t have a plan, someone else will, and they’re likely to become more successful than you simply because they’re going to follow it.
3. You don’t “just do”. All of the successful affiliates will tell you that they’re successful simply because they “just do”, as opposed to sitting around and dreaming about doing it. If you have an idea, pursue it. Buy a domain, make a site, and get the wheels in motion.
4. You don’t allow success. What I mean by this is that you don’t allow yourself the possibility to fully realize your successes. If you jump when you get a conversion, or spend every cent that you earn, you’re limiting yourself.Expand your business, and live off of the run-off. Don’t spend every cent that you earn- reinvest, grow, expand.

This is a good thing.

On Friday, I put in a 3 week notice at my current day job.  Over the past 2 months, I’ve seen what can be accomplished with affiliate marketing and I want to devote more time to it.

I’ll be at Affiliate Summit West next week in Vegas so feel free to drop me a line if you want to meet up.  I’m interested in meeting new affiliate managers, networks, and pretty much anyone in the biz since I’ll be doing this full-time.  I’m excited to ramp up an already decent revenue stream to only-dream-about levels.

The online economy is hot, and many people are making millions of dollars every year on the internet. These people are relatively new entrepreneurs, and they probably aren’t that much smarter than you. So, how come they’re making the big bucks and you aren’t?

There are a lot of reasons for this. A lot of reasons, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why one business will fail while another (seemingly identical) business succeeds. There are so many variables to a business (even online ones) that it’s impossible to say without analyzing every aspect of it. However, I did come to realize that one of the main reasons that online businesses fail to take off is because the owners of those businesses fail to accept and abide by a few simple truths:

1. Making money online is not easy. In fact, many people describe it as one of the hardest things that they have ever done. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but it also holds some truth.Anyone who expects to open an online business (be it affiliate, eCommerce, or otherwise) without a solid business plan and a method of attack will probably fail. It has nothing to do with luck or chance, but rather competition from other marketers who do have a plan and a method. Do your homework, make a plan, and work it.
2. People don’t mind shopping online. The myth that the majority of people don’t like shopping online is paramount, and it’s not even true. The internet is a multi-billion dollar per year economy, and you are losing money if you think that you can’t tap into some of that.
3. Advertising is big business €“ You may not even need to sell an actual product. Providing contextual or relevant ad space on your website can be quite profitable in its own right. However, in order to become valuable, you will need to have a website that logs frequent visits from unique users. Once you have that, you have an instant income stream.
   
4. A person is still a person. Regardless of who that person is, they are still just a person. Many affiliates forget this when they make their sites and frustrate themselves when their conversions are low. Do yourself a favor and remind yourself of this fact every single day.Ask yourself questions about the product you are promoting as you create your advertisement, landing site, or ad creative. Would I buy from an ad/site like this? What does this offer me as a user? The more intuitive you make your marketing, the higher your conversions will be.
5. Affiliate Marketing is need driven. By promoting a product, you are filling a need in the market. If the market is saturated before you enter it, your landing site and advertising will have to be exceptional; the market isn’t going to grow in size, but the number of people trying to serve it will.Get around this by finding markets that are in demand yer under served. It sounds daunting, but there are millions of markets like this.

If any of that made sense to you, congratulations! Understaning and accepting those truths is important in finding success. Looking at the affiliate industry with a myopic point of view will only hurt your success, not help it, so keep your mind open.

Having gotten into some new advertising platforms recently, I’ve realized something that can be vastly improved: daily stats tracking.

I love sites like Google Analytics, but I find that there’s so much buried data that I’ll never use.  And for everything else, it’s a pain logging into site after site, only to get one single piece of information, and then being unable to juxtapose that data with the previous stat.

Time to take this to the next level.

I like programming. Mainly Java for enterprise Web apps and storefronts, but PHP is the clear winner for every problem I’ve wanted to solve lately.  It’s literally the perfect Web/scripting language for affiliate marketing.

I program for a living full-time but am slowly starting to realize the value of automating literally everything possible. Why not dedicate a few hours a day now to save days and weeks in the future?

The script I started (and mostly finished) today logs into a few of my advertising and affiliate accounts (Facebook and OurFreeStuff currently), scrapes relevant stats data, and downloads the information to a local DB on my dedicated server. The next step is to build a reporting platform on top, using the same sort of open-source stuff I’ve been using up until this point. The script runs every X minutes (X is 5 at the moment), then queries the reporting system to provide me graphs with relevant metrics like leads/sales per hour, CTR at different times of day, which days of week give the most volume, etc.

