How To Totally Fail At Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a powerful tool to make money online. I have been talking about it a lot (here and here) the last few weeks.

But what if success scares you and you want to fail miserably at affiliate marketing? How do you do that?

Here are some tips that will help you fail faster than the average joe

1. If Something Works Stop Doing It Immediately
If something works stop doing it immediately and try something else. This is one of the most obvious rules of bad affiliate marketing. Most people start out doing this, but if for some reason you are new to affiliate marketing and you find that you are making money with it, then STOP doing what is working. Otherwise you might have great success and ruin your chances of failing!

2. Only Promote Products You Hate
A product may be hot, but is it the right product for you? Contrary to popular belief, most affiliates have success when they are passionate about a product. The passion itself creates energy and drive, and these are the things that your potential customers will tune in to. So to ensure failure only pick products you either hate or at the very least ambivalent about promoting. Never promote products that you are passionate about if you want to fail!

3. Join Every Affiliate Program on The Face Of The Earth
Problems are bound to arise when you join too many affiliate programs at once. The more affiliate programs you join the easier it is for you to be pulled in multiple directions at once. Not being able to focus is an AWESOME way to fail at affiliate marketing or any business venture for that matter. No matter what you do, do NOT promote only one or two programs that pay large commissions. And absolutely don’t give those programs your undivided attention. If you can’t sign up for enough affiliate programs to keep you from focusing on promoting one or two programs, then your chances of making money with affiliate marketing actually might get too high and you (gasp) might not fail!

4. Don’t Do Your Research
Don’t research companies to see if they have good customer reviews and don’t find out if they pay affiliates. If you insist on researching affiliate programs be sure to search the internet for scams and affiliate programs that have lots of complaints from affiliates about not being paid for their efforts. That’s a great way to find a loser that will all but ensure failure!

5. Promote Products and Services You Know Nothing About
A common mistake that new affiliates often make is not being familiar with the product. This mistake almost guarantees your failure. So… NEVER BUY THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE YOU ARE GOING TO PROMOTE. If you do buy the product or service and you like it, then you CAN NOT promote it or you might make money! In order to be sure you are going to fail, only promote products you hate or that you have never used.

In summary, using these 5 methods should ensure you failure in affiliate marketing. What is your favorite method of failing? If you know of any other good methods for failing at affiliate marketing let me know in the comments below?

Make Money Online With Five Types Of Affiliate Marketing

Recently, I talked about using affiliate marketing to make money online. So, today I’m going to discuss five of the best types of affiliate marketing for making big money online.

Pay Per Click (PPC) – Google Adsense

With PPC marketing the merchant pays affiliates whenever a visitor clicks on a merchant’s banner or text ad. The affiliate gets paid for every click even if the visitor he referred does not purchase anything from the merchant’s site.

Pay per click marketing is most closely associated with Google Adsense. Google Adsense is THE biggest money makers on my pure content sites. Adsense is a truly great way to make money with content sites and blogs.

The advantages of PPC systems like Adsense are:

1. Very easy to add to your site.
2. You don’t have to sell anything to make money with PPC.
3. You don’t have to choose programs to promote, the PPC system does that for you.

These advantages make PPC systems like Adsense very appealing to small websites and beginners. I, and many others that I know, have made a lot of money with Adsense.

Pay Per Sale (PPS)

PPS affiliate marketing is the most popular type used by merchants. In this type of affiliate program, the merchant only pays the affiliate whenever his referral buys a product. Affiliates are often paid on a commission basis (percentage of the sale), although some merchants pay a fixed fee. Commissions in PPS affiliate marketing can range from 1% to 100% of the sales.

Pay Per Lead (PPL)

Pay-per-lead (sometimes called Pay Per Action) is a type of affiliate marketing that is often used by insurance companies and other companies who rely on leads for their profits. The Death of Adsense ebook was a good example of Pay Per Lead in the Internet marketing industry. In this type of affiliate marketing, the affiliate is paid whenever the visitor he/she referred to the merchant’s site fills in an application form or takes an action that the merchant wants them to take. For example, a car insurance affiliate program will often want a person’s zip code to help find the best car insurance for them. Compensation for this type of affiliate marketing is a fixed fee and is often very lucrative for affiliates. In fact, one of my friends and mentors makes a nice income from pay per lead affiliate marketing.

