Yep - but it would help tremendously if you were part of a marketing group that has resources such as done for you traffic, campaigns, capture pages, autoresponder, training, support, etc!

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yep, it would also help to be part of a marketing group that has done for you traffic, training, and support!

Choose, Research, test good way

I really agree with this! But it does take time, patience and determination before you start to see results.

Exactly. Do not move from one strategy to another too easily. Be patient and persistent. Your efforts will pay off, eventually. Once you find the best strategy for you, everything else will follow. However, for me, this requires big investments but nothing still beats having top quality content on your website.

What is your website? If we could see it, we all might be able to help out a little more.

Totally agree with Yukon. Pick one and ONLY one!! Stick with it until it produces at least $500 - $1000 monthly (my break through was Adsense).

It is never easy at first, but you will learn what to do and what not to do (I call mistakes/lessons - Tuition). Tuition = Knowledge (good or bad). But, whatever you do don't give up!!

Wishing you the Best
Chris

Vox there is a lot to it but you can boil it down to a few things. This is what worked for me anyways at a high level and I make a very nice living doing affiliate marketing full time. Let me also state you need to have the background to be an affiliate marketer. Business, technical, marketing mind is the best combination and it's not an easy combination of skills to have.

1. Learn how to select the right niche. (Nichesiteduel.com with Pat Flynn is a great resource. Watch how he uses Market Samurai.) I started with high payout cost per sale model. If I would of started off with trying to deal with Commission Junction, Shareasale or some other big affiliate network I would of lost interest and be in the position you are in now. Find some decent payouts and establish a direct relationship with a company.

2. Once you select the niche research the hell out it and find an angle where you can provide value. Google rewards good, well thought out content and it will stand the test of time. Copy one of the number one results but do it better. I'm a big believer in not reinventing the wheel and just doing something better than my competition.

3. Consistent content is key. Look at your competition and figure out how you can have more content and better content then them. Work on the site everyday whether that is new content or a new blog post, comments. This is the single biggest item that helped me. I went an entire year doing a little every single day. It was actually a lot everyday but the everyday part is key.

4. Promote the site. This is the tricky part because to do it right you need to spend some money. You can go about this part a lot of different ways but what has and what continues to work for me is building a private blog network of high PR domains (1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 PR domains). I put original content on them and spend some time designing them as well because I want them to be around and look legit. Then I use them for back links. I also recommend combining this with some press coverage via press releases.

If you take these steps and don't generate traffic in a few months I would be surprised.

Instead of trying to make money from selling various affiliate offers, take time to learn what sells the most... Which is offering products or services that help others succeed in making money online.

Also, if you can afford it, using a coach or mentor is worth it.

Whatever you do, keep learning and don't quit. Perseverance pays off.

Mark

I agree. Offer a service and you will see some income.

Valarie

Yep, very easy to get off track which will limit your output. To prevent that, you need to come up with your daily strategy & then schedule every minute of your day!

Yeah you have information overload.

Follow this guy's advice.

This guy has a great point.

Making money doing this stuff is pretty simple...send traffic to a high converting offer. Period.

The hard part comes in the dynamics of mastering a certain way of generating traffic (copywriting and other skills are of course important too)

The way I do it is by shooting value based videos, creating blog posts it of them, and promoting them in a certain way so that they will go viral.

But there are many others. Pick one and master it.

Another thing I have to mention....listen to audios by master marketers and people who make lots of money. There are hundreds of thousands of youtube videos that you can dl mp3s from.....have them going in the background during the day while you are doing whatever. I can't stress how much of a game changer this can be.

making money online is fairly simple, but being overwhelmed with information thrown at you gets you stuck.

Every one of us has been there so you are NOT alone.

FOCUS is the key!

ONE NICHE IS ALL YOU NEED.

You need to find people with a problem first

Give them solution to that problem.

Mom after Birth want so lose weight.

Give her plan that helps her.

What ever NICHE you choose to work with, once set up, you need to concentrate on driving traffic to that offer and look at your conversions.

