Need Help with Affiliate programs

[NEWORLEANS ROOKIE]

Hi,
I have been trying to figure out a way to make money via the internet, and it seems as though affiliate programs could work. Is it possible to generate a steady 500.00 / month, or am I just dreaming? I spend at least 12 hours a day trying to figure out how to make money on the net. I am an accomplished web designer, and am lost when it comes to marketing and the ability to generate revenue. I looked at clickbank,and amazon, and am wondering it this is worth promoting. Please help me , trying to figure this out is driving me crazy! Any suggestions on how to make money would be appreciated. I am currently out of work.


Thanks!

[Linda Buquet]

NEWORLEANS ROOKIE,

Welcome! Yes 500 is possible. There are travel affiliates that make over 100K a month with the http://www.ian.com program which promotes hotels.com, travelnow and others. Also consider adding luggage and other products travelers would be interested in. I manage the www.Irvs.com and it is a good program. Other good program can be found at www.abestweb.com.

One of the big keys is being good at SEO and traffic generation. You can find lots of great info and support at Abestweb too.

Best of luck and hope this helps!

[Cedric]

Is it possible to generate a steady 500.00 / month, or am I just dreaming?

It's possible for a solo person to easily make that and much much more. I'm a solo affiliate marketer (though I do outsource some contract work such as script implementation, link checking, specialty graphics, etc.) and affiliate marketing is the sole source of income for my family. And we live quite well. ;)

For starters, I would recommend avoiding pay per click and pay per lead campaigns. These programs have their place, but until you get some experience under your belt, it is difficult to discern which are worth your time and which are not.

I would also recommend joining Commission Junction. http://www.cj.com/ -- they are one of the best networks for finding merchants to promote, and IMO, the very best for people new to affiliate marketing.

The toughest hurdle for new people to overcome, IMO, is that you have to focus on selling products, not providing free content or services. Take it from an old time content provider, you've got to spend some time learning what people are looking to BUY (not read, download, or get for free) and then show them the best places to buy it.

http://www.wordtracker.com

WordTracker is invaluable for learning exactly what people are looking to buy. I don't make a move without it.

As Catalyst says, SEO is critical. For most Affiliate Marketers, free search engine traffic is a huge source of their buying traffic. If you don't learn SEO, plan to spend a goodly bit of your income on advertising.

However, while good SEO is critical and an excellent start-up strategy, the Search Engines are extremely volatile and free SE traffic should not be your ONLY source of traffic for the long term. Once you're generating a decent income from SEO (or even before), you want to look at long term goals and how you will get repeat visitors to YOUR site (not the merchants).

What makes your site worthy of a bookmark?

It may not sound important when you're doing well in the SEs, but TRUST me, you'll understand the value on the day google belches and your sites end up missing (even when you've done nothing to "spam" the search engine). Yes, I DO speak from experience. ;)

For beginner affiliates, I also recommend avoiding Amazon -- there's much too much competition. Additionally, they do NOT have the best affiliate terms (commission, length of cookie, quarterly payments), so it takes some experience to know when it will be profitable to promote them over merchants with better programs.

[NEWORLEANS ROOKIE]

First of all thanks Catalyst and Cedric for replying.I needed to hear that this is a worthwhile effort. I need to get my site SE friendly. I am reading as much as I can about how to do that. I like the luggage Idea as well. I am trying now to get a cgi script to work so that I can trade links with other webmasters. Hoping that will help my site get listed with google and the other guys. I am having a tough time setting this script up. I was wondering since my domain name is cliknsav.com , what do you think about the idea of having a screen door page, that has links to categories such as travel, shopping,classifieds and others .This seems like it would allow me to expand my site and include different affiliate programs in different areas of my site. Or maybe I should do this with a portal type site. Having my travel things in the middle and links to other categories around the outside. Is this a bad idea, will the search engines like this? Or should I just leave my site alone,add some affiliates and find the easiest way to promote and generate traffic. I am sooo confused!
Thanks!

[AussieWebmaster]

You can set up your main index page as a type of portal but all that does is centralize your various sales areas. Each one of them has to be optimized as do the individual item pages. You are spending a lot of time on the web but I think you shopuld step away from it for a couple of weeks and do some reading and not get distracted.
Print out a bunch of articles, go to a bookstore and pick out a couple of good books and just read them.
What happens is you count your time online - whether it is emailling, reading stuff, search surfing etc and what you need to count is the actual work time. How many hours a day you spend designing a page with content optimized for the web etc. Making submissions to various places, getting link exchanges, and to a lesser degree checking the competition etc.
This is work. The other (and hey we are all guilty of it) is playing or being distracted. The successful ones do not get too distracted.