In addition to the above types of affiliate marketing, there are other affiliate marketing types that enhance the earnings an affiliate can make.

Multi-Tier Affiliate Marketing

Some affiliate programs offer multiple tiers or levels that the affiliate can make money from. Single-tier affiliate marketing is the much more common than multi-tier, but multi-tier affiliate programs can be much more profitable. In a single-tier affiliate marketing program, the affiliates are paid based on the direct sales or traffic referred to the merchant.

In two-tier affiliate marketing programs, the affiliate is paid for for both the direct traffic or sales that he refers to the merchant’s site, AND all the clicks (PPC) or sales (PPS) or leads (PPL) referred by various other affiliates who joined the affiliate program through his affiliate link. Multi-tier affiliate marketing (3-tier, 4-tier, 5 tier, etc.) creates additional commission for the affiliates from the different tiers in the affiliate network. A good example of a multi-tier affiliate program is SiteSell which has 5 tiers.

Residual Income Affiliate Marketing

In residual income affiliate marketing, the affiliate gets paid whenever the customer he/she has referred returns to the site and purchase another product or renews a membership, etc. Compensation for such type of affiliate marketing is usually based on a sales percentage or a fixed fee. Residual income affiliate marketing is most commonly used by membership sites. I personally love getting paid every month from affiliate programs that offer residual income and look for opportunities to join affiliate programs that offer residual income in the areas I promote.

This is a basic summary of these five types of affiliate marketing. The important thing, as with all other kinds of marketing, is to find what works for you and your business. Experiment with different programs and different types of affiliate marketing and find out what works best for you and your visitors. As with everything else in making money online, it’s all about the numbers. If a particular method isn’t making money for you, by all means try something else.

What Is Affiliate Marketing – Introduction To Affiliate Marketing

One of the two main ways I make money online is through affiliate marketing (the other is through Internet marketing consulting).

For those of you who are new to affiliate marketing, I thought I should give you an introduction to the basics of affiliate marketing…

“What is affiliate marketing?”

Affiliate marketing is a method for people who sell things online to share their revenue with people who are willing to promote their products for sale. Affiliates (those willing to promote other businesses products on their website) are paid based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a combination of methods.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online. In the future I intend to talk about some of the proven affiliate marketing systems that I have successfully used to make money. For starters, here’s a list of the most common used affiliate marketing methods…

What are the most common affiliate program models?

Based on a survey in 2007 by AffStat 80% of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as compensation method, 19% use cost per action (CPA) and the remaining 1% use other methods, such as cost per click (CPC) (ie. Google Adsense). I will discuss each of these methods in more details in future posts.

The main thing to remember is that affiliate marketing allows you to make money online by sending people to visit other people’s websites and buy their products/services. This means you don’t need to deal with customers, you don’t need to create products, you don’t need to store inventory, and you don’t need to ship products. All you do is refer people to the affiliate site in a buying frame of mind and the affiliate site does the rest of the work. This makes affiliate marketing a very easy business to start. No inventory, no product, no customer service, no problem!

More Affiliate Programs To Emulate To Make Money Online

A little while back I wrote about emulating StomperNet’s marketing to sell your products and services with affiliate marketing.

But I do affiliate marketing and I don’t sell products or services. Anything for me to emulate?

If you are an affiliate marketer then I recommend you look at the way top affiliates sell other people’s products. There are many affiliate programs that make it easy for affiliates to promote their products. However, in the Internet marketing industry the two that stand out most in my mind are:

Ken Envoy’s SiteSell and the Affiliate Classroom.

I suggest that you sign up for both of them (as affiliates). They provide great resources for affiliates to market their products. Unlike many other top Internet marketing products, these two products don’t rely on big launches to make money. They rely on consistent marketing by their affiliates and on retaining their current customers by providing a great product.

Ken Envoy’s SiteSell offers free tools, free ebooks and great promotional materials for promoting their program. I highly recommend that you check them out to learn how to make money with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate classroom is great for affiliates because they provide you with lessons to teach you how to promote their program. In other words, they give their affiliate free affiliate marketing training (very cool).

