help and advice for newbies and people who need a kick up the backside in 2009

[Seamaster]

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It would be interesting to hear from the people who managed to register one of smingle's domain suggestions and others who have started in AM from reading this thread about what has worked for them etc.

There only seems to be a handful of us posting and we seem to be in the same boat.

[bluebird]

I'm surprised at how many people despite reading all the advice on here are expecting AM to be an easy ride.

I've been an affiliate for about 8 months - I have one big site and a couple of niche sites. I guess I had an advantage that I'd worked as an affiliate manager for many years prior so understood the business.

My sites bring me in some nice pocket money but I have to work on them building links, writing content etc and I still have to rely on the whims of Google. I've also got a couple more sites in the pipeline which I will begin to build this weekend.

There's no way I expect my affiliate earnings to be bringing in the equivalent of a full time wage for quite some time yet - also, I'm not spending full time hours on affiliate marketing so it would be daft of me to expect it anyway.

This thread has got some brilliant advice in it - my advice would be stop reading and start building.

[pedigreechump6]

It would be interesting to hear from the people who managed to register one of smingle's domain suggestions and others who have started in AM from reading this thread about what has worked for them etc.

There only seems to be a handful of us posting and we seem to be in the same boat.

I can't claim to be very successful in AM as you might think of it but I do make a very nice living from some sites of mine (no I am not sharing them with you ) and there are some things that I have realised from reading this thread.

1) People are obssessed with making money through affiliates themselves and shun Google Adsense as a potential source of income. I have some sites which have pretty much no affiliate deals but get searched a lot and have a lot of advertisers on Adsense so I put up some good information and the users click, simple as that they click in their hundreds.

2) Finding a niche is tricky sure but you need to be creative and think outside the box. I have probably entered 5000 different keywords or phrases into the Google keyword tool in the last month alone and maybe 100 of them have been put in my excel spreadsheet where i keep "potentials". Of these I will probably only develop 10 or 20.

3) Patience is vital. I help several other people with websites to make them a small side income and I see impatience in all of them. When I first started out I was making a few quid a month, 6 months later it was maybe at £100 a month. Then things clicked, Google started to like my site a lot more and my traffic rose dramatically. But in all those months when I was making about enough for a pint down the pub I never stopped building backlinks, writing content and trying new sites too.

4) Risk and spending money to make money. As soon as I started making any money on my sites I put ALL of it back into them. I suggest you do the same if you really want things to take off.

I hope I have been of some help.

[karenlb]

my advice would be stop reading and start building

Exactly.

I made £2.99 yesterday. Whoopie - crack open the champagne - not.

However what did I really do yesterday? I wrote 5 posts, signed up to a couple of new merchants to promote, created four ECUs to use in the coming days, dugg a couple of pages, got myself a free Wordpress blog for one of my niches, and put submitted one of my sites to a few directories. All of that whilst running a family home with 2 kids under 6.

Not bad work for £2.99. But I know that in the end all that work will start to reap rewards - I didn't log into Affiliate Window expecting to see £100 in my account for all that work - but I will hope to see £100 a day at sometime in the future because of the work I do now. That is me done on here for today. I'm off to do some proper AM work!

[Seamaster]

I'm surprised at how many people despite reading all the advice on here are expecting AM to be an easy ride.

I'm not suprised at all. There were mentions of people using the information in this thread to help them out if they were about to be made redundant etc. I'm not saying there was miss-information, just that I can see how some people might have thought this would lead to them making money in the short-term future.

However what did I really do yesterday? I wrote 5 posts, signed up to a couple of new merchants to promote, created four ECUs to use in the coming days, dugg a couple of pages, got myself a free Wordpress blog for one of my niches, and put submitted one of my sites to a few directories.

I think we are all doing that amount of work each day and it should set us in good stead for the future, fingers crossed...

[Darren M]

I was dabbling with Affiliate Marketing for almost 10 years before I decided to go full time. When my monthly AM income exceeded the income from my day job I waited a whole 6 months before giving up the day job.

Most people fail at AM because they have no patience, which is good news for the people dedicated enough to stick with it. I've had plenty of failed projects and also projects that I felt like abandoning as the sites had no traffic and made no cash. I stuck with those sites, keeping them up to date for almost a year with no sales and nearly all of those sites bounced back and started making regular sales again.

I'm always getting requests from people (friends of friends) that want to get into AM and want me to talk them through it. Invariably they need some extra money ASAP and think AM is a way to make a quick buck. One guy actually said to me 'I want a job that pays me while I'm sleeping' and that was his main motivation! It seems that some people are attracted to the lifestyle and aren't aware of the amount of hard work needed to get them there.

