All Posts Tagged With: "Affiliate Techniques"

Affiliate Marketing Tips: Spending Money to Make Money

Posted by Kyle Eslick on May 26th, 2008 | Category and Tags | 5 comments

If you are planning to become an affiliate marketer, it can sometimes be difficult for someone starting out from stratch. That is why I shared my story and suggested people go through their existing content and add affiliate links to it. As a side note, if you are looking for an easy way to do this (which I hadn’t discovered until after I did mine manually, but now use on it on some of my websites), you can use the WP-Affiliate Pro WordPress plugin to search for keywords and replace them with designated affiliate links. It also does a variety of other things to manage your affiliate links from within your dashboard. You can see my recent review of this plugin here.

Anyway, I digress. The one area I’ve found that new affiliate marketers seem to either fail to learn or have a misconception of is that you become an affiliate marketer and suddenly you are rich. That is why in my previous post, I recommended people start by adding affiliate links to their existing content they’ve already written.   This way you get some seed money to start out with.

The main thing people have a hard time grasping is that you need to spend money to make money.  Without advertising, link building, and networking in general, you can still make a little income. With the proper advertising, you can truly make a fortune.

The problem is you can’t make money without people visiting your website, so you have to find ways to get people there. Google AdWords is a great and cost effective way to do this and probably my main advertising expense next to purchasing private advertising. I actually re-invest a large portion of my income into these areas to continue to grow and expand my websites/blogs.

Blog and website directories are also a great way to do link building and to get traffic. This has SEO benefits and will often give you a little bonus traffic as well.  Unfortunately most quality directories also have a cost associated with them, so that is another area where spending that money can help you make money.

If you find that you are making money online, what are you doing to grow your business?   How are you expanding your advertising reach?

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Are You a Free Affiliate?

Posted by Kyle Eslick on May 21st, 2008 | Category and Tags | 6 comments

If you are a blogger, you probably have a few things you are very passionate about.   Through the course of a typical week, you probably link out several times to various companies, products, or services that you endorse because you personally enjoy them.   If it is not a paid review or an affiliate link, then you are doing so for free. 

Now, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that, but why not get paid for it?   People seem to have a misconception that affiliate marketing requires you to endorse products you don’t use, which is completely untrue.   MOST companies now have affiliate programs of some sort, so if you are endorsing anyone, you can get paid.    Your web hosting company and your domain registrar more than likely have affiliate programs.   Any book or TV show reviews you do can be endorsed through Amazon.  Anything sold on eBay can be endorsed through their affiliate program.   There are such huge advantages for companies to run an affiliate program that most companies are doing so. 

It was with that in mind that about six months ago when I decided to make a change in my online practices and shift my focus primarily to affiliate marketing.   The first thing I did before launching any new campaigns was to dig through my existing websites and popular individual posts looking for affiliate opportunities.   Because of the amount of content I had produced over the past two years on my network of websites, this was a fairly big task and took most of one weekend to complete (about 13 hours).  

Like I encouraged others to do in one of my last posts, I started with the basic 6 affiliate companies.    I also spent some time looking through my blog analytics and figured out which companies I was sending the most traffic to.  I then went to Google and searched for the companies name and affiliate.   I was surprised that 3-4 of of these companies had affiliate programs as well!

Once I was done signing up for relevant affiliate programs and collecting affiliate links, I went back into those posts and updated these existing links within my posts to be affiliate links.  I chose to mask my affiliate links because it makes it much easier to use them on multiple websites, but it really isn’t needed as you are targeting search engine traffic.   I then took any others that were relevant and added them to the blogs sidebar. 

After each day, I began to check on my progress by logging into my affiliate accounts.  Each day it seemed my eyes widened more and more.   Within 30 days I had made almost $1,200.00 just from these affiliate programs.   This was without factoring in and new affiliate campaigns, just links I had naturally done on my sites over the years.  It was an exciting time, but also depressing to think about how much money I had lost in the previous weeks, months, and even years by not learning the secret to making money online earlier.  And these were all links I made originally without any income in mind, but just because I enjoyed the product or service.  

In the months since, that income has been pretty consistent and I’ve been growing it with new niche sites, new campaigns, etc.   It is fun to see the income rolling in 24/7, and have that money come from work I’ve done in the past.   Any work I’m doing now will hopefully be adding to that income six months from now!

If you have a lot of content indexed in the search engines, I highly recommend you carve out some time to research affiliate programs and update your links.   You’ll probably be surprised with the opportunities that present themselves. 

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