Let’s step back first.

The main problem I’m trying to solve is: when I start a campaign, how can I know for absolutely sure whether it will be profitable?

It’s not even an option to work with affiliate networks that don’t provide real-time stats. I need to know now.  Or at least within the next 20 minutes from when I start receiving impressions.

For you fellow geeks out there (and the rest of you who want to be thoroughly confused, impressed, or annoyed), here’s the technology stack I chose:

• PHP using cURL for logging into Web sites, POSTing user/pass for authentication, and regular expressions for parsing data from returned-HTML
• MySQL for data storage, using a custom schema I came up with while considering business needs
• Linux Crontab for scheduling (every 5 minutes) - the goal here is I don’t want to even touch a single thing unless it’s CTRL + R in Firefox on my stats page
• JpGraph for colorful, useful graphs that show me the metrics I want

The beauty of all this?  Well, besides that it works, and it’s badass; it’s all FREE.  I love open source stuff.  Why re-invent the wheel, or why pay for the wheel when it so readily available?

A few weeks ago when I started thinking about this, I was almost going to outsource my stat tracking to a virtual assistant.  Timothy Ferriss’ of the Four Hour Workweek goes into great detail about how to basically automate your entire life.  Do you set goals or have a daily to-do list?  If not, well, maybe you should work on that. If you do, consider re-reading all your tasks/goals with one thing in mind: could I have someone else do this for me? If your time could be better spent starting campaigns or researching niches, why not pay somebody else to do your menial tasks? It’s amazingly cost-effective - every hour you spend doing affiliate marketing is insanely more valuable than collecting, gathering, and organizing data.  Let’s be honest - you can pay a high school freshman to do that.

Literally, Ferriss outsourced everything from his businesses’ customer service to ordering flowers for his girlfriend.  Pure genious.  When about ready to putt this in action, my plan was to outsource stat tracking and all the annoying (but important) tedious tasks I don’t enjoy doing - i.e. login to all my advertising, affiliate, and stats accounts and send me one daily email every morning with a nice, clean report with all the info I need.  And maybe I’d have him/her reserve a table at a hot LA sushi restaurant one week too.

But instead, I decided just to code it myself.  Refreshing one site (mine) instead of ten and get all the combined information should be more efficient.  Imagine being able to get only the relevant Google Analytics stats you want, combined with the impressions/clicks/CTR/etc. from your Facebook Ad Manager, and also stacked right up against the number of leads you’re generating from your affiliate account?

That’s 3 sites, all calcuated together: overall page views -> impressions -> clicks -> leads -> dollars.  Boom.

Anyway, that’s the idea, now time to get back to work so I can pimp this one out. If it ends up being worth something to someone, maybe I’ll just sell it or give it away for free, who knows!

But the point remains - focus on stats and tracking - for every successful campaign I’ve begun, I’ve started 3 that lost money or just simply didn’t perform.  The earlier you catch this, the better. 

It’s January 4, 2008. How much money have you made online this year?

I know of one affiliate who’s already made $4,000. I know of another affiliate that’s made $9,000. I’ve made $1,300.

So how about you, how much have you made?

I’m not asking you this because I want to brag about how much money I make, or how much money people are making, but rather the new year is already in full force, and if you haven’t been trying to ramp up your marketing efforts you are doing yourself a rather large disservice. After all, what better an opportunity than one with a completely new year and a completely new shot to try and make things work.

For me, the important fact is that this time last year I had only made $700, meaning that I’ve nearly doubled what I was making on a daily basis in just one year. If I can continue this trend for a few years I’ll eventually achieve my goal of $5,000 a day. The other important thing here is that I’ve stuck to my guns and worked as hard as I had to work, every step of the way, to ensure some kind of success. Whether it was launching new ventures, optimizing established ones, or just trying my hardest to get things done, I did what I had to do and the results have clearly shown this.

But, if you still are reading this blog and haven’t actually taken the time to try and get things going on for yourself, it likely comes down to one word: laziness. You’re too darn lazy to make money, aren’t you?

If you haven’t thought of a plan, do it now.

If you haven’t decided where to focus your efforts, do it now.

If you haven’t actually done any work in 2008 yet, do it now.

If you aren’t making any money, make it work.

