Make Money With Affiliate Programs

Listen up …

1. Please, co not try to reinvent the wheel. Go and research what your competition’s doing and get to know what’s working for them. Try different keyword tools to get a glimpse how you could build your campaign. This will get you on a competing level with them right from the get go. Copying your competition is not the right way to get your campaigns into making profit from the start even some may tell you that. Try something else, try to beat them not by raising the bid prices but improving your ad copy i.e. Once you start making consistent sales, then you’d get more playful and tweak the things step by step.

2. Try to go go after buyer-type keywords. These are the keywords like “name of product” or “name of product+review” or “buy name of product” etc. This will this make your conversion rates higher than just raising the bid price all the time. There are many other variations, but the point is to make sure you target the buyers, not the lookers.

3. Test and Track. I failed to do this from the start, and I lost a lot of money because of it. Track your keywords, landing/squeeze pages, etc. If you don’t know where your traffic and sales are coming from, you will lose a lot of money.

4. Use opt-in E-Mail. Many people are not in the mood to read in the moment visiting your site but generally interested in the topic you deliver, so they may leave their e-mail address. It’s a small effort to implement aWeber i.e. but great success giving you the key to get them back to your site using a good autoresponder.

Recently I applied for the Shareasale affiliate network and got approved, almost instantly.

I immediately set up a campaign promoting EfficientPPC. A nice gadget for every PPC marketer. You can set up adwords campaigns fast as hell. Well then. After struggling with CJ and Linkshare for years, I was surprised to have sales flowing right away

That’s what I experienced so far:

• Shareasale gives Affiliates/Publishers access to product databases upon a merchant’s acceptance into a program. There’s no surcharge for product databases!

• Direct Deposit is available for Affiliates/Publishers ($50 minimum). But not to all countries, most though!

• They require merchants to have a certain amount of money “on their account” to pay Affiliates, (YOU!) - they periodically take merchants offline having “low funds”. Good to know you get paid end of month.

• Their merchants do provide a lot of banners and codes for your usage

Shareasale is one of the biggest network programs available at the moment. They have some good niche merchants and Brian, the owner, is a really cool guy. Everyone who’s not performing that well with CJ i.e. should definitively check out Shareasale.

Take following steps, if you don’t want to spend any money:

1. Create a blog on http://www.blogspot.com on the subject of your choice (preferably choose a subject which interests you).
2. Use some neat and clean template and put your Google Adsense code on it to earn the dollars.
3. Give one hour every day to your blog and try to write two GOOD posts (current events, news, reviews etc) on the topic.
4. Submit each of your post to all the famous bookmarking sites like digg, netscape etc. (this will take extra 10 mins)
5. Go everyday to http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65 and see the NEW DIRECTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS in the section. Submit your site to two new directories every day free of cost.
6. Register with some forums in your niche and put your website URL in your signature. Use the forum everyday for half an hour and interact with people in the forum
7. When you start getting some traffic from bookmarking sites or forum threads or search engines, you will be making some money out of it in Google Adsense.
8. When you get your first $10, start hunting for cheap links for your blog. Remember to get ONLY related links. Please remember to put all your money back into the site (promoting it) for quite some long time. Then will only it will rise.
9. Get more and more links when you get more and more money. That will give you more and more traffic. Which means more and more money.

So these are the steps I think I can tell you. Do let me know if you actually plan to follow them.

So the main points here were to get some free traffic first, which will make you some money, use that money to get some paid links, which will increase your traffic further.


Yesterday I was discussing with him like how is his project going. So he showed me his Google Adsense for the last month (6th month). In his 6th month he made around $502. But he has put in all the money he has earned back into his blogs promotion.

Today his 300+ post strong blog (niche: cars specs and news) gets around 1200 uniques per day and make him around $500/month. He says, he still does not need any money right now, so he will be using all his money back into his blog for next 6 months.:)

To continue this story, after suceeding with a blog, in means that you get more than 500 UV a day and actually having returning visitors the next natural thing would be to join an affiliate network, looking for products related to the blog topic, i.e. Shareasale or Azoogle are having good programs and various offers. They earn earn you some additional money to the PPC income and maybe you even create a downline of affiliates earning you more passively.

Well done.

This morning I checked the stats for one of my programs and suddenly an idea popped up: Since most of the sub affiliates are just signing up but not promoting a lot you could buy a product trough them so they have a sale, what motivates their attitude promoting your product -> leverage effect

The easiest way to earn money with affiliate marketing is by using Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising.
To pay the advertising costs you need some cash at hands, but revenue is only a matter of hard work and time.
Remember: If you want to make money you need to spend money mostly up front you earn some.