If you are looking for more free advice on affiliate marketing, then I suggest reading SiteSell’s affiliate master’s course. It is one of the best affiliate guides I have ever read and it’s free!

I am sure these resources will prove helpful to any of you planning on making money from affiliate programs.

Learn Affiliate Marketing By Emulating Programs Like Forumla 5

The folks at Stompernet are arguably the best affiliate marketing machine on the planet. Their affiliates make tons of money every time they release a new product or when they re-open Stompernet to new members.

They are coming out with a new product in early January called Formula 5. I don’t know if the product is any good yet (a review copy is in the mail heading my way), but I highly suggest you check out the marketing they do for the product launch. Go check out their first marketing video by clicking here and opting in to their list. Once you opt-in to their list, study closely how often they email you, how many free videos they release, how close together the emails are, what they say, etc. Also, keep track of what their affiliate are doing to promote it. I recommend you do this because they are THE best at what they do. You can learn a lot by watching the marketing the folks at Stompernet use to sell their products.

In a few weeks I am going to recommend a few other programs to look at for marketing purposes. These programs won’t be in the middle of a launch, but their marketing methods are excellent to emulate for selling an established product. In the meantime, go check out Formula 5 and figure out how to emulate their marketing to make more money online.

Ways to Make Money Online

There are many ways to make money online. I like to group them into three main categories:

1. Making money selling your stuff


2. Making money selling other people’s stuff


3. Getting paid to do something

Let’s talk a little more about each of these categories…

Way #1 – Making money selling your stuff
When most people think of starting a business they think of selling their own stuff. Here are some of the ways that people sell their own stuff online:

1. Selling products
   When I started out online my intention was to create educational software and sell it online. Like myself, most people that start a business online start off with the idea of selling a product. Almost every product imaginable can be sold online. Arguably, the easiest to create are information products.


2. Selling Services/Freelancing
   One of the quickest ways to start making money online is by selling your services. You call sell all kinds of services online. Some of the more common online services being sold are web design, freelance writing, coaching/teaching, virtual assistants, copywriting, traffic generation, and software development.


3. Domaining
   Domaining is essentially the process of buying and selling domains. While I own quite a few domains, most of them were bought with the purpose of developing them at some point in time. Although, I would be willing to sell some of them. For example, when John Reese bought trafficjam.com I wish he had contacted me about buying one of my domains blogtrafficjam.com, since I am not sure I will develop the idea I had for it when I bought it several years ago.


4. Website Flipping
   Website flipping is a very tempting business model to me. Flipping websites is a lot like flipping houses. You buy a website with the sole purpose of making it better so that you can turn around sell it. Much like house flipping, you should buy a website with good potential that is not properly monetized and/or not properly designed and marketed. After “rehabbing” the website, you can sell it at a much higher price. This process sounds like fun to me, except that I would have a hard time parting with the site after fixing it. I am more likely to buy a website, fix it up, and keep it for the residual income.

There are other ways to make money selling your own stuff, but the ones listed above are the most common.

Way #2 – Making money selling other people’s stuff

1. Affiliate Marketing
   Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online, and I will be discussing it in much more detail in a future series (or a free mini-course). Essentially, affiliate marketing is revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby affiliates(publisher/sales people) are paid based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, registrations, or a combination of methods. In layman’s terms, it means you get a percentage of a sale when you sell someone else’s stuff or cause someone to take an action that might sell someone else’s stuff. It is currently my primary method of making money online.


2. Advertising Income
   Many websites make money by selling advertising space on their site. This is most commonly done on content sites. Advertising income can also be gained through other methods like selling ad space on website templates and selling ad space in newsletters.


3. Drop Shipping
   Drop shipping is a technique where you sell products from one or more suppliers who take care of shipping the products directly to the customer. All you do is take the order and get the money from the customer, then you send the order details and and part of the money that you charge to the supplier. You make profit on the difference between the suppliers price (including shipping) and the price you charge the customer. This is essentially running a wholesale business without the inventory, although you will usually pay somewhere between true wholesale and retail prices for the goods. I have seen a lot of people run drop shipping businesses on ebay.