After a few e-mails from people who are looking for a step by step tutorial on how to make money I’ve decided to talk about one of the methods that I recommend to newbies that does well and doesn’t cost much to start up. 

What You’ll Need:

• An account at a reputable CPA network.  I recommend ourfreestuff.net since I’m an affiliate manager with them, but really any CPA network will do so long as they are reliable and reputable.  Also, make sure that you can contact your affiliate manager easily.
• Web hosting.  Get a top-level domain name that can be used for nearly anything.  I like to use “media” or “marketing” names (www.salvomedia.com, for example) as a subdomain can be added and not look fishy in the eyes of the users (ie- freewii.salvomedia.com). 
• Basic HTML and knowlege.  If you don’t know any HTML at all check out www.htmlgoodies.com and read up untl youi’re comfortable with it.
• A Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing account.  You’re going to be running some PPC ads, so get an account and desposit $50 or so into it.

The Method:

First, this method does not have longevity each time you do it.   In other words, once you start doing it you’ll have to continue to do it in order to maintain your income.  That being said, it only really takesd about an hour to get set up.  I’ve been able to milk around $1,500 to $2,000 a pop out of this method over the course of a couple of weeks each time I impliment it, but your results may vary.

1. Read the newspaper, watch the news, and generally stay up to date with current events.  Look for big stuff (remember Micheal Vick and his dogfighting ring?) that lots of people will be searching for online.  This is going to be your meal ticket.
2. Once you have something juicy (ie- Paris Hilton getting into another car accident), make a quick survey page.  The purpose of this survey page is to direct to an affiliate offer.  Your survey page should basically say something like “Is Paris Hilton a Bad Driver?  Vote for your chance to win INSERT OFFER HERE“.  Both answers (yes and no) will redirect your simple and easy affiliate offer.  Mobile, e-mail, and zip-submits are all good for this.
3. Set up your keywords.  Make sure that they are all related to current events and that your CPC’s are about 5% of the offer payout.
4. Test, test, test!  If you find that after 200 clicks you haven’t had a conversion you know that something is up.  Test your tracking and make sure it’s working properly!

That’s it, it’s THAT easy!

Income Potential:

You could easily make $500 a day doing this, but keep in mind that search volume will trail off drastically as the news gets old.  For some quick cash, this method can’t be beat!

Misc.:

Obviously, use a top-level domain that is somewhat relevant to the news.  Test your tracking, make sure that your keywords are targeted, and generally use a bit of common sense here.

A great way to create a passive income stream is to find a product or service you want to promote, write some creative content about it, and promote it via PPC.  The idea is simple – if you can come up with a conversion ratio that, when multiplied by your PPC costs, exceeds the payout that the product or service gives you, then you win.  Winning is good.

Let’s start with an example, shall we?

The tricky part here is creativity – it’s 4-fold, really: you need to pick a good offer, come up with a nice domain, write some solid content, and create your ads wisely.  This took several iterations to get good at – and even now not every one of my sites are home runs. Here’s what I do, in super brief description, from end-to-end: 

• Think of a domain that would adequately describe the site without infringing on any trademarks
• Go to GoDaddy, register the domain, set up your dedicated hosting server (hopefully you have one if you’re serious about doing this!) to point to it
• Create a virtual host for the domain (I have lots of domains on the same physical server), create a directory for the Web site content, create a test index file to ensure everything’s working, and hit it in a browser to make sure the DNS has propagated
• Install Wordpress in the site’s root directory
• Pick a theme for the site that suits your content – for example, if you’re going to create content on a automobile offer, pick a suitable automobile theme
• Write, write, write.  Come up with some good content that is informative, fun to read, and serves a purpose of promoting whatever offer you chose.  This is extremely important because your content is a big part of your Google Quality Score, and this will affect your CPC costs down the road.  Remember that your content should be helpful, accurate and informational. 
• Link to your offer throughout your site but not in any sort of overbearing way.  The goal is to encourage visitors that the product or service is valuable and that entering their email or zip code is worthwhile.
• Start a PPC campaign with long-tail ad groups.  If you’re promoting paid surveys, for example, use keywords such as “make money online survey” or “free fun myspace survey” instead of just “paid survey” or “fun survey”.  The latter keywords are more expensive because they’re more common, and many times the market on those keywords is very saturated.

After implementing all these steps, you’ll be up and running!  Again, this is oversimplified, but this is a true end-to-end business that just about anyone can start.