If you drive 100 people to the offer - even if it is free offer such as squeeze page, you need to concentrate on making that page convert HIGH.

Once you get a good number and good sales funnel in place. All you have to do is drive more traffic to it.

The key is to lower distractions and increase productivity.

Yep, l was involved with PPC Classroom, with someone who made $10,000 a month, and became rich with it.

He also eventually tried one of the hottest affiliate products out there, Earth for Energy, (Adwords won't touch it now, they did something wrong) and couldn't get it to work!

But l tried it for about 7 months, although l spent years trying to create or find a product, sell it, and scale it up!


Just like you it is bloody difficult to make it cough up. Create a great Facebook product with does well at one place, and won't work with Adwords because the kw costs are sky high!

Etc.

Creating software as a WSO can work over the course of a year or two, but it isn't a perfect system and will take time and some money to pull off.

I am currently staying with graphics, or a site l found since the SEO traffic converts well, so l only need to do high quality graphics over time.

Overcomes most of the other issues, involved with product creation, etc!

But of course you need to be good or great at graphics, which l learned over time, although music, 3D designs and images are also possible.

I would recommend going to Graphicriver, and scrolling down the bottom of the page to check out all their other sites, something might gel?

But if not you still have a great resource or other option to overcome the Affiliate brick wall.

Good luck!


Shane

This is what you need to know, right here. Start with this and sky's the limit.

I don't agree at all. Call me a skepchick, but it seems to me that 90+% of people have set off in altogether the wrong direction in the first place, and are never going to come anywhere even close to succeeding.

As a ClickBank affiliate in 9 different niches, over the last 5 years (nearly), I've promoted a very large number of different CB products. All my best-selling and highest-converting promotions have had gravity figures well under 20 (and most of them actually well under 10). Selecting only products with 20+ gravities, "nothing less", is really shooting yourself in the high-heeled foot before you start - and there are reasons for that. These threads explains some of those reasons, in some detail.

Gravity High or Lower - Which Sells Best & Why?
Clickbank gravity - is there a sweet-spot here?
Understanding Clickbank Gravity
Clickbank Gravity
Experience making money with Clickbank ?

The profit margin on Fiverr is next to nothing. How can someone really profit selling a service at $5 a pop?

Being an affiliate is all about pushing traffic around. That's it. Focus on harnessing as much relevant traffic as you can using rich content and frame it out with affiliate offers.

Strizheus is a convicted scammer. He promoted CPA offers where he filled in bogus insurance leads because he couldn't generate his own. Yeah, we've got a real guru here...
KELOLAND.com | News, Weather and Sports Video Archive

Davis it has been said made his initial money by being up to no good (over 100 adwords accounts banned among other things). Then he became a guru selling common info.

Kennedy has some good entry level material.

Hmmmm, probably true considering 90% try once and give up!

Then a further 8% try up to 3 times then give up!


The remaining 2% will keep trying no matter what!

They are the ones you hear about in success storeys, or the ones who create wealth.


Success can be difficult emotionally, especially when people around you don't get it, or when you are against a huge brick wall, but persist you must!

Once over the tipping point or 100% competency, then the floodgates open!

Not before!


Shane

I would suggest trying POF.. it is cheap and very testable and scalable. You can try many different offers and niches and with so many targeting options you can really figure out how to make small money then you can scale up slowly. Very good for beginners

You could be promoting affiliate products the wrong way. For instance, some places don't want affiliate links used there. So if you are ignoring that, you may have ghosted ads (ie ads that no one is seeing but you).

And some affiliate programs shut down or change what they sell, once they are set up, so your links may be leading people to the wrong places, to error pages or to inappropriate products now.

And some PPC activity is just worthless and useless. Facebook ads don't always prove useful, for example. Sure they may generate activity, but who shops there and for what? If what you are selling is not what people are shopping for there, it's a waste of ad money.

And list building has its own issue. Are you using autoresponders that even get emails into in-boxes? Or you also using print postcards or paid classified ads? Are you testing your own ads - do your links work? Phone numbers work? Email addresses work?