[NEWORLEANS ROOKIE]

I think your right. I surf to much and always think there is a better mouse trap, instead of picking a design and then focusing on how to:
optimize
submit
track progress
Adjust
and Promote

I am dedicated to work hard, but your right, i need to have a plan to execute. So tommorrow, I will go to a book store and read up. I wish you guys lived here in New Orleans. I would love to have coffee and brainstorm.


Cheers!

[john678]

I agree! Anyone can make $500 a month from affiliate marketing as longs as you put your time into it and do some research on the best tactics to take.

If you are just starting out with affiliate marketing, then it would be best to try programs that offer a low minimum payout and also pays monthly or sooner.

This is because any of the money that you earn, you can quickly invest it back into more advertising, improving your site, etc.

Some good affiliate programs that you could try are Pay Per Click Search Engines, Residual Income Progams, Pay Per Click Affiliate Programs, and 2 Tiered Programs.

I find it's always best to have a website to promote affiliate programs from.

[NEWORLEANS ROOKIE]

I appreciate the reply. I will definatley follow your advice. I have been going round and round trying to decide which path to take. I am trying to decide on how to provide fresh content to my site. I am setup for travel, but since my domain name is cliknsav.com , I think it might be wise to set it up as some sort of directory site, but I still need a hook to keep visitors coming back. I can't wait to figure this out. Its driving me nutz! I will keep you posted if I come up with something. Hope that when i finally do , You could take a look at it and let me know what you think.


Thanks!

[sbeco]

I've found a very good place for SEO newbies (or anyone for that matter) to leap ahead to the top of the pack on a high traffic search engine called Exact Seek. Exact Seek charges $12 for three months to have your site listed as a "featured site" which will show up on the first, second or third page for a specific keyword of your choosing. Only 24 sites are allowed to have any one keyword or phrase - like "small business" or "internet marketing" or "work at home." Those are the three key phrases I chose. Exact Seek guaranties that your site will be listed at the top of the list on the first page a certain number of times a week. They rotate the 24 sites with each search phrase.

Anyway. Since I'm also just getting started with affiliate marketing I thought this Exact Seek opportunity was one I couldn't pass up. I didn't want to wait for Google and Yahoo to list me weeks and weeks from now, and then I would be listed somewhere around number 4,953 for the key phrase "internet marketing."

Check it out. Exact Seek. Better hurry though, there are only 24 sites available for any one keyword or phrase. http://www.exactseek.com/featured_listings.html

[NEWORLEANS ROOKIE]

Thanks for the info. How long have you been at this? I am just getting started, with hopes of making some decent money. Hey, if there is anything that I can help you with(not that I know that much). Send me an email!

Thanks!

[Cedric]

sbeco, do you know why all the category pages of exactseek are PR0 -- especially when the front page has a PR7?

Makes some nervous to pay for inclusion to be listed on a page with a PR0...

[john678]

I would have thought that ExactSeek would have had a PR5 - PR7 for most of their pages as they are one of the major search engines.

I had a look at their search results the other day, and I found that their results were different to Google's, which meant that I had found different sites that I didn't find within Google.

But I also noticed that when I kept searching through the pages, I start receive pages where there were about 2 - 3 listings of the same site on one page.

If it was just for that phrase that I searched for or not, I'm not sure.

[sbeco]

I'm not sure what PR 0 or PR 7 is, but I do know that traffic to my site has increased considerably since I listed my site with Exact Seek using the three featured site listings for "work at home" and "small business" and "internet marketing." Before I chose those phrases I looked at Overture's search term suggestion tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ to see how well those three terms ranked with Overture, and those terms get an incredible amount of hits each month. So, I thought even if Exact Seek is not the best known search engine out there, surely a top ranking for those three terms on just about any search engine would probably bring a lot more traffic to my site. I was right, it did. And $12 for three months is really cheap. I'm happy so far. I made a sale for my most expensive program earlier this week. Very cool.

[cjshu]

To get started fast you will have to spend some money while you are waiting to get indexed into the search engines. So PPC would be the best way to go. Google adwords, Overture and Findwhat are probably the best.

Build multiple theme sites with reputable affiliate programs. Most anything sells online and keep reading at these boards.

[IAN - Jessica]

Good Afternoon- I'd like to second Linda's encouragement that $500 is more than possible, but probably with good ideas and lots of hard work. We do post our top checks each month and I believe there were three over 100,000 last month. We are also a great fit with Irv's which is a top notch program as you already know. Please feel free to contact my team with any questions you have and we'd be happy to help get you started! affiliate@ian.com