In terms of what to do going forward, you’ll want to tweak each of these steps to a certain extent.  As I’ve listed them above, you’ll want to spend the most time tweaking the bottom step and work your way up.  For example, spend the most time on monitoring and modifying your PPC campaign, a bit less time tweaking your content, and even less time changing your Wordpress theme.

The details of the PPC campaign are key because if you’re not getting enough conversions to pay for your PPC costs, this will be a losing venture.  It’s as important to find diamond-in-the-rough offers with higher payouts as it is to keep your ad groups very targeted.  Low PPC costs and higher payouts give you a much higher margin of error for a lower conversion rate.

This may come off more as a rant than an actual informative article, but I feel the purpose remains the same and that the information is valid for all affiliates.  What annoys me the most, more than anything, EVER, is when affiliate networks give their affiliates the shaft for no good reason.  Without naming any names (as there is still time for retribution on the networks end), I am owed nearly $4,000 in commission that is being withheld because the ads were ran on a site that I hadn’t listed in my application.

Uhh…. what?  If I had to tell every affiliate network each and every site that I owned my application would be 10 pages long.  What’s sick is that there are affiliates with ten times as many sites as I have, yet you don’t see them listing off all of their websites in the application, do you?  No, because there are many ways to promote a product and SEM is simply one of them.

Take zip-submits or mobile offers, for example.  I probably have 30 different landing pages set up to capitalize on zip-submit traffic.  Should I list all of those as well?  I mean, I literally have thousands of web addresses for various websites and landing pages.

Anyways, coming back to the original topic, if affiliates can’t trust the networks that they run their ads from it has a very negative impact on the industry.  The affiliate marketing industry is so new that it has not yet established itself.  Tarnishing its reputation affects ALL affiliates, not just the individual affiliates or networks.

Wow, so Google has effectively killed AffiliateWeb’s search engine rankings with their latest algorithm update, sending us from number 3 for the term “zip submits” to… get ready for it… number 46 (as of this writing). I’m annoyed, but that’s not the point of this article.

Many forums and message boards (www.wickedfire.com, www.sitepoint.com, www.digitalpoint.com, for example) are starting to make threads and comments about how shady zip/e-mail submits are and how they aren’t experiencing any conversions with them anymore. From an affiliates perspective it is probably quite frustrating, and I get that. Truth be told, I’m not running half as many e-mail/zip submit campaigns as I used to simply because there are a lot of them that aren’t converting anymore.

But, the real question here is, “why aren’t they *converting?”
Read the rest of this entry »

Many people don’t realize that there is an additional effective way to generate traffic besides using PPC, link exchanges and e-mail.  It can be a strange concept at first - you can pay someone to “deliver” qualified, targeted Web surfers to your site?  Where do these people come from?

Here’s the deal.

There are suppliers who exist in the online business world solely to deliver traffic to other Web sites.  They can do it in a number of ways - most commonly, for example, they own a network of sites that already get a substantial amount of traffic, and using a variety of methods they can send organic traffic to other sites.

Let’s look at expired domains for example.  These are domains, for one reason or another, that were not renewed by the previous owner.  If they are still receiving a small amount of traffic, a supplier may see this and buy up the domain (they’re so cheap nowadays, why not?).  The supplier might then slap a portal-like page on the site (example: www.webtraffic.com), that links off to other sites of similar topics compared to the original site or domain name.  The key for these suppliers is to buy up LOTS of these sites so they can cover virtually any topic possible.  That way when you want to pay them to drive traffic to their site, they can pull up 100 sites of similar topics (e.g. clothing, books, dog bones, etc.) and put your link into the rotation there.  And now you’re receiving traffic.

From my experience, depending on how targeted I wanted the traffic to be, the visitors would flow in at variable rates.  For example, for one of my sites I wanted only UK visitors to see it because I knew that would yield the highest conversions (I was selling a product geared toward people in England).  I used Revisitors for this particular campaign (and subsequent campaigns) because they gave me the most flexibility in terms of how targeted I wanted my traffic.  Plus the campaigns easily paid for themselves because I sold products and services with a fairly high CPA (cost per acquisition).  By targeting specific demographics, traffic came into the site noticeably slower than my other campaigns, but I knew it was worth it because each visitor was coming from a UK address to possibly buy a UK service.  You can verify the traffic sources using a free tool like Google Analytics which will analyze your access logs and tell you exactly what countries the visitors are coming from (among many other useful metrics).
Read the rest of this entry »