Just some things to note. Affiliate marketing is like a moving target. Keep your eye on what you are promoting, where, how and to what type of audience (i.e. how do they responde best- in print, via text messages, via email, via phone or mailing a reply card, etc.)?

:confused:
you use PTC ?

also curious mind to PM your tricks

Yeah I'm with Jenna on this. It's not much more complicated than what she said.

Just focus on one niche and a group of products you've determined are something they would buy or have bought. Then put those products in front of them with various methods (I prefer paid) to see which ones convert.

Some will, some won't.

When you find the ones that do, scale up your marketing so you can put the converting products in front of as many people in your niche as possible.

Paid traffic allows you to find out what works very fast and scale up massively.

You obviously didn't read the OP's post and are just trying to pad your post count.

Hello Million Dollar Idea Man,

Please accept my reply to you as being kind, wanting to help you.

But if you have made less than $1 in 15 years online, you are not qualified to build any software that could help others in IM.

There is so much software available and from brilliant programmers who understand and are involved in Internet Marketing. We own a small software company ourselves but we don't write the software, we funded two young American programmers so we get the UK and EU rights to each software under our own branding.

An idea for you though, and back to Affiliate Marketing. Start working on building a list of Internet Marketers, and again use a website and newsletter. Sign up as an Affiliate to various software programs, like Social Lead Freak if they have an Affiliate Program, then promote to your list. The fact is that many people who are involved in IM do not and can not keep up with what is available to them as far as software is concerned.

Even with WSO's there are people who sign up as affiliates and promote good offers to their lists, because most on their lists would not know about all the WSO's being released or on offer.

Being an Affiliate and selling someone else's creation for a commission is much easier than trying to create then market something yourself.

Lindy

Hello Voxbrethren,

I see many people have replied to your post, and a lot giving good advice too. Some others in the same position as you, not making money from IM yet.

We all have to start from nothing, my first year in IM I made only $408 profit for my whole year, selling resale rights ebooks in ebay. Then I found a mentor, he actually didn't want to mentor me, he said he didn't have time, but he would have 2 chats with me. But I wore him down till he agreed to mentor me, and in the end he has become my adopted Dad, and in ten years we have built multi millions dollar IM Business's together. I'll try to give you some advice and also a couple of solid examples of different thinking.

The Foundation - First of all you need to treat your IM Business as a real Business, you need to work on it every day. You most likely have to work for someone else for 8 hours a day, so you need to be willing to come home and put in a few hours of work for yourself each day too. Forget watching TV or any other time wasting activity that you do, put that time into your Business. And not just every now and then, treat it like going to work for yourself, 3 or 4 hours per night every night, including weekends if your really serious. You have to be a tough Boss, otherwise your sole employee - YOU - will try to slack off, and you will never get free of your JOB, or make any worthwhile additional income.

Education/Training - you must spend part of your time EVERY NIGHT on your education, learning more about IM from ebooks and courses. Your in IM Kindergarten at the start, you have to graduate IM University, and it's up to you to do that. You have to invest both some time and some money for your education, but there is a huge amount of free ebook downloads etc on the internet. When my Dad started mentoring me he made me read 4 ebooks per week. That's 200 ebooks in just one year, do you think you would be learning something from doing the same? And you keep on doing it, as soon as you think you know everything that's the exact time you know nothing! You can also read Positive Motivational books too, to keep yourself motivated and on track towards your goals.

Thinking - My Dad and I both have the word - Think - printed out in red and up on our whiteboards where we see it hundreds of times a day. It's about learning to think in a different way to others, like out of the box thinking. I'll give you an example of thinking differently:

We create what we call RoadMaps.

So say we make our first big goal (our Destination) to earn $50,000 per year. That's a nice amount, a lot could replace their Job income with that or it certainly would make a difference in most people's lives.

So $50,000 sound a lot right, but what if we say we will create 10 different Business's (or income streams) to earn that much.

Now each Business only has to earn $5000 per year to create that income. If we break that down again, that's only $100 a week or $14.28 per day over a 7 day week.

