Affiliate Marketing

Last month I posted this — “I decided to see how much money I could make by devoting the entire month of August to building affiliate sites. The goal is to work 7 days a week, devoting no less than 10 hours a day to this. Not much to report other than my shoulder and back are killing me right now.”

The results: I didn’t meet my 31 day goal for August, but I broke it and flew past a few days later. I am not going to publish numbers; I will say its definately enough to live on.

I did a few things with Azoogle earlier this year so this was not exactly my first run at affiliate marketing. Additionally, I have run PPC campaigns on Adwords since mid 2004 (with mediocre results.) So to be fair, if you have zero experience in this industry there is a path to be traveled.

Despite focusing on affiliate marketing right now, my long term goals still involve building profitable internet properties.

There are good reasons to expand your knowledge base of making money online. I think I have pointed this out before, but this industry is very segregated. On occasion you have a few people who crossover, dig deep, and reap the profits. At a quick glance, how many “adsense emperors” (you heard it here first, 0 results in Google) are making money from affiliate programs? Or how about domainers, making 10 or 20 cents a click when the traffic buying is bringing in $10 affiliate commisions?

It pays to focus on something specific and get really good at it. The thing that really sticks out to me is how many people in these segments sub-industries of online marketing think the other parties have some racket going on. After all, how many years have we heard about “domain squatters”?

Bottom line — keep learning. Get out of your comfort zone. Find out why and where your revenue is coming from. If you are making money from Adsense, learn about your top advertisers. If you are already successful at web publishing chances are high you can make a lot more money with a little extra work.

The past month or two I have been focusing heavily at affiliate marketing. I hope to use some of what I learn to be a better, and more profitable, publisher.

Some people seem to think Adsense is just a scam. Articles in Business 2.0 and other mainstream channels recently have painted a picture of lazy web millionaires filling their bank accounts up with revenue from pay per click advertising. Adsense and now the Yahoo Publisher Network have supposedly created an easy path to wealth for basement entrepreneurs building an “adsense empire” (I *explative* hate that phrase, by the way.)

Mistakingly, many believe that ad buyers are being had. Even pay per click marketing books and turtorials tell buyers to seperate their Adwords search and content bids — so you can lower you content bids.

Surprise, I have found traffic from the content network often converts better than search. Pay per click may very well evolve in to a cost-per-action market. Google certainly would not mind it, nor would publishers.

If you are interested in increasing your online revenue, be it through publishing or affiliate marketing, join me and my friends over at the WickedFire.com Internet Marketing Affiliate Forum.

Its very true that you should take anything a blogger says with a grain of salt. Typically I don’t care what bloggers outside the publishing & affiliate marketing circle say, but this post is just silly.

Brian White over at WeblogInc/AOL’s BloggingStocks.com calls PPC arbitrager’s “landing page con artists” “fraudsters and criminals” while accusing them of exploiting Google “in hopes of building a small fortune.”

Message to Jason Calacanis: exercise some quality control over your bloggers for hire.

There is nothing wrong with buying traffic from one source and sending it someone else. That is not fraud, its efficiency.

I feel like I’m going on a post rampage today, but I couldn’t pass this story up. Cnet reports that a new study has found the Internet is the #1 most used media; that trumps TV, newspapers, magazines. Here is the real kicker: “studies have shown that only about 8 percent of advertising goes to the Internet.”

Despite what some “experts” have called a PPC advertising bubble, I see the potential for very strong growth in internet advertising. I’d say that see these numbers double would be a conservative estimate. For publishers and domain investors this is great news. For those that rely on buying traffic to turn a profit, not so great.

My post on Azoogle has been getting some trackbacks, a post on The Blog Herald suggested using it for blogs.

I think I should have elaborated on this better, but I do not think Azoogle is a good choice for blog advertising, but rather for more mainstream sites. The reason for this is because within the correct market its not uncommon for Adsense to bring in 30 cent to a dollar a click, where as Azoogle brings in may be 10 cents. Additionally, Azoogle’s programs are less targetted than Adsense ads thus resulting in a lower clickthrough rate.

Even on my “mainstream” sites Azoogle under performs Adsense. On a blog with a very niche audience (which most blogs have) Azoogle would be a poor choice. They are a great program (with the best support I’ve ever seen) but I don’t believe sending bloggers with 100 targeted daily readers there way benefits either party.

Until recently I’ve been sticking strictly with pay per click advertising programs such as Adsense and YPN. Upon reading a post by Lee at The Forum Fix that Azoogle was raking in over $45,000 a month for him, I was ready to finally try this program out.

After being with the program a month I’m still a long way off from earning those five figures. However, the ads have been sitting side by side my Google ads without any negative affect on either clickthrough rank or earnings. In fact, Adsense revenue has increased during this time.
Azoogle has the best support I’ve encountered online to date. You will get a personal account rep who will call & e-mail you to give you a hand in placing the best possible offers on your website. Where as with other affiliate networks where you blindy feel your way to the best performing offers, they will lead you straight to them. The first offers I put up did nothing; upon implementing the suggestions of my rep the money immediately started flowing.

One incorrect idea I had about Azoogle from reading webmaster forums was that it was full of those free-smilies offers. Quite to the contrary, right now I’m running Free iPod and mobile ringtone offers. (Do you have lots of Myspace traffic? Hint: this is a program you’d be crazy not to be sending your visitors to.)

To try out Azoogle click right here (my affiliate link; yes, I’ve changed my mind about this.) Remember, you can run these in addition to Adsense and it should not have any affect on your clickthrough rate. Another suggestion; if you are running ads through a banner network, use Azoogle as your defaults.

I was wondering why I wasn’t laughing when I read this. It might be because I’m not suprised.

Have you been hearing lots of hype about Chitika mini-malls on various webmaster message boards and blogs? Over the past month or so it seems like there was a bombardment of news stories about this contextual affiliate ad program.

It turns out that now website owners are getting a very early, and nasty, Christmas present of a so called “audit.” A suprise to the tune of “earnings” being slashed by between 50% and 90%.

This isn’t new. There is a history of countless of adult affiliate programs popping up over night, offering their affiliates great “earnings”, and then dissapearing the next month. Thats why I wait to hear others results before jumping on the newest bandwagon in town. Do yourself a favor and do the same.

Over the past year I’ve heard the occasional opinion expressed that affiliates are overpaid. After all, they just post a link with a code, do nothing, and many make 50% or more of any sales they send — while the retailer is working their ass off day and night. Isn’t it a complete waste that the job being done by a guy making hundreds of thousands, or even over a million dollars a year could be done by a cookie-cutter employee being paid $35,000 a year? Right?

I was reading a very good blog post at Revenews which illustrates why the affiliate marketing business model works — and works well.

some merchants tend to think that they should pay the affiliate less. the problem with in-house teams is that they don’t really care - it’s not their money. If they lose it, they have excuses, if we lose our money, we have less money for next month - reality bites.

Additionally, affiliates add a critical element to online success: traffic. Traffic = money. Affiliates are essentially investments that send pure profit back to online retailers. They have traffic sources, they know where to get them, and they are going to send it your way. If that $35,000 a year employee had those same traffic sources, well, he wouldn’t be making 35 grand a year or be working for you.