Ian Fernando has been nice enough to invite Clint Lenard and Myself to speak about Affiliit and various other affiliate marketing topics at a live webinar next Wednesday (December 9, 2009) from 7:00pm to 8:00pm EST. Ian is well known in the affiliate marketing industry, we are very happy to have this opportunity to be part of this organized event and hope this may lead to future endeavors.
I really hope you can make it to the webinar!
To sign up for this FREE webinar just follow the link below.
Last night I decided to announce to the Twitter world that I was a knob, I didn’t go into any details as I was too frustrated at the moment. I have decided that now’s a good time to explain further as to why I am a knob 
For an unknown reason the past few sites I have launched I have had a very tough time getting them indexed and ranking well with-in the search engines, mostly Google. I have solved this mystery. It seems that the default install of WordPress with my cpanel is now using an enhanced Privacy Policy by default – in turn blocking search engines from crawling the site.
This is very easy to change, you just need to go into the WordPress admin and Under Settings, Privacy Policy, select “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone…”.
I for one really hope that WordPress changes the default back to that. I’m really frustrated and embarassed it too me this long to notice. Like I said – yes I am a knob!
So far today I have made a whopping $4.88 through Adsense. While some people may say wow that’s amazing and others will just make fun of me. Either way, it doesn’t matter! Do I use adsense as a source of income? Of coarse not. I think like everyone else when I first started designing websites I threw Adsense on them for the sake of it, this was before I knew anything about affiliate marketing and thought – hey I might be able to make some money from this! So years later (this year) I finally received my first Adsense check. You can imagine my joy – out of nowhere I get a random check from Google for years of advertising! Now that’s a business model!
But back to seriousness. I’m sure many people will find Adsense as a means of income. In my personal opinion, if you are making a reasonable amount with Adsense (not what I’m making off it! lol). I think there are better ways you could monetize your sites. CPA offers, even Yahoo advertising. I have personally talked to many people who were running strictly Adsense and after some experimenting we were able to find some CPA offers which matched the website content and demographics and there income went up substantially. Now will this work for everyone? Probably not. It can take lots of testing and experimenting to find winning combinations, however if your willing to put the time in it is very likely you will find a winner.
Now back to Adsense. Now that you’re making fun of me wondering why I am even talking about it. I had a nice friend at PPCMom who started to joke around what she was making on it, so I just had to jump in on it too. Most of us Affiliate Marketers do not rely on Adsense to make money. It seems to be more of a webmasters thing. I do not mean that condescending or anything. Affiliate Marketers have one main goal in mind – to make money. Webmasters on the other hand want to design a site, get constant visitors, it’s what they live for. It’s 2 different types of people and 2 different types of businesses and business models. However in the end there is much we can learn from each other!
So ironically I had to actually look up which domains/sites I had Adsense on as I had no idea as it’s been so long. Man those are hurting sites, they just were setup a long time ago, not much optimization, or even real design. They are like old war veterans on auto-pilot. Who knows what there next mission will be!
So by now, you probably realize this post makes no sense. As many of my friends say, after 6 I start to make no sense and its 12:30 now! Have a good night everyone!
Yes I know the design was hideous before, hopefully this new design will look a tad better. We are still playing with and testing some stuff. We hope to be adding more shortly to bring more value to this site. Stay tuned for more details!
Thanks to any and all the readers for putting up with us!
I would just like to take a moment to wish all my American friends a happy and safe Thanksgiving, Black Friday and weekend. Although I am Canadian as I get older I find myself becoming more American so to speak. For example in Canada, Thanksgiving happened about a month ago. However this year my family celebrated it both during the Canadian weekend and this weekend as well. I honestly believe part of that is due to my affiliate marketing. Before I even got involved with affiliate marketing I did have some hobbies which had me visiting the states and interacting with friendly Americans. I have noticed recently I have been interacting more and more with other affiliate marketers and thus becoming more accustom to US holidays and traditions.
I think Canada is starting to do this as well. This is the first year I have ever seen Black Friday sales in Canada. Mind you they aren’t anything as spectacular as what we see in the US, we at least get something. If you’re from America, one thing you might not know is our big sale day of the year is Boxing Day (Dec 26 – the day after Christmas). It is somewhat comparable to Black Friday in the US, however we still don’t see the same deals that we see down south! Don’t even get me started to tell you how much we can benefit from the exchange rate on currency!
Well enough of this random babbling from me for now. Have yourself a good and safe day and weekend!
Ok let’s face it, most people are trying to pitch something in some way shape or form, especially bloggers. In the Affiliate marketing industry, most people are looking out for one person and guess what – that person isn’t YOU, it’s THEMSELF! There are far too many people trying to make a living off of people new to affiliate marketing. It’s really sickening.
If you’re new to affiliate marketing, even if you’re not new, remember one thing. You do NOT NEED ANY product to become successful. All of these products that these self-proclaimed guru’s are offering will not make you rich, they may help you make money, but the keyword is HELP, they may HELP you make money. Not so much these days, but a year or two ago the big craze was keyword tools and keyword programs. They were advertised to make you think that with that tool or service, you will make money. Guess what? It isn’t that simple. If you know what you’re doing, they will come in handy and help shorten manual research, but the product alone will not make you money.
The latest trend seems to be spy tools. You get to “spy” on your competition and successful affiliates and “borrow” (steal) there campaign details. I can see why so many people would fall for this and think that something like this would make them money, but it just isn’t the case. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how these tools would be good for research purposes, but realistically if you are using these tools to there full capacity, chances are you don’t NEED them, they are just a nice addition to help save you time and you would still be making money regardless.