To earn just $14.28 a day sounds much easier than to earn $50,000, right? But if we build 10 small Business's that just earn $14.28 a day, we now have our $50,000 a year. Then we up our goal, set our sites higher, say to $100,000 a year. And hey, we only have to earn $28.56 a day from each of our 10 business's to earn that.

So that's just an example of thinking differently about making $50,000 a year. It sounds a big goal in itself, but if we break it down by thinking differently it doesn't sound so hard in smaller chunks.

You said: "How The Hell Do I Make Money With Affiliate Marketing??? I'v tried everything!!!" Well I bet you just havn't, because you have just used normal thinking.

Plus you said you have tried PPC, PPV, FB, Blogs, SEO. But you most likely havn't learned enough yet about these things, some you need a fair bit of experience and knowledge to use them effectively.

So I'll give you a couple of examples that you can use as brain food to come up with your own ideas.

When my Dad and I started building our Business's, we actually started with Affiliate Marketing. (We still do it but now its only a small part of our operations, but still gives us $8K to10K commissions per week) He taught me it was easier to sell to a warm or hot market than a cold market. What that means is that it is easier to sell someone something they are already interested in. So you build niche related Lists to market to, rather than using PPC etc.

So my example here is in Music/Musicians niche, one of the first Lists I build, as I'v been involved in music since I was at high school, I sing, I play lead electric guitar and I'v always had my own Bands, still do just for fun.

So I created a monthly email Music Newsletter to send out to my list, something to keep them engaged and interested in hearing from me, and where I could add my own affiliate promotions for anything I thought they might be interested in. And that didn't have to be just affiliate promotions relating to music, it could be anything that my list members would be interested in. For example many of my original list members were from UK (where I live) so one very successful affiliate promotion was for high end sunglass's from America, they were available in UK retail stores but very high priced. I build a list of around 7,400 singers and Band Members, no one big, mainly just local type Singers/Bands who received the Monthly Newsletter. Each newsletter had about 6 to 8 Affiliate offers in it and would return a flood of Affiliate Commissions per issue, in the thousands of dollars per month.

When my Daughter Sherri turned 14 her GrandDad encouraged her to start her own Internet Business's, I have since given her that Music List and they have expanded on my original idea. She has now added a simple website to it that incorporates 6 Amazon Music Stores selling al types of music equipment that Singers and Bands would be interested in, also a Poster Shop and a ClickBank product for Musicians, as well as an MP3 song download affiliate site. These 7 stores would have well over 200,000 individual products in them, so every issue of her Newsletter now features an Ad for her website offering more than 200,000 items in the stores alone. So do you think she gets some Affiliate Sales? The Music List is really a HOT target market of people who are absolutely interested in what she's selling in the stores. She has built the list to over 10,000 now and still includes other offers as well, including things like the sunglass's etc.

Now Sherri has the advantage of being mentored by myself and my Dad, her GrandDad now, but she's not even 17 yet, has 4 IM Business's, the other 3 from her own idea's and a total income of nearly US$200,000 a year. If you would like to look at how this website is made up its at: jammusicsearch (com)

Come up with your own similar ideas for other markets, Amazon alone has products ranging over hundreds upon hundreds of niche markets.

I'll use a 2nd example of one of Sherri's Business's, this one is her smallest but still produces a very nice monthly income for her, and from her own idea. This one is not Affiliate Marketing, just an example of her thinking differently, like we have taught her to.

A large part of our main Business's now is providing services to Offline Business's, and again we use email lists and Newsletters to keep in contact with our Customers and potential Customers. John and I were writing a Newsletter and our feature story was about QR Codes and how Business's could use them, we provided a link to a Free QR Code Builder.