1. Create a site. Use an own domain, get a cheap hosting account for it, put up a Wordpress blog and choose a free theme (takes the hassle out of creating a site) and you’re in business.
2. Depending on which niche you choose you have to pick an appropriate domain, one which makes sense the SEO-way. If you don’t have a clue, make the site around an affiliate marketing offer i.e. an ebook reviewed on this site (Have a look at the products listed with images on the right side of this page). It could be a product or a service in just any niche you want. Almost every niche got it’s affiliate program these days. Compare them and pick one. Don’t spend to much time researching, take action. I recommend you pick a niche you have a clue about and maybe can contribute some quality articles or blog posts (Regarding your your future blogs or sales pages)! There are no bad or good picks, everything can work out in it’s own right way if done correctly. If you are lazy super-affiliate like me, then choose a product that is attractive for the end user and serves some type of beneficial purpose. Affiliate networks like Clickbank, Azoogle, MoreNiche (promoting MakeingYouRicher.com) or NeverBlueAds have tons of offers, I’m sure you can find one. Try and keep out of the ringtones and finance/mortgage niches for now. Those are very busy and established niches with many super-affiliates in having years of experience and bringing in lots cash, making it difficult to compete with.
3. Good, having picked your product, make a blog post about it on your blog (You could have set up and own blog on your hosting account or an account on blogpost i.e.). If you don’t know that much about it, do some quick research on Wikipedia or bit G. It’s also a good idea to put a banner up or a full page ad for it if you aren’t going to write a blog post about it. Either way, make sure the theme of the blog is matching the product you are promoting. Using the same color scheme as the page the user will get forwarded to in order to buy something from you is obvious.
4. After you set up the hosting, the domain and blog packed with content, comes the next issue: traffic, the fun part though! You can either use Google Adwords, Yahoo SEM or MSN AdCenter to promote it on the big engines. Take $100 i.e. and deposit it into yahoo SEM. For Adwords you’ll preferably need a CC. With Adwords you can start off right away, but with MSN and Yahoo you may have to wait a few hours until they activate your account and approve your ads.
5. You don’t have to buy  every keyword tool under the sun, use the Google Keyword tool and have a look at Keyword Elite. It’s coty but nevertheless a class of it’s own. But in advance, let’s do a bit of manual work. First have a look at the affiliate publisher’s page and pull keywords off there by hand. You can search with the Google Keyword Tool using them as starting point. Use synonyms and your own mind (What would you type in looking for that certain product?). Primarily we focus on LONG TAIL KEYWORDS. We don’t want the one or two word keywords because they are very competitive and therefore expensive. Many people are using them for research purposes and mostly don’t a “buy now” - mindset.
6. After you successfully grabbed those long tail keywords, is what you should do first is to get a nice long list of longtail keywords of what you think people are using when they are in “buying mode” when searching on the engines for your product. So if the product is some kind of energy drink, your keywords would be: buy energy drinks, best energy drink, recommended energy drinks. Those are pretty good, and sure, they are nowhere near as robust as something like “energy drinks” or “energy drink” but they are more likely to be in buying mode than researching mode.
7. Great, we have our keywords, the site, the domain, the product. Wonderful, now on to getting some traffic finally! Take those groups of keywords and make one primary campaign for them in AdWords and the sub-campaigns for them based on which keyword theme they are.
8. Finally, when you’re done with all of the above steps mentioned it’s time for the next very important step, change the keywords so they are all EXACT and PHRASE matching. You can even go as far as to create a seperate ad group for every mother phrase, but sometimes this is an overkill and may also screw up your other campaigns.
9. Will it make you millions? We doubt that. Be realistic: Try things out and learn them for yourself before you can pass judgement on it or decide it’s “too hard”, it’s actually not hard at all. It’s easy shit compared to any job offline that you may have had to do for a pittance. Stop sitting on your lazy ass finished reading this, go out and do something about it! Luck is in your hands.

Recently we had a discussion on DP forums. This is what we go in the end to answer this particular question. Ways to promote your own affiliate program:

• Create a good sales page first (with own domain, SEO-optimized), Get feedbacks on on TFC or DP forums from more experienced fellow internet marketers.

• Create several Blogs covering your niche to increase your SE ranking. Link to your sales page. SEO fine tunning is important.

• Make a viral ebook

• Use affiliate directories where you can list your program on

• Search for email lists regarding your niche. You could use following methods to get into a newsletter without knowing the author pesonally:

1. Give him a preview of the product/service for free if they will review it in their newsletter
2. Offer him an extra incentive (i.e. more money) if they promote your product from beginning (launch).
3. Offer them to give his list members an extra bonus/discount
4. Pay for an ad

• Pay for advertising in places where webmasters gather

• Try forum advertising, Adwords, and in the end compare results.

Dear fellow marketers

Finally, being in the comfortable situation having quit the day job and only earning money online, working at beaches and internet-bars I had to notice, once again: Adwords campaign management is taking so much time. Having arrived on a level of managing about 30 campaigns with almost 100 ad-variations per campaign and struggling with slow internet connecitons here in Thailand, Testing and Tracking takes up to 4h daily.

Adjusting the min bid is the main task though. I like to set up the campaigns on paper first (If you just trial and error, it will be very time consuming to proper them afterwards)
I’m really considering hiring someone to manage the ads now.

Here a nice photo from last night (Koh Samui):