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Patience with Affiliate Marketing

January 26, 2009 By Jeff 6 Comments
I'm a TigerI 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.

Filed Under Making Money, Marketing Tagged With , , ,

Weekly Friday Link Dump #1

December 19, 2008 By Jeff Leave a Comment

There are a lot of blogs that I read that do a weekly link dump.  I usually think that it is a waste of time, however I am changing my mind.  I think that I understand why people feel that they need to do it. 

There are a lot of great writers out there, and I simply don’t have time to blog about them all.  But I do have time to thumb them, and sometimes Twit them.  Now every Friday I am going to link them on this site.

Marketing

  • #1 Pay Per Click Lie – This is all about the discussions that we all read on the forums.  What are the right keywords, or these keywords suck.  Well maybe your site SUCKs, maybe you are not converting because of the user experience and not the keyword.
  • Are You on a Mission – What you and your company’s mission statement has to say, reflects a lot on the type of management there is within the company.  If your mission statement has a lot to say about the shareholders and not a lot to say about the employees and more importantly the customer, then you are probably working for a poorly managed company over the long run

Business

  • Dilbert December 13, 2008 – Sometimes it makes a lot more sense when Scott Adams talk about it.  You don’t mitigate risk by buying more crap.

Blogging

  • Do-Follow Blog Search – This is awesome, I have seen so many of these lists for sale on DP that it was getting stupid.  Now you can just search for the blogs that you want to post to.
  • Keywords for WLW – AS you may know I have found WLW and I love it.  This is an old page but it has the information that I believe that I need to make WLW the best thing since sliced bread.
Filed Under Blogging Tagged With , ,

My Affiliate Marketing Plan

June 28, 2008 By Jeff 3 Comments

So I have decided to jump in and do some CPA Affiliate Marketing.  So now I need a Plan of Attack!

I have a few ideas on what “niche” and market that I am interested in getting involved in. so…

  1. Pick out the niche and product that I want to start targetting.
  2. Find an “aged” domain that has all of the properties that I am looking for, or add a sub-domain to one of my existing sites (this is the way that I am leaning for these tests).
  3. Pick out specific products that I am going to market.
  4. Start working on gathering content and keyword related articles.  I am going to use a basic version of wordpress for the CMS as I have found that it works very well, and it is easy to add content to.
  5. Start a PPC campaign.  For this I am going to start with Adwords as it is still the Cadillac network when it comes to volume of traffic.
  6. Refine keyword list, refine landing pages, repeat.

My goal is to break even in what ever area that I decide to get started in, however I am going to give myself a month to do this.  I am also setting a $$$ limit on what I am willing to put up.  I don’t want to dig myself into such a hole that nothing I can do will get me out of it.

As for timeline I am planning on having my niche, domain and products decided on this weekend.  Then the landing page, contact page, about page and at least 5 other articles related to the product group published.  From there it will be getting some easy links to get spidered.  This will take me about a week or so.  Then the PPC, this I am planning to have started by the second week of July.

I will have a series of weekly posts every Monday or Tuesday as the experiment runs its course.

Filed Under Making Money, Me Rambling Tagged With ,
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