Sherri read the Newsletter before it was sent out, went to the site and made her own QR Code in about 2 minutes flat. Came back to me and told me she wanted to start a Business making QR Codes, so would we take out the link to the Free QR Code builder and put her advertisement for her paid service in there instead. We thought absolutely brilliant for a 16 year old to straight away see a possibility for a Business, costing her nothing except a few minutes of her time to make them and email them to her customers. She priced her service at twenty pounds per package, she would make as much or more per week as an average adult's wage in UK. Now sure she had the advantage here of a way to promote her Business idea via our existing newsletter, but her idea was really brilliant, John and I didn't even think of it for ourselves, but Sherri's thinking was most Business's wouldn't know they could make them for free if we didn't tell them, so here was an opportunity!

I'll just give one more example of how using different thinking could turn an Affiliate promotion into a weekly income of $100 or way more. Now for this one you have to take the time to learn how to design simple 3 page websites. You can get a free website builder from an English company called Serif (com) Look in their Free Downloads for WebPlus Starter Edition. It's full featured just really an older edition, we use WebPlus ourselves and its a very easy program to use and to learn.

So the idea, any of the larger US Hosting companies like HostGator for instance but many more, have Affiliate Programs and offer $100 to $125 Commission (depending on how many signups you get per month) The Customer still only has to pay about $8.25 a month for their Hosting. Now don't try to rort the system, they have checks in place to prevent fraud transactions.

Now the idea, instead of trying to sell Hosting accounts you use Different Thinking again. (make yourself your own THINK sign to put on your wall. lol) So look for small Business's in your community that don't have a website, offer to design them one for free, a starter 3 page website (Home Page, Information Page, Contact Page) Your only requirement, they have to register their Domain Name (You become a Godaddy Affiliate and give them your link, so you make a little bit of Affiliate income from that too) and they have to sign up for Hosting via your Hostgator Affiliate Link. You could even tell them your learning web design and want to start a Web Design Business and want to build up a portfolio, that's the reason you will design a small website for them free, you just want to build up a portfolio and some testimonials. Now later you could offer to enlarge on their website if they wanted that and actually charge them for the extra work, but first of all do it like I say.

So, do you think you could give something away for free and make $100 or more every time you do? Of course you can if your prepared to put a little bit of effort into learning something new, how to make nice little 3 page websites, and if your willing to get off your bum and go out and get some customers for yourself.

Hope my advice helps.

Lindy

Hello Stephen and Jennifer,

Nice to see other Pommy's in here giving advice too. My Dad is an Australian and he calls me a Pommy, since he luv's me it's obviously an endearing term. lol.

Thought I would just expand on my post, and something you mentioned too, re building targeted niche lists.

When I first started to built the Music List that I mentioned I used fairly old fashioned ways, like small classified ads in music magazines and so on.

Now with FaceBook it is really easy to build targeted niche lists. You create a FanPage for your niche subject and you attract your target audience to it, and sign them up to your newsletter. You will find numerous groups interested in just about any subject going in FaceBook, so already a HOT target market there and waiting for you.

An easy way of doing this is with a software called Social Lead Freak. It does cost just under $100 but very well worth that cost. You could just watch the videos about it and also do the same manually if you can't afford that cost.

Another way to build a niche list is to look for forums or blogs related to your subject where you are able to make some useful posts and offer a free subscription to your newsletter. But way slower than using FaceBook.

Lindy

Lindy

View Profile: voxbrethren

#1. You have not tried everything.

#2. You have 2 whopping posts on this forum, the first from 2011. In 2 years, you couldn't find time to come back in and interact to ask if you were headed in the right direction?

#3. How much you want to pay?

You need to learn your craft. Throwing money at a strategy without truly understanding the fundamentals is a quick road to failure. Foundation is key. You need to invest in your marketing education, be teachable and have someone hold your feet to the fire.

Most affiliates will usually make the bulk of their money with a few merchants. It is sometimes a matter to trying which merchants will work for you and which won't. It is very volatile as well. In August, I produced $80,000 in sales for my top merchant. Then suddenly, the conversion rate dropped by 60% a month ago and dropped further a couple of weeks ago. My sales were almost down to nothing and I lost money because I was using PPC. What seems to have happened was that the merchant made some alterations to their site that interfered with the tracking. They told me it had been fixed now but it will take weeks before I know whether things are back to normal. It is just so frustrating sometimes.

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