[bluebird]

I'm always getting requests from people (friends of friends) that want to get into AM and want me to talk them through it. Invariably they need some extra money ASAP and think AM is a way to make a quick buck. One guy actually said to me 'I want a job that pays me while I'm sleeping' and that was his main motivation! It seems that some people are attracted to the lifestyle and aren't aware of the amount of hard work needed to get them there.

Ha - I get that too.

I respectfully suggest that if they don't have the inclination to go and do the research for themselves (online afterall!!) then affiliate marketing is probably not right for them!

[Darren M]

Ha - I get that too.

I respectfully suggest that if they don't have the inclination to go and do the research for themselves (online afterall!!) then affiliate marketing is probably not right for them!

I think you hit the nail on the head there. These are the people that have read a bit online and as it all sounded a bit too hard they've decided to talk to someone that has done it before. Then you're getting requests to reg domain names, setup hosting accounts, help with building websites... It's a long learning curve for some that's for sure.

Oops, are we going off topic here? :blush

[mcderd]

Paul,

Just looked at your power plates site.

It looks good to a human, but not sure how the search engines will see it as it does not validate properly.

If I click your link Valid XHTML 1.1 in your footer it fails with 242 errors and 166 warnings.

I think it would be time well spent ensuring every page validates properly.

Dennis

[smingle]

Ok I know alot of you have been missing me and emailing me, but the proof is in the pudding - I haven't had enough time recently to dedicate to this thread as I have been putting in the hours on my own projects, making my own projects work and looking after clients.

Paintence is all you need to succeed

[Matt Seigneur]

I just wanted to chime in although im pretty busy with projects and stuff wanted to say..

I had been doing AM for a few years when I met Frank. He guided me further and made me think different (completely differently, in fact), that I am now earning over twice as much in six months as I did in the year previous. I'm not one to kiss ass but if it wasn't for Frank the learning curve to get where i am today would have taken twice or three times as long.

[Chimpo]

OMG!
You mean I'm putting myself through all this self knowledge, all to get on the first google search page, to get zip!!

Surely not?

Are you saying that someone on the first page of Google searches can make nothing?

Been there for 2 weeks. Amazon links and google ads.

Nil, nada, nout, nothing.

[Miracle]

And I'm a full blown newbie with a strong desire to learn the trade. A year ago I bought a domain name which I thought was suitable for my first idea, and had no idea how to make it come true. Then I bought more domains and did not do anything with them. Since then, I've bought a book about AM and thought that that book was the best I'd ever read because it taught me so much in a nutshell. I only had to implement it, and I loved that work because I once used to work as a web designer and loved it. Then changed jobs and had a very busy last year. A couple of weeks ago I came back here and decided to participate instead of just reading. I did some research taught to me by my AM book, but did not know enough to interpret the results I saw. I assumed that my niche was okay to develop. Now, almost a year on, I am still stuck to it (maybe a mistake), but I have to develop this kind of a site even if it brings me nothing to start with. I am also looking at ohter niches while learning to know better. Thanks to all of you here

[fizzbird]

Now, almost a year on, I am still stuck to it (maybe a mistake), but I have to develop this kind of a site even if it brings me nothing to start with. I am also looking at ohter niches while learning to know better. Thanks to all of you here

Don't forget that a good site has many values other than what it returns in affiliate earnings.
A well established site with a lot of quality back-links can be a useful resource to have in your portfolio

[Seamaster]

I gathered this bit of info for a PM I sent to someone but thought I'd post it here too as it is relevant.

These are the stats for this month for a site I built from using the info in this thread, it was the first one I built and is the only one still on page one in google (at the bottom) which explains why it is still getting traffic (the other sites I made have all gone right down to page 10+):

01 March: 20 visitors from Google - 6 clicked through to amazon - 0 items ordered
02 March: 12 visitors from Google - 5 clicked through to amazon - 1 items ordered
03 March: 10 visitors from Google - 7 clicked through to amazon - 3 items ordered
04 March: 13 visitors from Google - 6 clicked through to amazon - 1 items ordered
05 March: 12 visitors from Google - 4 clicked through to amazon - 1 items ordered

The search term got 18,100 exact matches in Feb 2009.

It is worth pointing out that the items are £8 to £15 so it hasnt even covered the cost of the domain yet. As the items are low cost it is going to be much easier to convert as users don't have to think too much about making the purchase. I am using other merchants on my sites but none of them have converted (apart from a couple from ebay). I use ECUs and direct links but the direct links to amazon are the only ones to make sales for me so far.

This shows you can make sales with one of these pages but there are a few inmportant factors to consider:

• Are your items are things people actually want to buy not just look at?
• Is the merchant you link to trusted, well known and do they have a nice site that is easy to use and looks legit?
• Low-cost items seem to convert better
• If you arent on page one of Google you might as well start crying