4. Retail commerce
   Retail commerce is where you buy products at wholesale prices from wholesale distributors, carry an inventory and turn around and sell said products. Many of the ecommerce shops you see are doing this. This model is similar to drop shipping. The advantage of this method is that you can make a higher profit margin then with drop shipping, the disadvantage is that you store the inventory and you handle the details of shipping the products.

These are the most common methods for selling other people’s stuff online, although certainly not the only ones.

Way # 3 – Getting Paid To Do Something

1. Paid to sites (Paid to surf, Paid to take surveys, etc.)
   With “paid to” sites you can make a little extra money online every month. You can’t really use these sites to make a living online (at least not that I’m aware of), so I won’t be devoting more space to them here. If you’re interested in a little extra cash, and this method appeals to you, there is plenty of information available on the internet. And if you ARE making a living from these sites, and you’d be interested in writing a series on the topic, contact me.

As you are considering how YOU want to make big money online, this list should prove a good starting place . In my next post in the getting started series, I will be wrapping up with a list of resources to help you continue your quest to make money online.

When Should You Use Kontera Ads?

I have been meaning to write about this topic and was reminded of it recently when I read Shai’s post last week called, “Kontera: In-Text Advertising“.

At the end of the post, Shai asked:

“...do you think Kontera is something you’ll be interested in using on your blog or site? Why or why not?”

Here is my answer:

I have played around with Kontera ads on some of our blogs and I know from that experience that some people don’t like to see them on a website, while some people do like to see them on a website. Why is that?

Why are there so many mixed opinions on Kontera In-text Ads?

I can tell you why. In general, I have found that the people who don’t like them are the people who see them on “make money online” blogs and on tech blogs. At first I thought the problem was that tech savvy people don’t like them. While that may be true, I think a bigger reason that they don’t like Kontera ads may come down to the fact that the ads just aren’t targeted well on non-product related blogs.

I put Kontera ads briefly on our Summer Olympics blog and it was horrible. The ads were showing for all sorts of random words and made the blog look ugly.

On the other hand, I have put Kontera ads on product related blogs and most of the ads are relevant and help people find things they are looking for.

So, when should you use Kontera ads on your blog or website?

I don’t recommend using them on blogs or websites where there is a focus on information (news sites, “how to” sites, etc.). I do recommend using them on non-technical product type sites, or on “how to” sites that make mention of a lot of products in the text of the articles (like a recipe site).

What do you think about in-text advertising? Would you ever use in text advertising like Kontera on a site?

Why Doesn’t Your Traffic Convert Into Money?

Do you ever wonder why it is that you have 500 or 1000, or even 5000 subscribers to your RSS feed and thousands of visitors per month… yet you barely make any money from your blog, if any at all?

The reason is simple…

You have the wrong kind of traffic coming to your blog (or website)!

Most make money online bloggers write post after post aimed at other bloggers and internet marketers, and they try to get as many readers as possible through social websites and other things like that. However, this is not a very good strategy if you really want to make money from your blog.

The people you are targeting with your blog posts are the exact same people who are doing the same things you are trying to make money online and they are definitely not the ones who are going to click on your ads or buy your recommended products. They know what Adsense ads are and they are probably promoting the same products you are on their blogs. So why would they take any action that will make you money? They won’t!

If you really want to make money online then most of your traffic needs to come from search engines because the average person doing a search won’t have a clue what Adsense is so they will gladly click on your ads. They also don’t know what an affiliate link is so they will buy products through your affiliate link if it’s going to help them make money online.

So what do you need to do?

Stop wasting all your time getting traffic through social sites and writing your posts aimed at other bloggers in the same niche as you!

You need to start getting keyword rich inbound links with the sole intent of ranking highly on the search engines (specifically Google) so you can start getting traffic from searches. Let’s say, for instance that you want to rank highly for “how to make money online” then you need to start acquiring backlinks with that as the link text and variations of it.

Want to know what kinds of inbound links you should be getting to maximize your search engine rankings? Read my recent post on finding the perfect backlink. And read Ryan’s recent post on the subject: What Links Can You Point at Your Web Site?

