I have been dabbling in Affiliate Marketing for about 6 months now, however it has really been sporatic until recently.  One of my New Year’s resolutions was to increase my personal income dramatically by mid-year.  I believed that the best way to do this with long term thoughts was to increase my exposure with affiliate marketing.

So starting January 1, I made my self more involved with the Ebay Partner Network and started researching niches that I have some knowledge in on Tearpeak.  With this information in hand I started building Wordpress blogs with a few articles and a lot of Ebay ads using PHP-Pro.  I decided to use PHPBay-Pro versus BANS (Build a Niche Store) because of all of the headaches that a few friends of mine were having getting delisted from Google faster and faster.

Here are the steps that I have been taking to get my sites online and making money:

1. Find a broad niche with Terapeak
2. Use the Google Adwords Tool to find the “diamonds in the rough” and Terapeak to match what people are looking for and selling
3. Buy an .info domain for cheap
4. Outsource a minimum of 5 articles that are related to the niche.
5. Build a store with a lot of different items that are related to the niche.
6. Pick one item that has lots of cheap, relevant keywords and popularity on Terapeak, and write a short article with Ebay Ads embeded.
7. Develop an Adwords campaign to drive traffic
8. Profit!

That was the plan going in, and that is still the plan in broad strokes, however I am having HUGE problems with that last step.  I am not making any profit at the moment, currently my ROI is very poor, negative poor.  My mutual funds are doing better.  Now I am not losing a lot of money since I am only spending very little and still am testing the waters, but that doesn’t make it feel any better.  I expected by now to be at least coming close to breaking even.

How am I going to fix it?

Right now I am taking a step back to analyze where I am at.  I am not sure what I have to change, or what I have to tweak to bring in the people that want to buy what I am selling, but I have to figure it out before the end of February.  That is the date that I have given myself to show a profit or jump ship.  I do have patience, and I know that I am late getting into the game, but I need to be making money and not losing it to reach my goals.  I could be freelancing my various skills, but I feel that I am better served finding revenue streams that will have longer term gains when I stop putting the same level of effort into them.

I will update everyone at the beginning of Feb with a spreadsheet of my endeavours.