One of the biggest threats in my eyes are some of these self proclaimed super affiliates who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. Often they are failed affiliates and they pray on people new to this industry. Some will brag and boast of how much money they make, guess what, almost any successful affiliate is not going to just come out and tell you what they make. I’m not going to name names, I’m already involved with enough drama as it is and I don’t need to add to it, drama doesn’t make me any money.
Just remember, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. You aren’t going to start making money with out lots of hard work. I know many people are going to look at this post and question it as I am one of the owners of Affiliit. However, at Affiliit we are upfront and let people know to become successful, they will need to work for it. We can guide people through proven techniques and show them and offer help on the way, but in the end it will be their motivation and work ethic that takes them to the path of success. We only offer guidance and training, their is no get rich scheme or magic pill here. Anyone can be successful in Affiliate Marketing, it just depends on how much time, energy and money you want to invest in it.
We’ll see it from time and time again. Some affiliate marketer will start up a new blog to make money. Sometimes it’s to mimic John Chow, Shoemoeny, <insert another blogger here>, etc. There are so many out there. One odd that is most of these affiliate marketing blogs do not actually talk about affiliate marketing, but that is for another story. This blog was never setup to make money. I started it as I felt this would be a good way to get out some of my thoughts and feelings of affiliate marketing and even off topic items, why? I have no idea, it felt like a good idea at the time. lol, you were expecting a better answer?
Now, by now just by looking at this, you should be able to tell I’m not your typical affiliate marketing blogger. I don’t have a super fancy theme, I don’t even know if it looks nice, it’s just simple and gets the job done! I’m not looking to impress here. On the upside, it tends to load well in most browsers. I don’t have any cartoon of myself or even a real picture of myself. Why? I have no idea, mostly because I haven’t put the time into this blog as I maybe should have. That is mostly because I’d rather put that time into projects where I make money than something I do for fun.
Content, what content? You’ll notice we rarely add new posts to this blog and it comes in spurs. I don’t know why when there are days with multiple posts that I don’t set some of them to publish on a future date to give a more reasonable break between and space them out evenly, this is just the way it happens . This is how my “creative” mind works. For a bit things spark up for a while, I get all of it out, and then when it dries up it’s back to the days on end without updates. Which I must add is a terrible way to blog. You lose readers, they lose interest as they are waiting too long for the next update. Again, some days I just sit here thinking maybe I should write a blog post, but instead I work on my campaigns!
I don’t have any fancy plug-ins or any social media integration. Why? I’m not a fan of social media (aside from advertising), I guess I might just be old or old school or just plain lazy! I just don’t know! But really, why don’t I have links to Facebook, Twitter, etc on here?
Proof reading? What is that? When my mind is on a post and I’m in the mood it just comes out and what I say stays most of the time. I don’t spend time proof-reading, brainstorming or any of that stuff that bloggers SHOULD do.
I don’t advertise my blog enough. I’m not out there replying to other people’s blog posts my url, why? I spend this time working on campaigns and projects instead. Rarely I will make a comment on a friends’ blog but that’s about it. Talk about failing at SEO and free marketing!
Oddly enough if you read this whole post and do the exact opposite you might have the blueprint for a successful blog . If this is something you want, just remember – don’t go starting a blog to make money, the majority of people that do this don’t make much. Start a blog for yourself, get it updated and filled with content and get a decent user base before you try to make money off it. Or if you’re like me and don’t care about making money off your blog – still do all that stuff anyways!
A while back I posted with a link to a guide how to make money with polls. That was 1 out of 3 guides for that. I figured sooner or later I better post the other 3. For those who do not know, polls are a method many use to get cheap traffic to promote e-mail submits. Often this method is criticized as the quality of traffic is normally low. Meaning the traffic is not backing out for the advertiser. Meaning that advertiser isn’t making money on the offer. Due to this, the advertiser will often boot affiliates from running this offer, or they will just start to scrub leads.
You can still make money with polls! Just follow the instructions as outlined in the tutorials!
Enjoy this freebie, courtesy of PPCMom.
You probably didn’t know, but a while ago I posted an article on here called Acai is Pissing More and More People Off. Ironically enough that article alone has ChrisDOT.com ranking and ranking well for some Acai keywords. It’s kind of ironic how it can be so difficult to rank for keywords at times when you put a ton of effort into it. Somehow also when you put no effect into it you can rank reasonably well.
Well sorry to bore you, this was more of a general ramble than anything! You may now go back to drinking your Acai tea!
Too many times we’ve seen it. A company that is going ok or that is new and starting to build a reputation or even one that has a very good reputation – they make the one big mistake that kills them. We especially see this with affiliate networks it seems. The whole point of an affiliate network is to provide a protective buffer between the affiliate and advertiser. They are to provide cash flow, support and more.
So what happens when the advertiser doesn’t pay the network? If the leads are fraudulent, then obviously the affiliate will eat the loss. But what happens if they leads are ok? Who takes the loss? This is when you will see the different between the good and crappy networks. The good networks will eat the loss and pay the affiliate, they will do whatever they can to keep there reputation. The bad networks? I think we all know what happens there.
In this business word travels fast. With the amount of forums, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc – it only takes a matter of minutes for info to get around.
Now, as a business what seems like the smarter move? Not pay your affiliate, they will trash you, word will spread and no one will want to do business with you. Or do you pay your affiliate, get them to tell everyone “hey the advertiser didn’t pay this network, but they paid me”, what do you think will work better in the long run? Isn’t that money put to good use by helping increase your reputation? Of course it is.
This just goes out to remind everyone, be careful of who you deal with. Make sure they have a good reputation and a good business sense. This extends further than just networks. If you contract someone out to do services, your name could be on the line. The last thing you need is a 3rd party contractor ruining your name.
Keep your reputation. Money will come and go, a negative reputation will haunt you forever.