You should also do some keyword research on all the various searches related to your niche and start writing some posts about the different topics that are being searched so you can get rankings for lots of long-tail keywords. The traffic you get from those posts will start adding up and can turn into a lot of visitors and a lot of money!

Getting traffic that actually makes you money isn’t rocket science, it’s really quite easy. All it takes is the discipline on your part to build backlinks and write specific keyword rich posts.

WordTracker For Free

I wanted to let you know about this FANTASTIC deal I recently learned about.

WordTracker is now offering a free 7 day trial. That is really cool!

I occasionally use WordTracker for keyword research, because it can give you a lot of excellent information quickly. I will definitely take advantage of the free trial to find some good keywords to target on my next site.

If you have ever considered using WordTracker, then I recommend that you click here to try it out for free.

PS. Mom and baby are doing well and I expect to get back to a regular blogging schedule in July.

New York Affiliate Marketers – It’s Time To Move To Texas

I have been VERY busy getting ready for our new baby to come. So I wasn’t planning on writing any news related posts, but…

This news is TOO BIG

If you haven’t already read about it, New York has passed a state law that is going to seriously affect online businesses. I found this out first on Andy Beard’s blog when he wrote “Amazon vs New York – Affiliate Can of Worms“. Amazon is suing the state of New York over this law that will require them to collect sales tax from New York residents even though Amazon is not based in New York. For the legal/tax aspects of this issue click here.

The next day Andy wrote:

Today’s news is that Overstock have decided that they are axing 3400 affiliates in the New York area because of the previously reported “Amazon Tax” – which Amazon is fighting.

Apparently, California is considering passing a similar law.

I imagine many other companies will follow Overstock’s lead. I plan on launching a product this year with an affiliate program, and I now plan on restricting affiliates from New York from promoting my product. That kind of stinks… but it seems like the best option.

Anyway, all of you New Yorkers should move to Texas, because as a conservative as we are here, Texas will be one of the last states to adopt this ridiculous policy if it ever gets past the Supreme court…

Oh, wait Texas has thrown their hat into the ring too... UGHH… so much for my Texas pride, good thing I am originally from Florida… Florida would never do such a thing, right?

Adsense Secrets 4.0 Is On Sale

Joel Comm has just released a completely revised and extended AdSense Secrets 4.0 for 2008. It includes all the latest techniques that Joel used to earn over $500/day in passive income.

For a limited time (you knew that was coming, eh?), Joel is allowing you to get your hands on AdSense Secrets v4.0 for just $9.95!

If you are new to making money online with Adsense or you want to learn Joel’s latest strategies for making money with Adsense then you should click here to go check it out for yourself.

Create Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaigns At The Speed Of the Light

OK, Speed PPC v3 doesn’t work at the speed of light, but from what I understand it is very, very fast.

Version 3 of Speed PPC launched last week and you have until 9am (EST) Tuesday, April 15th to get it at a discounted price.

It’s true that I don’t own Speed PPC. I am currently not running PPC campaigns and I have not needed a product like this all year. However, I will be running PPC ads again in the very near future. PPC is an excellent way to drive targeted traffic that is ready to buy your product to a website. If you don’t run PPC ads, then don’t buy Speed PPC. I don’t advocate buying products just because they are cool. However, if you run a lot of PPC ads or plan to run multiple PPC ads in the very near future, Speed PPC is a product you should check out.

From what I understand (from a friend who uses it) Speed PPC is excellent at creating tons of ad campaigns quickly (not at the speed of light).

They have added a lot of new features to version 3 of Speed PPC, but in my mind the coolest new feature is the additional PPC engines that are now supported. SpeedPPC Version 2.0 worked for Google AdWords and MSN adCenter. Now it also works with Yahoo! Search Marketing, ABCSearch, Affiliate Radar, ASK.com, Enhance, GoClick, LookSmart, Miva, Search123, and ValidClick. 11 PPC networks in all.

That’s pretty cool!

Anyway, if you spend a lot of time running PPC campaigns then you should click here to go check out Speed PPC v3.

Next Page »